I’m in the process of divorcing my good-for-nothing, lazy, hateful wife. For years she has stayed at home, where she spent my money and had me subsidize her lifestyle while she supposedly was doing the “hard work” of raising children. Whenever I came home from a busy, hectic day, she would throw the kids at me, then sit on her phone while I did all the heavy lifting; on weekends, she would harangue me if I had the audacity to go out with friends when she has no friends of her own and expected me to be her entertainment. She complained that she never had a day off, but what about me?
We’re divorcing now, and she’s whining to everyone that she’s going to be penniless, that I’m throwing her out and she’s going to be homeless. She’s complaining that she gave up her career to take care of the kids. One of them is special needs but his needs aren’t that bad (just a feeding tube and wheelchair and a few weakness issues). I know she used it as an excuse to quit her job that she hated. She is lazy and spiteful and I don’t want to give her an ounce of my money, but I know my story isn’t sympathetic, and I’m afraid she’s going to take me to the cleaners. What can I do?
.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Martinbowra/iStock/Getty Images Plus.
Eternals is the latest film belonging to that great, teeming, not-so-riotous achievement in cross-platform multi-vertical corporate synergy/narrative cat-herding known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
You perhaps read the above and rolled your eyes. Maybe you muttered something unkind under your breath as well. If you didn’t, you assuredly know someone who did. That’s just simple statistics: Superhero films have become our cultural furniture; they’re the steady, unceasing hiss of universal background radiation none of us can escape.
And today, with the debut of every new film and television show, more and more prospective audience members find themselves aching to escape, to rid themselves forever of these children’s characters and their microweave pajamas and their hypertrophic musculature and their too-tidy, infantilizing morality tales.
It’s not a backlash, really, because backlash suggests a reflexive reaction driven by a sudden, overwhelming need to reject, to force out, to detoxify. What some critics and audiences are manifesting now, as they find themselves wading clavicle-deep through whatever particular numbered MCU Phase we find ourselves in, is something softer and sadder — a weariness bred by familiarity.
.
Ikaris (Richard Madden) and Sersi (Gemma Chan) in Eternals. Sophie Mutevelian/Marvel Studios
Here’s a chilling statistic for you: According to the CDC, Up to 40 percent of annual deaths in the US are preventable. Their causes range from unintentional injuries to heart disease.
More terrifying still is that this percentage is estimated to increase in the future. And even if we manage to reach old age, perhaps we’ll have to endure diseases that significantly reduce the quality of our days. As Norman Lazarus, an octogenarian doctor famous for his enviable health, says in his book, The Lazarus Strategy, “the number of people living with four or more diseases will nearly double between the years of 2015 and 2035.”
In recent years, BBC Culture has conducted an annual poll of film critics, experts, and industry figures from around the world to decide on the greatest films in a particular category: you may have come across our 100 greatest films directed by women list in 2019 and our 100 greatest non-English language films in 2018, among others. However, this year, it felt about time that we turned our attention to another art form: television. That’s in part because TV has played such a crucial role in many of our lives over the past 18 months when we have relied on it for information, entertainment, solace, and inspiration in equal measure.
But also it felt like the right time to survey the television landscape because arguably it has been the defining art form of the past 21 years: where once, rightly or wrongly, it was largely patronized as cinema’s younger, more rough-and-ready sibling, today its artistic credibility is unassailable, while the advent of streaming platforms has also given shows the ability to reach unprecedented global audiences all at once. And so, in order to mark TV’s ascendancy, we have decided to ask the question: what are the greatest TV series of the 21st Century?
Comedians Bobcat Goldthwait and Dana Gould were premiering their new documentary comedy special Joy Ride at the Moontower Comedy Festival in Austin, Texas, earlier this fall where “Jerry Seinfeld is a god,” and as the section of the film about Goldthwait’s decades-long feud with that iconic comedian approached, he started to get a little nervous.
“I was relieved when they burst into applause after I said, ‘Jerry Seinfeld finally has an opinion and it’s about me,’” Goldthwait tells me on this week’s episode of The Last Laugh podcast. “I was really happy to hear comedy nerds laughing at that.”
“Hot dog buns and Bobcat Goldthwait, the two things that get his goat,” Gould jokes.
Goldthwait goes on to explain in the film how Seinfeld used an episode of his show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee—or “Rich Comedians in Cars Bitching About Their Diamond Shoes Being Too Tight,” as he calls it—to attack him during a conversation with the comedian Bridget Everett.
“If you’re funny, you win. If you’re not funny, you don’t,” Seinfeld says in the episode. “And he’s not funny. That’s why he had to do that stupid fucking voice. Because you have no fucking act!” Everett, who has to then tell Seinfeld she is good friends with Goldthwait, laughs uncomfortably throughout his rant.
You know what feels like a little bit of a rip-off? Sunday night prep. And I use that term liberally — I’m talking about meal planning, house cleaning, getting a jump-start on your work to-do list, even taking off chippy nail polish and replacing it with a fresh coat. Yes, I do all of these things because they are practical and they’re a good way to ease into Monday morning. I’m not disputing their usefulness — just that we have a limited number of weekend hours at our disposal, and yet we’ve all collectively decided to spend a chunk of them being weekday-style productive. Wouldn’t the weekend feel so much longer if we spent it, well, weekending?
Sort of. As it turns out, my bitterness is slightly, but not entirely, misplaced: Dedicating every Sunday evening to the same old routine really does make it seem like the weekend is rapidly disappearing from under you. But then again, lazing around in your pj’s has the same effect.
Being a leader requires confidence, decisiveness, and quick thinking–none of which are served by overthinking every decision or scenario or worrying about every move you make. There’s a time to think, a time to act, a time to reflect, and a time to move forward.
Overthinking causes us to spend too much time thinking, getting stuck in a loop of inaction and turns positive reflection into debilitating worry. Not only does it not move us forward, it moves us backward and downward.
For three decades, I’ve been coaching employees and entrepreneurs with tendencies to overthink things, and I can share 11 mental tricks to dash the dissecting and stop the over scrutinizing.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Martinbowra/iStock/Getty Images Plus.
James' World 2 