News

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Rolling Stone may receive an affiliate commission.

The New York Times bestseller list is typically home to recent, buzzworthy releases, but a 2017 nonfiction book has been dominating the Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction and Paperback Nonfiction charts for months, currently sitting at number two and one, respectively. That book is Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, first published in Feb. 2017.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Buy Now at bookshop.org Buy Now at barnes & noble...

The dawn of the second Trump age has been marked by corporate fawning. Tech executives and obsequious media companies are making lavish donations to Trump’s inauguration; concluding horseshit lawsuits with settlements that look suspiciously like protection money; placing Maga cronies on their corporate boards; or even shelling out tens of millions on a creative deal for the First Lady.

In this moment of preemptive submission by corporations that trade on Wall Street, will the incoming Trump administration see a true popular resistance in the street-streets?

No one is expecting...

Donald Trump will be president again.

Far more dispiriting than what the election says about Trump is what his win says about the American body politic. We are a house divided on a fault line of decency. Trump’s venality, his bigotry and racism, his fondness for dictators, and his disregard for the truth were on flamboyant display for American voters — with his former top general even decrying Trump as “fascist to the core.”

Campaigning for the White House, Trump was a peacock with fetid feathers. And others flocked with...

Timothy Snyder is a Yale history professor whose pamphlet, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, provided progressives a historical road map for resisting the abuses of the first Trump administration. (First lesson: “Do not obey in advance.”)

Snyder predicted that Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss could lead to a coup attempt. And the professor of totalitarian history in Europe warns that Trump will, again, seek to use violence and intimidation to return to the White House, if the votes don’t go his way.

Trump’s dictatorial incentives...

Update: Rachel Maddow devoted the top of her MSNBC show to outlining the reasons for her objections to NBC News’ hire of former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, calling the decision “inexplicable” and challenging some of the network spin in response to the backlash.

“I will tell you, the fact that Ms. McDaniel is on the payroll at NBC News, to me that is inexplicable,” she said. “You wouldn’t hire a wiseguy, you wouldn’t hire a made man like a mobster to work in a D.A.’s office, right? You wouldn’t hire a pickpocket to work as a Tsa screener. So I find her decision to put her on the payroll inexplicable, and I hope they will reverse their decision.”

Maddow, the top rated personality at the network, is the latest NBCU personality to publicly call out news division leadership over the decision, an unusual...

Katheryn Winnick is best known for playing shield maiden Lagertha in “Vikings” and the Canadian actress is now embracing a new role: ambassador for United24, the global initiative to support Ukraine, launched by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Winnick shared a virtual conversation with Zelenskyy, which was shared via social media.

“Thank you very much for being with us. We are grateful that you have decided to become a United24 ambassador and that you are the first female ambassador from Canada, with whom we have many connections,” said President Zelenskyy, who also invited Winnick to visit Ukraine.

Read More: Mark Hamill Selling Signed ‘Star Wars’ Posters To Raise Money For Ukraine Drones

In her role as United24 ambassador, Winnick will focus on reconstruction efforts to rebuild houses in the Kyiv region that have been destroyed by Russian warfare.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Володимир Зеленський (@zelenskiy_official...

Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s ever more timely The Meaning Of Hitler, a Doc NYC highlight, features Saul Friedländer and Francine Prose on Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph Of The Will, Martin Amis on political tactics and characterology, Klaus Theweleit on strangers, Deborah Lipstadt, Beate Klarsfeld, Serge Klarsfeld, Ute Frevert, and Yehuda Bauer. The filmmakers start in 2017 with a commuter train ride into New York City, and then on to a subway - Epperlein is seen reading books that mark the moment by the likes of Timothy Snyder, Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Theweleit, and the one by Sebastian Haffner that gives the film its name.

A little avalanche of movie clips, from Mel Brooks’s [film id=10451]The...

Francine Prose will join Roger Berkowitz, head of the Hannah Arendt Center, Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker for a conversation on Doc NYC Facebook Live this Monday at 2:00pm (Est) Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s kaleidoscopic investigation into the past and our future takes us on the road of history and the state of the world at this moment in time, featuring interviews with Saul Friedländer and Francine Prose on Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph Of The Will, Martin Amis on political tactics and characterology, Deborah Lipstadt, Beate Klarsfeld, Serge Klarsfeld, and 94-year-old Yehuda Bauer getting the last word. We enter with books by Timothy Snyder, Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Klaus Theweleit, and the one by Sebastian Haffner that gives the film its name.

Clips from Mel Brooks’s The Producers to Bruno Ganz in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall to Anthony Hopkins in George Schaefer’s...

“Pain and Glory” director Pedro Almodovar, “The Nun” actor Isabelle Huppert and “Call Me by Your Name” filmmaker Luca Guadagnino are among a galaxy of 70 film, television, literature and eminent personalities from other walks of life who have signed an open letter expressing “outrage” over the repression of the LGBT+ community in Poland.

Addressed to Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, the letter states: “We, the undersigned, express our outrage at repressions directed against the LGBT+ community in Poland. We speak out in solidarity with activists and their allies, who are being detained, brutalized, and intimidated. We voice our grave concern about the future of democracy in Poland, a country with an admirable history of resistance to totalitarianism and struggle for freedom.”

Other signees include Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski, whose “Ida” won an Oscar, “The Favourite” director Yorgos Lanthimos, “Vera Drake” director Mike Leigh, and actors Ed Harris and James Norton.

During a recent trip north to Santa Barbara, I escaped the rain in a used bookstore and struck up a conversation about America with the clerk. We talked about the limited shelf life of so many political books, especially those with words like “Trump” in the title. But after we migrated over to the nonfiction paperbacks, one immediately struck me as both evergreen and useful. It’s called On Tyranny, a 2017 book by Yale historian Timothy Snyder, and it is so small that it can nearly fit in the palm of my hand.

January brings such touchstones as the Golden Globes and the Oscar nominations announcement, but it’s also been home for the last several years to the release of Steven Soderbergh’s master list of everything he consumed the previous year. The director has released his 2017 list of all the films, TV shows, plays, and books he watched and read, and it’s full of reliable and unexpected choices that prove Soderbergh’s taste has no boundaries.

Read More:Steven Soderbergh Movies Ranked from Worst to Best

Soderbergh posted the full 2017 list on his Extension 765 blog, and it appears his year started with a very surprising choice: “Passengers,” the maligned science fiction romance starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. The director decided to end his year like many of us did: Bingeing the six new episodes of “Black Mirror” on Netflix.

Of course Soderbergh kept up with this year’s awards contenders as well.

The Four Sisters: The Hippocratic OathIn a review of Claude Lanzmann’s memoir, Adam Shatz observes that “self-flattery is characteristically Lanzmannian.” This sort of self-regard often manifests itself in interviews that the filmmaker grants to journalists and proved grating indeed in Napalm, a Lanzmann documentary screened as a “Special Presentation” at Cannes in 2017. During a recent trip to North Korea enshrined in Napalm—which offers a cursory look at the historical roots of the hermit kingdom’s totalitarian impulses—Lanzmann emerges as considerably more preoccupied with celebrating his youthful dalliance with a North Korean nurse during an earlier visit in the 1950s as a member of a leftist delegation. With Lanzmann, however, it’s often necessary to swallow a little of his self-aggrandizement in order to appreciate his genuine accomplishments. Contradictions abound inasmuch as his best work, such as the magisterial Shoah, is both formally audacious and historically focused while a minor work like Tsahal,...