JD Vance’s Yale Law School pedigree came up at least a dozen times at the Republican National Convention. His degree from the institution gives the inexperienced Vance more legitimacy and validates his Horatio Alger story.

The use of elite educational credentials by populist critics of elite education isn’t new. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who went to Yale College and Harvard Law School, did a version of the same thing when he was running for president. Senator Josh Hawley, he of the raised fist on Jan. 6, graduated from Yale Law in 2006. Representative Elise Stefanik, who spent much of the past year grilling college presidents on Capitol Hill, graduated from Harvard College. And Trump himself likes to brag about his bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School (although at the time, over half of applicants were accepted).

But Vance’s degree is central to his narrative in a way that it’s not for those other politicians. Admission to Yale was his main accomplishment when he wrote his best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” It cemented his rise to the elite. It framed Vance as an effective source to “explain” poor white politics (and poor white dysfunction) to the NPR-listening, tote-bag carrying, book-buying public. It’s no exaggeration to say that, without Yale Law School, there could be no phenomenon of JD Vance — at least, not by the tender age of 39.

Yale Law has also played a vital role in legal conservatism. At the Supreme Court, Justices Clarence Thomas (’74) and Samuel Alito (’75) have gone from being peripheral voices to becoming the authors of major new conservative opinions that seem likely to last at least a generation. One of the reasons they have such influence now is the appointment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh (Yale Law ’90). The court currently has an unprecedented four Yale lawyers, including liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor (’79). Together they account for nearly half of the nine Yale law school graduates that have ever sat court.

What makes the prominence of these figures fascinating is that there are so few conservative graduates of Yale Law School. A generation ago, Bill and Hillary Clinton, also both graduates of Yale Law, brought an extended network of their liberal classmates and friends to Washington. Such liberal Yale Law graduates are not hard to find — and remain prominent in a wide range of legal jobs, especially as professors. (I went there myself.)

Yale’s conservatives are something else again. The law school is small to begin with, graduating only around 200 students a year, meaning there are about 600 law students at a time. And while there’s no official count, the number of those who identify as conservative is not likely to be much greater than 10% — and might be smaller. Consider: The photo on the homepage of the Yale Federalist Society chapter features just 20 students.

Their rarity is doubtless one reason Yale Law conservatives ascend so quickly. Consider judicial clerkships. More than half of federal judges are conservative and look for clerks who will support their world view. At the Supreme Court, the conservative-to-liberal ratio is 2 to 1. That gives conservative students a significant leg up, statistically speaking.

As important, however, is the experience of alienation shared by so many Yale Law conservatives, which seems to harden their political views and also becomes a central part of their narratives. Thomas and Alito have both spoken extensively of feeling like outsiders at Yale. Neither came from the upper or upper-middle class. (Kavanaugh, in contrast, who did grow up upper-middle class, used to speak warmly about his social experiences at Yale and remains a relatively moderate conservative.)

Vance, who grew up poor, also experienced a sense of alienation at Yale, one he emphasized in his book and has played up further in his political career. For him, as for Thomas and Alito, Yale Law became a double-edged component of his self-perception and self-presentation. On the one hand, having gone there proves one is now a member of the elite. On the other, being exposed to Yale elites confirms one’s belief that populist conservatism is the right way to see the world.

Vance benefited enormously from Yale, making the connections that helped him to find a top-tier literary agent and launch his career in Silicon Valley. And it’s in part in hopes of providing this kind of elevator for working class students that elite institutions like Yale believe in the value of admitting students from a wide range of backgrounds. I believe in it myself.

But one result is the inevitable emergence of people who use their elite experience to become proponents of anti-elitism. That’s their right.

I would venture to suggest, however, that elite institutions can and should do better in being aware of and trying to minimize the alienation associated with being any kind of an outsider there — whether based on social class, race, religion, or conservative politics. Some culture shock is inevitable so long as elite educational institutions draw so heavily on the children of economic and educational elites. Yet we can teach our students, from day one through graduation, to think harder about the experiences of others, and to take some of the moralizing out of their encounters with people who think differently. The real-world effects might give us more thoughtful graduates and fewer reactionaries.

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People.”

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“Time Bandits,” which premiered Wednesday on Apple TV+, adopts the premise and particulars of Terry Gilliam’s wonderful 1981 comic fantasy adventure and stretches it, without breaking, into a television series. Created by Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi and Iain Morris, it’s likable, lively, funny and fun.

