Why Don’t We Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to enter a golden age: a triumphant musical revolution full of screaming fans, earworm melodies, and harmonizing. Lots of harmonizing. A generational rite of passage since the days of Beatlemania and continuing into the ’80s with New Kids on the Block, the ’90s with the Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync, and more recently, the multi-pronged One Direction phenomenon, the stars are aligning and singles are rising to signal another burst of American boy bands to soothe a weary world.

Zoe Kazan. Ruby Sparks is a fantasy-romance about a lonely writer named Calvin (Paul Dano) who spins a story about his dream girl — she listens to Phil Collins, roots for the underdog, loves motorcycles, and didn’t finish high school — and then that girl comes to life. Zoe Kazan, Dano’s offscreen love, not only stars as the title character, she also wrote the movie. Vulture spoke with Kazan about her debut screenplay, what Warren Beatty had to do with it, and why you should not call Ruby, or anyone, a manic pixie dream girl.

I’ll have an apple martini. Wanna see my ID? Totally have it. 13 Going on 30 is a movie about alternate realities. Specifically, an alternate reality in which 13-year-old Jenna Rink grows up to be hot and cool and Jennifer Garner, and also a fairly terrible person. The morale, of course, is that none of it is worth it if you don’t actually like yourself and don’t have anyone — ahem, Mark Ruffalo — to share your success with, so you should run straight to your parent’s house in suburban New Jersey where some magical dust — the same magical dust that whisked you from age 13 to 30 — will transport you back to being a teen so you can live your life over again and this time not suck at it, e.

This week we’re providing a series of Vulture Hacks: expert advice, gear guides, and recommendations to help you maximize your entertainment experience. Podcasts are often celebrated for their capacity to dive deep, whether it’s a searching interview that gets stronger as it goes, a conversation that builds upon itself, or an investigative narrative that leaves no stone unturned. There are even some, like Dan Carlin’s beloved Hardcore History series, that regularly leave the realm of reason, bolting past the three-hour mark.

Ban this GIF forever. In 2016, Workaholics executive producer John Quaintance tweeted photos of two whiteboards from the show’s writers’ room filled with all the jokes, bits, and lines deemed too cliché for the series. While the post undoubtedly helped some people off their cringey comedy crutches back when it first went viral, the ensuing years have spawned a host of new unfunny bromides in need of a moratorium. Despite predictions to the contrary, there’s a strong case to be made that humor has only gotten worse during the Trump era, so with the clean slate of a new decade before us, the moment could not be more opportune to nip some of these new hacky habits in the bud.

“It” girl Song Ji-a in action. It’s been a wild and sometimes infuriating ride, but Single’s Inferno is finally over. The eight-episode Netflix reality-dating show brought a cast of attractive singles to a deserted island and had them face off for opportunities to escape to a luxury hotel for better accommodations and one-on-one dates. It became the first South Korean reality show to ever make it into Netflix’s top-ten list of TV shows watched globally, and it showed us just how much can change over the course of nine days (Moon Se-hoon, for example, managed to end up receiving praise instead of a restraining order).

The Stephen King Multiverse has, deep into the author’s fifth decade of publishing, seized more cultural real estate than ever before. “People love big shared universes,” his author son Joe Hill told USA Today, “and have tapped into the idea that Dad’s universe is as big as the Marvel universe, but it’s like for grown-ups.” King’s 60-plus novels and ten long collections of short fiction reflect and refract, connect to, and illuminate each other.

This interview originally ran during the 2023 Venice Film Festival. We’re recirculating it in advance of Green Border’s theatrical debut. We’ve also asked Holland an additional question, which can be found at the end of the interview. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Green Border since I saw it at its Venice Film Festival premiere this week. The film, about the refugee crisis on the forested border between Poland and Belarus, is a call to arms from director Agnieszka Holland and co-writers Gabriela Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko and Maciej Pisuk — a viscerally disturbing, two-and-a-half-hour warning about the international encroachment of fascism and mass dehumanization, captured even as tragedy continues to unfold.

Alan Zweibel. As a writer on Saturday Night Live from 1975–1980, Alan Zweibel wrote and appeared onscreen as part of the show’s first few years on NBC. During season five, he was credited as a featured player, one of the first to receive this distinction. He went on to enjoy a prolific career as a screenwriter, author, showrunner, and more, co-creating the legendary It’s Garry Shandling’s Show in addition to writing the screenplays for Dragnet and North.

Alexander Payne. Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, which hits Blu-ray and DVD this week, just won him his second Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay (he’d also won for his previous film Sideways), cementing his status as one of America’s most reliable adapters of literature. But in many ways that status is a bit misleading, because it has been Payne’s sensitive yet understated directing style that has truly brought these stories to life.