There are detours in life, and then there are total reroutings. In this new series, Elle Fanning plays Margo, a college student whose promising future is derailed when she learns she’s carrying her English professor’s baby. She quits school and goes it alone, but the bills begin piling up. So what’s the daughter of a former Hooters waitress and a professional wrestler to do? Why, start an alien-themed OnlyFans, of course. Fanning is terrific in David E. Kelley’s adaptation of Rufi Thorpe’s hit 2024 novel, while Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman, and Nicole Kidman lead the all-star supporting cast. 
Wednesday, April 15, Apple TV

by Ben Lerner

“As ever with Ben Lerner’s novels, the plot of Transcription is sparse, propelled mostly by the characters’ winding speech and the narrator’s thoughts,” said Hannah Gold in Harper’s. But even at 144 pages, it’s a “remarkable” book, one that suggests human consciousness, and thus our individual experience of the self, has been forever changed by the phones most of us now carry in our pockets. “The novel is by turns slapstick and sincere in its consideration of digital devices”: It opens with its unnamed Lerner-like narrator accidentally dropping his phone in a sink of water, triggering a foolish bit of subterfuge. When this middle-aged poet meets with his former mentor, a renowned 90-year-old intellectual, for what’s likely to be the older man’s final interview, he pretends that the broken phone is recording, then creates a faked transcript. As events play out, Lerner’s writing “crackles with new insights, images, motifs.”

“In another writer’s hands, the novel would be a comic tale of comeuppance,” said Sukhdev Sandhu in The Guardian. “Lerner is more ambitious.” The voice of the  German-born mentor, Thomas, unfolds in “layered, associative sentences” that “skip across time and place to riddling, thrilling effect,” and although the narrator is lambasted when, in the novel’s middle section, he reveals at a symposium lecture after Thomas’ death that he reconstructed Thomas’ words. Lerner doesn’t end there. He adds a third section that finds the narrator in dialogue with an old friend, Max, who was also Thomas’ only son. That pair’s conversation touches on technology, parenting, and the Thomas they both knew, and yet the bristling intelligence of their back-and-forth is “at its most gripping when it addresses a seemingly simple issue: how to get a teenage girl to eat.” Max has watched his only daughter waste away, pained that she seems, in his eyes, to be rejecting the life provided to her because that life is a lie. 

Such ideas “risk becoming arid, and there are certainly times when Lerner overexplains them,” said Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal. But “Lerner’s method is to flicker between humor and heartbreak,” and Transcription “mines a lot of humor from the bumbling of its poet-narrator.” Max recalls having his own final interview with Thomas, a remote phone-assisted conversation he recorded while Thomas lay dying in isolation because of Covid restrictions, yet that scene too is “ultimately reconfigured in surprising ways, leaving its meanings bracingly indefinite.” It remains a striking moment, said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. These days, “smartphones have become so integral to our lives that how modern authors incorporate them into regular old paper books has become a kind of steeplechase. Right now Lerner, with his combination of erudition and lightness, is winning.”

The naturalist who lived among the orangutans

Biruté Galdikas spent two months in the swamp forests of Borneo, braving fire ants and leeches, venomous snakes and wild pigs, before she spotted her first orangutan. It was 1971, she was 25 years old, and she suddenly had her life’s mission. Over the next 55 years, much of it spent in that same forest, the primatologist became the world’s leading expert on the great ape. She was somewhat less famous than the other two disciples of paleoanthropologist Louis  Leakey— chimpanzee whisperer Jane Goodall and gorilla devotee Dian Fossey—but she was the most academically advanced, and it was Galdikas who set the record of longest continuous study of a wild mammal by a single person. On that first day, when she looked up into the trees and saw a mother with an infant on its shoulder, she realized that the 10 years Leakey had promised to fund her wouldn’t be enough. “I began to think I’d need a lifetime,” she said.

Born to Lithuanian parents in Germany, Galdikas grew up in Los Angeles reading Curious George books and dreaming “of life as an explorer,” said The New York Times. She earned a Ph.D. in anthropology at UCLA, where she studied under Leakey and learned of the work of Goodall and Fossey. The three women became “like daughters to Leakey, and sisters to one another.” Leakey helped Galdikas launch her research in Borneo, where she chronicled orangutans’ daily lives, their child rearing behaviors, and their shrinking numbers. She rose before dawn to trail the primates until nighttime, often falling asleep in a hammock slung near them in the forest. Her work first found a wide audience in 1975, when National Geographic published a photo of her carrying one young orangutan while holding hands with another.

“Almost everything Galdikas learned in the 1970s was groundbreaking,” said The Washington Post, including her discoveries of orangutan mating practices. But as her knowledge grew, her focus gradually shifted from science toward conservation. She campaigned to protect orangutans from threats like deforestation for palm oil production and the commercial pet trade. Such work “inevitably carried risks,” said The Telegraph (U.K.), and Galdikas was “threatened, harassed, and reportedly even kidnapped.” Undeterred, she continued visiting Borneo until she was 78, saying she still felt most at home in the jungle. “I was born to study orangutans,” she said, “because they, like me, were of the forest.”