Still, it’s best to put Gilliam’s film out of your mind, or at least not to mind the differences. There are some direct borrowings and a similar sort of humor, but where the movie is unsentimental, violent and grotesque — in a good way, I mean — the series is sentimental, not so violent and grotesque only when it comes to actual monsters. Most notably, the bandits, who were played by little people in the movie, led by the great David Rappaport and including Kenny Baker, the man inside R2-D2, are full-sized actors here. (There are little people in other roles, who appear to be set for a second-season plotline.)

As before, the central character is a small English boy named Kevin (Kal-El Tuck), whose room, unbeknownst to him, happens to be a portal through time and space. (Both Kevin and his room, the series suggests, are significant in a special way.) Kevin is an exuberant nerd whose impulsive lectures on history his parents, glued to their screens, find boring; his sister, Saffron (Kiera Thompson), a new character, regards him as ridiculous, pathetic and a little repulsive, as siblings can. She’ll play a large role in later episodes.

One night, a wardrobe in Kevin’s room begins to shake and emanate light, and when he opens the door, he finds himself on a faraway beach, in a faraway time, where a Viking is being chased by Saxons — nothing as dramatic as the knight on horseback that bursts into his bedroom in the film, but sufficiently alarming. Nevertheless, Kevin takes the opportunity to ask the hunted man “why the Vikings suddenly stopped their murderous ways and adopted agrarianism.”

The next night, the self-styled Time Bandits — they refer to themselves this way, as if it’s a band name they decided on — creep into his room. They’re on the run from the Supreme Being, whose cosmic map they have stolen in order to commit robberies and escape with the loot to different times. (They are bad at this.) Each has been given a defining personality and team specialty, like Doc Savage’s crew or the Impossible Mission Force.

Penelope (Lisa Kudrow, bringing the full Kudrow) describes the gang as a collective but herself as the leader and is continually having to switch from “I” to “we” when describing even the smallest of their accomplishments — which indeed are generally small. She’s also nursing a broken heart. There’s a running joke in which she can’t remember Kevin’s name, which remains surprisingly funny, given how often it’s repeated.

Bittelig (Rune Temte), says Penelope, introducing the bandits to Kevin, “has the strength of seven average-strength men” and “a sensitive side.” Judy (Charlyne Yi), “the master psychologist,” restates the obvious or gets it wrong; Alto (Tadhg Murphy), a flamboyant actor, is their master of disguise; and map-reader Widgit (Roger Jean Nsengiyumva), is the sometimes accurate navigator. The colorful diversity of types makes them less plausible as anonymous low-level employees of the Supreme Being, but I didn’t think much about it until I wrote that sentence.

To cut to the 10-episode chase, Kevin is swept up in their draft as they try to evade the Supreme Being, who initially manifests as a giant three-faced head, but soon enough will be revealed as Waititi. Co-creator Clement plays Pure Evil, who also wants the map, and sends a demonic agent (Rachel House) to get it. Good and Bad will prove equally problematic.

Co-written by Gilliam and Michael Palin, with appearances by Palin as a luckless dweeb through the ages and John Cleese as a posh Robin Hood, “Time Bandits,” the film, was very much a Python work. (Gilliam, the American in the group, created their animations.) Structurally, it’s a sketch show with a framing narrative, proceeding from the Napoleonic Wars to Sherwood Forest to ancient Greece to the Titanic and so on; its humor follows “Holy Grail” and “Life of Brian” in mixing historical and mythical scenarios with modern attitudes, issues and vernacular. Rowan Atkinson’s “Blackadder” series worked from a similar playback, as did the recently canceled pirate comedy “Our Flag Means Death,” where Waititi was an executive producer, director and co-star.

The series follows in that vein. It’s highly episodic — indeed, there are episodes even within episodes. In the first 46 minutes alone, we visit a sea battle in 18th-century Macao, Stonehenge under construction — “It’s very much a venue for hire, innit, you know, you got your banquets, your weddings, your sacrifices,” Kevin is told — and ancient Troy, where the bandits plan to steal a famous horse they are surprised to find is large and made of wood.

Further adventures will take them to Prohibition New York, the Maya empire, the African desert, the Ice Age and Georgian England. There is tension, given the stealing — Kevin does not approve, and especially not “stealing from history” — the pursuers and the unpredictable environments, though Kevin conveniently knows a lot about wherever they happen to be.

The departure of Yi halfway through production — they accused an unnamed actor of sexual harassment, a charge the production office found to be unsubstantiated — is handled awkwardly, though I’m not sure there was an especially elegant way to do it. But while it must have occasioned a good deal of rewriting, their absence has no effect on the larger story.

And there is a larger story. There’s a brutal simplicity to Gilliam’s film, which works perfectly over two hours. But this is a long series with plans to go longer, and though there’s enough variety to maintain interest from episode to episode, the added length seems to require something extra. We get motivations and explanations and … feelings. Toward the end of the season, meaningful speeches creep in; they can feel a little obvious, a little made to order. But it doesn’t take long for the jokes to take over again.

