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There’s a lot to admire about “Amend,” a new documentary series from Netflix whose goal is to educate the viewing public on the history of civil rights in America. The project — executive-produced by Will Smith and former “Nightly Show” host Larry Wilmore, and featuring both on-camera — is the sort of fundamentally educational product that’s unusual from an entertainment company. It’s done in a refreshing tone of complete earnestness, walking the audience through the different permutations of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, that which guarantees equal protection under the law, and ways it is has been used to expand rights for various protected classes. While this may be well-known to some, if you are looking for a teaching tool about recent and not-so-recent history, you could do a great deal worse than this.

“Amend” has a fairly loose structure. Smith, an affable presence who provides a sort of low-pressure template for learning,...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell didn’t think much of a New York Times report that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had been questioned in a bar fight in 1985.

In response to the report, McConnell mocked the newspaper from the Senate floor on Tuesday.

“Last night the New York Times unleashed this major story,” he said in a sarcastic tone. “Get this! Judge Kavanaugh may have been accused of throwing some ice across a college bar in the mid 1980s. Talk about a bombshell!”

In its piece for The Times, reporters Emily Bazelon and Ben Protess found that while Kavanaugh was himself never arrested, he had been accused of throwing ice on another patron, according to a police report. Kavanaugh was a junior at Yale at the time the incident took place.

Also Read: Stephen King Likens Brett Kavanaugh to a 'Dry Drunk'

Bazelon has publicly tweeted about her displeasure with Kavanaugh’s nomination,...

Critics everywhere have hailed Bully as an important, engaging documentary. EW’s Owen Gleiberman calls it “sensitive and eye-opening”; the film has also earned a near-perfect 93 percent “Fresh” rating from the reviews aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes. But in an article posted late last week, Slate’s Emily Bazelon alleged that some crucial parts of Bully are “utterly one-sided” and “factually questionable.” Her piece focused on Tyler Long, one of the doc’s featured subjects; when he was just 17, Long took his own life, apparently because he was bullied by his classmates.

But according to Bazelon, that isn’t the whole story.