My precise view

https://ift.tt/3BWH1xB July marks the high point of the summer season, and television has noticed. Along with the sparse, anticlimactic but occasionally transcendent Tokyo Olympics, the past month’s best programming has gone hard on sun and fun. Below, you’ll find a devilish dramedy that revolves around trouble in paradise, romances of the both the period-drama and the reality-competition variety, a journey into the sounds of pop music—as well as a surprisingly honest, artful documentary portrait of an Olympian among Olympians. In need of additional suggestions? Here’s a list of my favorite shows from the first half of 2021, plus a few more highlights from June . [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] FBoy Island (HBO Max) Here’s something I never thought I’d type: thank heavens for FBoy Island . Like Love Island , Temptation Island and, sure, 30 Rock ‘s satirical MILF Island before it, FBoy transports a couple dozen hot people to the kind of luxury-beach-resort backdrop...

https://ift.tt/3j3H2XY When music fan Noah Zelinsky bought tickets to the Chicago music festival Lollapalooza in May, he thought it might signal something of a return to normalcy after more than a year of isolation. “There’s so much pent up excitement, being the first major thing back,” he says. But a lot can change in two months. “Now, there’s a lot of fear countering that.” As Lollapalooza arrives, along with its potentially hundreds of thousands of attendees, in Grant Park, worrying signs abound: the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus has spread across the U.S., with Chicago’s COVID-19 daily case rate quintuple what it was a month ago , albeit nowhere near the heights of this spring . And recent music festivals, including the Verknipt festival in Utrecht, Netherlands, and Rolling Loud in Miami, have been connected to outbreaks among their attendees and surrounding communities. Whether or not Lollapalooza, which runs from July 29 through Aug. 1, succeeds...

https://ift.tt/3rHnvR1 This article is part of the The DC Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox every weekday. The whole sexiness of cryptocurrency has been its potential to disrupt the status quo, to revolutionize Wall Street and create a new democratic ethos in a global economic system has largely been dictated by the U.S. dollar since the end of World War II. Well, that allure is starting to fade as even crypto’s strongest evangelists realize they may still have to play by Washington’s rules if they want to keep literally printing money. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] A bipartisan framework on infrastructure spending—and how to fund that spending—cleared its first procedural hurdle in the Senate on Wednesday. A 2,500-page draft of the deal is now racing through Washington, though lawmakers today are saying it’s premature to treat it as gospel. Special interests are still trying to sneak in their own effort...

https://ift.tt/3zT7ytS In recent years, Tunisia has become a victim of its own reputation. In the decade since its landmark 2011 revolution, its characterization as “the only democratic success story of the Arab Spring” has hung around the country’s neck like an albatross. While observers have routinely celebrated its “democratic transition” they overlooked a parliament that regularly descended into chaos and a flailing economy. Into this mix, factor in the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the government’s catastrophic response to it, and an event like the one that occurred Sunday—when President Kais Saied suspended the country’s legislature and dismissed unpopular Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi— becomes almost inevitable. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Few saw Saied’s intervention coming. Nevertheless, late on Sunday evening, following what had at times been violent demonstrations across the country, with protesters calling for the dissolution of parliament and early...

https://ift.tt/3rIl8NK The best way to appreciate the planet fully is to leave the planet entirely. To inhabit a world is to get awfully used to it. The sky is up there—big as ever. The ground is down there—solid as ever. The ocean is over that way. Canada is up the other way. There are happy places—Paris, Bora Bora. There are parts of the world—North Korea, Afghanistan—where people suffer tremendously. Our own place in all of that determines who we become. We’re like wine grapes; we have a terroir, a home soil that flavors us and changes us, and once we’ve become one thing it’s hard to become—or even understand—something else. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] But for a tiny handful of us—fewer than 600 in all of human history—there’s been a way outside of all of that, and it’s by flying above all of that. Ever since Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space, 60 years ago this April, astronauts have come home to describe what they call the Overview Effect: the chan...

https://ift.tt/378Zc4X Pity the British aristocracy. Oh, sure, they had a good run through the Victorian era. But by the time the Great War wrapped up, the country’s professional class was ascendant, progressive social movements were gaining steam and the aura of God-given superiority that surrounded people who could trace their lineage back to the Norman conquest was starting to dissipate. The monarchy faced threats from communism on the left and fascism on the right. Rich Europeans had infiltrated high society. Such newfangled ideas as careers for aristocratic men and formal education for their future wives scandalized the older generations. This is the tumultuous, if still enviable, backdrop for the three-part miniseries The Pursuit of Love , an adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s classic novel from writer-director-actor Emily Mortimer that comes to Amazon on July 30. An instant best-seller in the UK, the book, which TIME’s reviewer praised in 1946 for how it “plays on the sur...

https://ift.tt/3l8Yugg The day before a moratorium on evictions is set to expire, President Joe Biden faces criticism from some of his allies for his hasty effort to preserve it—and for not acting sooner to prevent what they view as an imminent housing crisis. Biden asked Congress on Thursday to act swiftly to extend the ban on evictions, set to expire on Saturday. But Democratic lawmakers are divided on how much longer the moratorium should remain in place, and it isn’t clear whether there’s much Republican support for any extension. White House aides have long been aware that the moratorium would expire on July 31. But the administration was caught off guard by the recent surge in Covid-19 cases fueled by the delta variant, said a senior White House official. The pandemic’s turn for the worse—combined with the slow dispersal of federal emergency rental assistance money in states and cities—has lent sudden urgency to the plight of Americans struggling to stay in their homes...