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Let’s start with the elephant that’s not in the room. The new bio-pic “Michael” includes no mention that its protagonist, the late pop star Michael Jackson, faced multiple accusations of child sexual abuse. The allegations (which Jackson denied) were addressed in an earlier cut of the film, as the director, Antoine Fuqua, told Kelefa Sanneh for a recent profile in this magazine. But the relevant scenes were reportedly removed at the insistence of Jackson’s estate (which also paid for related reshoots), on the grounds that its settlement with an accuser prohibited it from depicting or mentioning him. This dismaying course of events reflects a major problem with bio-pics: that the involvement of interested parties—whether the subjects themselves, their families, or other rights holders—risks distorting a life story by sanitizing it, leaving out events that would make the subject look bad. This dilemma is even more pronounced for bio-pics of musicians, which depend upon rights holders granting use of the subject’s music. (The Jackson estate has been aggressive about shielding the artist’s reputation, even suing HBO in 2019 over a documentary, “Leaving Neverland,” centered on two of his alleged victims; the film has since been yanked from the platform.)

When it comes to a story as well known as Jackson’s, the sanitizing hardly seems worth it, because the absence of the accusations is as conspicuous as their presence would have been. Setting aside the woeful omission, though, and considering the film outside the realm of preëxisting facts, as if it were a work of fiction about a fictitious character, “Michael” still counts as only a modestly noteworthy achievement, enjoyable yet flawed—because it contains other, artistic blind spots that keep the drama thin and narrow. The film’s perspective on its protagonist (I’ll call him Michael, to distinguish him from the historical Jackson) is unusual and engaging, especially by comparison with another new movie about a pop star with personal demons, David Lowery’s “Mother Mary,” which treats stardom as a given and reduces career obstacles to metaphysical neuroses. “Michael,” by contrast, explores the practicalities by which an artist’s raw talent is refined, a group of local performers reaches the big spotlight, and famous figures are transformed into global phenomena. The movie offers catchy narrative anecdotes that form a coherent and poignant portrait, but it fails to fill out its themes with much insight into the artistic consciousness.

The story starts one evening in 1966, in the living room of the Jackson family, in their home town of Gary, Indiana. There, the patriarch, Joseph (Colman Domingo), presses the child Michael (played with admirable musical and dramatic flair by Juliano Valdi) and four of Michael’s older brothers into rehearsal. Joseph—that’s how his children address him—is a steel-mill worker, and he exerts authoritarian power over the kids in the hope of making them successful performers and thus freeing them from the world of manual labor in which he’s stuck. At first, he commands them with a mere tone of menace. Then one night, after the group returns home late from a local gig, he demands that they rehearse; when his wife and the kids’ mother, Katherine (Nia Long), says that Michael is too tired, Joseph beats him with a belt. The act of physical brutality also serves as a warning to Katherine that she can’t protect the children from him.

In bed afterward, recovering from his father’s assault, Michael reads an illustrated Peter Pan book in which a drawing of the villainous Captain Hook is hand-labelled “Joseph”—a blatant foreshadowing of Michael’s refuge in a fantasy version of childhood. Soon, his real childhood is overtaken by his career, when Joseph pulls the group—now called the Jackson Five—out of school for a Chicago gig. The group is a hit with the audience, and, in the wings, an executive for Motown Records, Suzanne de Passe (Laura Harrier), slips Joseph her card. With planted irony, she praises Michael’s “God-given talent,” as Joseph’s hint of a sneer suggests that he’s claiming credit for it. (Domingo’s performance, which seethes with a ferociously warped sense of purpose, is far subtler and more varied than the script’s rhetorically heated but underdeveloped character.) The movie doesn’t take its time: cut to Los Angeles, where the Jackson Five is recording for Motown, under the guidance of its founder, Berry Gordy (Larenz Tate). Gordy coaches Michael through the vocals of “I Want You Back” and, in the process, initiates him in the technical art of making records. He also offers a form of mentorship altogether different from Joseph’s reign of terror.

