One summer day some 25 years ago, a Chicago lawyer went on a date with a summer associate at her firm. Well, there was some disagreement about whether it was a date or not. But that couple went on to fall in love, get married, and much later on, live in the White House, and now there is a movie about that fateful day in 1989 when it all began. When she wasn’t bemoaning the reality of the Obamas’ imminent departure from the White House, Slate movie critic Dana Stevens found Southside With You tender, intelligent, and refreshingly lacking in traditional suspense: “Though it’s barely 84 minutes long, this buoyant yet reflective movie captures the ever-shifting mood of a daylong encounter that changed both its protagonists’ lives.”
Dating sure worked out well for Barack and Michelle, but if you’re a Christian who grew up in the ’90s, you might remember I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Joshua Harris’ best-selling book that urged young people not just to practice abstinence but to avoid dating altogether. This week Ruth Graham caught up with the author, who’s now married with teenagers of his own. “And these days, he’s having very mixed feelings about the book that turned him into a Christian celebrity,” Graham writes. Or as Harris himself put it, “It’s like, well, crap, is the biggest thing I’ve done in my life this really huge mistake?”
Nostalgia radiates through Endless and Blond (or is it Blonde?), the two new Frank Ocean albums Slate’s Carl Wilson reviews this week, one about “a past but never-forgotten love affair” and the other with a “running theme of memories of faded teenage summers and the first stirrings of desire.” In the anti-pop moment that’s coming to define this year in music, neither album is really suited for background listening—“Settle in with headphones and the lyrics, though, and it’s the confidential closeness—not to mention the teasing withdrawals—that can make them seem like exactly what you need to hear right now.”
A few more links to send you into the weekend:
- Why the artisanal cider movement has beef with six-packs
- Slate’s postmortem interview with The Nightly Show’s Larry Wilmore
- The contradiction at the heart of the Nate Parker controversy
- An 11-year-old cross-examines Miss Peregrine author Ransom Riggs
- The bizarre reason behind a common movie-credits disclaimer (hint: it involves Rasputin)
- An exhausted account of Bruce Springsteen’s longest show ever
- Werner Herzog’s favorite salt
- Brace yourself for the coming board game revolution
- Who are the Chainsmokers, and how’d they end up with a No. 1 song?
- Kanye West’s poem about McDonald’s: A close reading
