Culture

If you attended Sunday or Hebrew school, you know the story. There once lived in the ancient Persian city of Susa a King Ahasuerus and his Jewish wife, Queen Esther. At first she hid her Jewish identity from the king, only revealing it in order to foil the plot hatched by Haman, her husband’s Jew-hating second-in-command, to exterminate all who shared her faith. In doing so, Esther saved her people from destruction – and earned a volume in the Hebrew Bible named for her. Less well-known is that centuries later, in the Amsterdam of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69), Esther’s valor also made her a heroine to the citizens of the predominantly Protestant Dutch Republic.

At the corner of Manhattan’s Tenth Avenue and 22nd Street, there is a mural by the Brazilian artist Eduardo Kobra. Situated over the landmark Empire Diner, Kobra's painting reimagines Mount Rushmore as a paean to art stardom or, depending on how one looks at these things, the tragically hip and perpetually overrated.  Kobra supplants George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt with the graffiti artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Mexican fabulist Frida Kahlo and the melanin-deprived panjandrum of Pop, Andy Warhol. These cultural icons loom over the crowds supping on blistered shishitos and tuna tartare inside the diner.

Making a spin-off of a spin-off is the trickiest task on television, not least because it assumes that the audience is sufficiently fond of the original and the reinvention alike to be happy to go steady with the third round, too. In all fairness, the new workplace-themed sitcom (although on the evidence of this first season, comedy-drama is probably a more accurate designation) The Paper is only a callback to the US The Office, in that its premise is that the same documentary crew that captured the bewildering banality of life at Dunder Mifflin has headed to Toledo, Ohio, there to follow the travails of a once-proud, now-flailing newspaper, the Toledo Truth-Teller.

Of the 1,800 objects on display at the newly reopened Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the funerary poles of the Asmat people stick out.  At 15 feet tall, they tower above the swarm of visitors and nearly touch the newly rendered, gorgeously curved ceilings. The poles, decorated with carvings of haunted-looking faces and bodies, were traditionally made to mark a violent death. Once that death was avenged, the poles were removed to the woods, where they were left to decay.  These particular poles have further meaning, though, beyond their eerie beauty and the symbolism they confer of the cycle of life. They were collected by Nelson Rockefeller’s son, Michael, on a trip to spend time with the Asmat in New Guinea in 1961.

Once, it might have seemed strange for American politicians to use a rock star as a proxy means of sniping at one another, but these are not normal times. Gavin Newsom used the White Stripes’ song “Seven Nation Army” on Instagram to soundtrack various campaign posts, and the band’s songwriter Jack White commented that “Fans of this song and also democracy, notice that I'm ok with this track being used in this manner. Not so much when Trump and his gestapo try to use one of my songs. Keep hitting him back Gavin!” For good measure, he also attacked Trump’s redesign of the Oval Office, calling it “disgusting... a vulgar, gold leafed and gaudy, professional wrestler’s dressing room.

Bruce Springsteen chuckled when I asked him about the making of Born to Run. “I was just a kid in my 20s trying to keep a record deal together – there was nothing more to it than that,” he told me. One way to see the Springsteen of the summer 1975, just before Born to Run released, is to imagine a wispy-bearded, 25-year-old man hanging around a beachfront New Jersey bar, telling you about his life. He relates slightly improbable tales of having attended a local Catholic high school, where one of the supervising nuns expressed her misgivings about his scholastic performance by stuffing him upside down in a garbage can in the classroom.

Since its Netflix release in June 2025, KPop Demon Hunters – an animated children’s movie about a Korean girl band – has broken records, becoming the platform’s second-most popular film of all time. Its soundtrack has matched that momentum: the anthem “Golden” reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100, the first time a girl group claimed that spot since Destiny’s Child in 2001. Other tracks, such as “Soda Pop” and “Takedown,” have charted across the global top 10. Sing-along theater screenings are taking place across the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. How has such a seemingly niche film soared to such heights? There are more than just catchy tunes at play here.

