From Star Wars to Superman, Jaws to Harry Potter, dozens of American movies wouldn’t be the same without the scores of John Williams. A celebratory documentary explores the composer’s life and career, starting with his days as a jazz pianist and surveying his vast opus. Collaborators including Steven Spielberg, Itzhak Perlman, and Yo-Yo Ma share their memories. Friday, Nov. 1, Disney+.

by Musa al-Gharbi

Musa al-Gharbi’s first book “announces him as a rising intellectual star,” said David Brooks in The New York Times. A deeply researched study of “wokeness,” We Have Never Been Woke goes a long way toward explaining why America’s cultural elite became so progressive starting in about 2010 that its members’ beliefs helped fuel the current polarization of U.S. politics. Al-Gharbi, a sociologist, grounds his argument in a recognition that among today’s highly educated class, the prime way to signal virtue and build status is by being anti-elite. Not surprisingly, “this sort of cognitive dissonance often has a radicalizing effect”—causing academics and journalists like me to compete over who’s the greatest defender of society’s marginalized groups even as we do little to truly make society more equitable. 

One of al-Gharbi’s key insights is that there’s nothing new about the educated class engaging in these internecine squabbles, said Adam Szetela in The Washington Post. In fact, “we have been doing it for a century.” Al-Gharbi identifies three prior “Great Awokenings” in which mostly white, educated urbanites who regard their chosen professions as altruistic have hit a bad economic patch and responded by competing for status through virtue signaling. Think of the anti-war fervor of the late 1960s or the “political correctness” fever of the late 1980s. Typically, these “awokenings” do nothing for the marginalized people they champion but do create more jobs for the privileged agitators, such as in the diversity, equity, and inclusion offices established by many corporations in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd protests. “While many people will no doubt disagree with al-Gharbi’s account, it is one of the most historically rigorous and empirically grounded investigations of “wokeness” we have.” 

“As social science, We Have Never Been Woke sometimes overreaches,” said Jonathan Marks in The Wall Street Journal. When al-Gharbi draws parallels between the “awokenings” of the 1930s and the 1960s with the one we’re just emerging from, “he is working with too little evidence.” Still, “he is mainly in the business of describing, not moralizing,” and his attempt to persuade his elite cohort to analyze its own behavior is important and useful, especially because al-Gharbi is not anti-woke in any normal sense. “I had a recurring thought as I read this book: I cannot believe he’s writing this. I cannot believe it’s getting published,” said Carrie McKean in Christianity Today. Instead of putting all the blame on Trumpism, which would be easy, “he’s asking his peers to be honest with themselves about their complicity in America’s social breakdown.”

The scientist who ran a chilling experiment

Philip Zimbardo was intrigued by the dynamics of power. In 1971, the Stanford University psychologist designed a study to explore how wielding power over others might alter behavior. He recruited 24 college-aged young men, paying them $15 a day to participate. Placing them in a mock prison in the basement of a campus building, he randomly designated half the men as guards and half as prisoners. What happened next, Zimbardo later wrote, was “shocking and unexpected.” Given khaki uniforms and mirrored sunglasses, the guards grew abusive, waking prisoners up with whistle blasts and forcing them to strip, do push-ups, and clean toilet bowls with their bare hands. Anxious and enraged, the prisoners tried to revolt, and the experiment, meant to last 14 days, was halted after six. The study became famous as the Stanford Prison Experiment—a window, Zimbardo said, into the way our behavior is shaped by our social roles. “It shows normal, intelligent, young middle Americans can be quickly corrupted,” he said. 

Born in the South Bronx, Zimbardo grew up in a large Sicilian family “dependent on welfare payments,” said The Times (U.K.). As a youth he sold magazines and shined shoes, and he paid his way through Brooklyn College by checking coats at a Broadway theater. After earning a doctorate from Yale, he taught at New York University, where he took part in anti-nuclear protests, before moving to Stanford in 1968. Zimbardo drew criticism for his experiment, said the San Jose Mercury News. It came out later that he had not served as a “neutral observer,”but rather, in acting as prison superintendent, had subtly encouraged the guards to be cruel. Nor were the results as clear-cut as he suggested: Not all the guards turned sadistic. 

Still, for years, Zimbardo’s work was cited by those studying genocide in Rwanda, the rise of Nazism, and other atrocities, said The Washington Post. In 2004, he testified on behalf of a U.S. Army sergeant convicted of abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, arguing that the soldiers weren’t bad apples, as the Army claimed, but “good apples put in a ‘bad barrel.’” And he remained steadfast in his belief that people’s actions depend on their environment and access to power. “We all have the capacity,” he said, “to be Mother Teresa, to be Hitler or Saddam Hussein. It’s the situation that brings that out.”