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As you know, the C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare, fifty-year-old Brian Thompson, was murdered on the street in midtown Manhattan, on Wednesday morning, twenty minutes before sunrise. He was in town for an investors’ convention, and had worked for UnitedHealthcare for more than two decades—a company that is part of UnitedHealth Group, a health-insurance conglomerate valued at five hundred and sixty billion dollars. UnitedHealthcare had two hundred and eighty-one billion dollars in revenue in 2023, and Thompson, who became C.E.O. in 2021, had raised annual profits from twelve billion dollars to sixteen billion dollars during his tenure. He received more than ten million dollars in compensation last year. Andrew Witty, the C.E.O. of UnitedHealth Group, remembered Thompson in a video message to employees as a “truly extraordinary person who touched the lives of countless people throughout our organization and far beyond.” Thompson lived in a suburb of Minneapolis, where UnitedHealthcare is based, and he is survived by his wife and two sons. The Lede Reporting and commentary on what you need to know today. The particulars of this murder are strange and remarkable: it occurred in public; the suspected shooter went to Starbucks beforehand; he got away from the scene via bicycle; he has not yet been found. But the public reaction has been even wilder, even more lawless. The jokes came streaming in on every social-media platform, in the comments underneath every news article. “I’m sorry, prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers,” someone commented on TikTok, a response that got more than fifteen thousand likes. “Does he have a history of shootings? Denied coverage,” another person wrote, under an Instagram post from CNN. On X, someone posted , with the caption “My official response to the UHC CEO’s murder,” an infographic comparing wealth distribution in late eighteenth-century France to wealth distribution in present-day America. The whiff of populist anarchy in the air is salty, unprecedented, and notably across the aisle. New York Post comment sections are full of critiques of capitalism as well as self-enriching executives and politicians (like “Biden and his crime family”). On LinkedIn, where users post with their real names and employment histories, UnitedHealth Group had to turn off comments on its post about Thompson’s death—thousands of people were liking and hearting it, with a few even giving it the “clapping” reaction. The company also turned off comments on Facebook, where, as of midday Thursday, a post about Thompson had received more than thirty-six thousand “laugh” reactions. What on earth, some people must be asking, is happening to our country? Are we really so divided, so used to dehumanizing one another, that people are out here openly celebrating the cold-blooded murder of a hardworking family man? That people are making jokes about how the assassin could’ve won the Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in Washington Square Park? That when a journalist at the American Prospect called an eighty-eight-year-old woman who was aggravated by her poor Medicare Advantage coverage for comment, she wisecracked that she wasn’t the killer—she can’t even ride a bike? There had been prior threats against Thompson, his wife told NBC News, motivated, she said, by, “I don’t know, a lack of coverage? . . . I just know that he said there were some people that had been threatening him.” There had been protests at the UnitedHealthcare headquarters, in Minnesota, in April and July; during the latter, eleven people were arrested. The group responsible for the protests, People’s Action, also confronted Witty, the UnitedHealth Group C.E.O., at a Senate hearing in May. In a statement, People’s Action leaders referenced endless hours on the phone trying to get medical care covered, and denials of coverage for lifesaving medication and surgery. A recent statement from the group, in response to Thompson’s death, read, “We know there is a crisis of gun violence in America. There is also a crisis of denials of care by private health insurance corporations including UnitedHealth.” They urged political leaders to “act on both.” UnitedHealthcare has the highest claim-denial rate of any private insurance company: at thirty-two per cent, it is double the industry average. And, though the shooter’s motive remains unknown, shell casings found on the scene had the words “deny,” “delay,” and possibly “depose” written on them, echoing the title of a 2010 book by Jay M. Feinman, “ Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It ,” which by Thursday had leapt up one of Amazon’s best-seller charts. To most Americans, a company like UnitedHealth represents less the provision of medical care than an active obstacle to receiving it. UnitedHealthcare insures almost a third of the patients enrolled in Medicare Advantage, a government-funded program facilitated by private insurance companies, which receive a flat fee for each patient they cover and then produce their own profits by minimizing each patient’s care costs. Reporting in the Wall Street Journal has found that these private insurance companies, which cover more than a third of American seniors on Medicare, collect hundreds of billions of dollars from the government annually and overbill Medicare to the tune of