There’s precisely one surprising moment in Scarlett Johansson’s feature directorial debut “Eleanor the Great,” written by Tory Kamen. It’s the impetus for the entire drama that unfolds in this film, and it feels genuinely risky — a taboo that will be hard for this film to resolve. Yet, everything that unfolds around this moment is entirely predictable.

Also unsurprising? That star June Squibb’s warm, humorous and slightly spiky performance elevates the wobbly material and tentative direction of “Eleanor the Great.” If Johansson nails anything in her debut, it’s in allowing the 95-year-old Squibb to shine in only her second starring role (the first being last year’s action comedy “Thelma”). For any flaws or faults of “Eleanor the Great” (and there are some), Squibb still might make you cry, even if you don’t want to.

That’s the good about “Eleanor the Great,” which is a bit thin and a bit treacly, despite its high-wire premise. The record-scratch startle that jump-starts the dramatic arc occurs when Eleanor (Squibb) is trying to figure out what to do with herself at a Manhattan Jewish community center after recently relocating from Florida. Her lifelong best friend and later-in-life roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar) has recently passed, and so Eleanor has moved in with her daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht) in New York City.

Harried Lisa sends Eleanor off to the JCC for a choir class, but the impulsive and feisty nonagenarian poo-poohs the Broadway singing and instead follows a friendly face into a support group — for Holocaust survivors, as she’s alarmed to discover. Put on the spot when they ask her to share her story of survival, Eleanor shares Bessie’s personal history of escaping a Polish concentration camp instead, with horrific details she learned from her friend over sleepless nights of tortured memories.

Eleanor’s lie could have been a small deception that played out over one afternoon, never to be spoken of again if she just ghosted the meeting, but there’s a wrinkle: an NYU student, Nina (Erin Kellyman) who wants to profile Eleanor for her journalism class. Eleanor initially makes the right choice — declining to participate — before she makes the wrong one, calling Nina and inviting her over when her own grandson doesn’t show up for Shabbat dinner. Thus begins a friendship built on a lie, and we know where this is going.

Nina and Eleanor continue their relationship beyond its journalistic originas because they’re both lonely, and in mourning, Eleanor for Bessie, and Nina for her mother, who has also recently passed. They both struggle to connect with their family, Eleanor’s terminally criticized daughter Lisa, and Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Nina’s TV anchor father, who is paralyzed with grief over the loss of his wife. And so they find an unlikely friend in each other, for lunches and bat mitzvah crashing and trips to Coney Island.

Eleanor decides to have a bat mitzvah herself, claiming she never had one due to the war (the reality is that she converted for marriage), but it feels mostly like a device for a big, dramatic explosion of revelation. It also serves the purpose of justifying Eleanor’s well-intentioned deception with lessons from the Torah.

It’s still hard to stomach her continued lying, which is perhaps why the script keeps her mostly out of the support group — where the comparison to the real survivors would be too much to bear — and in the confines of a friendship with a college student far removed from that reality. Johansson also makes the choice to flash back to Bessie’s recounting of her life story when Eleanor is speaking, almost as if she’s channeling her friend and her pain. The stated intent is to share Bessie’s story when she no longer can, and surprisingly, everyone accepts this, perhaps because Squibb, as Eleanor, is too endearing to stay mad at.

Johansson’s direction is serviceable if unremarkable, and one has to wonder why this particular script spoke to her as a directorial debut. Though it is morally complex and modest in scope, it doesn’t dive deep enough into the nuance here, opting for surface-level emotional revelations. It’s Squibb’s performance and appealing screen presence that enables this all to work — if it does. Kellyman is terrific opposite Squibb, but this unconventional friendship tale is the kind of slight human interest story that slips from your consciousness almost as soon as it has made its brief impression.

‘Eleanor the Great’

2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for thematic elements, some language and suggestive references)

Running time: 1:38

How to watch: In theaters on Friday, Sept. 26.

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Have you ever wondered how St. Paulites celebrated the end of the Civil War? Or what they thought about Prohibition? Or how many saw Elvis Presley play his first concert in town?

It’s easier than ever to find out.

Earlier this month, the Minnesota Historical Society launched a searchable online database of archival Pioneer Press issues spanning a century of state and local history beginning in 1861.

The Historical Society’s Digital Newspaper Hub has offered researchers access to hundreds titles from around the state since it debuted more than a decade ago, but until recently the state’s oldest newspaper was largely absent.

An infusion of cash from the Minnesota’s Legacy Fund helped MNHS to digitize more than 750,000 pages of Pioneer Press coverage, allowing anyone with internet access to peruse this unique archive by date or keyword.

“This was an extraordinarily important step,” said Luther Granquist, a retired Twin Cities attorney who now spends his free time researching the Faribault State Hospital from his new home in Ventura, Calif.

