The year was 2020, and schools abruptly closed. Kids Zoomed into kindergarten, and someone had to supervise them. Disproportionately, that task fell—because of course it did—to moms. So out of necessity, the moms quit their jobs. Thus began America’s first female recession.

Beyond the immediate trauma of job and income loss, economists worried that this “she-cession” would scar female employment for the long term. The thinking was that once women stepped back from the workforce, reentering would be difficult or impossible.

But that appears not to have happened. Recently, the she-cession largely ended—or, at least, women’s employment has seen a robust recov-her-y. (Sorry.) In fact, remote work appears to have allowed mothers of young children in particular to join the workforce in record numbers.

[Read: The professional women who are leaning out]

Nearly as many women are working now as before the coronavirus pandemic. Women’s labor-force participation was 57.9 percent in February 2020 and 57.7 percent last month. So-called prime-age women—those from 25 to 54—are working in even greater numbers: More than 77.6 percent of them are in the workforce, compared with 77 percent before the pandemic.

Perhaps more surprising is the group of women whose employment has rebounded the most: Women whose youngest child is under 5 are “powering the pack’s upward trajectory,” a recent Brookings Institution report found. In particular, mothers of young kids who are highly educated, married, and/or foreign-born are working in greater numbers today than before the pandemic. “Labor force participation among mothers with young children who have at least a bachelor’s degree has exceeded its pre-pandemic peak,” the Brookings-report authors, Lauren Bauer and Sarah Yu Wang, write.

The rebound has been so dramatic that, when I emailed Misty Heggeness, an economist at the University of Kansas, she emailed back, “What she-cession.” To be sure, women’s employment did suffer in the pandemic’s early days: Women’s jobs accounted for 55 percent of the 20.5 million jobs that were lost in April 2020, in part because service workers, who are disproportionately female, were laid off in large numbers, and in part because the closure of schools and child care meant that many women stopped working. The pandemic quickly wiped out nearly a decade’s worth of progress in women’s employment.

Now, though, we’re coming off of “hot mom summer,” as Heggeness put it—by which she means high levels of female employment, of course. Several things seem to be driving women back to the workforce. Inflation is high, and student-loan payments are restarting, so many families simply need more money to cover expenses. The labor market is tight, so many women can find jobs with relative ease and negotiate for terms that feel favorable. Child care has finally mostly reopened, so women who want to work are no longer stuck without someone to watch their kids. Also, the pandemic acted as a stress test of sorts, proving to families that they can do hard things. The thinking among many women, as Brookings’s Bauer told me, was something like “the pandemic sucked, but now I can get through anything.”

Another big factor seems to be remote work. Bauer and Wang point out that mothers of young children who have a bachelor’s degree or higher are the most likely group of workers to be teleworking, and married mothers of young kids are among the likeliest groups to be teleworking. These are also the groups that have made the biggest gains in labor-force participation since the pandemic: More than 40 percent of college-educated mothers with young kids teleworked at least one day a week in the early part of this year. “That is so high,” Bauer told me.

Several other data points prop up the idea that remote work is helping women rejoin the workforce. Women’s employment rebounded especially quickly in New England and California, where many jobs can be performed remotely, compared with the Midwest, where in-person manufacturing work is more common. Nearly a dozen women interviewed by The Washington Post recently said that a combination of rising prices and workplace flexibility had prompted them to get jobs.

Across Europe and America, work-from-home days have quadrupled since the start of the pandemic, and 35 percent of Americans who can do their jobs from home now work remotely all the time, compared with 7 percent before the pandemic. Last year, women were more likely to work remotely than men were, and women are generally more interested in remote jobs than men are. Julia Pollak, ZipRecruiter’s chief economist, told me that surveys the job site conducted show that 54 percent of men and 69 percent of women are interested in remote jobs. “Work-from-home is by far the largest change to have happened in the labor market,” Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist who studies remote work, told me.

About 90 percent of the candidate pool at the staffing firm FlexProfessionals is female, says Maura Connelly, the company’s senior recruiting manager. Their preference for remote work is overwhelming: Though some are interested in hybrid work, “nobody I talked to wants to be on site five days a week,” she told me. “Nobody.” The candidates say they want to be able to meet the bus when their kid gets home, or drive the occasional carpool. Connelly says many women might have returned to work recently because the pandemic showed them that remote work is out there—that it exists, and that they could get those jobs.

