Watching is The New York Times’s TV and film recommendation website. Sign up for our thrice-weekly newsletter here. Until we get the updated weather report from Punxsutawney Phil, it might remain best to stay inside, stay warm and stream. Below are the most interesting of what we’ve found among the new TV series and movies […]
Subscribe: iTunes | Google Play Music | How to Listen The venture capitalist Roger McNamee has a long history with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. Among other things, he suggested that Zuckerberg hire Sheryl Sandberg to be his chief operating officer. “For the past two years,” McNamee says on this week’s podcast, “I have converted from […]
An up-and-coming young adult author has cancelled the publication of her highly anticipated debut novel, following a flood of online criticism from readers over her depiction of race and slavery. Amélie Wen Zhao’s novel, Blood Heir, was sold to publishers for a high six-figure sum last January. A fantastical retelling of the Anastasia story involving […]
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you’re interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. ‘Money That Has Been […]
Season 2, Episode 3, ‘Point of Light’ Let’s call this a return to form for “Star Trek: Discovery,” in that “Point Of Light” was the first episode this season to remind me of last season. By which I mean it offered crowded, haphazard and choppy storytelling with bold choices that depart from historic Trek norms. […]
Michael Jackson was quite possibly the most famous entertainer of the 20th century. When he died in June 2009, it seemed like the long-boiling national conversation around the multiple allegations of child molestation against him died, too; the focus instead shifted to his planned This Is It comeback concerts, his unreleased songs and a musical […]
One of our recommended titles this week — “Aristotle’s Way,” by Edith Hall — posits that the path to happiness lies through moderation in all things. We like to think that Aristotle would have made an exception for reading. Here, then, are 10 books for our fellow obsessives, from an expansive Native American history to […]
When I was writing my second novel, For the Good Times, it never occurred to me that we might be approaching a kind of Troubles “moment” in literature, but I did wonder. Were we finally far enough away from the events of 1968-98 to start fictionalising them? Is it necessary for there to be a […]
Is it hyperbole to call Good Omens one of the most successful collaborative novels of all time? Certainly, it’s a success: it’s clever, funny and has stayed in print – and stayed relevant – for almost three decades. More than that, it is deeply beloved. When we chose it for the reading group this month, […]
ZUCKED Waking Up to the Facebook CatastropheBy Roger McNamee The dystopia George Orwell conjured up in “1984” wasn’t a prediction. It was, instead, a reflection. Newspeak, the Ministry of Truth, the Inner Party, the Outer Party — that novel sampled and remixed a reality that Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism had already made apparent. Scary stuff, […]
We’re not starved for choice these days when it comes to disturbing thrillers: murderous nannies in Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby; foully intentioned lovers in, well, the majority of new titles. But even by these standards, Alice Clark-Platts’s The Flower Girls (Raven Books) goes to some very dark places indeed. The author, a former human rights lawyer, […]
Who knew a thriller could be this boring! Felonies, hush money, Russian agents, dogged journalists — in real time, it turns out, all that stuff moves like molasses, with none of the subtle internal coherence you find in a good novel of suspense. We may have to concede that while truth is indeed stranger than […]