A Documentary You Need to Watch

Tuesday, March 03, 2026

Back when Wikipedia was new, my college roommate and I huddled around my gigantic laptop and looked up all the awesome historic events that had taken place on our dates of birth. I had high hopes for mine, April 10. Turns out that was the day the Titanic set sail. And something even worse: in 1970, Paul McCartney announced he was leaving The Beatles, effectively ending the band. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how that cosmic connection has affected my life. You know who's thought about it more? Paul McCartney. The excellent new documentary Man on the Run captures Paul in the aftermath of the breakup, a period of time that's never really been explored in depth. Esquire's Josh Rosenberg talked to director Morgan Neville about delving into a painful time in the life of the rock legend. Check it out below.

—Kevin Dupzyk, contributing editor

Plus:

In Man on the Run, Paul McCartney Is Still Processing Why the Beatles Broke Up

Morgan Neville, the director of the new Prime Video documentary about McCartney's post-Beatles life, told us why the legend still has his demons.

Let this sink in: Paul McCartney was 27 years old when the Beatles broke up. By the age LeBron James was when he won his first NBA championship, Paul McCartney had written, recorded, toured, and released 13 albums—each and every one of them a hit. Given McCartney's astronomical early success, it's a wonder why so much of the world turned on the artist when he escaped to Scotland in 1969 to sort out the end of the Beatles.

Peter Jackson's The Beatles: Get Back docuseries showed the band's demise unfold over nearly eight hours of footage in 2021, minting another generation of Beatles obsessives. Turns out, the now-83-year-old songwriter isn't done processing that era either. According to Morgan Neville, the director of a new documentary about McCartney titled Paul McCartney: Man on the Run, the decade that McCartney spent processing the end of the Beatles is still something that has the musician racking his brain today.

"Paul started to understand that the reality was not what everybody told him it was: that the end of the Beatles was all horrible and they all hated each other," Neville says. "A lot of the '70s was painful. There's still this process of Paul reevaluating what he did in that time. When he saw the film for the first time, he was very emotional. When you hold up a mirror to people and say, 'This is what I see,' then they can see themselves in a different way."

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The 4 Best Digital Notebooks for Handwritten Notes

Something strange is happening with young people in our AI obsessed world. Instead of unplugging completely, zoomers and millennials are embracing analog retro tech, often leaning into nostalgia for eras they don't remember or never experienced. And while CRT TVs are cool, there is one piece of analog tech I find genuinely useful—the digital notebook.

Digital notebooks keep the art handwriting alive with all the forgiveness and convenience of working on a digital document. That includes cloud storage, converting handwriting to test, and the ability to hit copy, paste, or undo. They tend to sport e-ink screens, popular in e-readers and called by different names such as e-paper or ePaper, which are a lot friendlier on our eyes than our phone screens. Tablets like the Kindle Scribe and the Remarkable let you read, take notes, sketch, doodle, and everything else you'd be able to do with traditional pen and paper. Using the smart pens that come with these devices, you have all the advantages of writing with a pen or pencil, including an eraser, plus the added freedom of digital tools.

By Bryn Gelbart

The Iran War Is God's Plan, Say U.S. Military Leaders (Who Believe Trump Was Anointed by Jesus)

As a Catholic Christian from birth, I have come to wish devoutly that two things had happened in the early days, when the Jesus Movement was just getting rolling. First, that Saul had gotten back on his horse and hightailed it back to Tarsus and never written a word about this charismatic carpenter he never met. And second, that Patmos had been destroyed in a massive volcanic eruption an hour before John in his cave had set stylus to papyrus. We could have avoided a lot of extra-Jesus foolishness down through the millennia.

By Charles P. Pierce