Beatlemania endures. Legendary director Martin Scorsese serves as producer of this new documentary about the Fab Four’s arrival in the U.S. Footage shot by documentarians Albert and David Maysles is paired with new interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr to tell the behind-the-scenes story of the band’s scream-inducing arrival at New York City’s Kennedy Airport and performance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Friday, Nov. 29, Disney+.

by Lili Anolik

“When I first cracked open Lili Anolik’s dazzling and provocative Didion & Babitz, I was dubious,” said Leigh Haber in the Los Angeles Times. Anolik, a staff writer at Vanity Fair, had already written a profile and biography of Eve Babitz that had sparked a renaissance for the semi-autobiographical writings of the brilliant onetime party girl. How much more could Anolik say about Babitz’s free-spirited ramble through 1960s and 1970s Hollywood? And could Joan Didion, another iconic though more esteemed California writer, truly be characterized as the yin to Babitz’s yang? The two writers had been friendly, and they exhibited sharply contrasting styles both on and off the page. Anolik works at offering new insights on both of her subjects, but she remains far more in thrall to Babitz, and it’s hard to blame her. “Her heroine is endlessly fascinating—self-destructive, loving, frustrating, ingenious.” 

Didion & Babitz is “one of my favorite books of the year,” said Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post. “Both enormously informative and openly prurient,” it feels motivated by the very writerly desire to know both women totally, “to suck their secrets dry.” Anolik started the project when she came upon a box of Babitz’s papers that included a testy letter written to Didion but never sent. Babitz had met Didion in 1967, becoming a regular at the parties Didion and her husband, Gregory Dunne, threw at their rented Hollywood mansion. Later, Didion helped Babitz land her first book deal before Babitz rejected Didion’s suggested edits and the friendship cooled. In retrospect, “their rivalry feels fated.” Didion was “proper and composed,” a tiny rail-thin woman whose writing was “downright steely.” The younger Babitz was voluptuous, “did an impressive array of drugs,” wrote with hedonistic abandon, and counted among her many sexual conquests Jim Morrison, Harrison Ford, and Annie Leibovitz. 

About that letter, said Lynn Steger Strong in The Atlantic. “It’s impossible to read it and not want to know more.” But Anolik “gets trapped on the flat surfaces,” making a caricature of Didion while championing Babitz. Even the gossip she shares—that Dunne was gay and Didion’s marriage to him largely a career move—belittles the amazing writer who’s supposed to carry half this book. It’s not wrong to interweave contrasting portraits of Didion and Babitz. “Both used their strengths, performed their public personas—Joan with her steely reserve, Eve with her froth and sex—to attain whatever status they could in a literary world built mostly to slap them down.” Unfortunately, “as much as the book seems earnestly set on redefining both of these women, the truth it captures more than any other is how quickly wit can slip into caricature, fun and fizzy gossip into cruelty.”

The right-winger who fought for gay marriage

At the arch-conservative legal group the Federalist Society, Ted Olson was a hero. As private litigator, assistant attorney general under Ronald Reagan, and U.S. solicitor general under George W. Bush, Olson scored victory after victory for the Right, rolling back affirmative action, expanding corporate power, and defending school vouchers. In one of his 65 Supreme Court appearances, he argued the 2000 Florida recount case that helped secure Bush’s presidency. And after the 9/11 attacks—which killed his wife, Barbara, a passenger on the hijacked jet that crashed into the Pentagon—he defended the Bush administration’s indefinite detention of suspected terrorists without charges. But Olson also broke with the party line to follow his conscience. He won a case to allow the 700,000 “Dreamers,” undocumented people brought to the U.S. as children, to remain in the U.S. And he led the charge to legalize same-sex marriage—which he called his proudest achievement. To respect “a stable, committed relationship that provides a backbone for our community,” he said, “is a conservative value.”

Theodore B. Olson grew up in Mountain View, Calif., where his father was an engineer and his mother a teacher, said The Washington Post. One of “few conservative students” to study law at UC Berkeley, he joined a Los Angeles law firm and soon “rose to partner.” As head of the Office of Legal Counsel under Reagan, he worked on high-profile cases, including efforts to end race-based busing. But he “broke into the public consciousness” when he argued the Bush v. Gore case, said NPR.org. His subsequent nomination to solicitor general “was fiercely opposed by Democrats, who saw him as too political,” but he was narrowly confirmed. 

“It was a shock to many” when Olson took on a California gay-marriage case, said The New York Times. Opponents barraged him “with homophobic emails,” while some gay activists accused him of taking the case “in order to sabotage it.” But Olson brought on “liberal superlawyer” David Boies as co-counsel, and their bipartisan win was credited with paving the way for the Supreme Court to back gay marriage in 2015. Olson’s fourth wife, Lady Booth, joked that she was on a quest to find Olson’s “inner liberal,” and while Olson said he remained conservative, he always listened to the other side. “We don’t learn anything,” he said in 2009, “if we surround ourselves by people who think the same way we do.”