around ten billion dollars per year; UnitedHealthcare has used litigation to fight its obligation to repay fees that were overpaid. In 2020, UnitedHealth acquired a company called NaviHealth, whose software provides algorithmic care recommendations for sick patients, and which is now used to help manage its Medicare Advantage program. A 2023 class-action lawsuit alleges that the NaviHealth algorithm has a “known error rate” of ninety per cent and cites appalling patient stories: one man in Tennessee broke his back, was hospitalized for six days, was moved to a nursing home for eleven days, and then was informed by UnitedHealth that his care would be cut off in two days. (UnitedHealth says the lawsuit is unmerited.) After a couple rounds of appeals and reversals, the man left the nursing home and died four days later. The company has denied requests to release the analyses behind NaviHealth’s conclusions to patients and doctors, stating that the information is proprietary. At the same time that news was breaking about the NaviHealth algorithm, the company was fighting—ultimately unsuccessfully—a court decision that it had acted “ arbitrarily and capriciously ” in repeatedly denying coverage of long-term residential treatment to a middle-school-age girl who repeatedly attempted suicide, and has since died by suicide. Several years ago, government investigators found that UnitedHealth had used algorithms to identify mental-health-care providers who they believed were treating patients too often; these identified therapists would typically receive a call from a company “care advocate” who would question them and then cut off reimbursements. Though some states have ruled this practice illegal, it remains in play across the country. There is no single regulator for a private health-insurance company, even when it is found to be violating the law. For United’s practices to be curbed, mental-health advocates told ProPublica, every single jurisdiction in which it operates would have to successfully bring a case against it. Thompson’s murder is one symptom of the American appetite for violence; his line of work is another. Denied health-insurance claims are not broadly understood this way, in part because people in consequential positions at health-insurance companies, and those in their social circles, are likely to have experienced denied claims mainly as a matter of extreme annoyance at worst: hours on the phone, maybe; a bunch of extra paperwork; maybe money spent that could’ve gone to next year’s vacation. For people who do not have money or social connections at hospitals or the ability to spend weeks at a time on the phone, a denied health-insurance claim can instantly bend the trajectory of a life toward bankruptcy and misery and death. Maybe everyone knows this, anyway, and structural violence—another term for it is “social injustice”—is simply, at this point, the structure of American life, and it is treated as normal, whether we attach that particular name to it or not. The Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung coined the term “structural violence” in 1969, in a paper that offers a taxonomy of violence—ways to distinguish between the forms that violence can take. It can be physical or psychological. It can be positive, enacted through active reward, or negative, enacted through punishment. It can hurt an object, or not; this object can be human, or not. There is either—Galtung notes that this is the most important distinction—a person who acts to commit the violence or there is not. Violence can be intended or unintended. It can be manifest, or latent. Traditionally, our society fixates on only one version of this: direct physical violence committed by a person intending harm. The pretty girl killed by a boyfriend, the C.E.O. shot on the street, the subway dancer strangled by the ex-marine. You don’t even need a human object—people are generally more troubled by the Zoomers throwing soup at paintings in a weird bid to raise attention about climate change than by the more than ten thousand farmers in India who die by suicide every year in part because of the way erratic and extreme weather renders their debts insurmountable. If one were to, hypothetically, blow up an unoccupied private jet in protest of the fact that the wealthiest one per cent of the global population accounts for more carbon emissions than the poorest sixty-six per cent, this would be seen by many people—like Thompson’s murder, and unlike the tens of thousands of human deaths per year already caused by climate change—as a sign of profoundly alarming social decay. On this point, though, everyone’s really in agreement. It’s just a matter of where you locate the decay—in the killing, or in the response to it, or in what led us here. The only way to end up in a situation where a C.E.O. of a health-insurance company is reflexively viewed as a dictatorial purveyor of suffering is through a history of socially sanctioned death. A person who posted on Reddit’s r/nurses forum, whose profile describes her as an I.C.U. nurse, wrote, “Honestly, I’m not wishing anyone harm, but when you’ve spent so much time and made so much money by increasing the suffering of the humanity around you, it’s hard for me to summon empathy that you died. I’m sure someone somewhere is sad about this. I am following his lead of indifference.” Reading this, I thought about the statistic, from 2018, that