Though families must still pay for child care when parents work remotely, remote work allows them to pay for less child care. Instead of leaving the house for your commute at 7 and returning at 6, you’re rolling to your home office at 8 and “returning” from it at 5. That’s two fewer hours of babysitter coverage every day.

Kerri Sterowski’s son was just a few months old when the pandemic began, and working full-time didn’t feel safe or practical for her. Instead, she helped watch a friend’s child and did some part-time work remotely. She returned to full-time work in August 2022 because she lives in expensive Northern Virginia and her family was feeling financially pinched. Still, she turned down jobs that would have required her to be in the office most of the time, because she wanted to be around in case her son was sick or had a half-day at school. “If I were to have a job in person, then I would be missing out on a lot of my son’s life,” she told me.

Remote work might also have encouraged new mothers who would otherwise have left the workforce to instead stay in. Rather than see themselves trapped in an office all day, they might have figured out that they can breastfeed around Zoom meetings and knock out memos at naptime. After Mozi Nolte’s daughter was born in October 2020, she and her husband spent two years taking care of her at home, without paid child care, while working full-time. She was worried about the infection risk, and she also wanted to save $2,000 a month on day care. It was hard: Her bosses were very understanding, but there were times when she was on a conference call, changing a diaper, and pumping at the same time.

Now Nolte has child care, but she would never consider a job that requires five days a week in the office. She goes in two days a week, but it takes her an hour and a half each way to get to her office. Doing that every day, “it’s three hours when I could pick my daughter up and do laundry, play with her. The quality of life is just not worth it,” she says.

[Read: The other work remote workers get done]

What’s less clear is whether remote work will continue to boom, and women’s employment along with it. There are currently not as many remote-job openings as there are job seekers who want to work remotely. But Bloom believes the work-from-home trend is shaped like a Nike swoosh: There was an initial post-pandemic drop as even Zoom called some of its employees back to the office a few days a week, and now we’re in the fat, flat part of the swoosh. But soon, he thinks, the trend will be on its way up again as technology improves. Beyond videoconferencing, he envisions a future of virtual reality and holograms that would allow you to interact with colleagues in 3-D. What’s more, newer companies that have always been remote will expand and inspire others, he believes, so the norm may shift away from big offices.

Working remotely has some downsides: A spread-out workforce makes mentorship more difficult, so if women are flocking to remote work, they might lose out on valuable networking and learning opportunities. And it’s not clear that remote work is sufficient to keep women in the labor force. Pandemic-era child-care funding is set to end this month, which might cause some day-care centers to close and some parents to step back from work again. You might not need as much child care when you work remotely, but you do need some.

If the remote-work trend continues, though, and women’s employment stays high, it might mean that in the future, women will face less of a “motherhood penalty” for taking time off when their children are born. “If there are more women who can stay on the track that they were [on] prior to having a baby, or closer to an ideal track,” Bauer said, “then that sets their whole family and her on a different trajectory in terms of her participation, earnings, and career ladder.” Far from a she-cession, we might see a future of prosp-her-ity.

The ongoing Hollywood strikes may have dimmed the usual glitz that comes with the fall festival circuit—the star-studded red carpets, the applause-filled Q&As, the endless photo shoots—but this year’s Toronto International Film Festival still featured hundreds of new titles from established auteurs and first-time filmmakers alike. Earlier this month, my colleague David Sims and I caught as many of TIFF’s offerings as we could, leaving with plenty of movies to discuss and recommend. Below, David and I have rounded up our favorites from this year’s festival, most of which will be in theaters or streaming before long. — Shirley Li

TIFF

The Royal Hotel (in theaters October 6)

Kitty Green quickly proved herself a master of the slow-burn nightmare with 2019’s The Assistant, a film starring Julia Garner as a young woman forced to tolerate her unseen studio-executive boss’s sexual indiscretions. In her follow-up, Green casts Garner as a young woman backpacking across Australia with her best friend (Jessica Henwick). When the pair take bartending jobs in a male-dominated remote mining town to make some cash, they dress for work, not for play—no skirts, no heels—and even claim to be Canadian to ward off judgment about their American backgrounds. But the line between a gaze and a leer can be terribly thin—and The Royal Hotel shows in taut, tense sequences how being accommodating only works so well as a defense mechanism.  — Shirley Li

