Culture

Cardinal Robert Prevost entered the 2025 conclave as a long shot for a job no American was supposed to get. He left it as Pope Leo. Here's what happened behind closed doors.

— via NPR Arts & Life, Scott Detrow

A divorce lawyer's worst case: Dominic West and Sienna Miller play a power couple shredding each other through two rival London firms in HBO's new anthology drama. Season one is just the opening skirmish.

— via NPR Arts & Life, Linda Holmes

Four writers respond to the alleged rape at Cornell University in 2024, each reading the case against a different fault line in how assault gets reported, believed or dismissed.

— via NPR Arts & Life, Sophia Paliza-Carre

A doctor who talks to ghosts turns into a vehicle for Argentina's political rage, mixed with real dread and dark jokes. The Spanish-language miniseries doesn't resemble anything else currently on TV.

— via NPR Arts & Life, John Powers

One member demanded werewolf erotica for four straight years; when the club finally banned smut, she kept showing up just to sulk in the corner. Book clubs are booming, up 33% on Eventbrite, but behind the wine and vibes, plenty are quietly imploding.

— via The Guardian: Culture, Stephanie McNeal

You cross the same bridge three times before the credits roll. Gears of War's prequel nails chainsaw combat but buries it under collectible chimes, repeated levels and a "mission failed" screen for straying off the beaten path.

— via The Guardian: Culture, Kirk McKeand

Mahmoud Khalil went from Columbia protest leader to a detention cell in Louisiana. His new memoir, "No Land to Stand On," traces how it happened.

— via NPR Arts & Life, Tonya Mosley

Men make up just 4% of Mills & Boon's sales, and less than 2% of the Romantic Novelists' Association is male. Yet a hidden readership of straight men is quietly devouring romance novels, finding in werewolf CEOs and gender-flipped vampires a permission to feel things masculinity usually forbids.

— via The Guardian: Culture, Amandas Ong

Dennis Haskins, the actor behind Saved by the Bell's Mr Belding, has died at 75, his agent confirmed. Cause of death remains undisclosed, but a Burbank karaoke bar he frequented says he'd been ill for about eight years and kept it private.

— via The Guardian: Culture, Victoria Bekiempis

A billionaire survival fantasy is uniting factions that otherwise despise each other. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor trace how tech moguls and far-right supremacists share the same conviction: they're the chosen few built to outlast the collapse.

— via NPR Arts & Life, Ericka Taylor

Herding livestock in Lesotho's mountains means dropping out of school, often for years at a stretch. A handful of night classes, run on almost no money, are teaching these boys and men to read and write anyway.

— via NPR Arts & Life, Julie Bourdin

Min Jin Lee's new 600-plus-page novel took nearly a decade to write, the third installment in a planned four-book saga on the Korean diaspora. The result is sweeping and intimate at once, and deliberately, almost overwhelmingly, a lot.

— via NPR Arts & Life, Maureen Corrigan

Trump's New York deal-making instincts are colliding with a city built on federal law, not real estate leverage. Preservationists warn the changes he's pushing could set a precedent no future president can undo.

— via NPR Arts & Life, Rachel Treisman

A double-donor conception left one woman with no genetic tie to either parent who raised her. She tracked down both bloodlines anyway, uncovering two separate families she'd never known existed.

— via NPR Arts & Life, Martha Bebinger

A severed finger arrives at a school and then almost nothing happens with it: Liane Moriarty's long-awaited Big Little Lies sequel trades the first book's murder-mystery jolt for menopause, vaping teens and a stalker plot so telegraphed it barely raises a pulse.

— via The Guardian: Culture, Bec Kavanagh

Willem Dafoe has five films coming out in the second half of this year alone. At 71, his drive to keep challenging himself is turning into a release schedule most actors half his age couldn't match.

— via NPR Arts & Life, Rachel Martin

Oprah Winfrey is taking her "AHA" show to Sphere in Las Vegas next year. She tells NPR's Leila Fadel what that means for a format built on immersive scale, and why she picked this stage for it.

— via NPR Arts & Life, Leila Fadel

Warning signs about Sean Combs circulated for decades, yet his power kept growing. A Rolling Stone reporter's new book traces how the industry kept protecting him anyway.

— via NPR Arts & Life, Tonya Mosley

A new entry in Tahir's Ember in Ashes universe picks up moments after 'Heir' ends, with S'rsha bound to the same monster she set out to kill.

— via NPR Arts & Life, Dhanika Pineda

Fans once showed up at John Green's house late at night, babies asleep inside, after The Fault in Our Stars turned him into a phenomenon that sold 20m copies. In his first adult novel, he tries to work out why fame felt less like fortune and more like empty calories.

— via The Guardian: Culture, Carter Sherman