health-care workers account for seventy-three per cent of all nonfatal workplace injuries due to violence. Nurses, residents, aides, specialists—they are asked to absorb the rage and panic induced by the American health-care system, whose private insurers generate billions of dollars in profit and pay executives eight figures not despite but because of the fact that they routinely deny care to desperate people in need. Of course, the solution, in the end, can’t be indifference—not indifference to the death of the C.E.O., and not the celebration of it, either. But who’s going to drop their indifference first? At this point, it’s not going to be the people, who have a lifetime of evidence that health-insurance C.E.O.s do not care about their well-being. Can the C.E.O. class drop its indifference to the suffering and death of ordinary people? Is it possible to do so while achieving record quarterly profits for your stakeholders, in perpetuity? Thompson’s death resurfaced some unsavory details about his industry. We learned, for instance, that Thompson was one of several UnitedHealth executives under investigation by the D.O.J. for accusations of insider trading. (He had sold more than fifteen million dollars’ worth of company stock in February, shortly before it became public that the Department of Justice was investigating the company for antitrust violations, which caused the stock price to drop.) A new policy from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield also went viral: the company had announced that, in certain states, starting in 2025, it would no longer pay for anesthesia if a surgery passed a pre-allotted time limit. The cost of the “extra” anesthesia would be passed from Anthem—whose year-over-year net income was reported, in June, to have increased by more than twenty-four per cent, to $2.3 billion—to the patient. On Thursday, the company withdrew the change in response to the public outrage, if only in Connecticut, for now. It’s hard not to be curious about what, if anything, might happen to UnitedHealthcare’s claim-denial rates. I was at a show in midtown Manhattan on Thursday night, and when the comedians onstage cracked a joke about the shooter the entire place erupted in cheers. ♦ New Yorker Favorites The best albums of 2024. Little treats galore: a holiday gift guide . How Maria Callas lost her voice . Two teens went to prison for murder. Decades later, a juror learned she got it wrong . An objectively objectionable grammatical pet peeve . What happened when the Hallmark Channel “ leaned into Christmas .” Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .None
35 Unique Gifts They Probably Didn't Even Think To Put On Their WishlistGary Neville tells Ruben Amorim to copy Enzo Maresca’s Chelsea strategy at Manchester UnitedF rance on Saturday prepared to throw open the doors of the capital’s Notre Dame cathedral after a half-decade closure, in a ceremony attended by dozens of world leaders celebrating the rebirth of the Paris landmark ravaged by a devastating fire. Held up as an example of French creativity and resilience by President Emmanuel Macron, Notre Dame’s renaissance so soon after a 2019 blaze that destroyed its roof and spire comes at a difficult time for the country. The re-opening will officially take place when archbishop of Paris Laurent Ulrich opens the doors to the cathedral at 1800 GMT, by knocking three times, to herald the start of the almost two-hour ceremony. Macron has scored a major coup by attracting US president-elect Donald Trump, on his first foreign trip since his election, for the ceremony along with some 40 other leaders, including Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky and the UK’s heir to the throne, Prince William. It is “a cathedral like we have never seen before,” Philippe Jost, the head of the restoration project, told Franceinfo radio, saying he was proud to “show the whole world” a “great collective success and a source of pride for all of France”. In one last-minute hitch, harsh weather forced officials to move Macron’s planned speech indoors and pre-record a concert planned for after the ceremony, with forecasts for winds of up to 80 kilometres (50 miles) per hour. You Might Be Interested In Bangladesh opposition demand new vote German mass data attack ‘known for weeks’ by cyber officials Trump threatens ‘national emergency’ over wall The service will feature prayer, organ music and hymns from the cathedral’s choir, followed by the televised concert — pre-recorded Friday night due to the weather — with performances by Chinese piano virtuoso Lang Lang, South African opera singer Pretty Yende and an orchestra conducted by Venezuelan maestro Gustavo Dudamel. US singer and fashion designer Pharrell Williams is also believed to have taken part. The sense of national accomplishment in restoring a beloved symbol of Paris has been undercut by political turmoil that has left France without a proper government and in a budget crisis. Macron is hoping the re-opening might provide a fleeting sense of pride and unity — as the Paris Olympics did in July and August. The scale of the immense security operation also recalls the Olympics — with some 6,000 police officers and gendarmes mobilised. The re-opening “is the proof that we know how to do grand things, we know how to do the impossible” Macron said Thursday. During a visit with TV cameras last week. however, he somewhat undermined the suspense behind the re-opening, revealing the cathedral’s freshly scrubbed limestone walls, new furniture and vaulted wooden roof cut from ancient oak trees selected from the finest forests of France. The reconstruction effort has cost around 700 million euros (US$750 million), financed from donations, with the re-opening achieved within five years despite predictions it could take decades. “This state-of-the-art restoration, the fruit of a worldwide collective effort and the use of many traditional French skills, has enabled this masterpiece to regain all its splendour,” said Audrey Azoulay, the head of the UN cultural agency UNESCO, describing the work as “dazzling”. SOURCE: AFP