Anatomy of a Fall (in theaters October 13)

The winner of this year’s Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Justine Triet’s French legal drama is amassing buzz as one of the fall’s clear art-house breakouts. The plot is straight out of a ’90s paperback best seller—a novelist (played by Sandra Hüller) is arrested for murder after her husband dies in a fall at their mountain home, and must fight to prove her innocence during a long and complex trial. But Triet’s film delves beyond the (thrillingly showy) French legal system and into the intricacies of a troubled marriage, asking the audience to consider whether every subtle sign of decay in a partnership should amount to motive. The film works largely because Hüller, a German actress probably best known for her role in Toni Erdmann, gives an extraordinary performance already being tipped for Oscar success.  — David Sims

The Burial (in select theaters October 6, streaming on Prime Video October 13)

A legal drama about a man trying to save his business from a greedy investor may sound dreadfully serious, but this Maggie Betts–directed film—based on a 1999 New Yorker story—is a crowd-pleaser, full of well-drawn characters, show-stopping monologues, and a wonderfully energetic performance from Jamie Foxx. The actor stars as the boisterous personal-injury lawyer Willie E. Gary, who improbably joins forces with Jerry O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones), his first white client—a funeral-home director being bankrupted by a heartless corporation taking advantage of low-income communities. But The Burial isn’t just a skin-deep look at an unusual partnership; it also observes the way a courtroom distills people into tidy narratives according to attributes such as their race, class, and gender, producing a microcosm of society’s most basic impulses.  — S.L.

TIFF

The Pigeon Tunnel (streaming on Apple TV+ October 20)

The documentarian Errol Morris is famous for using the “Interrotron,” a device for interviewing his subjects that allows him to look them in the eye as he explores their life stories. He’s used it on notably controversial figures such as Robert McNamara, Donald Rumsfeld, and Steve Bannon, but in The Pigeon Tunnel he tries to capture the essence of a much more celebrated personality: John le Carré. In what was le Carré’s final major interview before his death in 2020, the British novelist and former spy talks Morris through his childhood, his complicated relationship with his con-man father, and his life in the world of clandestine intelligence. Through it all is the tension of whether one can truly know le Carré, a man who first made a living hiding his true self, and then another living as a writer delving into it. Morris captures that paradox, and the author’s effortless intelligence and charm, quite perfectly.  — D.S.

The Holdovers (in theaters October 27)

After the muddled (if fascinating) Downsizing, Alexander Payne has tapped a familiar face for this return to form: a curmudgeonly Paul Giamatti, who last worked with the director on his Oscar-winning hit Sideways. In that film, Giamatti was a wine snob; here, he’s a classical-history teacher at a stuffy Massachusetts boarding school in the early ’70s, pressed into service as a caretaker for the few kids staying over during Christmas break. The Holdovers kicks off with all the grumpy cynicism of Payne’s past classics such as Election and Nebraska, but there’s a touch of holiday sweetness as it explores the deepening bonds between Giamatti’s character, a rebellious young student (Dominic Sessa), and a chef in mourning (the tremendous Da’Vine Joy Randolph).  — D.S.

Nyad (in theaters October 20, streaming on Netflix November 3)

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are well regarded as documentary filmmakers, with work such as the Oscar-winning Free Solo and the Thai cave-diver film The Rescue earning great acclaim. Nyad is their first narrative feature, but it’s a close cousin of their prior films, as it also delves into the strange passions and the involved process behind an extreme athlete—in this case, the long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad (played by Annette Bening). An accomplished athlete in the ’70s, Nyad resurfaced in the 2010s and declared that she would attempt a never-before-done free swim from Cuba to Florida. The film is a fairly standard triumph-over-adversity true story powered by strong work from Bening and Jodie Foster as her coach, Bonnie Stoll, but the exacting technical details of Nyad’s process are its most fascinating elements.  — D.S.

