A giant lumberjack accompanied by a blue ox named Babe, he's often credited with carving the Grand Canyon and spilling the trail of water that would become the Mississippi River. Tall tales aside, he literally towers over our national landscape in the form of flannel-clad roadside statues scattered from coast to coast-monuments to the rugged workingmen of an ascendant nation.
A century after the Bunyan legend's heyday, the U.S. is, to say the least, no longer on the rise. So it's fitting that Boots Riley, the veteran rapper and activist who pivoted to the screen with 2018's surreal anticapitalist satire Sorry to Bother You, has created a new supersize folk hero for our tumultuous times. The protagonist of his equally offbeat-and even more daringly radical-Amazon dark comedy I'm a Virgo is a 13-ft.-tall Black teenager named Cootie, portrayed with gentle-giant naiveté by When They See Us standout Jharrel Jerome. And instead of roaming free across the country, he spends his first 19 years under unofficial house arrest.
This story is from the July 03, 2023 edition of Time.
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This story is from the July 03, 2023 edition of Time.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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TV SHOWS
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MOVIES
If you read only the synopsis of Babygirl before seeing it, you might imagine it's an erotic age-gap thriller about the workplace power dynamic between men and women.
BOOKS
Percival Everett's reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which won a National Book Award, is a sweeping story centering on Jim, the enslaved sidekick in Mark Twain's classic adventure tale.
ALBUMS
Singer Beth Gibbons hasn't released much music in the 30 years since her iconic band Portishead stormed out of the gate with seminal trip-hop record Dummy. Nor has she spoken to the press much, gaining a reputation for intense privacy.
PODCASTS
The most engrossing podcast Dan Taberski has produced since Missing Richard Simmons, Hysterical investigates a mysterious illness that spread among high school girls in Le Roy, N.Y., beginning in 2011, in what is believed to be the largest case of mass hysteria since the Salem witch trials.
Elton JOHN
Elton John has no address. Visitors to his home are given three names: the name of a house, the name of a hill, and the name of a town, which is near Windsor, as in Windsor Castle, where King Charles III lives.
Caitlin CLARK
A Fever coach has tasked me with standing under the basket to retrieve her misses. But as Clark, the two-time college national player of the year for the University of Iowa, reigning WNBA Rookie of the Year from the Indiana Fever, and emergent American sports icon, runs all over the court to launch long-range bombs, I barely have to move. Swish, swish, swish. She hits 14 shots in a row. A dozen in a row. Eleven in a row. Nine in a row. Another nine.
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It's the day after the U.S. presidential election, and like much of the nation she was awake until the early hours, transfixed as the results came in, only tearing herself away once it became clear that Donald Trump had won.
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