The top three innovation hurdles for K-12 schools in 2025 will be attracting and retaining educators and IT professionals, keeping up with the evolution of teaching and learning, and working toward digital equity, an annual trend report found. The full report, , from the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), a professional association for K-12 ed-tech leaders, won’t come out until February. But a Tuesday cited those top three hurdles, along with the top three factors set to accelerate and enable K-12 innovation in 2025. The findings are based on extensive surveys and discussions, according to the release. It lists the accelerators as learner agency, or the will and the skill of students to learn; building an array of school leaders; and changing attitudes about how student learning can be demonstrated and assessed. These factors will “help motivate and increase the speed of innovation,” the news release said. The report’s top three “tech enablers” for 2025 are generative artificial intelligence, analytics and adaptive technologies, and untethered broadband and connectivity. These tools will help schools “surmount hurdles and leverage accelerators,” per the release. These are what CoSN calls the “Top Topics” of the forthcoming report. More than 100 advisory board members from 13 countries and 34 states were involved in creating it and selected these topics, the news release said. It describes advisory board members as “educators, technologists, changemakers and industry partners.” “Selecting the Top Topics is a vital step in CoSN’s initiative, as it highlights the most pressing challenges and opportunities our schools face,” CoSN CEO Keith Krueger said in a public statement. “We are deeply grateful to our advisory board for their invaluable contributions — their insights, diverse perspectives and commitment to innovation make this project possible.”OTTAWA - The RCMP will create a new aerial intelligence task force to provide round-the-clock surveillance of Canada’s border using helicopters, drones and surveillance towers. The move is part of the federal government’s $1.3-billion upgrade to border security and monitoring to appease concerns of U.S. president-elect Donald Trump about the flow of migrants and illegal drugs. Trump has threatened to impose a 25 per cent tariff on all Canadian and Mexican exports to the U.S. as soon as he is inaugurated next month unless both countries move to improve border security. Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc says he has discussed parts of the plan with American officials and that he is optimistic about its reception. Canada will also propose to the United States to create a North American “joint strike force” to target organized crime groups that work across borders. The government also intends to provide new technology, tools and resources to the Canada Border Services Agency to seek out fentanyl using chemical detection, artificial intelligence and canine teams. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 17, 2024.
Indian National Trade Union Congress president Dr G. Sanjeeva Reddy called for immediate action to ensure fair wages and job security for workers in Telangana. He lauded the key role played by various sections of workers in the development of Telangana state. Addressing a diverse gathering of trade union leaders, workers, and policymakers, Dr Reddy stressed the pressing need to address the grievances of workers, including field assistants of MGNREGA, anganwadi teachers, ASHA staff, cab drivers, workers in the auto, building and construction, municipal, electrical, Singareni coal mine sectors and contract labourers. In his keynote address, Dr Reddy expressed concern over the poor working conditions these groups faced, and called for swift action to ensure fair wages, job regularisation, timely salary payments, improved working conditions, and access to social security benefits. The conference, presided over by Dr Reddy, was a platform for deliberations on the challenges faced by the workforce. TPCC president B. Mahesh Kumar Goud acknowledged the critical contribution of workers to Telangana’s growth, stressing the urgency of addressing issues like delayed wages, inadequate safety measures, and job insecurity. Minister A. Seethakka pledged to advocate for workers’ rights during the upcoming Winter Session of the Assembly starting December 9. She reassured attendees of the government’s commitment to policy changes aimed at uplifting workers’ livelihoods. “The Congress will prioritise these issues and stand by every worker in Telangana to ensure their demands are met with actionable solutions,” she stated. The conference adopted a resolution to intensify advocacy efforts for workers’ justice. Intuc leaders, including B. Janak Prasad, G. Satyajeeth Reddy, Bhasker Reddy, Naganna Goud, Adil Shariff, Jagan Mohan Reddy, Sridhar, Venkateshwara Reddy, and Chandra Shekar, vowed to collaborate with political leadership to achieve meaningful outcomes.