TIFF

Dream Scenario (in theaters November 10)

The premise of Kristoffer Borgli’s dark and surreal dramedy is a zany bit of speculation: What if, out of nowhere, people around the world started dreaming of the same person, someone they’d never met before? That starts happening with milquetoast professor Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage), who begins popping up in people’s subconscious for no discernible reason, and becomes a strange celebrity. Cage, balding and sporting a bushy beard, plays the character’s growing egotism and mania wonderfully as the script spins into ridiculous directions; eventually, Borgli loses some grip on whatever metaphor for fame he’s exploring, but there are some hilarious (and terrifying) swerves along the way.  — D.S.

Fallen Leaves (in theaters November 17)

The most consistent filmmaker working today might be Aki Kaurismäki, the Finnish master who produces a soft-spoken and mordant comedy every six years or so and never, ever misses the mark. Even by his high standards, Fallen Leaves—an 81-minute yarn about a halting but tender romance between a lonely supermarket stocker (Alma Pöysti) and an alcoholic contractor (Jussi Vatanen)—is close to perfect. As both scratch out fairly meager existences in Helsinki’s working class, they’re troubled by news of Russia’s nearby war against Ukraine and besieged by uncaring bosses. But Kaurismäki delights in depicting how they forge a connection, lobbing pithy line after pithy line along the way.  — D.S.

Rustin (in theaters November 3, streaming on Netflix November 17)

Produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, Rustin is a biographical drama about the civil-rights activist Bayard Rustin (played by Colman Domingo), an architect of 1963’s March on Washington who worked closely with leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Philip Randolph. George C. Wolfe’s film stresses Rustin’s status as a brilliant outsider, often ostracized even within the civil-rights community for his homosexuality and his past membership in the Communist Party. Domingo’s outsize performance gets across how he survived and succeeded through charm and sheer force of will. The film is most interesting when it examines the staging of the march, and the internecine politicking that went on behind the scenes, even as the script (co-written by Milk’s Dustin Lance Black) often veers into more typical biopic formula.  — D.S.

American Fiction (in select theaters November 3, everywhere November 17)

Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (a witty, wondrous Jeffrey Wright) is an English professor and an author, and, yes, he’s Black—but must all of his work be classified as Black writing? Frustrated that only stereotypical characters and narratives find success with mainstream readers, Monk comes up with an obnoxious parody of such novels, only for his work to become a hit. Based on Percival Everett’s book Erasure, the Watchmen writer Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut dissects Monk’s psyche with a surprisingly light touch, turning his grift into an intimate character study that explores his love life and family (including siblings played by Tracee Ellis Ross and Sterling K. Brown). Smart, meaty, and funnier than expected for a film juggling weighty relationship drama with the philosophical conundrums running through Monk’s head, American Fiction is a dramedy with a refreshing point of view.  — S.L.

TIFF

The Boy and the Heron (in theaters December 8)

The masterful Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki has been supposedly approaching retirement since the mid-’90s; each of his films from Princess Mononoke on has been rumored to be his swan song. With The Boy and the Heron (originally titled How Do You Live?), the 82-year-old has made a transfixing statement on the perils of guarding one’s legacy too closely, and the necessity of letting younger generations conjure up new worlds on their own. The Boy and the Heron begins as a direct enough fable, following a 12-year-old who loses his mother during World War II and is then moved to the countryside when his father marries his mother’s younger sister. There, he encounters a mythical bird-creature and a forbidden tower containing a dimension beyond our own, but that’s merely scratching the surface of the wild dream logic that unfolds. The Boy and the Heron may or may not be Miyazaki’s final movie, but either way, it’s a staggering addition to one of animation’s most totemic filmographies.  — D.S.

The Zone of Interest (in select theaters December 8)

Under the Skin director Jonathan Glazer’s latest film, which tracks a family living just outside Auschwitz, casts an unsettling chill that’s hard to shake. All day, every day, the concentration camp’s commandant, Rudolf Höss (a real-life figure, played by Christian Friedel); his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller); and their children can hear screaming, but they go about their lives with blissful thoughtlessness. Based loosely on Martin Amis’s novel of the same name, Glazer’s film would be a completely nauseating watch if not for the way the writer-director keeps the audience at a distance. He isn’t trying to humanize the Nazis or retell the terrors of Auschwitz; instead, he delivers a mesmerizing, almost anthropological study of how evil can manifest in mundane ways, through ordinary people.  — S.L.