“The lack of a digitized Pioneer Press was an impediment to anyone doing research into Minnesota history,” Granquist said. “There’s no question about that.”

More than 35,000 issues

Until now, the only way to read old issues of the Pioneer Press was to visit a library or the Minnesota History Center and thread a roll of microfilm onto a viewing machine.

Researchers like Granquist have been asking the Historical Society for years to scan these reels so they could be accessed through its Digital Newspaper Hub, said MNHS digital collections manager Anne Levin, who oversaw the digitization project.

The Minnesota Historical Society launched a new database in Sept. 2025 of digitized issues of the Pioneer Press spanning the century between 1861 and 1961. This new online portal allows researchers to browse archival newspapers by date or search by keyword. (Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society)

“We knew the Pioneer Press was something people really wanted to see there,” Levin said. “There have always been many requests for access to the St. Paul newspapers.”

Although it only takes about 15 minutes to scan a reel of microfilm — each one containing about 500 newspaper pages — the work of processing and cleaning up these scans takes much more time, Levin said.

This project, which cost nearly $1 million and included the digitization of three other titles, took a year and a half to complete.

When the new database launched two weeks ago, researchers wasted no time diving into the more than 35,000 Pioneer Press issues it contains. Archival newspapers are a valuable resource for anyone looking into the history of their family, community or a local business, Levin said.

St. Paulite Ana Pooley has been researching the history of her North End neighborhood as she and her husband prepare to celebrate the 100th birthday of their house in 2027.

“It’s fun to just dig around and see what St. Paul was like over 100 years ago and how it’s changed today,” she said. “The best thing about it is being able to do a deep dive and go down rabbit holes. There’s no limit to what you can find.”

This newly digitized collection begins with the January 1861 debut issue of the St. Paul Press (which merged with the older St. Paul Pioneer in 1875 to create the Pioneer Press) and continues to January 1961.

Levin said MNHS would like to digitize the rest of the Pioneer Press — as well as related titles like the St. Paul Dispatch and the St. Paul Daily News — if more funding becomes available.

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By BARBARA ORTUTAY

Despite years of congressional hearings, lawsuits, academic research, whistleblowers and testimony from parents and teenagers about the dangers of Instagram, Meta’s wildly popular app has failed to protect children from harm, with “woefully ineffective” safety measures, according to a new report from former employee and whistleblower Arturo Bejar and four nonprofit groups.

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Meta’s efforts at addressing teen safety and mental health on its platforms have long been met with criticism that the changes don’t go far enough. Now, the report published Thursday, from Bejar, the Cybersecurity For Democracy at New York University and Northeastern University, the Molly Rose Foundation, Fairplay and ParentsSOS, claims Meta has chosen not to take “real steps” to address safety concerns, “opting instead for splashy headlines about new tools for parents and Instagram Teen Accounts for underage users.”

Meta said the report misrepresents its efforts on teen safety.

The report evaluated 47 of Meta’s 53 safety features for teens on Instagram, and found that the majority of them are either no longer available or ineffective. Others reduced harm, but came with some “notable limitations,” while only eight tools worked as intended with no limitations. The report’s focus was on Instagram’s design, not content moderation.

“This distinction is critical because social media platforms and their defenders often conflate efforts to improve platform design with censorship,” the report says. “However, assessing safety tools and calling out Meta when these tools do not work as promised, has nothing to do with free speech. Holding Meta accountable for deceiving young people and parents about how safe Instagram really is, is not a free speech issue.”

Meta called the report “misleading, dangerously speculative” and said it undermines “the important conversation about teen safety.

“This report repeatedly misrepresents our efforts to empower parents and protect teens, misstating how our safety tools work and how millions of parents and teens are using them today. Teen Accounts lead the industry because they provide automatic safety protections and straightforward parental controls,” Meta said. “The reality is teens who were placed into these protections saw less sensitive content, experienced less unwanted contact, and spent less time on Instagram at night. Parents also have robust tools at their fingertips, from limiting usage to monitoring interactions. We’ll continue improving our tools, and we welcome constructive feedback — but this report is not that.”

Meta has not disclosed what percentage of parents use its parental control tools. Such features can be useful for families in which parents are already involved in their child’s online life and activities, but experts say that’s not the reality for many people.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez — who has filed a lawsuit against Meta claiming it fails to protect children from predators — said it is unfortunate that Meta is “doubling down on its efforts to persuade parents and children that Meta’s platforms are safe—rather than making sure that its platforms are actually safe.”

The authors created teen test accounts as well as malicious adult and teen accounts that would attempt to interact with these accounts in order to evaluate Instagram’s safeguards.

