| | | | The rules governing everything from “Big Brother” to “The Real Housewives” started three decades ago, with a radical experiment on MTV. By Emily Nussbaum  Illustration by Nicholas Konrad; Source photographs from Alamy / Everett / Getty One spring day in 1992, Eric Nies, a twenty-year-old model from New Jersey, walked into a swanky SoHo loft that he shared with six other young people. In the kitchen, he found two of his housemates, Heather B. Gardner and Julie Oliver, flipping through a coffee-table book of nude photographs and giggling. “Did you leave this out for us?” Julie asked him, teasingly. She held up the book to display one of the images: a full-frontal shot of Eric, in black-and-white, as he took a cautious step through a deep, mysterious-looking forest, like some hunky innocent exploring Eden. One floor downstairs, in the control room for the first season of MTV’s “The Real World,” the show’s co-creators, Jon Murray and Mary-Ellis Bunim, gazed at a bank of live-feed monitors in excitement. They had planted the book—the fashion photographer Bruce Weber’s collection “Bear Pond,” which had been Eric’s big break as a model—inside the loft, hoping that the racy image would provoke a reaction from the housemates. Bunim, an experienced soap-opera producer, had a playful nickname for these kinds of interventions; she called the method “throwing pebbles in the pond.” Now the gamble looked like it was about to pay off, triggering a flirtation or, possibly, a fight. Either outcome was fine with them. | | | |  | If you know someone who would enjoy the daily, please share it. Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up. | | | | Hooper Dept. | | The New Yorker staff writer Louisa Thomas on the defining moments of Game Four of the N.B.A. Finals, in which the Dallas Mavericks beat the Boston Celtics 122–84, to stay alive in the series. Luka Dončić is famous for his step-back threes, his space-bending passes, and his complaints toward the referees, which can be operative in their intensity. During Game Three of the Finals, he seemed to spend more of his energy on those arias of grievance than on stopping the Celtics from scoring, for instance. Everyone knew that the Mavericks, which came into Game Four down 3–0 in the series, had no chance unless Dončić stopped whining and started asserting himself on the defensive end. Even Dončić understood that, apparently. Dončić was one of the best defenders on the floor last night. And when he was called for a foul partway through the second quarter, he not only stayed quiet but smiled. “A totally different mind-set and approach tonight from Luka Dončić on both ends of the floor. And then, mentally, with the officials,” J. J. Reddick said on the TV broadcast. “Well, it helps to have a twenty-four-point lead,” Mike Breen responded. | | | | From the News Desk | The New Yorker Radio Hour Is Being a Politician the Worst Job in the World?Rory Stewart, a former Conservative Party Member of Parliament, explains the upcoming U.K. elections, the “catastrophic” Brexit, and the soul-crushing sham of a life in politics. With David Remnick | | The Political Scene Podcast Hunter Biden’s Conviction and Trump’s Risk to the Justice Department in 2024“It defies imagination to think that this is a case that would have existed in any other context than the context of Biden being in the White House,” Susan B. Glasser says. With Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos | | | | | Editor’s Pick |  Photo Booth Bela Borsodi’s Luminous Images of Children and Their DrawingsFirst, the kids drew their dreams. Then they posed next to them, in bed. The resulting black-and-white photos reveal the emotional realism that lies behind the fantastical. By Rivka Galchen | | | | | | | Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  Hey, Zoey, by Sarah Crossan (Little, Brown). What, in our digital age, constitutes an affair? Texting? Swiping? How about buying an eight-thousand-dollar A.I. sex doll and hiding it from your wife in the garage? In this entertaining novel, the middle-aged narrator, Dolores, discovers that her husband has done just that. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Sidetracks, by Bei Dao, translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang (New Directions). More than a decade in the making, this book-length poem traces its acclaimed author’s years in exile after his expulsion from mainland China in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Token Supremacy, by Zachary Small (Knopf). In this gimlet-eyed chronicle, a Times journalist traces the market for art in the form of non-fungible tokens (N.F.T.s)—digital commodities stored and traded on the blockchain. As the value of the crypto market hit a peak of nearly three trillion dollars, in late 2021, the prices of N.F.T. art works rose along with it. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Committed, by Suzanne Scanlon (Vintage). “My writing was fuelled by desperation, and madness, too,” Scanlon, a novelist, writes in this affecting memoir, which recounts her stay at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in her early twenties, following a suicide attempt. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | | | | Culture Dept. | On Television A Succession Battle Over America’s Largest Ren FaireA new HBO documentary series follows King George, the eighty-six-year-old overlord of the Texas Renaissance Festival, and the vicious competition to replace him. By Carrie Battan | | The Front Row “Shoeshine” Marked a New Era of Political CinemaVittorio De Sica’s 1946 neorealist drama helped put Italian movies at the center of world cinema. By Richard Brody | | Culture Desk Dry Ice and Rose Petals: An Entrance Fit for the Father of the BrideAnd did I mention the fireworks? Lighting your way down the aisle! By Sanika Phawde | | Culture Desk When Dads Cry: A Memoir in Man TearsMy wife sees it as an expression of feelings-friendly masculinity to be modelled for our two still-impressionable boys. By David Ostow | | | | |  | Name Drop: Can you guess the identity of a notable person—contemporary or historical—in six clues? Play our trivia game » | | | | | P.S. King John “was spiteful and he was weak,” Jill Lepore, writes, adding, “although, frankly, so were the medieval historians who chronicled his reign, which can make it hard to know quite how horrible it really was.” But John is remembered for signing, on this day in 1215, the charter that would become Magna Carta, which stated that the king is not above the law. As Lepore writes, “Few men have been less mourned, few legal documents more adored.” | | | | | | | |
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