Blogs

Seth Rogen lands the “tragic job” of movie exec in The Studio. Ken Tucker recommends three new songs. New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz explains how Democrats can win back young male voters.

When a police inspector goes missing, his identical twin assumes his identity in an effort to solve the disappearance. Ludwig is one of the most original takes on the TV mystery genre.

In Bad Law, Elie Mystal argues that our country’s laws on immigration, abortion and voting rights don’t reflect the will of most Americans, and we’d be better off abolishing them and starting over.

Updating Strunk and White. Link two thoughts with a semicolon, as in: He’s not even the real President; the other, even weirder billionaire seems to be in charge.

Comedian Conan O’Brien received the Mark Twain Prize at the Kennedy Center on Sunday night, which David Letterman called “the most entertaining gathering of the resistance ever.”

(Image credit: Clifton Prescod for Netflix)

In season two of Severance (streaming on Apple TV+), we got a blowout finale with answers to mysteries and even more layers of weirdness. The show stars Adam Scott as an employee of a sinister corporation called Lumon. He has undergone a process called severance, which separates your work self and home self.

Listen to Short Wave’s episode about Severance.

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America is a deeply spiritual nation. Over 70% of us say that we feel spiritual in some way. But – at the same time – we’re getting less religious. So for people who are spiritual-but-not-religious – what’s replacing organized religion? What do they believe – and where does that show up in their day-to-day lives? In our new series called Losing My Religion, It’s Been a Minute is going to find out.

This week, we’re getting into psychedelics. That’s an umbrella that includes the drugs LSD, magic mushrooms, peyote, and often ketamine and MDMA too, among others. And some of these drugs have a history of spiritual practice spanning millennia. But there’s a new group that’s really taking on the psychedelic mantle: tech bros and CEOS. Brittany is joined by Maxim Tvorun-Dunn, PhD candidate at the University of Tokyo, and Emma Goldberg, business reporter at the New York Times, to discuss what it means that these drugs are getting championed – and sometimes financially backed – by the tech elite, and how might that affect our culture’s relationship to psychedelics as spiritual tools.

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Rounding up the big interviews you might have missed, from gardening tips with Martha Stewart to a conversation with a former astronaut about what happens to our bodies after that much time in space.

(Image credit: Spencer Platt)

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Uzo Aduba stars as a brilliant detective in this high-energy, light-hearted murder mystery show on Netflix.

(Image credit: Erin Simkin)

This week, we’re live in Orlando with special guest Moe Wagner and panelists Eugene Cordero, Alonzo Bodden, and Paula Poundstone