Naomi Fry

Readers respond to Eyal Press’s article about blue-collar voters, Hannah Goldfield’s piece on Southern California’s health industry, and Sage Mehta’s essay about her father.

The actress recommends some of her favorite accounts of detectives, deaths, and the down-and-out.

In projects like “Problemista” and HBO’s “Fantasmas,” the multihyphenate uses uncanny flourishes to make sense of our most convoluted bureaucratic systems.

“Social Studies,” a documentary series by Lauren Greenfield, follows a group of young people, and screen-records their phones, to capture how social media has reshaped their lives.

The Philadelphia-born rapper on stage clothes (“Jumpsuit, bitch!”), the Diddy situation, and her run-ins with Questlove and Jay-Z. It's a Philly thing.

From the daily newsletter: too many crooks. Plus: how Trump benefitted from the politics of inflation; the end of American climate leadership; and a novel that captures Modi’s India.

The performances of Karla Sofía Gascón and Zoe Saldaña bring energy and emotion, but the movie never gets beyond its splashy surfaces.

In the days since Donald Trump’s reëlection, art has offered a distraction for those reeling from the news. But what does it mean to turn away when circumstances demand our attention?

About midway through “Social Studies,” Lauren Greenfield’s new five-part FX docuseries about teens and their relationship to social media, we see one of the show’s protagonists—an eighteen-year-old University of Arizona freshman named Sydney—as she exercises on an elliptical machine at the gym. Wearing a gray tank top and black short shorts, with her hair tied back in a high ponytail, Sydney works out while striking poses for her phone camera and posting the images she captures to Snapchat. We watch all this from the P.O.V. of Sydney’s phone lens, and her living-my-best-life selfies fill our screen as she takes them, their stop-and-start rhythm matched by the immersive beat of the dance music that scores the scene. But then the soundtrack suddenly stops, and we turn to a full body shot of Sydney from a slight distance. Though she’s still exercising, still posing for the iPhone she holds aloft, her head cocked prettily in one direction and then the other, there is an almost comical chasm between the world that is recorded on her device and the world outside it. The illusion of energetic seduction is gone, and, instead, we are keenly aware of the dull labor that goes into creating it. With the music now silenced, Sydney’s ballet mécanique is accompanied only by the faint squeaking of the elliptical’s shifting gears.

A new documentary reveals social-media platforms’ iron grip on the lives of teen-agers, one that’s increasingly being linked to a slew of mental-health issues. How scared should we be?