As the lead singer and the prime personality of the Jackson Five, Michael is propelled into stardom and the compromises that come with it, starting when Gordy advises him to lie about his age. One compromise that weighs heavily on him is the fact that he has no friends, and the depiction of him as an isolated, idiosyncratic young adolescent stokes pathos simply and plainly. To fill his solitude, he buys animals (a snake, a rat, a llama; eventually, a chimpanzee and even a giraffe). Human peers, he laments, only gawk at him and want a photo. Katherine, his companion in nighttime TV-movie viewing (“Singin’ in the Rain,” the Three Stooges), says that she always knew that he was different, and she exhorts him to embrace his difference: “Let your light shine,” she tells him. And so he does—in scenes set seven years later, in 1978, when Michael, now an adult played by Jackson’s real-life nephew Jaafar Jackson, goes behind Joseph’s back to pursue a solo career. (The group had, by then, moved to Epic Records, a division of Columbia.)

As the grownup Michael asserts himself artistically and professionally, the drama becomes pugnacious, with Fuqua and the screenwriter John Logan filling in fine-grained details of business maneuvers whose glaring ironies are pierced with pain. Michael, while working on his first solo album with Quincy Jones (Kendrick Sampson), can’t bring himself to tell his father; when Joseph is nonetheless informed, he responds with a power play of his own. To wriggle out of Joseph’s grasp, Michael hires a brash young lawyer, John Branca, played by Miles Teller, who lends the coolly confident character a delightfully rough edge. (The real-life Branca, who was also Jackson’s business adviser, is an executor of Jackson’s estate and a producer of the movie.) Thus ably abetted, Michael insists that the record company’s head, Walter Yetnikoff (Mike Myers, bringing outrageous yet principled streetwise humor), force MTV—considered then to be denying Black artists airtime—to broadcast the music video of “Billie Jean,” a key step toward making it a worldwide hit.

With this plethora of behind-the-scenes incidents, “Michael” becomes a vigorously effective business movie. Unfortunately, it’s far less detailed or effective in its portrayal of the title character, and the trouble starts with the script, which omits many matters of incontrovertible interest even beyond the allegations of child abuse. For starters, there’s nothing of the eternal triangle of sex, politics, and money. The story is filled with dealmaking, but just how rich the Jackson family, and Michael himself, get from their success goes unspoken, unsuggested—except that it’s plenty. As for politics, a TV report about gang violence inspires Michael to head into Los Angeles (accompanied by his bodyguard and driver, Bill Bray, played by KeiLyn Durrel Jones) to meet some streetwise young people in the hope of using dance to bring peace, but his awareness of the world seems to go no further. Sex, meanwhile, is simply not a part of Michael’s life in any way, nor is its absence acknowledged—is he naïve, shy, asexual, repressed? Even Michael’s social life is left blank, far beyond his adolescent solitudes. Young Michael may have seemed strange, or just plain different, to kids his own age, but what about the adult Michael, whose professional life took him outside the family orbit and into offices, studios, and night clubs? Did he never meet and talk with other stars? And what do stars discuss, anyway? Fuqua and Logan can’t be bothered to figure it out.

The film does show the adult Michael seeking connection with children. He spends time visiting sick kids at a local hospital. With his full shopping cart on a toy store’s checkout line, he gets into conversations with child customers and gives enthusiastic pointers to one on a video game. Michael arrives home from the store gleefully bearing the game Twister, and implores his brothers to play it with him (but he ends up playing it with his chimp instead). Though Michael’s bond with children is depicted as unfailingly innocent, these scenes all but shriek to be watched between the lines.