La Chimera (TBA)

There’s nothing quite like La Chimera—which is typical of the Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, who is fond of adding dashes of magic to tales that explore her country’s past. On paper, her latest effort sounds absurd beyond belief: It’s a film about a vaudevillian Italian troupe that robs ancient Etruscan tombs by using a vaguely mystic human dowsing rod (played by Josh O’Connor). The movie uses O’Connor, known for his stuffy work as Prince Charles in The Crown, wonderfully against type as an oddball in a group of outsiders who’s mysteriously connected to ancient times. In case that wasn’t enough, the film also features Isabella Rossellini as a swoony Italian grandma. — D.S.

Origin (TBA)

Ava DuVernay’s first film since 2018’s bizarre adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time attempts something even more ambitious, dramatizing Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents—a work of cultural anthropology that examines America’s history of racism through historical systems of caste, such as Nazi Germany and India’s stratified society. Origin plumbs all of that, but it also retells Wilkerson’s personal narrative, with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor playing the author as she faces personal tragedy and professional skepticism on the way to publishing her book. The overall result is possibly too muddled to function as a successful piece of dramatic storytelling, but too much inventiveness is on display to easily dismiss.  — D.S.

TIFF

Woman of the Hour (TBA)

In a festival packed with directorial debuts from actors turned filmmakers, Anna Kendrick’s effort stands out for its gutsiness. Though the movie tells the story of the real-life serial killer Rodney Alcala (played by Daniel Zovatto), Woman of the Hour is not just a true-crime drama. It’s a study of how violence can loom at the margins of courtship—and how dangerous rejecting advances can be for women. Kendrick juxtaposes scenes of Alcala killing victims throughout the 1970s with sequences from the day he infamously appeared on the blind-matchmaking game show The Dating Game and wooed the contestant Cheryl Bradshaw (played by Kendrick herself). With so much screen time devoted to Alcala baiting, stalking, and hurting women, the movie can be punishing to watch; I certainly struggled to sit through my screening. Still, Kendrick proves herself a skillful director, with a knack for building suspense.  — S.L.

Hit Man (TBA)

Leave it to Richard Linklater, the director behind Dazed and Confused and the Before trilogy, to pull off what’s perhaps TIFF’s most tonally versatile film. Hit Man tells the story of Gary Johnson (played by Glen Powell), a bland college professor who works part-time as a tech consultant for the local police department. When the precinct’s usual assassin impersonator—yes, such a thing exists—is sidelined during a sting, Gary steps in and proves himself a surprisingly dashing replacement. The movie is based on a Texas Monthly article, but Linklater has taken plenty of welcome liberties with the material, turning Gary’s tale into a delightfully mischievous romance-noir about the appeal of pretending to be someone else, if only for a while. The police scenes are just light enough to be funny, the screwball sequences are just dark enough to keep you on the edge of your seat, and Powell, along with a playful Adria Arjona as one of Gary’s marks, is obviously elated to be handling such twisty material.  — S.L.

Sing Sing (TBA)

Few creative outlets exist for people in prison, but the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program isn’t just an extracurricular activity; for some inmates, it’s a lifeline. In Sing Sing, Colman Domingo delivers a soulful—but, crucially, never showy—performance as Divine G, a real-life former program participant who was incarcerated for murder but has long maintained his innocence. He’s surrounded by a skilled cast of actors, most of whom are real alumni of the RTA; together, they engage in acting exercises and brainstorms as they build their next show. The film can sometimes feel like an earnest documentary as a result, but Bryce Dessner’s score and Domingo’s deeply felt work help anchor Sing Sing as a lyrical depiction of a unique way of life.  — S.L.

Sorry/Not Sorry (TBA)

How should we treat public figures who have abused their power? Sorry/Not Sorry, a documentary about the comedian Louis C.K.—who, in 2017, admitted to a pattern of sexual misconduct toward female comics—and his subsequent return to the stage never fully answers this question. But the film, directed by Caroline Suh and Cara Mones and produced by The New York Times, considers this through interviews with female comics who spoke up about C.K., as well as male colleagues who wrestle with how they responded to C.K.’s “open secret.” Though a movie with C.K.’s involvement would probably have been more illuminating, Sorry/Not Sorry remains a fascinating documentary as it breaks down, scene by scene, how easily misbehavior can be twisted into a punch line.  — S.L.

