Joanne and Noah haven’t just lasted; the unlikely pair at the center of this hit romantic comedy now live together. But Kristen Bell’s Joanne still feels like an outsider at the synagogue led by Adam Brody’s Noah even as she explores converting to Judaism in a class taught by a rabbi, played by Sarah Silverman, who’s new to the show. Meanwhile, Noah’s brother, Sasha, is pushed back into the dating world by his wife, Esther, who’s in midlife crisis mode. That makes the existing romantic tension between Sasha and Joanne’s sister, played by Timothy Simons and Justine Lupe, well worth monitoring. Thursday, Oct. 22, Netflix 

by James Marriott 

“It is a shame how many people wouldn’t dream of reading James Marriott’s eloquent, learned, and admirably brief book,” said Daniel Akst in The Wall Street Journal. Reading is dying, as the 33-year-old London Times columnist tells us, so it’s inevitable that most of the public will miss out on the joys of following him as he lays out his concerns. The causes of his worries aren’t new. A 2022 survey found that in the previous 12 months fewer than half of American adults had read a book. A year later, another study found that in an average day only 16% read anything for pleasure. Of course, there’s “a lot more at stake” in this decline than good books being left unread. Marriott, by revisiting ties between the rise of mass literacy and mass democracy, “makes a strong case” that long-form reading is a necessary ingredient to sustaining the kind of rational and probing collective dialogue that has made mass democracy possible. 

Marriott “might be insufficiently pessimistic,” said George F. Will in The Washington Post. Though he’s right that smartphones and the short-form videos they spawn have contributed to reading’s decline, the larger problem is that too many of our fellow citizens have become “pathetically nostalgic for the mental lassitude of preliterate people.” It was not until the 18th century that large numbers of our forebears began reading widely, but we have them to thank for launching the modern age, and today, as childish thinking spreads, we’re seeing that “reason, tolerance, and progress are contingent, not inherent, facets of humanity’s story.” Marriott, “like many alarmists,” builds his argument on cherry-picked data, said Chris Ferguson in Reason. He reports that reading scores for U.S. students hit an all-time low in 2024 without mentioning that they’d peaked in 2012, several years after the advent of smartphones. Meanwhile, the supposed link between literacy and healthy democracies is undermined by the highly literate societies that gave birth to the fascist regimes of 20th-century Germany, Italy, and Japan. 

“The New Dark Ages is too ominously titled,” said Michael O’Donnell in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Throughout the book, Marriott “thoughtfully acknowledges” evidence that reading and reason might not be utterly doomed, though he could have done more to acknowledge that the work many of us do still requires a lot of reading and writing. “Are we courting the same scenario as the Middle Ages, when a select few held the keys to knowledge, to the exclusion of all others? Probably not.” Still, “the thrust of Marriott’s argument— there is a decline in reading that is antithetical to the progress of the Enlightenment— strikes me as persuasive.” 

The preacher who was felled by his many sins

Jim Bakker preached prosperity gospel, which holds that piling up earthly wealth is a marker of divine grace. By that metric, Bakker was a blessed man. During his mid-1980s peak, he and his wife, Tammy Faye, pulled in $129 million a year through their television ministry, PTL, short for Praise the Lord (or, to detractors, Pass the Loot). The pair had four homes, a fleet of luxury cars, a 55-foot houseboat, and a gold-plated bathtub. In 1978, they opened Heritage USA, a Christian theme park in South Carolina that drew 6 million visitors a year; by 1986, PTL had 13 million viewers a day. It all hit a wall in 1987, when it came out that Bakker had paid $265,000 to a 21-year-old church secretary, Jessica Hahn, to keep her quiet after she accused him of rape. (He said the sex was consensual.) Two years later, he was convicted of siphoning millions from PTL to bankroll his opulent lifestyle, and he served five years in prison. “Excess and success are close together,” he said in 1985. “Anyone who is successful has got to be excessive.” 

Bakker grew up in a blue-collar Pentecostal family in Muskegon, Mich., said The Charlotte Observer. A “middling student,” he showed an Eva Marie Saint made a massive impact in her first few films but wasn’t given much of a chance after the 1950s. One of the last living stars of the classic Hollywood era, she won an Oscar for her first role, a shy convent school graduate who falls for Marlon Brando’s disillusioned prizefighter in 1954’s On the Waterfront. In 1957, she played a spy who seduces Cary Grant in the Alfred Hitchcock classic North by Northwest. After that, she frustrated her agent by insisting she would do no more than one picture a year so she could be home for her two children. When she filmed with Grant, she was just two weeks postpartum, and Hitchcock had her clambering around 30 feet up on a movie-set version of Mount Rushmore for the scene where she dangles off the side of the mountain. “I thought, if I tumble, how am I going to hit my mark on that mattress below?” she said. “But coming from the Actors Studio, if you get hurt, you get hurt.” Raised near Albany, N.Y., Saint was the younger daughter of Quaker parents. She attended Bowling Green State University and initially planned to be a teacher like her mother, said the Los Angeles Times. But “on a dare from a friend, she tried “interest in showbiz and a talent for salesmanship.” At 18, he ran over a 3-year-old in a church parking lot, but the boy survived without serious injuries, an apparent miracle that spurred Bakker to attend Bible college. There he met Tammy Faye, whom he proposed to on their third date. The pair dropped out of school and traveled the country preaching and singing before landing a show on the Christian Broadcasting Network. That led to a stint as hosts of The 700 Club, then the launch of The PTL Club in 1976. The program had a “folksy, talk-show style,” said The Washington Post. There were interviews, “upbeat music,” and “relentless fundraising, often punctuated by tearful pleas from one or both of them.” 

The revelation about Hahn yielded a “spectacular fall,” said Christianity Today. Bakker was convicted on 24 fraud and conspiracy counts, and prosecutors branded him a “brazen con man.” Freed in 1994, he remarried and launched The Jim Bakker Show. With “a new focus on end times,” Bakker lauded Donald Trump and sold survival gear and freeze-dried food. In his later years, his focus was on “the broken and the bruised and the hurt,” he said. “I’m here to say we have a God of second and third chances.”