As Michael becomes a world champ of sales and celebrity, of adoration and admiration, he lives in increasing isolation, struggling to both acknowledge and avoid the crowds that form to catch a glimpse wherever he goes. In depicting Michael as an emotionally stunted and grievously wounded artist of historic greatness, the film outdoes other recent bio-pics, such as James Mangold’s aw-shucks early-Dylan portrait “A Complete Unknown” and Baz Luhrmann’s self-bedazzled “Elvis.” As Michael, Jaafar Jackson’s speaking voice is expressive, and his presence blends strength and fragility, power and vulnerability, even if, in dramatic scenes, the character is granted too little substance for there to be a self to express. In musical scenes, however, Jaafar delivers singing and dancing that is startlingly persuasive, passing through impersonation into something like channelling. Michael’s greatest joy, his prime state, is performing, no matter whether it’s done on his own terms or his father’s. Onstage, Michael is exalted, transfigured, fully alive, with neither fear nor shame. The movie carries him to 1988 and ends with a title card reading “His story continues.” No kidding. ♦

So how, exactly, does America’s war with Iran, the one that Donald Trump said would probably be over in a couple of days, or four to six weeks, nearly eight weeks ago, end?

Since Trump has thus far failed to achieve the peace deal that he—and the world’s financial markets—had anticipated by the end of his two-week ceasefire with the hard-line Iranian regime, the conflict has entered into a liminal state that Gideon Rachman, of the Financial Times, called “the fog of peace.” It’s a murkiness befitting a President who has conducted this conflict in the Middle East as a one-man smoke machine obscuring reality behind such a cloud of lies and disinformation that it’s difficult to imagine that even Trump himself could keep straight what is real and what is fiction. On Monday, he told the New York Post that Vice-President J. D. Vance was in the air, en route to Pakistan, to seal an agreement with Iran. But Vance had never left, and days later he still hadn’t. By Tuesday, after variously threatening to bomb all of Iran to smithereens and claiming that he was on the brink of a “FAR BETTER” deal to halt Iran’s nuclear program than any of his predecessors, Trump unilaterally announced an indefinite ceasefire.

As of Thursday morning, Trump was publicly demanding that the U.S. Navy “shoot and kill” any Iranian boat dropping mines in the Strait of Hormuz and then, half an hour later, insisting that “we have total control” over the “Sealed up Tight” strait. Also, the President wanted Iran’s leadership to know that he doesn’t need a deal; however, he might kill any Iranian negotiator who did not give him what he wanted. The bottom line appears to be that more negotiations may or may not take place in Pakistan soon and that there may or may not be an unofficial new Trump deadline of this weekend for Iran to come back to the table. Got that?

One safe conclusion amid the confusion is that it remains, a decade into the Trump era, extremely difficult to distinguish between Trump in dealmaking mode and Trump in meltdown mode. Was the President lying when he said that Vance was on a plane to Islamabad? Out of the loop? Playing some clever game of head-fakery with his adversaries? At one point earlier this week, Trump gave interviews to four different publications suggesting that he had a deal with Iran and listing specifics, including that the regime had agreed to an “unlimited” suspension of its nuclear program and to hand over all its enriched uranium. Not only was this not true but it was almost impossible to believe that it could ever be true with this Iranian government, as experts quickly pointed out. “They’re running into the same fundamental hurdle that shaped the long decade-plus of negotiations” that led to Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, Suzanne Maloney, of the Brookings Institution, told the Washington Post, “which is that the Iranians are completely immovable on the question of enrichment.”

In foreign-policy circles, there tends to be a lot of learned discussion of just how one is meant to differentiate the signal from the noise at such fraught geopolitical moments. But the wise men, so far as I know, have historically been silent on what to do about a situation in which it’s the President himself who is responsible for so much of the noise while at the same time seeming oblivious to any of the signals.

Trump’s instability and inability to read his adversaries correctly aren’t the only reasons to wonder: Why would anyone make a deal with this man?

Top of mind for Iran’s negotiators, no doubt, is that Trump could hardly be counted on to keep his word even if they were to reach an agreement. There’s also the very real possibility that a future American President would reject Trump’s deal, just as Trump, in the course of his two terms in office, has rejected so many deals made by his predecessors. The long list includes Trump ordering the U.S. to pull out of the Paris climate agreement (twice), the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the World Health Organization, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty, and, of course, the original Iran nuclear deal negotiated under Obama. In January, he issued an executive order to exit sixty-six different organizations that the U.S. had agreed to participate in during past Administrations, including groups ranging from the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations to the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships in Asia.