‘Time Bandits’

Rating: TV-PG

How to watch: Apple TV+

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One of the most plaintive refrains of the Y2K era was sung by Mark Hoppus of Blink-182: “Well, I guess this is growing up.” Their hit song “Dammit” was released in 1997, and precedes Sean Wang’s narrative feature debut “Dìdi,” set in 2008, by a decade, but the poignant pop-punk sentiment hangs over this emo-era coming-of-age period piece nevertheless.

Our protagonist, Chris (Izaac Wang), finds himself in a tricky transitional moment: the summer before freshman year of high school. His identity is in flux, wobbling on the ever-shifting grounds of personal insecurity, fickle friendships and family pressure, and his unsteady sense of self is represented in the film by his various names and nicknames.

There’s the endearment “Dìdi” (Mandarin for “little brother”) that Chris is called at home by his mother Chungsing (Joan Chen) and grandmother, Nai Nai (Zhang Li Hua). His middle school friends call him “WangWang,” one of a few silly monikers among his longtime friend group, who preen and posture beyond their years. But he’s also starting to feel that maybe he just wants to be “Chris,” which is how he introduces himself to a group of slightly older skater boys when he’s searching for connection, adrift in a Northern California summer.

In this loosely autobiographical tale, writer/director Wang zeroes in on this specific, fleeting moment of life, just a couple of months long, and throws it all under his cinematic microscope, examining all the awkward agony and brief ecstasies of this age. Wang grew up in Fremont, California, in the mid-aughts and he sets “Dìdi” there, in a Taiwanese American family. He previously mined his personal family specifics for the Oscar nominated documentary short “Nai Nai & Wài Pó,” about his grandmothers, one of whom appears in “Dìdi” as Chris’ grandmother.

In addition to the cultural and geographical specifics, Wang also digs into the distinctive visual, sonic and media environment in which the story takes place. Chris and his friends, who come from a cultural melting pot of East and Southeast Asian American families have been sprouted in a digital media landscape that flowers with MySpace Top 8s, power-pop band merch and AOL Instant Messager chimes. The film opens with a shaky, grainy YouTube video of Chris and his friends blowing up a mailbox, his joyful, childlike face captured in freeze-frame as he’s running away.

Wang utilizes this mixed-media approach to presenting Chris’ life, lived equally offline and on, and the juxtapositions in form reflect what’s happening internally for Chris too. Lo-res DV camera footage of Chris’ pranks and skate tricks that he posts online contrasts the warm, intimate close-ups of the film’s cinematography by Sam A. Davis. Chris’ real-life social interactions are fumbling and uninformed, unlike his online chatting, which is bolstered by furious Google and Facebook searches, trolling digital lives for clues. So much of his social life is mediated though computer screens that in person, he flails.

But it’s not just social media that makes up his world. Race and culture also fundamentally shape his reality, and Wang lets that theme emerge organically but indelibly, allowing the audience to witness how Chris navigates his own Asian American identity. It’s not so hard amongst his Korean and Pakistani middle school friends, but with the white and Black skater guys and their crew, he chafes at the nickname “Asian Chris,” the only moniker he attempts to edit, an attempt that ultimately backfires.

Much of “Dìdi” is about the halting, inadvertent mistakes that Chris makes in his fumbling attempts at connection: when he blocks his crush Madi (Mahaela Park) on AIM instead of telling her how he feels; when he deletes a bunch of videos he’s taken of his new skater friends simply because one was imperfect; or when he explodes at a classmate in a PSAT tutoring session. But Izaac Wang’s performance of this tortured teenage soul, so young, still in braces, is a sensitive expression of the insecurity Chris feels around others and anxiety about how he will be perceived. Wang’s performance is mirrored by Chen as his mother, a housewife with an artist’s heart. She delicately balances steeliness and vulnerability on a knife’s edge to deliver a heartrending performance.

Sean Wang’s commitment to realism means that some of the storylines don’t feel entirely finished, as storylines in life often do. Chris messes up, he wallows, he does his best to make things right, and things don’t always wrap up neatly. He keeps moving forward, his only task is to try and figure out who he is, what he wants, and to feel secure enough to savor those short, blissful moments of connection and freedom. Friends come and go, but family remains, always. We watch his journey to arriving at that simple, but profound realization, and well, I guess this is growing up.

‘Dìdi’

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for language throughout, sexual material, and drug and alcohol use — all involving teens)

Running time: 1:34

How to watch: In theaters July 26

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