A new documentary follows the comeback of the world's biggest K-pop group

Watching

• BTS: The Return. On March 21st, BTS: The Comeback Live, the Kpop group’s long-awaited return from group hiatus due to military enlistment, was streamed live on Netflix to millions of viewers around the world. On Friday, Netflix released BTS: The Return, a feature documentary that takes viewers into the making of BTS’ latest album, Arirang. Read more.

• Vladimir. Rachel Weisz is a blocked novelist who teaches English at a liberal arts college. And there is no setting more emblematic of freedom—and its discontents—than the campus, where tenure is supposed to protect the intellectual liberty of faculty and students living independently for the first time try on new ideas and identities. Read more.

• Dynasty: The Murdochs. Rupert Murdoch has a reputation for cheating at family games of Monopoly. Director Liz Garbus visualizes the Murdoch children’s very public succession battle as a gilded board game presenting various paths to the ultimate objective: inheriting the patriarch’s throne. Read more.

Reading

• Almost Life. In 1978, Erica, an English student on holiday, encounters Laure, a Sorbonne doctoral candidate, kindling a sapphic romance while exploring sites in Paris. Yet more than the English Channel eventually divides them. Is their romance doomed? Read more.

• Upward Bound. Set in an adult daycare center in Los Angeles—“a shabby one-story building” with an “eighties-era aqua-and-peach exterior and convenient ramp”—this vibrant debut novel spotlights a cast of disabled and neurodiverse characters and their caregivers. Read more. 

• American Han. In Lisa Lee’s first novel, Korean American siblings Jane and Kevin Kim come of age in the Bay Area during the 1980s. Jane sets off for law school, while her brother heads to the police academy. When Kevin goes missing, the family members must confront their fragile bonds and the cultural expectations that have long tethered them. Read more.