The explosive expansion of the Yellowstone universe continues, as Kelly Reilly’s Beth Dutton and Cole Hauser’s Rip Wheeler attempt to put down new roots in the Lone Star State. With Montana’s ghosts in their rearview mirror, the couple set out to build a ranch of their own even though doing so will require taking on another landed family run by a ruthless matriarch and bolstered by the power of legacy. Let the battle of South Texas begin. Annette Bening co-stars as rival rancher Beulah Jackson, while Ed Harris plays a steely veterinarian who befriends the newcomers.
Friday, May 15, Paramount+

by Bob Spitz

“Hundreds of books have been written about the Rolling Stones, but few sparkle quite like Bob Spitz’s,” said Marc Ballon in the Los Angeles Times. The author, who has previously written doorstop accounts of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Led Zeppelin, tells the band’s story in full. We get the boys’ early days as a blues cover band, creative highs such as Exile on Main St., valleys such as 1986’s Dirty Work, the drug problems, the breakups, the makeups, and the disastrous 1969 concert at Altamont. Though Spitz “unearths little new information, he excels at presenting the Stones in glorious Technicolor” because he “homes in on telling details that give the band’s story a deep richness and poignancy.” The result is a “magisterial” work worthy of its 700 pages. “For anyone who loves or even likes the Stones, it’s indispensable.”

The tale begins with “one of the great origin stories, ranking up there with Steve Jobs inviting Steve Wozniak over to play with computers,” said David Kirby in The Wall Street Journal. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were the loosest of acquaintances when they ran into each other as 17-year-olds in 1961, Richards struck by Jagger’s armful of records. Thus was born one of rock’s most dynamic duos, soon to be joined by Brian Jones, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, and Ian Stewart, the last a piano player pushed off the band’s official roster because of his looks. Most would make it through several decades together, though Jones was dismissed from the band he co-founded shortly before his 1969 death, to be replaced by Mick Taylor, then Ronnie Wood. Revisiting their collective story with Spitz’s guidance is like seeing a familiar portrait anew. “The faces are the same, but the light is different, and suddenly you see shadows you never noticed, a new determination in one person’s eyes.”

“There’s a certain swagger in Spitz’s subtitling his chronicle of the band ‘The Biography,’” said Leah Greenblatt in The New York Times. But the author is a credible biographer of record, his takes on the music are “both forensic and poetic,” and “many small revelations and corrections emerge along the way.” His account is “diligent to a fault” as he strings together albums, addictions, court battles, and relationship dramas, and after devoting 600 pages to the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, he “suddenly leapfrogs over several decades in the final chapter, as if he just realized that his car is double-parked.” But he’s wise enough to position the Jagger-Richards partnership as the story’s central platonic love and enduring source of tension. And his epilogue, which finds the surviving Stones crushing yet another 2024 tour stop, “feels appropriately celebratory and bittersweet, like an Irish wake without the body.”

The rogue biologist who mapped human DNA

J. Craig Venter was a scientist of breathtaking ambition, more entrepreneur than lab nerd. During the 1990s push to sequence the human genome, he became convinced that the whole process could be done faster, simpler, and cheaper than the endeavor by the international, publicly funded Human Genome Project (HGP). With $70 million in funding from a biotech entrepreneur, he set about to map it himself using a different method that involved computer algorithms. Traditional researchers disdained Venter’s approach and especially his plans to patent DNA sequences; Nobel-winning geneticist James Watson compared it to “the way Hitler wanted to own the world.” But Venter sped up the decoding process so dramatically that he and his small team finished at about the same time as the HGP with all its thousands of scientists. He went on to make another norm-shattering breakthrough, engineering the first synthetic life form. To those who called him a “maverick,” he said, “I consider it a tremendous badge of honor.”

Born in Salt Lake City and raised near San Francisco, Venter was “a rebel by nature,” said The New York Times. A champion high-school swimmer but a slacker in school, he spurned a college scholarship to pursue, in his words, “drink, girls, and bodysurfing” until he was drafted. He served in a Vietnam naval hospital, and the “relentless stream of mangled young bodies” spurred him to a medical career. While his “goofing off in school as a youth had left him barely able to spell,” by 1975 he’d earned a doctorate in physiology from UC San Diego. He joined the National Institutes of Health, where he “was quick to appreciate the possibilities” of machine-sequencing DNA. By 1995, he had mapped out the genome of a bacterium known to cause ear infections and believed he could “make a serious contribution” to the HGP.

Other scientists believed he “had sold his soul to Mammon” by going private, said The Telegraph (U.K.). In fact, Venter’s public announcement that he’d sequenced the genome undermined his company’s plans for patents, and the firm fired him in 2002. “Characteristically, he refused to go quietly,” revealing that the draft genome had primarily used “DNA from his own sperm.” Nor did he stop then, said Stat. He created the first synthetic bacterial cell, sailed the world collecting sea-life DNA, “drove fast cars, drank red wine, and pissed people off.” In his final years, he studied human longevity. “I used to say that 70 is the new 50,” he said in 2024. “Now I say 100 is the new 70.”