The list raises many unanswered questions, not least of which is the possibility that the United States is now in favor of piracy on the high seas. But the general point is relevant not only to the Iranian government, which has plenty of credibility issues of its own after decades of pursuing a nuclear program while publicly disclaiming any interest in doing so, but more broadly to whether any U.S. guarantees—to anyone—will still be valid beyond the limited time horizon of Trump’s erratic Presidency.

Unfortunately, the events of the past few months have underscored an unpleasant reality of Trump’s character: he is constant only in his faithlessness, whether to his own supposed friends and partners or to the nation’s. Ask the women who have served in his Cabinet, three of whom have been ousted in recent weeks despite their collective self-abasement in Trump’s name, which included calling him “the greatest President in American history” (Pam Bondi) and “the greatest President of my lifetime” (Lori Chavez-DeRemer), as well as extolling Trumpian powers so vast that they apparently involved the ability to personally stop hurricanes (Kristi Noem). Ask the other thirty-one members of NATO, who are no longer certain that the alliance’s fundamental guarantee of mutual defense, enshrined in Article 5 of the treaty that was created in the aftermath of the Second World War, still applies to the Trump-led United States.

Just this week came the news that Trump, having already suspended the resettlement program for Afghans who had helped the United States over the course of its twenty-year war in their country, is now looking to send more than a thousand refugees—whose fates have been in limbo since they fled Kabul—to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These are people who were forced to leave their homeland because of the work that they did for the United States. When the U.S. military’s withdrawal in 2021 precipitated the Taliban’s return to power, Joe Biden gave America’s word to those who had aided us. Trump has no problem breaking it. He is, after all, a President who has already suspended the entirety of America’s program to allow refugees into the United States—with the exception of a few thousand white Afrikaners who, he claims, are victims of a nonexistent genocide. It is only a measure of the extra cruelty that he and his Administration seem to reserve for the world’s neediest that they now propose to send these Afghans to Congo at a time when it is already suffering one of the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crises.

Countries—like companies and like people—rely on credibility to get things done. Trump and his allies insist that he has gone to war because Iran “cannot be trusted” to have a nuclear weapon. Fair enough. But can anyone trust him, either? No wonder there’s an impasse. Expect high gas prices and more low, low, low Trump approval ratings. ♦

[Vice-President J. D.] Vance, who is Catholic, told a conservative audience at the University of Georgia that the pope was wrong to say that disciples of Christ are “never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”

To: The Pope

From: The Offices of the President and Vice-President

Dear Pope,

We have noticed that you said some things about Jesus recently that show you have no idea who Jesus was or what Jesus meant or what He did for a living. We say this not to be mean or critical but simply to point out that you are of very low intelligence about Jesus and should literally maybe get a new job, as we heard yours pays very poorly (not at all?).

Some things we know that might be news to you:

Did Jesus like war? No one knows for certain which side He was really on, as He never spoke much about it. But He definitely wasn’t against war and, as one story goes, once said to “bomb the shit out of them,” in regard to Herod’s army. You can find all of this in a very famous biography of Him called “Bible.”

What Jesus did say—and this is quoted in “Bible”—was that “vengeance is mine but it can also be yours if the price is right” (which is likely where the game show got its name). What did Jesus mean by that? Scholars who have studied “Bible” say that this was largely about arms dealing. Jesus hated communism and liberals and the A.C.L.U., which existed in a form back then, and felt that, if necessary, it was “O.K.” (His word) to take up arms against them and kill them. “Go ahead,” He apparently once said. “What do I care?”