TIFF

The Beast (TBA)

One of the oddest and most compelling films I encountered at TIFF this year was Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, the rare drama that actually bears comparison to surreal masterworks such as David Lynch’s Inland Empire. A three-part story that zaps from our present into the distant future and back to the turn of the 20th century, each strand of The Beast centers on a woman (Léa Seydoux) and a man (George MacKay) having a chance encounter and sensing some distant familiarity. Bonello uses these encounters to pose questions about love, desire, and more terrifying masculine urges, depicting moments of pure tenderness and tense, unsettling threat.  — D.S.

Backspot (TBA)

The phrase cheerleading movie probably brings to mind montages of showstopping flips, energetic routines, and bitter rivalries between squads. But Backspot is not Bring It On. Rather, it’s an intense study of a perfectionist athlete whose enthusiasm and drive can work against her. It’s a film about mental gymnastics, in other words. Directed by the DJ turned first-time filmmaker D. W. Waterson, the story stars Reservation Dogs’ Devery Jacobs as Riley, a teenager whose joy and anxiety are wrapped up in her extracurricular activity; she’s dating her fellow cheerleader, Amanda (Kudakwashe Rutendo), and she sees her steely new coach, Eileen (Evan Rachel Wood), as akin to a demigod. Competition, then, both excites and scares her, and the film’s greatest strength is how it conveys that turmoil. Riley’s entire identity is cheerleading. Being so passionate about something is beautiful, the film posits, and brutal too.  — S.L.

Concrete Utopia (TBA)

An earthquake destroys Seoul at the beginning of Concrete Utopia, but it would be a mistake to call South Korea’s Oscar entry a mere disaster movie. The film, directed and co-written by Um Tae-hwa, blends spectacle with social satire as it follows the people inside the only apartment complex still standing. What begins as a sanctuary for the city’s survivors rapidly turns into hell on Earth: Those who lived in the structure before the apocalypse clash with the desperate newcomers, corruption plagues their attempts to self-govern, and supplies rapidly dwindle as winter stretches on. Concrete Utopia traces familiar themes of class warfare—think Snowpiercer in a building—but sets itself apart with impressive production design, inventive set pieces, and an ensemble of memorable characters, including Yeong-tak (played by Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun), a man whose unyielding vigilance when it comes to protecting his home becomes calamitous.  — S.L.

His Three Daughters (TBA)

Indie filmmaking is robust with stories about dysfunctional families, but His Three Daughters does more than just mine difficult dynamics for tension. Starring Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne as three stepsisters reuniting to care for their ailing father, the film is at once bitingly funny and disarmingly honest about how siblings treat one another under pressure. The writer-director Azazel Jacobs’s assured, dialogue-heavy script keeps the melodrama to a minimum, focusing instead on the ways in which each sister reacts to her situation. Moving but never maudlin, His Three Daughters is a film packed with delicate moments and realistic conversations, bolstered by a uniformly excellent cast.  — S.L.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Like millions of other Americans, I enjoy many of Sylvester Stallone’s movies. But in recent years, I’ve come to think that Sly might have also been teaching me something.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic.

Streaming has reached its sad, predictable fate. Can Poland roll back authoritarian populism? Elon Musk’s latest target hits back. Why go with an evil-looking orb?

Self-Deprecating and Graceful

My best friend growing up was the Italian Stallion. No, not that one—not Sylvester Stallone’s fictional boxer from Philadelphia, but an actual Italian. My pal Silvio emigrated from Italy and lived around the corner from me. When Rocky delivered a haymaker to the theaters in 1976, there was no way we weren’t going to see it, and throughout high school, if I heard someone in the hallway yell, “Yo, Stallion,” I knew my buddy was around somewhere.

But while watching Stallone in his 2022 Paramount+ series, Tulsa King, I realized that for some years, I’ve been thinking of the original Italian Stallion as my pal too—especially as we both get older.

