Shiva Baby and Bottoms star Rachel Sennott nails the Gen Z zeitgeist in her new comedy series about a group of young L.A. strivers. Sennott wrote the series and plays Maia, a neurotic talent manager who is passed over for a promotion and further shaken when her former BFF, a wild social media influencer played by Odessa A’zion, shows up at her doorstep. Sunday, Nov. 2, at 10:30 p.m., HBO and HBO Max.

by Andrew Ross Sorkin

“It’s tempting to cast the leaders of 1920s Wall Street as a bunch of crooks,” said John Cassidy in The New Yorker. Just don’t expect Andrew Ross Sorkin to do so. In his new book, the New York Times columnist and CNBC anchor is surprisingly forgiving of the Wall Street bankers who enriched themselves in the 1920s by corruptly inflating stock prices before the market’s inevitable collapse impoverished millions of their fellow Americans. He writes that most of them did nothing “appreciably worse” than most other people would. Still, in his account of the 1929 crash, said David Champion in Harvard Business Review, “you’ll find all the ingredients of a compelling one-season series for Apple TV or Netflix: wealth, ambition, greed, ideology, and stupidity, combining to an inevitable end desired by no one.” And while Sorkin doesn’t emphasize parallels between 1929’s stratified U.S. economy and today’s, “once you start looking for similarities, you see them everywhere.” 

Sorkin’s deeply researched account is “a real eye-opener,” said Andy Haldane in the Financial Times. Instead of zeroing in on Washington’s response to the crisis, Sorkin spotlights private-sector players who helped create it, including “Sunshine” Charlie Mitchell, CEO of the Citibank precursor that was then the nation’s largest bank. At a time when bankers routinely (and legally) colluded with other corporations to pump up the value of stocks and then dump them, Mitchell went further, defying federal overseers by handing out loans to speculators who used the money to play the market. In the years leading to the crash, Mitchell and other leading bankers were popular heroes, and the power of private finance relative to government power was arguably “unsurpassed in history.” After 1929, the balance switched dramatically—probably too dramatically. This part of Sorkin’s narrative, too, “contains some timely lessons.” 

Along the way, Sorkin “offers hints that the crash looms larger in our memory than it did in the moment,” said Judge Glock in The Wall Street Journal. October 1929’s “Black Thursday” was rapidly followed by two more dark days. The market then partially recovered, and the true enduring crash happened in 1930, when tariffs and bad Federal Reserve policy sent the market into a deeper spiral. At the end of 1929, the likelihood of a Great Depression was remote enough that The New York Times rated Richard Byrd’s flight to the South Pole as the news story of the year. In any case, Sorkin isn’t focused on the reasons for the crash here. His eyes are on the people involved, and his method “brings the drama of the crash to a high pitch.” On a subject that’s been much covered, he has written “one of the best narrative histories I’ve read.”

The rocker who shot fireworks from his guitar

Ace Frehley was 21 in 1972 when his life was changed by a Village Voice ad. “Lead guitarist wanted,” it read, “with flash and ability.” The Bronx native was still living with his parents, and his mom drove him to the audition. But his muscular blues-rock riffing impressed bandleaders Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, and the theatrical glam-metal act Kiss was born. Decked out in platform boots, spandex, and face paint, the foursome (including drummer Peter Criss) were worshiped by teenage boys around the world, selling over 100 million albums. A top concert draw, they lit up arena audiences with fire and smoke, spitting blood and pumping out pop-metal anthems like “Rock and Roll All Nite.” Frehley’s wailing Les Paul solos were a staple of the sound, and he contributed fan favorites “Shock Me,” written after a near electrocution, and “Cold Gin.” That he was anonymous out of his makeup was key, he said in 1977. “Onstage I’m Ace Frehley,” he said, “and offstage I’m a kid from the Bronx.” 

Born into a musical family, Paul Daniel Frehley got his first electric guitar at 13 and “never looked back,” said Variety, practicing Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix licks for hours. He started playing in bands in his teens, picking up his nickname for his “ability to score dates.” Once in Kiss, he and his bandmates, inspired by the New York Dolls and Alice Cooper, decided to start “painting their faces and donning outrageous costumes.” After three modest-selling records, they were launched into stardom with 1975’s Alive! and their likenesses “began appearing on jean jackets across the United States.” Dubbed “the Spaceman” for the stars painted on his face, Frehley had the band’s “most spectacular onstage presence,” said The Telegraph (U.K.), “his pyrotechnically rigged guitar shooting out fireworks and lasers to match his blistering solos.” 

By the decade’s end, said The Washington Post, Frehley was irritated by the “lack of spontaneity” in the live sets as well as by the relentless marketing—Kiss was everywhere, from action figures to lunch boxes. His prodigious drug use bothered his bandmates, and he left in 1982. In the following decades he played solo and with Frehley’s Comet, and rejoined Kiss in 1996 for a series of lucrative reunion tours. He marveled at having found worldwide fame while “wearing makeup and dressed as a superhero,” he said in 2023. “I still look back on it today and I go, ‘Wow, that was weird.’”