Amazon’s hit show is a fantasy of a woman living in two contradictory worlds at once.
THE BILL BOARD LOOMED above me on La Brea Avenue: THE MARVELOUS MRS. MAISEL, it said in a twinkly, 1950s-style font, as a fetching young woman in a pillbox hat smiled down at me. My heart sank— not another museum-quality period piece from the gods of television. Then one day a friend mentioned the show over lunch. She’d heard it was good. That night I punched it up on my iPhone while I was lying in bed, but hit pause almost as soon as it started so I could put on my glasses and beam it onto a bigger screen. And then I tumbled into it, episode after episode, and I have to confess: It is literally a feelgood show. You see the damn thing and you feel … good. Evidently I wasn’t alone in needing just that. It won big at the Golden Globes and the Critics’ Choice Awards this past winter. By September—when more and more people will have seen the show, which streams on Amazon—it’s sure to be rewarded with Emmys.
Is there by now a more settled science in all of the television academy than the fact that married women of the 1950s were bored out of their minds, a lost generation stuck with the babies and pets while their dundering, no-good husbands were rewarded with the Elysian pleasures of selling life insurance and rotating tires? So when The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel begins on Miriam “Midge” Maisel’s wedding day— candlelight and orchids, an ivory dress and floor-length veil—we know we are looking at a doomed creature. “This day is perfect; it’s like a dream,” she says, and she might as well be Jackie Kennedy accepting bouquets at Love Field. Here we go again, we think to ourselves, and wait for the crash: her plaintive discovery that she’s been left with the laundry and the children, the realization that the college girl full of potential is gone, and that no one else seems to miss her.
Denne historien er fra May 2018-utgaven av The Atlantic.
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Denne historien er fra May 2018-utgaven av The Atlantic.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
Catching the Carjackers - On the road with an elite police unit as it combats a crime wave
On August 7, 2022, Shantise Summers arrived home from a night out with friends around 2:40 a.m. As she walked from her car toward her apartment in Oxon Hill, a Maryland neighborhood just southeast of Washington, D.C., she heard footsteps behind her. She turned and saw two men in ski masks. One put a gun to her face; she could feel the metal pressing against her chin. He demanded her phone, wallet, keys, and Apple Watch. She quickly handed them over, and they drove off in her 2019 Honda Accord.
The Most Remote Place in the World - Point Nemo is Earth's official "middle of nowhere." A lot seems to be going on there.
It’s called the “longest-swim problem”: If you had to drop someone at the place in the ocean farthest from any speck of land—the remotest spot on Earth—where would that place be? The answer, proposed only a few decades ago, is a location in the South Pacific with the coordinates 48 52.5291ᤩS 123 23.5116ᤩW: the “oceanic point of inaccessibility,” to use the formal name. It doesn’t get many visitors. But one morning last year, I met several people who had just come from there.
You Are Going to Die - Oliver Burkeman has become an unlikely self-help guru by reminding everyone of their mortality.
"The average human lifespan," Oliver Burkeman begins his 2021 megabest seller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, "is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short." In that relatively brief period, he does not want you to maximize your output at work or optimize your leisure activities for supreme enjoyment. He does not want you to wake up at 5 a.m. or block out your schedule in a strictly labeled timeline.
Washington's Nightmare - Donald Trump is the tyrant the first president feared.
Last November, during a symposium at Mount Vernon on democracy, John Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general who served as Donald Trump's second chief of staff, spoke about George Washington's historic accomplishments— his leadership and victory in the Revolutionary War, his vision of what an American president should be. And then Kelly offered a simple, three-word summary of Washington's most important contribution to the nation he liberated.
The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books - To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University's required greatbooks course, since 1988. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading, College kids have never read everything they're assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames's students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem.
What Zoya Sees
Long a fearless critic of Israeli society, since October 7 Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi has made wrenching portraits of her nation's sufferingand become a target of protest.
Malcolm Gladwell, Meet Mark Zuckerberg
The writer’ insistence on ignoring the web is an even bigger blind spot today than it was when The Tipping Point came out.
Alan Hollinghurst's Lost England
In his new novel, the present isnt much better than the past—and its a lot less sexy.
Scent of a Man
In a new memoir, Al Pacino promises to reveal the person behind the actor. But is he holding something back?
THE RIGHT-WING PLAN TO MAKE EVERYONE AN INFORMANT
In Texas and elsewhere, new laws and policies have encouraged neighbors to report neighbors to the government.
