In this new feature-length drama, Tony winner Jessica Lange stars as a beloved Broadway actress who is preparing for her latest production when she begins struggling with forgetfulness and confusion. Determined to make it to opening night, she presses on against rising odds. Kathy Bates, Pierce Brosnan, and Lily Rabe co-star. Friday, May 31, at 8 p.m., HBO/Max.

by Salman Khan

"Brave New Words is an important read for a changing world," said Ruby Rosenthal in New City Lit. Salman Khan, the founder and CEO of the nonprofit online tutoring site Khan Academy, has a new product to sell: a chatbot called Khanmigo that he believes can be part of a revolution in education. While he's "not blind to the problems that come with AI," he's confident that its effects on education are coming whether they're effectively harnessed or not, and he presents a vision in which bots like Khanmigo facilitate learning for students at all income levels by serving as individual tutors. Khan has certainly earned a listen, said Dominic Green in The Wall Street Journal. Through Khan Academy, which today provides free educational videos to more than 150 million students a year, Khan "has done more than anyone to compensate for the failings of old-school education." 

His book is "a welcome riposte to the AI doom-mongers," said Rachel Sylvester in The Times (U.K.). While schools today are "bound by a one-size-fits-all approach because all 30 pupils in a class have to learn together," AI would allow students to study at their own pace. A bot can bring the past to life by taking on the persona of a historical character to answer the student's questions. A bot can tailor math questions to the student's outside interests. In Khan's view, it can also serve as a debating partner, a Socratic questioner, and a guidance counselor, and do so without making teachers obsolete. Instead, because bots can do much of the busywork, including grading students' assignments, partnering with AI will free teachers to focus on ways to bring out the best in every child. 

However upbeat its tone, Khan's book "amounts to an ultimatum": get onboard with Silicon Valley's vision for the future or be left behind, said Kevin Canfield in the San Francisco Chronicle. And Khan is hardly a disinterested party. His organization must adapt or die itself, and Khanmigo isn't free: It will cost $35 a year per student for any district that uses it. Perhaps that explains why so much of the book details scenarios in which a tutor bot might make a great ally and the prose "reads like peppy ad copy." Whether or not you buy the pitch, though, the book is useful, because it "asks us to consider what we want from AI — and how much of ourselves we're willing to sacrifice in the bargain."

The Emmy winner who was deliciously hateable

Dabney Coleman delighted in playing cads. Over a varied career spanning nearly six decades and 175 roles, he found his niche portraying comically self-centered male chauvinists who often got a richly deserved comeuppance. In 1980's 9 to 5, he played what Jane Fonda's character called "a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot" of a boss and ended up getting hogtied and hung from a ceiling by fed-up female employees. Two years later, in Tootsie, his sexist, butt-slapping soap opera director is chewed out by an indignant, cross-dressing Dustin Hoffman. By all accounts, Coleman was nothing like these slimeballs — at least outwardly. "When I meet a person I don't like, I make a notation about what it is I don't like about them," he said in 1983, "and hopefully I can integrate that into a part." 

Coleman, whose Texas drawl "was a part of almost every role," was the youngest of four sons of an Austin military veteran, said Texas Monthly. Uncertain what career to follow, he found himself "failing out of law school." Then he met a movie star, got bitten by the acting bug, and moved to New York City the next day. His TV career, interrupted by two years of military service, began in 1960 with roles on Dr. Kildare, I Dream of Jeannie, and That Girl. Coleman "remained a busy if relatively anonymous character actor," said The New York Times, until he achieved a career-defining breakthrough in 1976 playing a smarmy small town mayor and "underhanded stage father of a child evangelist" in the offbeat satirical soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Offers to play a rich variety of "unsavory characters" followed — a turnaround he partially credited to growing his trademark mustache. "Without it," he later said, "I looked like Richard Nixon." 

Although "audiences were repulsed" by his turn as an obnoxious TV talk show host in the 1983 sitcom Buffalo Bill, said New York magazine, the character is now considered to have been the first great sitcom antihero. Coleman's "greatest late-in-life monster role," in HBO's 2010–14 gangster epic Boardwalk Empire, was a bullying, predatory mentor to Steve Buscemi's Nucky Thompson. Such roles, he said, made his job fun. "You get to do outlandish things, things that you want to do, probably, in real life," he said in 2010. "But you just don't, because you're a civilized human being."