FLOOD

Colson Whitehead’s latest novel brings America’s subterranean history up into the light.

Using rotoscope animation and imagined talking-head interviews with survivors and victims, the Austin director brings us back to the scene of the 1966 massacre at the University of Texas.

Enough with creepy clowns, slender men, and other viral freak-shows. Let’s focus instead on more enduring horrors.

It’s a little more than a month until the United States will have an election that has the capacity to literally make Donald Trump the most powerful man in the world. But right now, today, we simply wait. We are not there yet. And these first acts celebrate that vibrating moment before the plot thickens.

Because no human being should be made to look like a contestant on “Celebrity Jeopardy.”

Brad and Angelina are Brangelinathingofthepast, but rather than brooding upon the ephemerality of romantic relationships or the fragility of human projects as a whole, let’s celebrate, instead.

The 2012 film adaptation of David Mitchell’s grand story has its share of flaws, but it exceeds Mitchell’s work in the novel’s grandest ambition: being a moral work of art.

On a network overflowing with jaded takes on everyday life, “Better Things” stands out as a show that’s serious about its laughs.

“The Great British Bake Off” is losing its two lovely hosts, but [author has something in eye, pauses, swears, composes self, resumes] there are more where those came from!

The Guardian artist—and author of Goliath—talks about his new book, due out later this month from Drawn + Quarterly.

A supplement to the BFI’s (very white, very male) list of the the twenty-first century’s 100 Greatest Films.

We get cultish with the “Wet Hot American Summer” actor, who played Manson girl Susan Atkins in the 2004 version of “Helter Skelter.”

Just a reminder: We don’t have to shackle ourselves to the past when we stand on the shoulders of giants.

Pop culture recommendations for those of us who may have big dreams, but who lack the ability to climb up the face of a glass-fronted skyscraper in order to pursue them.

What do you do when you’re tired of being a film critic but you still love the movies? If you’re Karina Longworth, you turn the history of film into a longform podcast series.

Olympic telecasts go heavy on human-interest content, but not every human being is interesting—and many, in fact, are dull (and many of those have a monomaniacal devotion to sport). So let’s put away our thirst for meaning and medals for a moment and just enjoy some lives well lived.

Sean Ellis’s WWII drama tells the story of how the Czech resistance managed to assassinate Nazi general Reinhard Heydrich (a.k.a. “The Butcher of Prague”) and shows what they suffered as a result—but it fails to answer the question of why this story matters.

“BoJack Horseman” is a show that’s about a lot of things—adulthood, ambition, depression, Los Angeles, legacies, and more—but the recent “Fish Out of Water” episode shows how it can deliver profundities even when it isn’t trying, simply by plumbing the depths of its utterly original world.

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are threatening the evil friendships genre by implicating it in their anarchic plot to destabilize the world; but that doesn’t mean that all diabolical friendships are bad. Let us count the ways.

We’ve all spent a lot of time in Cleveland this past week, metaphorically speaking; let’s remedy that with some R&R at these pop cultural paradises.