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 Apple TV When we last left the residents of Deerfield, the fictional Midwest town at the center of the strange occurrences in The Big Door Prize, everyone was zapped of energy—in some cases, quite literally. The Season 1 finale of Apple TV 's existential comedy ended with a key character in the hospital after being electrocuted while trying to destroy a MORPHO machine, a photo booth-like contraption that tells you your life's true potential. The rest of Deerfield's population is just as exhausted (though, luckily, not under medical care) after spending the show's first season comically upending their comfortable lives because the mysterious MORPHO spat out a little blue card with one vague word printed on it.
The results of this small-town chaos yielded one of 2023's most unexpectedly delightful new series, which had much more to say about adult life and the nuances of our neuroses than a certain sickeningly upbeat Apple TV show. Quirky Deerfield dwellers like Dusty (Chris O'Dowd), his plucky wife Cass (Gabrielle Dennis), Cass' arrogant mother Izzy (Crystal R. Fox), and toupéed restaurateur Giorgio (Josh Segarra) struggled to understand what their MORPHO cards meant, often finding that one word could conjure endless potential outcomes. These bite-sized, intertwining character studies were a novel joy, albeit one that had limits. Even though last season's finale packed more than a few twists, repeating the same storytelling patte
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Palestinian solidarity protests and encampments are appearing on college campuses from Massachusetts to California to protest Israel's attacks on Gaza and to call for divestment from Israeli apartheid. This week, police have raided encampments and arrested students at Yale and New York University. Palestinian American scholar and New York University professor Helga Tawil-Souri describes forming a faculty buffer to protect students, negotiating with police, and the ensuing crackdown that led to over 100 arrests Monday night. Uptown in New York City, the encampment at Columbia University is entering its seventh day despite mass arrests of protesters last week. "In my opinion, the NYPD were called in under false pretenses by the president of the university," says Joseph Slaughter, professor at Columbia University. "The university is being run as a sort of ad-hocracy at this point, the senior administration making up policies and procedures and prohibitions on the fly, changing them in the middle of the night."
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The party is banking on abortion access as an issue to animate the state's competitive race for governor and, they hope, galvanize voters for President Biden.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel says he will "act immediately" to ban Al Jazeera in the country after the Knesset passed a law Monday that allows the government to shut down foreign news networks deemed to be threats to national security. Al Jazeera, one of the few outlets with local reporters in Gaza, denounced the move and said it was part of a pattern of Israeli attacks on the Qatar-based network, including targeting its journalists in Gaza since October 7 and the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh in the occupied West Bank in 2022. For more, we speak with Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator and president of the U.S./Middle East Project, who says Netanyahu's move to ban Al Jazeera is "red meat to his own base … in a situation in which the war is not going particularly well for Israel. He's looking for distractions."
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