The Atlantic: Entertainment

Charles Sykes / Invision / AP Art has a long tradition of shaping public perceptions of history. Shakespeare transformed Richard III, a brutal monarch in a typically brutal time, into a physically-deformed, Machiavellian tyrant.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

Heinz-Peter Bader / Reuters “I’ve observed a general societal decline in kindness to our fellow man,” wrote the blogger Matt Raymond in 2010. “At the same time, our senses of entitlement have seemingly spiked.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

If Trevor Noah had been losing any sleep in recent months over what a vast challenge lay before him, it didn’t show on Monday night. The Daily Show with Trevor Noah wasn’t without its foibles and clunky one-liners: the pitfalls any new late night talk show has to dodge.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

In a joint review of new albums by Disclosure and CHRVCHES, Caracal and Every Open Eye, respectively, Spencer plucks a track from the latter:

Of the six books that have been shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize, A Spool of Blue Thread appears, at first glance, to be the least provocative. Anne Tyler’s novel—one of two American works on the shortlist this year—takes as its subject the everyday joy and heartbreak that occur within the mostly pleasant lives of a white, middle-class Baltimore family, the Whitshanks.

In a 2010 piece for Slate, Michael Newman argued that Lisbeth Salander, the brilliant, fearsome hacker heroine of the hit Millennium series deserves better than the man who created her.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show, that campy beacon of sexuality and self-acceptance, premiered in the U.S. on September 25, 1975, at the Westwood Theater in Los Angeles. The film follows a terribly traditional 1950s-esque couple, Brad (Barry Bostwick) and Janet (Susan Sarandon), as they spend the night in the gothic castle of the cross-dressing alien Dr.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

In about a week, the Washington Nationals—picked by many to reach the World Series before the season started—will finish well behind the New York Mets and miss the postseason altogether.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

In The Intern, the businesswoman Jules Ostin (Anne Hathaway) and, by extension, the writer and director Nancy Meyers, has a question: Where did all the “real men” go? Jules mourns not for the bossy, sexist fools of the Mad Men era, but for grown-ups, men who could rock a pocket square, who had a handkerchief at the ready, who had a good head on their shoulders and ambitions for existence.

Sicario, the new film by the French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, is in effect two separate movies. One is terrific and one quite good, but the two coexist in uneasy tension.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share