Some other things you might not know about Jesus that we share here in the spirit of friendship and also so you don’t get lippy with the Jesus-talk and make a fool of yourself again:

Jesus said that the last shall be first and the first shall be last. Again, what did He mean? The meaning here is crystal clear: Be first. Get to the head of the line. Except, “Wait,” you might say. “What about the first being last?” Use your head, please. If the last shall be first and the first shall be last, what are the last supposed to do? Be first. Run up there, get to the front. Cut the line. Oh, but there’s an old woman and a baby up there. “How is that my problem?” Jesus might have said. Jesus never talked about children or the elderly and wisely remained a bachelor with no kids but did date casually and was apparently very good-looking.

Do you know how Jesus died? It wasn’t in a traffic accident, as most people think. It was Crucifixion, which is unpleasant, but the upside is that it made Him very famous (likely a four or higher Nielsen rating, were it televised today), so not all bad.

“Why did Jesus have to die?” a lot of people ask. The answer is because some people sin and vote and use the wrong bathroom and criticize others who are the President or Vice-President, which they shouldn’t do, and that’s why Jesus likely died. For other people’s sins.

Have you ever heard the story of Jesus turning water into wine? O.K., well, many people here in America say that a certain someone reminds them of Jesus. We won’t name names, but suffice it to say that this person recently turned wine into Diet Coke—which, granted, was done by accident when a certain someone poured a Diet Coke into a glass of wine. But many in attendance said it was a miracle.

What were Jesus’ thoughts about money? Again—“Bible,” which tells us that He walked into a bank one day to cash a check but the bank happened to be doing business in a church because the main branch was being renovated and apparently Jesus went crazy and turned over the desks of bankers who were trying to close a very big real-estate deal. Which begs the question: Was Jesus rude? Yes, at times. What was His message in turning over the tables, besides showing His rudeness? The message was: Don’t be stupid and rent. Buy. Renting is for saps. That’s what pissed Jesus off. “Cash is king,” He said at one point in “Bible,” toward the end, where they kill the shark and Quint dies.

Our point is this: Get to know Jesus better, Pope. Ask yourself the question each day: “What would Jesus do?” Isn’t that the question we are all trying to answer? And the answer, we think, is that He would go into tech or possibly private equity. ♦

You shouldn’t count other people’s money, but I can’t help thinking that the kingdom of Saudi Arabia could’ve found better uses for five billion dollars than sinking it into the upstart golf league LIV. Several news outlets have reported that the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which has been pumping about a hundred million dollars a month into LIV since the league’s launch, in 2022, will be pulling its funding at the end of the year. The league isn’t officially dead, but it doesn’t seem long for this world. What happens, then, to LIV’s players, who received absurdly lucrative contracts to defect from the P.G.A. Tour, and may be banned from returning? Was this all just a waste of time? What do I do now with all of my team merch for Cleeks Golf Club and the HyFlyers?

In the end, LIV was less evil, as a geopolitical project, than many people claimed, and more soulless, as a sport, than I thought possible. Since LIV’s inception, the press has widely labelled it an exercise in “sportswashing”—image rehabilitation for Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, after the murder and dismemberment of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In LIV’s first season, I spoke with Saudi and U.S. officials, some of whom did business with M.B.S., who said that the sportswashing idea made no sense. Starting an expensive professional golf league was a roundabout way to launder the reputation of a violent autocrat.

LIV was one element of Vision 2030, M.B.S.’s effort to transform and diversify Saudi Arabia into a post-oil economy. The Saudis wanted to attract Western business, and to have Riyadh supplant Abu Dhabi and Dubai as the Middle East’s economic capital. The project was outrageously ambitious; it called for, among other things, building a city from scratch, called Neom, whose plans, at one point, included an artificial moon. Golf was part of the plan’s goal to make Saudi Arabia a sports-and-entertainment destination; the leaders of the PIF, the Saudi sovereign-wealth fund, also thought that golf would attract business executives, and the league ended up being a useful tool with which to curry favor with President Donald Trump, who would go on to host LIV tournaments at his golf clubs. It didn’t hurt that Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the PIF’s governor, was an avid golfer. If LIV was a vanity project, it would have been Rumayyan’s. M.B.S. is a video-game guy. Although he has loomed large in the golf world’s imagination, there have been no indications that, to any disproportionate degree, the business mattered to him.

