At a recent event, the novelist Marlon James was asked to name a book by another author that he wished he'd written. He picked Dogeaters, Jessica Hagedorn's 1990 novel about the Philippines. Although it is set in Manila during the rule of Ferdinand Marcos, James couldn't help thinking of Jamaica, the country he grew up in, as he read it. 'I thought: She knows Kingston,' he said. What he meant was that her book helped him better see the beauty, thrum, and chaos of the Jamaican capital, which would become the setting for his Booker Prize'winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. Gary Shteyngart made a similar discovery about the slipperiness of literary inspiration when he traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, for The Atlantic, seeking traces of the Nobel Prize'winning author J. M. Coetzee. He was hunting for clues to decipher the author's parable-like novels in the homes Coetzee had lived in and the streets he had walked'but Shteyngart learned more from discovering what the author chose to leave out....

Those of us who worship at the altar of Rachel Weisz had high hopes for Vladimir, Netflix's new miniseries starring the British actor as a frustrated English professor who becomes giddily unmoored by a sexual fixation on her new colleague Vladimir (played by Leo Woodall). On-screen, Weisz is our preeminent interpreter of erudite but animalistic desire; Woodall is the most reliably lunkish and sleepy-eyed rogue currently acting. Put them together, and it's fair to expect'at a bare minimum'fireworks. So why does Vladimir feel so leaden, so performative' Watching it, I felt detached anthropological curiosity at best, and more often was irritated by how insistently the series proffered close-ups (Vladimir's calves, the folds of his neck, his tacky silver chain) as motifs of desire instead of actual chemistry. Weisz's unnamed professor is a fiendishly unreliable narrator; she breaks the fourth wall constantly to tell viewers things that are obviously untrue, while hammering us with repetitive glimpses of her fantasies'Vladimir pressing her up against a bookshelf; Vladimir pushing a ripe plum into her mouth'to the point where they feel less erotic than intrusive. Her attraction to Vladimir doesn't seem based on a real craving for connection. Rather, she's projecting her anxieties about aging and diminishing status onto a hunk-shaped void....

Three weeks into Donald Trump's war against Iran, the president has still refused to define victory other than to say the war will soon be over. From the moment he launched hostilities, he offered many rationales for the war, choosing among them like he's picking hors d'oeuvres from a buffet at one of his golf resorts: It's about nuclear weapons, it's about terrorism, it's about ballistic missiles. As the media, and the world, press him for explanations, he continues, as Pegah Banihashemi and Paul Poast wrote in The Atlantic on Wednesday, to 'careen' between demanding 'unconditional surrender' from Tehran and signaling 'that he might abruptly declare victory and leave.' But Trump did seem to have an overarching goal at the start of the war: regime change. In a video he released during the first night of the attack, he told the Iranian authorities to surrender and called on the Iranian people to rise up against their government. Unfortunately, the regime in Tehran seems to be recovering and, even worse, consolidating power. The American intelligence community has reportedly issued an assessment that the regime 'will remain intact and possibly even emboldened, believing it stood up to Trump and survived.' Trump now appears lost, unable to comprehend how a blockbuster movie that he scripted out, one in which he cast himself as the Liberator of Iran, has turned into a poorly received miniseries that might yet be renewed for another dreary season....

Here's how you know Project Hail Mary is a work of science fiction: It's about the disparate nations of Earth pooling together their resources and intelligence to confront an apocalyptic problem'in this case, the pending death of the sun, due to a mysterious alien substance. The film, co-directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, is based on a novel by Andy Weir published in 2021, when the world was haphazardly confronting the coronavirus pandemic; intentionally or not, the book felt like a nakedly optimistic bit of counterbalance to international chaos and discord. The screen adaptation is similarly heartening, even cheerful'it suggests that a can-do attitude and some cutting-edge technology might be enough to see humanity through calamity. (Ryan Gosling's sparkling smile and finely tousled hair have been thrown in for good measure.) Is that perspective naive' Maybe, but Lord and Miller, who previously engineered similarly bouncy adventures such as 21 Jump Street and the Spider-Verse series (which they wrote and produced), are daring audiences to hope against hope. Project Hail Mary, despite its harrowing premise, is a Big Friendly Giant of a movie, told at epic scale and somewhat daunting length (156 roomy minutes). It's the kind of dazzling-looking, all-ages adventure that's become rare in Hollywood: a grown-up story that kids can also enjoy. Lord and Miller's endeavor here should be easy to root for....