Why do reunions inspire such anxiety? Could it be that the films of our youth have primed us to melt down at the prospect of a weekend-long show-and-tell game centered on how we’ve been spending our precious and once-promising lives?

David Chase never imagined that his show, about an ­anxiety-prone mob boss and his family, set in suburban New Jersey, would get picked up for a second season, let alone transform American television to such a degree that we’d still be talking about it 25 years after it premiered.

Bryan Johnson doesn’t have a publicist. Yet his quest for immortality, which is overseen by a rotating staff of health care professionals and costs him an estimated $2 million a year, has been extraordinarily well documented in the press—fueled by our fascination with the “quantified self” movement, atomized into millions of social media posts and swept up into the magic flywheel of clickbait journalism.

As temperatures climb to their highest recorded levels, we have officially entered the Summer of Spite. A desire to wreak havoc on our enemies, even in the absence of any direct benefits for ourselves—and sometimes at a cost to ourselves—is driving the culture.

In the four years since the last season of Black Mirror dropped, we’ve experienced a global pandemic that has bound us more tightly to our screens than ever; the attempted overthrow of American Democracy at the hands of an Internet-conspiracy-crazed mob; and an A.I. revolution that is–at least in part–responsible for the ongoing Hollywood writers’ strike. It’s all just so Black Mirror.

The real reason Succession has made such an enduring cultural impact has less to do with the writers’ talent for predicting the news than it has to do with the last words Logan Roy ever uttered to his children: “I love you, but you are not serious people.”

If you hail from Westeros and happen to be named Aegon, it’s a good indicator that you’re kind of a big deal.

With Don't Worry Darling and Deep Water dominating 2022 headlines—plus two more steamy films on the horizon—Big Horny Energy is, once again, stirring.

Gosling is part of that very first vintage of kids who broke into the industry on the then nascent Disney Channel, on one of two shows. There was The All New Mickey Mouse Club (a.k.a. MMC), a reboot of a popular 1950s variety show created by Walt Disney and originally broadcast on ABC. And then Kids Incorporated, a more narratively driven preteen precursor to Kidz Bop and Glee.

The coronavirus pandemic, coupled with the tumult following the 2020 election, sent shock waves through our already strained interpersonal relationships. Fifteen percent of Americans reported ending a friendship over politics, according to a June 2021 survey by the American Enterprise Institute. Add social media to the mix and you can witness the technological embodiment of the aphorism “show me who you love and I’ll tell you who you are.”

On Hacks, Einbinder, 26, plays Ava Daniels, a chronically oversharing, bisexual Gen Z comedy writer whose once-promising television career got derailed by an offensive tweet. (In other words, she was “canceled.”)

High on the entitlement that comes with a far-flung portfolio of tax-exempt assets, billionaires are going buck wild, buying up jets, Van Goghs, and NFTs, and building penis-shaped rockets that they ride to space. The optics from earth no longer seem to matter.