Let me put some numbers behind a trend you might have noticed: More than ten major musical artists have outright canceled their tours in 2026. Dozens of music festivals have called off their dates. At the same time, the average concert ticket in the U.S. has climbed over $140, while BTS has raked in $1 million in sales per month for several months.
What the hell is going on? Led Zeppelin sang it best: Right now, for artists, concertgoers, and the music business overall, it is very much a case of “Good Times, Bad Times.”
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The first time he went to the Emmys, Patrick Ball says, “it felt like I was in a fever dream.” The actor, who plays Dr. Frank Langdon on The Pitt, was there with his castmates after the HBO Max medical drama became one of the year’s biggest sensations. People were incredibly excited about this new show that felt kind of like an old show (but not exactly) and had, almost overnight, become part of the entertainment zeitgeist.
But this was Ball’s first ongoing TV gig. (He was a guest on Law & Order in 2023.) And the sheer speed of The Pitt’s ascent left everyone, within the cast and without, feeling slightly shaken. “We were so new and so out of left field,” Ball says, “that nobody quite knew what to do with us.”
This time around, things were a little less jarring. Ball was nominated, as was the show itself. His girlfriend, Elysia Roorbach, flew down from Canada, where she was filming, to attend with him. And though Ball didn’t walk away with a trophy, “it was just really amazing to move through the evening of the Emmys—through the whole weekend—and have so many people who I have looked up to my entire life come up and make me feel like I belong.”
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Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil, a late-summer powerhouse flexing technical bravura across its vacuum-sealed ninety-five minutes, isn’t just good “for a video game movie.” It’s a superb film and it’s based on a video game. Since 2002, Capcom’s zombie franchise has plagued theaters with subpar releases that were essentially director Paul W. S. Anderson bragging that he’s married to Milla Jovovich. After a drab 2021 reboot, the director of Barbarian and Weapons shows how it’s done with a refresh that wholly abandons its source text’s universe to stay true to what really matters: the euphoria of white-knuckle survival and the sopping-wet horrors only Resident Evil games infamously deliver.
In theaters September 18, Resident Evil by Zach Cregger is the eighth live-action film based on the action-horror games. But it is the first that’s truly worth paying any attention.
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To say that Karl-Anthony Towns has had a big year is a colossal understatement. In just 365 days, Towns (you might know him as “KAT”) has won an NBA Championship, proposed to and married the love of his life, and spent New York Fashion Week bouncing from front row to front row. KAT’s living his dream, and he’s as humble as can be. Before we even began our conversation, he made a point to emphatically thank me for taking the time out of my day. Because, obviously, I’m the busy one here.
But even though he’s having the most hectic summer of his life, KAT isn’t slowing down anytime soon. “I run towards doing the difficult thing, the hard thing, the thing that no one else wants to do, because it’s the most rewarding,” Towns says. “I enjoy the madness that comes with it, because I know what it was like to not have it, and I understand that I asked for this. I prayed for this type of life, this opportunity, the chance to do something special, wanting to win a championship.”
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The Emmys sent a single, clear message last night, and it was a call for help: We need more good guys.
The Emmys, just like the Oscars, don’t necessarily celebrate what will be timeless. They are a guide to what matters right now, in this time and place. The recurring theme during Monday’s TV honors was to honor unlikely heroes who step up when the going gets weird.
It’s a hairpin turn from last year, when the awards were a spotlight on monsters, psychopaths, and egomaniacs. Severance, Adolescence, and The Studio were the recurring winners last time, each a repository for despair, darkness, mania. That was what voters and viewers wanted to get off their chests and out of their system. The rare counterexample was Noah Wyle’s win for best actor in a drama for The Pitt’s valiant Dr. Robby.
He was the exception then; this year he was the rule. Wyle won again for The Pitt on Monday, and the show itself claimed best drama. The night’s other acting winners shared similar noble traits with his dauntless emergency room M.D. If toxic personalities were what the Emmys exhaled last year, this time they tried to breathe in goodness, strength, and decency.
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A cop guards the open gateway that leads from the house's driveway to the side yard, in case the man inside attempts to flee. At first the camera is static and the shot is simple: the cop, the gateway, vertical red fence planks, a right foreground portion of green bush. After a few minutes of this, the cameraman starts playing with the composition. The screen fills almost entirely with the bush, and then the view pans left from the bush to the cop, who is big and bald and has three upside-down blue V's—sergeant stripes—on the sleeve of his shirt. The cameraman zooms in past the cop to the patio area beyond, to a lattice of firewood and the blur of something green. The camera stills, focuses. The blur becomes a wheelbarrow. A green wheelbarrow leaning belly-exposed against a red wall.
While the shot of this particular wheelbarrow is superfluous to the television program being filmed here today and will be edited out along with most of the rest of this raw footage, there happens to be a story about the man inside the house in which a wheelbarrow plays a much more prominent role. The story begins more than two decades ago, at a party in another house not far from this one. The man inside was there, as were many of his friends, which meant that the attendees were a hodgepodge of the most notable lawyers and doctors and businessmen in Terrell, Texas. Anybody compiling a list of local luminaries back then might have placed the name of the man inside at or near the top. His high school class, of which he was president, had voted him most likely to succeed, and he had done so. At the time of the party, not much more than a decade out of law school and still in his thirties, he was already district attorney of his home county.
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