For instance, while Meta has sought to limit adult strangers from contacting underage users on its app, adults can still communicate with minors “through many features that are inherent in Instagram’s design,” the report says. In many cases, adult strangers were recommended to the minor account by Instagram’s features such as reels and “people to follow.”

“Most significantly, when a minor experiences unwanted sexual advances or inappropriate contact, Meta’s own product design inexplicably does not include any effective way for the teen to let the company know of the unwanted advance,” the report says.

Instagram also pushes its disappearing messages feature to teenagers with an animated reward as an incentive to use it. Disappearing messages can be dangerous for minors and are used for drug sales and grooming, “and leave the minor account with no recourse,” according to the report.

Another safety feature, which is supposed to hide or filter out common offensive words and phrases in order to prevent harassment, was also found to be “largely ineffective.”

“Grossly offensive and misogynistic phrases were among the terms that we were freely able to send from one Teen Account to another,” the report says. For example, a message that encouraged the recipient to kill themselves — and contained a vulgar term for women — was not filtered and had no warnings applied to it.

Meta says the tool was never intended to filter all messages, only message requests. The company expanded its teen accounts on Thursday to users worldwide.

As it sought to add safeguards for teens, Meta has also promised it wouldn’t show inappropriate content to teens, such as posts about self-harm, eating disorders or suicide. The report found that its teen avatars were nonetheless recommended age-inappropriate sexual content, including “graphic sexual descriptions, the use of cartoons to describe demeaning sexual acts, and brief displays of nudity.”

“We were also algorithmically recommended a range of violent and disturbing content, including Reels of people getting struck by road traffic, falling from heights to their death (with the last frame cut off so as not to see the impact), and people graphically breaking bones,” the report says.

In addition, Instagram also recommended a “range of self-harm, self-injury, and body image content” on teen accounts that the report says “would be reasonably likely to result in adverse impacts for young people, including teenagers experiencing poor mental health, or self-harm and suicidal ideation and behaviors.”

The report also found that children under 13 — and as young as six — were not only on the platform but were incentivized by Instagram’s algorithm to perform sexualized behavior such as suggestive dances.

The authors made several recommendations for Meta to improve teen safety, including regular red-team testing of messaging and blocking controls, providing an “easy, effective, and rewarding way” for teens to report inappropriate conduct or contacts in direct messages and publishing data on teens’ experiences on the app. They also suggest that the recommendations made to a 13-year-old’s teen account should be “reasonably PG-rated,” and Meta should ask kids about their experiences of sensitive content they have been recommended, including “frequency, intensity, and severity.”

“Until we see meaningful action, Teen Accounts will remain yet another missed opportunity to protect children from harm, and Instagram will continue to be an unsafe experience for far too many of our teens,” the report says.

By JIM VERTUNO

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The parents of the only girl still missing from the catastrophic July 4 flood that tore through Camp Mystic in Texas are demanding that the camp halt its plans to reopen.

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Officials announced this week that they plan to reopen part of the camp next year and build a memorial to the 25 campers and two teenage counselors who died. The body of 8-year-old camper Cili Steward, wasn’t recovered.

The reopening plan has drawn fierce complaints from some of the victims’ families, who said they weren’t consulted.

“To promote reopening less than three months after the tragedy — while one camper remains missing — is unthinkable,” CiCi and Will Steward wrote to Camp Mystic officials in a letter released Thursday.

“We call on Camp Mystic to halt all discussions of reopening and memorials,” they wrote. “Instead, Cile must be recovered, and you must fully confront and account for your role in the events and failures that caused the deaths of our daughters.”

Camp Mystic’s owners include the wife and other family members of Dick Eastland, who also died in the flooding.

Camp officials did not respond to an emailed request for comment. The camp’s account generated an automatic response that said its staff was still grieving for those who were killed.

The children and counselors who died have become known as “Heaven’s 27.” The letter was signed by CiCi and Will Steward “on behalf of ourselves and other families of the Heaven’s 27.”

It wasn’t immediately clear if other victims’ families participated in the letter. A spokesperson for the group said the letter speaks for itself.

The camp’s planned reopening would not include the area along the Guadalupe River from where the victims were swept away. That area, which was destroyed, would remain closed. An undamaged area called Camp Mystic Cypress Lake on higher ground would reopen.

In a letter to camp families this week, officials said they were working to comply with new camp safety laws that were recently passed.

The families of the campers and counselors killed at Camp Mystic came together to urge the Legislature to pass a series of bills aimed at preventing similar tragedies in the future. They delivered powerful testimony before legislative committees, often accusing Camp Mystic operators of not being adequately prepared.

The measures prohibit cabins in dangerous parts of flood zones and require camp operators to develop detailed emergency plans, to train workers, and to install and maintain emergency warning systems. One bill would allocate $240 million from the state’s rainy day fund for disaster relief, along with money for warning sirens and improved weather forecasting.