 Todd Marinovich: The Man Who Never Was The Fallbrook Midget Chiefs are fanned out across the field on a sunny autumn day in southern California, two dozen eighth graders in red helmets and bulbous pads. Whistles trill and coaches bark, mothers camp in folding chairs in the welcoming shade of the school building, younger siblings romp. Fathers hover on the periphery, wincing with every missed tackle and dropped pass.
Into this tableau ambles a tall man with faded-orange hair cropped close around a crowning bald spot, giving him the aspect of a tonsured monk. His face is all angles, his fair skin is sunburned and heavily freckled, his lips are deeply lined, the back of his neck is weathered like an old farmer's. He is six foot five, 212 pounds, the same as when he reported for duty twenty-one years ago as a redshirt freshman quarterback at the University of Southern California, the Touchdown Club's 1987 national high school player of the year. The press dubbed him Robo Quarterback; he was the total package. His Orange County high school record for all-time passing yardage, 9,182, stood for more than two decades.
Now he is thirty-nine, wearing surfer shorts and rubber flip-flops. He moves toward the field in the manner of an athlete, loose limbed and physically confident, seemingly unconcerned, revealing nothing of the long and tortured trail he's left behind.   Valentine's Day Is Not, Not, Important We all dread Valentine's Day but perhaps opthamologists do the most. Their offices are flooded each year with men who have rolled their eyes so hard at the holiday their eyeballs get stuck in that weird zombie position and they need a brisk cuff on the ears to dislodge them back to normal. Hell, that might even be true. It should be true. Words can hardly describe the contempt in which many hold this holiday, a heart-shaped trap set to ensnare those of us in relationships with unmeetable expectations and those of us not in a suckhole of self-pitying sadness. The only prudent course of action it seems is to roll our eyes and aver that Valentine's Day is not a big deal anyway. But the thing is, Valentine's Day is not not a big deal. It means something. But what? Also, why?
 Here's How to Watch All of This Year's Oscar-Nominated Films In a normal year for movies, film buffs would spend these precious pre-Oscars weeks darting from movie theater to movie theater, eager to cross each nominated film off their watch lists before the big night. But this year in movies has been anything but normal. With theaters shuttered or sparsely attended due to the pandemic, more films landed on streaming platforms than ever before—some by design, including original streaming fare like The Power of the Dog and The Lost Daughter, but others by necessity, including big-screen tentpoles like Dune and King Richard. Streamers and traditional studios have been duking it out for Oscar gold ever since Netflix and Amazon Prime got into the prestige film game, but this year, the boundaries are collapsing more than ever before. Sure, Dune is a big, traditional Warner Brothers blockbuster, but when it took its first bow on HBO Max, the game changed. Will the Oscars feel different when so many of us experienced the lion's share of the nominees from our couches? Only time will tell.
With the ceremony looming on March 27, now's the time to catch up on the slate and make your own judgments about who deserves the top honors. We've rounded up how to stream all of the major nominees for your viewing pleasure.  This Is the Kind of History They Want to Pass Laws Against Teaching Forty-two years ago on Wednesday, a bomb went off at a house at 1600 Valentine Street in Little Rock, Arkansas. Nobody was injured until the police showed up. Then they beat hell out of the man who lived there in an attempt to blackjack a confession out of him. They later went on to arrest two young Black men and charged them with the bombing of the home of Carlotta Walls, one of the Little Rock Nine. The man the police beat was her father. The two kids they busted were kids she knew. And, until this past Wednesday, I didn't know any of this. I mean, I knew about the Little Rock Nine. I knew about how the governor of Arkansas defied the authority of the federal courts so blatantly that even President Dwight Eisenhower was moved to send troops. I learned all this in school, where the episode was taught as a kind of American morality tale in which good triumphed over a vaguely defined evil, as it always did in the land of the free. Somehow, they never got around to telling me the story about how Carlotta Walls's house was bombed, and her father beaten by the police, and two of her friends dubiously arrested. They never got around to telling me about the white-supremacist bombing campaign that had coincided with the opening of the school year, or about the toothless sentencing of the men behind it.
 I Took the Advice in 'Men Are From Mars Women Are From Venus' 30 Years Later There is no door separating the bedroom from the living room in my 650-square-foot apartment, where my husband, Mark, and I have spent the past year together. It's not like we were having problems qua problems when I picked up a hardcover copy of the 1992 self-help best seller Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships, by John Gray, Ph.D., but after a year of quarantine, we weren't exactly in any position to be turning down marital advice in any form. Not to mention, Mark had recently started saying "Cool, cool, cool" every time one of his coworkers asked him to do anything, a habit I loathe. I don't want to kill him, but I don't not want to kill him. I'm sure he feels the same way about me.  Anthony Edwards Knows Some Good Things Take Time Anthony Edwards is older now. Top Gun's Goose, ER's Dr. Greene, and Gilbert from Revenge of the Nerds all turn 60 this year. He's been gone for a while; he stepped back in the early aughts to raise his kids, and then again a few years ago to heal from a trauma he'd endured in his youth, a situation he revealed publicly in 2017. That process has led him back to the thing he's known the longest, which is acting. "It's funny how this thing that gave me such joy when I was a kid, being in the theater and working with people has really been a through-line to help me through everything." He's back in a couple of timely projects: Inventing Anna, out on Netflix this weekend, about the story of New York grifter Anna Delvey, and WeCrashed, Hulu's take on the creators of WeWork. Processing his own trauma has also made him an activist; through his non-profit organization 1 in 6, he can use his familiarity and charm to connect with and help heal fellow survivors of sexual abuse. "My wife and I talk about this a lot," he says. "After a while, you learn to use your tricks for good."
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Sunday, February 13, 2022
The Quarterback Who Became a Junkie
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