We’ve seen Jessica Chastain track Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty. In this new limited series, the Oscar winner plays an undercover investigator who excels at infiltrating domestic extremist groups online and thwarting violent plots. She often works long hours alone while trying to remain an engaged mother and wife, and the stress ratchets up as she tracks a cell planning mass terror and learns that her family is in direct danger. Friday, Sept. 26, Apple TV+.

by Amy Coney Barrett

Maybe the America we know still has a chance, said Noah Feldman in The Washington Post. As Donald Trump’s attacks on the U.S. constitutional system mount, “Amy Coney Barrett is the most important justice on the Supreme Court,” and in her first book, she lays out her judicial philosophy in a way that makes clear both why she occupies the very middle of the nine-member court’s current ideological spread and why the rule of law may withstand Trump’s assault. Liberal constitutional scholars like me reject one of the major pillars of her philosophy: originalism. But “unlike some of her conservative colleagues,” including those who see the late Antonin Scalia as a model, Barrett “takes seriously Scalia’s personal aspiration to decide cases purely on the basis of what the law says, not what she thinks it should be.” That helps explain why she has broken from her conservative colleagues and the president’s lawyers even on some major cases. 

At a moment when the justices often spar sharply in the court’s written opinions, Barrett’s book is “a model of collegiality,” said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. “My own conclusions from it are, first, that she has a sharp and well-organized mind, and, second, that she is a very nice person.” She “seems genuinely burdened by the reality that most Americans know little about the Supreme Court” and devotes many pages to explaining how the court operates. When explaining her approach, she “writes superbly on originalism,” the idea that the Constitution must be interpreted according to its text as the framers understood that text. But she’s a bit less persuasive in explaining how the “due process” clauses of the Fifth and 14th Amendments protect certain unnamed individual rights but not others. 

If you hoped the book would help you get to know Barrett herself, you’re out of luck, said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. The former Notre Dame law professor and mother of seven “clearly knows that readers crave relatability, especially from women, so she offers a few breadcrumbs.” Still, “she’s not about to let her guard down, even for a reported $2 million advance.” Her book’s “studied blandness” becomes more irksome, though, when she’s claiming that justices are merely referees deciding who has played by the rules as the rules are written. For almost 50 years before she joined the court, the law of the land was that women have a right to abortion. For almost 250 years, the president had no right to act like a king. She voted to change those rules.

The pinup who flaunted her assets

Even in the heyday of blonde bombshells, June Wilkinson stood out. With her voluptuous measurements of 43-22-37, the British-born model and actress was known in the 1960s as “the most photographed nude in America.” She acted in over two dozen movies and TV shows over her career but was most famous for appearing topless, posing for Playboy seven times and once lending her bosom for an uncredited cameo in a Russ Meyer film. A tomboy as a child, she basked in her sex-symbol status. “I realized some time ago,” she said in 1958, “that as long as there were men in this world, I’d make good.” Born in Essex, England, to working-class parents, June Rose Wilkinson longed to be a ballerina. But once her figure began to develop at age 14, she had to abandon ballet for modern dance. A teacher suggested she audition for dance-hall revues, and by age 15, she was performing topless as “Baby June,” doing a fan dance that artfully concealed her chest. That was “the start of a career path that may have been considered orthodox at the time but which now seems unenlightened, to say the least,” said The Times (U.K.). 

Wilkinson moved to New York while still a teen and made her first Playboy appearance in 1958, at age 18, under the headline “The Bosom.” She “naturally captured the attention of a number of eminent men,” said The Telegraph (U.K.), and had dalliances with stars like Elvis Presley and Paul Anka and even the notorious playboy Henry Kissinger. A model at first, she began acting in films, “rarely remaining clothed to the end of the picture.” But after director John Cassavetes cast her in a small role, he told her she was too talented to “coast on your body alone” and should take her craft seriously. Wilkinson had a daughter from her nine-year marriage to Houston Oilers quarterback Dan Pastorini and worked steadily, acting onstage and in films until the 1990s. She ventured briefly into the fitness industry, then settled in Los Angeles with her daughter and mother. Despite the changing times, she never disavowed her early work, recognizing that her pinup days were “the cornerstone of her legacy,” said The New York Times. She even titled her 2023 autobiography Hollywood or Bust! “Why should I get mad” at men who ogle? she said. “I’ve been blessed.”