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“The Rainmaker” is basically a two-hour exercise in asking the question, “Is Katharine Hepburn pretty?” If you think that’s a pretty slim premise — not to mention cringe-ingly outdated — upon which to rest an entire feature film, then you’ll feel the same as I did about the picture, which is (sort of) headlined by Burt Lancaster as the title character, a wandering charlatan who really acts more as the story’s spiritual mascot.

Thanks for reading! Please consider supporting Film Yap with a paid subscription for access to premium content plus exclusive opportunities! Get 30% off forever “Vera Cruz” stands out for scraping bottom. This 1954 Western starring Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster startled audiences of its day for its hard-bitten approach to violence and sneering take on the iconography of the cowboy. It’s about American gunmen who go south after the Civil War as hired mercenaries looking to make a buck during the Juarista uprising in Mexico against the French-Austrian occupation.

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All good things must end. That is a sad truth in life, but the silver lining of that cloud is that the not-so-good stuff also tends to terminate eventually. Into which bucket am I placing the 25 months I spent living with the blue Tesla Model Y Long Range you see here? Well, I'm kind of pouring my thoughts out in between, if I'm honest. As I write this I find myself vacillating between begrudging respect and terminal relief.

Reflections on art, culture, literature, philosophy and politics By Reflections by Samantha Hill · Over 2,000 subscribersNo thanks“Wonderful and often brilliant writing from a millennial intellectual whose lightly worn learning will remind you of an older generation. ” ncG1vNJzZmirkaKur8DHmqmoq5Wdtq24jaysm6uklrCsesKopGg%3D

[This is a guest post by Zack Carpenter, from the Just Impact team]  I (Zack) recently traveled to Eastern Correctional Facility, one of New York State’s oldest maximum security prisons, with a group of 12 that included philanthropic donors, foundation staffers, a college student and two formerly incarcerated non-profit leaders. The purpose of our trip was to meet and talk with students enrolled in the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), a program which offers Bard college courses and degrees, taught by college professors, to roughly 300 incarcerated people across the state.

Last week, I participated in an online symposium convened by the American Enterprise Institute marking the thirtieth anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s seminal essay “Defining Deviancy Down.” Though it’s less well-known than Moynihan’s 1965 study, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, “Defining Deviancy Down” shares with that work a prescient understanding of the social consequences of shifting norms and the perverse incentives at work when efforts to destigmatize socially adverse behavior run up against the realities of life in a large, diverse, capitalist democracy.

When I was growing up as an evangelical pastor’s kid in the 1990s, there wasn’t a bigger name in the Christian athlete space than Reggie White. I still remember watching him win the Super Bowl in 1997 and then, in the glare of the postgame spotlight, thank Jesus Christ. For evangelical kids like me, struggling to reconcile our religious identities with our love for the “secular” activity of sports, White offered proof that the two could go together.

As part of my interview with FiveThirtyEight’s Josh Hermsmeyer on this week’s Unexpected Points podcast, we discussed the state of NFL front offices, and had generally pessimistic assessments. While I’ve previously been more optimistic than Josh about the influx of young, superficially analytically inclined general managers entering the NFL, there are issues that persist in negatively affecting decision-making. I want to highlight an important one that is impossible to mitigate without an overhaul of the incentive structure for general managers and coaches: the principal-agent problem.