I have to confess that in my youth, I wasn’t a huge Stallone fan. I saw Rocky in the theater when I was a freshman in high school, and then Rocky II (which was just … okay) the summer I graduated. Rocky III, in my view, is a lightweight cartoon. The final 1990 cash-in, Rocky V, is practically unwatchable.

Ah, but before that series-ending clunker, we had 1985’s Rocky IV, a gloriously cheesy Cold War parable. It’s not a great film, but it was the highest-grossing title in the series. (As a recent look back in Polygon put it, “It’s no one’s favorite Rocky movie, but no one in the history of the world has ever started watching it and turned it off.”) I saw it alone in a small theater in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, and, as a budding Soviet expert, I loved seeing the Stallion whomp the bejeebers out of that Soviet creep Ivan Drago, the steroid-filled Commie golem who killed Rocky’s enemy turned friend and mentor, Apollo Creed, in the ring.

But despite Rocky IV, I was more a fan of Stallone’s then-nemesis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, not least because I just couldn’t get into Stallone’s Rambo fantasies. In 1993, however, Stallone starred in Demolition Man, playing a cop named John Spartan who screws up and is put in cryogenic storage for his crimes. He is then thawed out in 2032 and thrust into an insufferably politically correct and insipid Southern California to fight Simon Phoenix, a criminal from his own time.

In Demolition Man, Stallone lampooned every stereotype about 20th-century tough guys—including himself. I was in my early 30s, and every time Stallone (who was at that point in his late 40s but looked 10 years younger) sighed and rolled his eyes and explained to his clueless sidekick how to swear (she didn’t get that it’s kick his ass, not lick his ass), or when he was flummoxed by the “Three Seashells” that 2032 Californians use instead of wasteful toilet paper, I felt like I was seeing myself in the near future.

Stallone later made some forgettable films, but I always thought the critics were too hard on him. (Fine, look, I liked Judge Dredd, okay?) And I felt like he was willing to contend with age, just like the rest of us, especially in 1997, when he gained almost 40 pounds at 50 years old to play a sad-sack New Jersey sheriff in the underappreciated crime drama Cop Land.

But I didn’t really admire Stallone until he returned in 2006 to his greatest character, in Rocky Balboa, a coda to his earlier Rocky movies. This time, Rocky is old, nearly broke, nostalgic, and even somewhat pathetic. He owns a joint in Philly, where he goes from table to table mugging for pictures; the rest of the time, he’s utterly absorbed by grief over the loss of his beloved wife, Adrian, who died years earlier. His sadness is so suffocating that even Adrian’s brother Paulie finally walks away. “Sorry, Rocko,” he finally says to his brother-in-law. “I can’t do this no more.”

I was in my 40s when Rocky Balboa came out; Stallone was 60, and for once, the usually buff actor looked it. His nostalgia became mine. Rocky Balboa is an almost elegiac movie that ends (as all Rocky movies must) with personal redemption. During the end credits, real people reenact Rocky’s original iconic training run up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and maybe it was just dusty in the theater, but I had something in my eyes that required dabbing at some tears.

I respected Stallone for giving Rocky a graceful exit. (When the character returned in Creed, it seemed natural and unforced.) The mournfulness of Rocky Balboa stayed with me for years, however, especially as I lost people I cared about and middle age became later middle age. Stallone returned to fighting form in the Expendables series, but by then, we were all in on the joke that he and Arnold and Bruce Willis were too hilariously old for this stuff.

And then I watched Tulsa King, in which Stallone plays Dwight Manfredi, a Mafia capo exiled from New York to Oklahoma after a 25-year stretch in prison (where he valiantly kept his mouth shut to protect his bosses). Tulsa King has been renewed for a second season, so I don’t want to say too much and ruin some of the twists, but Stallone, at the time 75, plays a 75-year-old gangster with grace, laugh-out-loud humor, and credible physical menace.

Manfredi survives prison in good shape, and when he has to make a new life—of crime, naturally—in Tulsa, he goes to work. But he’s no Superman or Terminator; he’s old, and he knows it. Soon, he assembles a ragtag crew, and that’s all I can say without spoiling the fun.