If viewers of Breaking Bad had taken bets during the show’s original run on which of the cast was likely to become a breakout action-film star a decade after the series finished airing, Bob Odenkirk would likely have been near the bottom of that list. The young actor Aaron Paul was perhaps the most obvious prediction, but Jesse Plemons, Dean Norris – even a grizzled and pumped Bryan Cranston – were all more predictable choices to do an alpha-male Liam Neeson-meets-Keanu Reeves act than the foppish comic relief Jimmy McGill, aka criminal lawyer (in both senses) Saul Goodman.

Another day, another bunch of rampaging, acid-blooded xenomorphs. Noah Hawley’s new series, Alien: Earth, comes hard on the heels of the profoundly forgettable but commercially successful latest installment in the film saga, Romulus. That film got into trouble with certain viewers for its artistic necrophilia in the artificial-intelligence-assisted resurrection of Ian Holm’s character Ash from the first Alien film, as well as some rather laborious fan service in the repetition of various hard-as-nails catchphrases. But still, its box-office revenue indicated that there is still, after four and a half decades, a hearty appetite for audiences who want to be scared witless by rampaging extra-terrestrials: the very opposite of kindly, friendly ET types.

Weapons, Zach Cregger’s sophomore picture after the acclaimed Barbarian, was a conspicuous success story in its opening weekend: brilliant reviews, an A- CinemaScore from audiences (rare for the horror genre, in which anything above a B is considered a major hit) and, of course, a massive box office. Its first weekend gross was $43.5 million, an astonishing amount for a film without an existing intellectual property, A-list stars (although Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich and Julia Garner are hardly unknowns) or big-name director.

The news that the actress Gina Carano has secured a climbdown and undisclosed (but undoubtedly) generous settlement from Disney over her dismissal from The Mandalorian television series in 2021 is sure to have far-reaching consequences that stretch far beyond La La Land. Carano posted a triumphant statement on X, saying, “I hope this brings some healing to the force,” thanked Elon Musk for bankrolling her case and concluded by saying “Yes, I’m smiling.” Disney, meanwhile, released their own, terse assessment in which they announced, “We look forward to identifying opportunities to work together with Ms. Carano in the near future.” It was a win for Carano on every level.

It’s hard to say out loud, but it looks like The Howard Stern Show may finally be winding down at SiriusXM. With his contract coming to an end and no clear word on renewal, even Stern himself sounds noncommittal. For the first time since the 1970s, the radio world is bracing for a future without him.But for many of us – particularly those of us in Gen X who came of age during his prime – that future started a long time ago. Because the Howard Stern we grew up on, the one we admired, feared, laughed with (and sometimes fought with) has been gone for years.I was a teenager in the Eighties and a driven, hard-working young professional in the Nineties. I didn’t just listen to Stern – I studied him: his timing, his fearlessness, his command of the mic.

You may not have realized it, but the actress Lindsay Lohan has been quietly orchestrating a comeback over the past few years. In 2022, she signed a multifilm deal with Netflix that led to such forgettable pieces of fluff as the Oirish romantic comedy Irish Wish, and now she has returned in her highest-profile film in years, the Freaky Friday sequel, Freakier Friday. Lohan stars opposite the Oscar-winning Jamie Lee Curtis in what is clearly (and cynically) intended as a piece of four-quadrant fluff, and Disney will be hoping that the sequel recaptures some of the 2003 original’s box-office alchemy; it grossed $160 million worldwide on a $26 million budget.

In this week’s South Park, the second episode since Paramount paid Trey Parker and Matt Stone eleventy billion dollars to make content, Parker and Stone absolutely and brilliantly rip the Trump administration to shreds. Unlike our late-night comedy hosts, who don’t have the chops for anything other than name-calling and juvenile slap fights with the President, South Park gets to the heart of darkness of the Trump administration, and also to what’s so funny about our new political age. Not only does the episode feature a savage attack on Trump, depicting him as Mr. Roarke at Mar-a-Lago as Fantasy Island, it also shows J.D. Vance as a tiny Tattoo, who Trump literally kicks out of the way when he gets annoying.