“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” This is one of the most famous and influential first lines in literature, the celebrated opening sentence of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel and foundational text for the magical realist genre and contemporary Latin American fiction, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Wisely, the expansive Netflix series that just debuted the first eight (of an eventual 16) hour-long episodes deploys the use of a narrator, ensuring that these peculiar, unpredictable words are the first spoken in the show. Watching this, however, was the first time I heard them in Spanish, reminding me that despite my enthusiasm for García Márquez’s work, I’d never actually read it as it was meant to be read. And surely there will be many whose only encounter with One Hundred Years of Solitude will be the television version, despite the 50 million copies sold. (Someone buying a book doesn’t mean they read it; my copy sat on a shelf for more than a quarter of the title’s time.) Those who encounter the story of the seven generations of the Buedía family living in the fictional village of Macondo as television will experience an even more radical translation than written language. That doesn’t mean this isn’t a remarkable production. New technologies García Márquez, nicknamed Gabo in his native Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America, was pretty adamant that a movie could never be made from the work. He told Harvey Weinstein that he would give Weinstein the rights on the condition that the producer “film the entire book but only release one chapter—two minutes long—each year, for 100 years.” This quote, like George Harrison saying “there won’t be a Beatles reunion as long as John Lennon remains dead,” might seem like final words, but don’t count out new technologies (like the deep-pocketed Netflix, and whatever is responsible for zombie Beatles songs like “Now and Then”), as well as the malleability of an artist’s estate. One Hundred Years of Solitude, the series, has been produced in concert with Rodrigo García and Gonzalo García Barcha, sons of the author, who maintain rights to their father’s work following his death in 2014 and the death of their mother, Mercedes Barcha, in 2020. Still, there are some Colombians who are pre-boycotting the work on principle. Such extreme fealty is understandable. A possibly true factoid you can read on the internet is that only the Bible has sold more copies in Spanish than the works of García Márquez. Another one, even hazier but just as striking, is that the influential book’s depiction of the Banana Massacre of 1928 was what forced United Fruit to rebrand and change its name to Chiquita. Then there’s the specificity of form. One Hundred Years is a massive, meaty text with frequent swerves into fantasy, prurience, and violence, and makes quick jumps between flashbacks and flashforwards. Then there’s the biggest roadblock for many readers, its intentionally perplexing family tree with a great many of the characters sharing the same name. Surely this confusion means something, you reassure yourself, unsure for the moment which José Arcadio has the spotlight in the middle of another fabulous tale. Indeed, the idea of behavior recurring over long periods of time is central. But filmed, as you are actually seeing it (and seeing faces), a lot of this magic gets lost in the translation—a complaint which goes beyond the expected “hey, that’s not how I visualized Pilar the fortune teller’s house!” gripes. One Hundred Years of Solitude has a narrative far too stuffed to summarize, but I can try. Married cousins José Arcadio and Úrsula decide to leave their village after José Arcadio kills another man while defending Úrsula’s honour. (She has been denying her husband sex, wearing chastity belts despite their raging desires out of fear that any offspring will have pig-like tails.) The dead man then starts hanging out in their home. A ghost story, I suppose, but García Márquez’s approaches the haunting—and every other fantastical element of the story—in a curious and direct manner. The dead man just appears in the house, hanging around, getting blood everywhere, more of a nuisance than a terror. Long journey José Arcadio has visions of a utopian city so he, Úrsula, and others join him on a long journey and eventually put down roots. Their village, Macondo, is totally isolated (indeed, for many of the early chapters you have no clue what year it is), lending each development the heft of importance. “Clearly,” you think, “every character and utterance is meant to be symbolic of mankind’s evolution, as Macondo is nothing if not all of humanity under a microscope.” And surely you can read it that way, or look for analogies in Colombian political history, but to do that too much undercuts the fun of riding along on García Márquez’s roller coaster. And this is precisely why some things work better in a book than in a movie or television adaptation. In prose, the bizarre elements—visions, levitation, impossibly long periods of rain, a character who chews on the walls—take on a humorous and