Okay, I’ll spoil one moment. Manfredi picks up a handsome 40-something woman in a bar and takes her to his hotel room. We are spared any graphic scenes, but afterwards, he apologizes for being a bit out of practice in the sack. The woman finally gets around to asking his age, and when he tells her, she freaks out, gathers her clothes, and flees. (She’d guessed him to be a “hard 55,” not 75. I wish someone would mistake me for a “hard 55.”) Manfredi takes the news with equanimity in a great scene that is both funny and wince-inducing.

Tulsa King has plenty of violence, but it’s only incidentally a crime story. It’s about a lot of other things, including aging, time, family, fatherhood, loyalty, and what it means to be a man. As in Rocky Balboa, Stallone treats his character—and the problem of aging—with self-deprecation and respect.

I was 18 when Rocky finally beat Creed, 24 when he floored Drago, 33 when Spartan demolished Phoenix, and 46 when Rocky finally retired once and for all. But watching Tulsa King at 62, I wished—for the first time—that I could be Stallone. Thanks, Sly. I miss Silvio, but I’m glad to be hanging out with the original Stallion as we both take a shot at aging gracefully.

Related:

Rock never dies—but it does get older and wiser. Sylvester Stallone’s glorious renaissance

Today’s News

According to a report unsealed today, a special grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, that helped investigate election interference allegations in the state recommended charges against more than three dozen people; Lindsey Graham, David Perdue, Kelly Loeffler, and Michael Flynn were among those not ultimately charged. Hurricane Lee, now a Category 4 storm, is expected to cause dangerous surf conditions in parts of the Caribbean and most of the U.S. East Coast, although it does not currently threaten any land. A major United Nations report assessing the world’s climate efforts warned that there is a “rapidly closing window” for securing a liveable future on Earth.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: 60 years after her death, Sylvia Plath’s life continues to fascinate, Gal Beckerman writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Matt Williams

The Man Who Became Uncle Tom

By Clint Smith

“Among all the singular and interesting records to which the institution of American slavery has given rise,” Harriet Beecher Stowe once wrote, “we know of none more striking, more characteristic and instructive, than that of JOSIAH HENSON.”

Stowe first wrote about Henson’s 1849 autobiography in her 1853 book A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an annotated bibliography of sorts in which she cited a number of nonfiction accounts she had used as source material for her best-selling novel. Stowe later said that Henson’s narrative had served as an inspiration for Uncle Tom.

Proslavery newspaper columnists and southern planters had responded to the huge success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by accusing Stowe of hyperbole and outright falsehood. Benevolent masters, they said, took great care of the enslaved people who worked for them; in some cases, they treated them like family. The violent, inhumane conditions Stowe described, they contended, were fictitious. By naming her sources, and outlining how they had influenced her story, Stowe hoped to prove that her novel was rooted in fact.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

A rom-com franchise that needs to end Our first ‘nonemergency’ COVID season We have no drugs to treat the deadliest eating disorder.

Culture Break

Kevin Mazur / Getty

Read. Red Comet, a 2020 biography of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark, provides a nearly day-by-day account of Plath’s activities—and somehow, it’s riveting.

Listen. Olivia Rodrigo’s sophomore album, Guts (out today), is less an evolution of Rodrigo’s sound than a persuasive fortification.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Some news: I’ll be onstage at the end of September. The fight’s gonna be in Moscow, and …

No, wait, that’s still Rocky IV.

I’ll be at The Atlantic Festival, in Washington, D.C., and you can join us September 28–29. The festival brings together influential and provocative political, cultural, business, tech, and climate leaders for in-depth interviews, timely forums, intimate breakout sessions, book talks, screenings, and networking opportunities. This year’s participants include Secretary of State Antony Blinken, former U.S. Representative Will Hurd, the actor Kerry Washington, Utah Governor Spencer Cox, the filmmaker Spike Lee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and many more.

They’ll be joined by Atlantic writers including Arthur C. Brooks, Shirley Li, Tim Alberta, Caitlin Dickerson (our newest Pulitzer Prize winner), and others, including me: I’ll be discussing the future of conservatism with Helen Lewis, David Frum, and Rebecca Rosen.

You can see the full schedule and get your pass here.

Join us!

— Tom

Nicole Blackwood contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The tough Proud Boys convictions will make sure that Trump’s followers will stick to flying MAGA flags and no more.