Unless you have been rock-bound over the last few weeks – or avoiding all social media, which in 2025 amounts to much the same – you can scarcely have missed the controversy over the recent three-night gala staging of the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar at the Hollywood Bowl. Jesus, you see, is not played by a white man, as is customary, but Cynthia Erivo, the Wicked star who is black, female and queer. This has not gone down well with traditionalists, but Erivo is one of the most talented singers working today – as well as a fine actress – and so, if the first reviews are to be believed, she blew the roof off the Hollywood Bowl, stealing the show entirely from a starry cast including Adam Lambert and Josh Gad.

Oh, to be a 19th-century Parisienne! A creature like no other, she arose “like Venus from the waters of the Seine,” as one fanciful journalist put it, “the supreme fruit of civilization.” An elegant arbiter of taste, she could be seen attending plays, concerts and exhibitions, or walking along Haussmann’s airy boulevards. By the time of the Third Republic, she did not need blue blood, so long as she had thoughts on paintings, poetry and music. To a city recovering from the horrors of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, which left thousands dead and monuments ravaged, she was a symbol of a brighter future. Artists flocked to paint the Parisienne (and expat wannabes), who in turn welcomed the opportunity to commission status-boosting likenesses.

Since 1997, South Park has satirized just about every group in modern life while hilariously positioning itself as the voice of moderation. Yet with the premier of Season 27 last week, the show seems to have lost sight of reality, instead circling the drain of MSNBC-style political delirium. Far from rejecting the extremes of American politics, the shows repositions leftist extremism as the new moderation.  The new season’s first episode shows the Principal, who was once politically correct, embrace devout Christianity in an America where wokeness is effectively illegal and Christian Nationalism reigns supreme. The town’s adults are annoyed to see public schools foist religion on the kids, so they organize their usual rabble-rousing resistance.

Ellen DeGeneres, the former queen of American daytime television, says she escaped the social turmoil of the United States by finding a $29 million farmhouse in the English countryside. And she would very much like the rest of us to take note. She and her wife, Portia de Rossi, reportedly arrived in Britain the day before the 2024 US election. When the results came in, accompanied, she says, by a flood of sad-face-emoji-laden texts from anxious friends, the couple made their decision: they wouldn’t be going back. Now they’re happily settled in the Cotswolds, that beautiful part of southern England where celebrities, rockstars and former politicians play out their fantasies of rural living.

David Letterman, who by now has retreated into full comedy-hermit mode, posted a bunch of old Late Show clips on his YouTube page on Monday, where he continually and brutally spit-roasted CBS. In honor of CBS losing NFL coverage to FOX in 1994 (and selling off several affiliates in the bargain), he ran a “Top Ten List” of “New CBS Slogans,” including “you can’t spell ‘Bumbling Executives without C-B-S!’ and ‘If you bring your talk show here, we’ll sell all your stations!’” As a reward for that long-ago roasting, CBS said nothing in response and kept Letterman’s highly profitable show on the air for more than two decades.

Very few of us, whether celebrities or mere mortals, manage to arrange the circumstances of our departure from this world in order to leave in a blaze of glory. Up until today, the only example I could think of was David Bowie, who died two days after his glorious final album, Blackstar, was released. But now he is joined in whatever Valhalla rock stars congregate in by none other than Black Sabbath’s Ozzy Osbourne, who has died at the age of 76. His death comes a mere two and a half weeks after his former band played their final gig in Villa Park in Birmingham, England, where the band hailed from. The concert, “Back to the Beginning,” saw Osbourne clearly in failing health, unable to stand or walk due to his Parkinson’s disease, and seated, appropriately enough, on a throne.

I preface this review by saying that – unless you are the greatest admirer of Lena Dunham or anyone in the (admittedly impressive) cast of her new Netflix series, Too Much – it is very easy to give this particular show a miss. It is a tedious, unfunny collection of clichés, strange American-centric perspectives on life in London, a charmless, Dunhamesque lead, a chemistry-free central pairing and guest appearances from her famous friends that seem somewhere between embarrassed and incongruous. Yet there are many worse shows on streaming services, most of which have not attracted anything like The Discourse that Too Much has thus far – and which, I am painfully aware, this article is contributing to. Why this? Why now?