Vision 2030, as a whole, has let some air into the repressive Saudi state. It has been a liberalizing force, moderating religious rule, neutering the religious police, and expanding the rights of women. The country, for the first time in decades, has cinemas. There are concerts, comedy shows, malls, sports. For the golfers, this didn’t make the moral choice of joining LIV any less fraught. Some gestured, comically, at their excitement at helping to reform Saudi society. (“We’ve all made mistakes,” Greg Norman, LIV’s first C.E.O., said, of Khashoggi’s murder.) Many golfers, frustrated by the P.G.A. Tour’s status as a near-monopoly, in which players had little negotiating power, simply used LIV as leverage to get paid. Phil Mickelson told the golf writer Alan Shipnuck, “We know they killed Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights.” He went on, “They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the P.G.A. Tour operates.” One golf agent told Shipnuck, “What you have to understand about professional golfers is that they are all whores.”

More than fifty golfers were willing to debase themselves in order to grab some of the Saudis’ cash. Mickelson, who ultimately joined, and was paid some two hundred million dollars, played a round with Rumayyan, and could be heard gushing, “Great shot, Your Excellency!” Jon Rahm was reportedly paid at least three hundred million. The money bitterly divided the golf world. Loyalists to the P.G.A. Tour, the dominant existing league, viewed the defectors as sellouts who gave up on real competition. The LIV defectors saw the loyalists as hypocrites who were jealous of their deals. Both were probably right.

It wasn’t that the money ruined the sanctity of the sport. If money did that, we’d have no sports at all; Juan Soto makes nearly eight hundred million dollars to play for the Mets. Rory McIlroy, perhaps the P.G.A. Tour golfer most vocally opposed to LIV, told me he wasn’t offended by the greed: “I’m gonna make a shit ton of money here, that’s the thing!” LIV’s problem was that it was a sport run by people who seemingly misunderstood something fundamental about sports: you can’t manufacture attachment. LIV’s most innovative idea was to have golfers play on teams, rather than only as individuals. Teams were assembled via a draft, which, it turned out, was a sham—some players had agreed, beforehand, on who’d play where. The team names (Crushers! Fireballs!) and branding (“Just like a majestic performance on the golf course, the Majesticks Golf Club team identity aims to sparkle and excite!”) had the charm of a consultant’s pitch deck. Rooting for them felt like rooting for a brand of toothpaste. Sports franchises everywhere can be tacky, rapacious, incompetent, extortionate, and otherwise exploitative, but only because their customers, the fans, are essentially captives. Your team is like your family; the new owner may be an oligarch or a war criminal, but what are you going to do, leave? LIV was as if the biggest boor you know tried to pay you to become your uncle. It didn’t work. I attended a LIV tournament at Trump Bedminster, in New Jersey, where people were doing almost everything other than watching the golf: drinking to excess, gawking at Tucker Carlson hanging out with Donald Trump. I saw one guy, next to a green, watching porn on his phone.

LIV lost a staggering amount of money. In 2024, LIV’s U.K. entity alone reported revenues of sixty-five million, and expenses of around five hundred and twenty-five million. Many assume its American branch is a similar money pit. This surprised no one, except, apparently, the Saudis. LIV incinerated so much money that one can understand why it was taken to be a sportswashing exercise. It was, however, a business proposition, albeit one with metrics in addition to just profit and loss—proximity to Trump, wooing foreign executives, the knock-on effects of building up a domestic sports-and-entertainment sector. Still, it was supposed to make money. Eventually, the Saudis found better means of achieving their strategic goals. A two-billion-dollar investment in Jared Kushner’s private-equity firm helped court Trump. Executives, it turned out, would come to Riyadh to beg for money whether they could do so on a golf course or not. (Also, the five billion and counting spent on LIV could’ve been used to build actual golf courses; the country still has only around a dozen.) M.B.S. has recently been more interested in investing in movie studios. The PIF contributed twelve billion dollars to Paramount’s takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. (Films and CNN, incidentally, are more effective means of shaping perceptions.)