discordant tone when simply stated as everyday fact. When you see it, at least for me, it cheapens it. The best example I can give you is when the town’s founding father, driven to madness after years as an only partially successful alchemist, decides to tie himself to an enormous (and rather symbolic) tree. Heavy oak metaphors have considerably less panache when you are watching them on your screen. The other big change is that, other than the foreshadowing in the famous first line, the series is told chronologically. This is an understandable decision, but it undercuts some of the magic of Macondo, where any stray moment can initiate a relevant jump on the timeline. Still, the production design of the town—a shabby collection of huts that grows into turn-of-the-century elegance—is remarkable, and reportedly one the largest productions in Latin American history. (Three separate towns were created, to represent Macondo’s evolution.) The eight episodes have been split between two directors. Alex Garcia Lopez is a United States-based director of Argentine origin, and an alumnus of hit shows like The Witcher, The Punisher and the recent Star Wars series The Acolyte. Laura Mora Ortega is a Colombian director with a less international resume, but whose work includes the Netflix series Green Frontier. Neither are afraid of One Hundred Years’s more lusty moments (you can set your watch to the regular hammock-based interludes) and when civil war eventually barges into Macondo, there are some heart-pounding battle sequences that don’t hold back on the gore. Visual form Some of the more famous moments from the first half of the novel (or, I should say, first half of the narrative, since the show mostly goes in order) stitch together quite nicely in a visual form. There is a stretch in which a plague of insomnia hits the town, which at first is welcomed. More time to get things accomplished, José Arcadio says. But with a lack of sleep comes confusion, until no one can remember what anything represents, forcing them to leave notes everywhere. (“Don’t Pee In The Streets, People Get Angry” is probably my favorite, because it’s funny but also true.) Eventually, the memory of the townsfolk gets so blitzed that no one can even read anymore, plunging everyone into paranoia and violence. This whole chapter cuts together marvelously in the show. Another moment—among the most emotionally resonant images from the story—is when one character is violently killed, and their blood spills out of their house, down the street, weaving around corners, into another house, and across several rooms until the streak ends at the foot of the deceased’s mother. This is a moment that is not diminished when filmed. However, there are some aspects of García Márquez’s story that are wisely tamped down. A major character (an adult) experiences love at first sight with a 9-year-old girl. His obsession becomes “a physical sensation that almost bothered him when he walked, like a pebble in his shoe,” and he is described in the novel as having fits of asthma just hearing her voice, especially when she calls him “sir.” Egads! He decides he must marry her, and a deal is worked out between the families. She can marry once she’s reached puberty, which occurs for her “before getting over the habits of childhood.” Yikes all around. All I can say is that in the book—in which there are soothsayers and ghosts and the pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone, not to mention enormous blocks of eloquent prose—these deviations don’t read quite so repulsive as I’ve laid them out here. Inadvertent near-incest To its credit, the show doesn’t erase this section entirely, but it is lessened. When we first meet the character Remedios, she is presented as “very young,” but she doesn’t look 9. I don’t know the age of the actress playing her, but when she later gets her first period (which we witness both as metaphor and reality), a few costume changes age her up considerably. It’s still questionable, but certainly skirts around the ick factor. The same goes for a moment of inadvertent near-incest. (A less inadvertent one awaits in season two, but I don’t know how that will play out just yet.) This loyalty to the text might be why Netflix’s promotional machine has been pretty minimal in the United States. Other than an article this summer in Vanity Fair, most of the press has been geared to the Hispanic market. (There were lines around the block to see the first episodes in Havana, but nothing happened in New York City.) Considering that Netflix’s biggest hit is the South Korean series Squid Game, the fact that One Hundred Years is in Spanish can’t be used as an excuse to keep this exclusively international. There is, however, a lot of content out there, so I’m wondering how much of an impact it will make with U.S. viewers. Will I watch season two? Absolutely, and not just because of the time I’ve already invested. On its own merits, the show is engaging, the performances (particularly Claudio Cataño as Colonel Aureliano Buendía and the mononymous Akima as the feral cousin Rebeca) are quite good. Everything (and everyone) is gorgeous, so the show is a winner from a visual perspective alone. But it may not be a bad idea to take advantage of the intermezzo between seasons and take the book off the shelf before the launch of part two. The series is, after all, only a rough translation. – foreignpolicy.com