/// WEEKEND BY VIC MATUS SEP 27 2026 --------------- Sticking to the sociological, Jon Ronson is out with his latest book, The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men. Nicholas Clairmont has a review. Like previous Ronson books such as The Psychopath Test, The Men Who Stare at Goats, and So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed—as well as recent podcasts produced with all the care of a full-on nonfiction book, like his excellent examination of all the things that happened because PornHub was created, The Butterfly Effect—The Castle is structured as a sort of investigation into an idea that begins to trouble Ronson about whether some small and previously unnoticed feature of reality actually explains a great deal. He takes you the reader along with him as he works out his own confusions and questions. None is resolved perfectly, but the curiosity is infectious, and it’s hard not to come away suspecting the answer is at least in the direction Ronson is headed in. “In this case, the issue in question is whether, as modern society has been restructured over the past few decades toward the therapeutic and the digital and away from the concrete, men are losing it. Many books have at least glanced at this subject, usually with a big prefatory defensive gesture that surely we all know women are the real subjects of concern. Richard Reeves and his book Of Boys and Men stands out among them. But the majority of the work on the subject comprises liberal fearmongering about the ‘manosphere,’ the internet subculture of blustering, often whoremongering dudebros such as Andrew Tate who openly advocate for polygamy and pumping iron and whatever supplement they’re selling. The manosphere is bad just like QAnon is bad, but the coverage of both seems less interested in telling human stories in their real scale than threat inflation aimed at flattering the liberal suspicion that all rightwingery is explained by bigotry that is either more or less open. “Ronson, despite being much more fun and funny to read, takes the subject of modern male struggles more seriously and humanely. Indeed, despite (or because of) taking a much fuzzier and more circuitous approach to the question of what is going wrong with men than any comparable book, The Castle is the best of the bunch.” []{} One man who never seemed to unravel was Paul Newman. As our series on the greatest movies of 1986 continues, Zach Kessel reviews Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!BB5-!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdf162da3-b5b8-4dfb-bdf8-acb9855b719a_683x1024.jpeg “Newman was by no means washed up by the time he reprised his role as Fast Eddie. But he had—quite famously—failed to achieve the glory befitting the greatest movie star of his generation. By 1986, Newman had been nominated for the Oscar for Best Actor six times. ... He won none. In 1986, the Academy gave him an honorary Oscar, to which Newman joked he was grateful it ‘did not come wrapped as a gift certificate to Forest Lawn,’ a Los Angeles cemetery. In the years between the 1982 release of The Verdict and his 1986 honorary Oscar, the only movie Newman made was Harry & Son, a critical and commercial failure. “Newman’s acting career was on its last legs, it seemed. He was pouring himself into racing and his charitable Newman’s Own salad dressing company. But as he said in his acceptance speech for that honorary Oscar, that award gave him ‘a kind of permission’ to take risks. Maybe, he said, his ‘best work [was] down the pike.’ It turned out that exact kind of project was in the works. Two years earlier, Newman, running point on a sequel to The Hustler, called another down-on-his-luck Hollywood icon in Scorsese. “In 1984, Scorsese’s long-running snub from the Academy had yet to become Hollywood legend. Raging Bull earned him a Best Director nomination, the first and only to that point in his career. ... 1973’s Mean Streets put Scorsese on the map. He followed that with Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore in 1974 and Taxi Driver in 1976, establishing himself as a critical darling and a bankable box-office director. What followed was different. New York, New York, released in 1977, failed to win over critics or moviegoers, and though Raging Bull did earn a bevy of Oscar nominations, it was not a financial success. Scorsese’s next film, The King of Comedy, made him radioactive. Now widely considered one of his best, it grossed only $2.5 million on a $19 million budget. ... By the time Newman called him, Scorsese was reduced to working as a gun-for-hire on After Hours, a far cry from the celebrated filmmaker audiences know him as today. “The next move Newman made was finding his Vince. Legend has it that Newman met Cruise after seeing him in 1981’s Taps, took a liking to him, and nicknamed him ‘Killer.’ When Newman got Cruise for The Color of Money in 1985, though, it wasn’t the slam dunk it would seem the next year, when the movie opened five months after another iconic 1986 picture, Top Gun. Cruise had a string of successes after Taps with, among others, Risky Business and All the Right Moves, turning him into one of Hollywood’s brightest up-and-comers. He had promise, but he wasn’t yet a movie star. Newman made a bet that that’s what he’d be.” []{} Happy Sunday. Vic Matus Arts & Culture Editor Washington Free Beacon Thanks for reading the Washington Free Beacon! Subscribe for free to receive new posts.