LIV’s imminent demise comes now for two reasons: the war in Iran stressed the Saudi economy, and the PIF has refocussed after years of underperformance. The Wall Street Journal reported that the PIF, which was more than nine hundred billion dollars in assets, is “strapped for cash.” It’s pulling back on Neom, the city from scratch, which means they’ll probably be stuck with just the regular old moon. It has stopped work on a hundred-mile-long “horizontal skyscraper” called the Line; all that’s left is a seventy-five-mile-long trench in the desert. One expert estimates that the fund had a return near zero in 2024; the S. & P. was up twenty-five per cent that year. Between 2017 and 2025, the PIF’s annual return has been seven per cent. The S. & P. averaged double that. A hedge-fund manager, presiding over such failure, would be out of a job.

When the reports surfaced that the Saudis were cutting off LIV’s funding, the league was playing a tournament in Mexico City. The TV broadcast cut out—technical issues, LIV said—but it was ominous. Players, who are paid in quarterly installments, didn’t get their paychecks when they expected to. According to the golf writer Eamon Lynch, they debated whether they should refuse to play. The PIF ultimately agreed to keep the league funded for the rest of the season, and the checks went out, but the league appears to be on a death march. Earlier this week, the hosts of one golf podcast began recounting the results of the Mexico City tournament, when they recognized the futility of the exercise: “This just feels like talking about who’s winning the dominos game on the Titanic.” Scott O’Neil, LIV’s C.E.O., is trying to find more investors. Maybe he will, but the odds aren’t great. In February, O’Neil told the Financial Times that LIV was five to ten years away from turning a profit. A few months ago, the league was working with Citibank to try to sell stakes in the individual teams. Earlier this year, the league said it had hoped the franchises would eventually be worth a billion dollars each. Now the league says it hopes to sell the teams for three hundred million dollars each. With seemingly little revenue, it is unclear where such a valuation comes from. As McIlroy explained to me, a few years ago, the value of the franchises are “all tied to the economics of the league, and right now that league doesn’t have any economics.”

What did LIV accomplish? M.B.S. is now a normalized leader and source of funds, but that was hardly LIV’s doing. A lot of golfers got paid. But over four years, I never got a convincing sense that the competition mattered to anyone. The stakes felt empty. For all of the P.G.A. Tour’s problems, at least you knew the players were desperately trying to win. For a sport to work, you need the players to care. Absent that, once you got past LIV’s business drama, and the sniping and backbiting, what you were left with was watching sensationally wealthy, morally compromised middle-aged men go to work. The market for such a product is saturated. If you find yourself missing it, next season, might I suggest tuning into a Cabinet meeting? ♦

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Cynicism is widely considered a defining quality of our conspiracy-addled, irony-poisoned age. But audiences and creatives alike now seem ready to cast it aside in favor of an attitude that’s long been out of style: earnestness. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz trace this trend from the outer-space buddy comedy “Project Hail Mary” to the real-life Artemis II mission, whose crew has spoken movingly about Earth as a “lifeboat” in the middle of a vast, mysterious universe. The hosts also consider two buzzy new books—Lena Dunham’s “Famesick,” and “Transcription,” by Ben Lerner—which find their authors turning to earnestness in midlife, after precocious beginnings. In this era of political, economic, and environmental precarity, younger generations, too, have come to celebrate big feelings, rather than living in fear of seeming cringe. “We’ve just seen too much awful stuff, and it’s impossible to ironize,” Cunningham says. “The only sane response to that is to kind of sober up and say, ‘All right, what resources do humans still have?’ ”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Project Hail Mary” (2026)
“The Pitt” (2025-)
“Love on the Spectrum” (2022-)
“Heated Rivalry” (2025-)
“Famesick,” by Lena Dunham
“Girls” (2012-17)
“Transcription,” by Ben Lerner
“Climbing Cringe Mountain with Gen Z” (The New York Times)
“Amos & Boris,” by William Steig
László Krasznahorkai’s Nobel Prize lecture

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.