The Sunday dozen
John Wyver writes: Slightly late posting this today, but offered now in the hope you’ll find it interesting and useful. Asd ever, it’s a miscellany of stuff that I found valuable and engaging over the past seven days. The appropriately snowy image is Claude Monet’s Le train dans le neige. La locomotive, 1875, which I saw on a blisteringly hot day last summer at the Musée Monet Marmottan.
But there’s only one thing to start (and end) with this week:
• Minnesota proved MAGA wrong: the best piece I’ve read about Minneapolis, by Adam Serwer for The Atlantic [gift link], with exceptional photographs by Jack Califano.
• The crime of witness: Fintan O’Toole excellent, as ever, for The New York Review [£; limited free access] on the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
• Another country: Adam Shatz for LRB [£; limited free access] is equally an essential read.
• What MAGA can teach Democrats about organizing – and infighting: lots of sensible, practical thinking from Charles Duhigg for The New Yorker [£; limited free access], which the Left in Britain might benefit from reading as well.
• Watching Blue Lights: at CST Online, James Walters spins a persuasive essay about toothbrushes in an episode of the very fine Two Cities Films/BBC Belfast-set police series.
• Opposition party: Elizabeth Alsop for LA Review of Books:
In 2025, however, prestige [television] series offered up an unrulier crew of extrajudicial truth-seekers—an assortment of renegades, rebels, and dudes, outmatched and mostly underresourced, united by an eagerness to redress systemic wrongs. The fictional enemy might take different forms: alien virus, political corruption, imperial fascism, craven hospital administrators.
But across Pluribus, The Lowdown, Andor, and The Pitt, we saw similarly conscientious objectors—protagonists whose principled opposition to authoritarian overreach makes it hard not to see them as symptomatic of a post-Trump, post–Peak TV era, defined by austerity and omni-crisis.
• 100 years of fake news: the accidental radio hoax that terrorised London: a remarkable story by Jude Rogers for The Observer about the 1926 BBC radio programme that inspired the famous Orson Welles The War of Worlds broadcast just over a decade later.
• Senses of Cinema 116: lots to ponder on in the latest edition of the invaluable journal, including the annual World Poll.
• Hitchcock’s The Lodger has been turned into a vertical microdrama. What’s next – Psycho on Snapchat?: this is so interesting, from Pamela Hutchinson for The Guardian.
• Aspect ratios with Sinners director Ryan Coogler: I missed this last year, but it’s terrific, especially with Sinners now in contention for a slew of BAFTAs and Oscars
• Rediscovered Warhols that Warhol never saw: Blake Gopnik for The New York Times [gift link] on a clutch of very early Warhol films, including eight Screen Tests, shot in the 1960s but not developed until 18 months ago; includes a couple of short extracts embedded in the web page.
• Cinema expanded: the films of Frederick Wiseman: Gary Couzens’ lengthy CineOutsider review of the new BFI box set acts as a fine introduction to this great American documentarist’s work.
• Why “read more” may be the most underrated thinking advice we have: on the process of writing, including the embrace of influences, by Kevin Dickinson for Big Think, drawwing especially on the ideas of William Zinnsser:
Because writing is a physical activity — whether we use a word processor or pen and paper — it gives our thoughts a form we can interact with. Seeing a thought on the page can clue us into where our understanding may be cloudy, where a hole may trip up our logic, or where we may need to check our facts. It further allows us to shape our thoughts by sharpening our sentences, reorganizing the structure, or refining our expressions.
• Somewhere called Uscita: a wonderfully evocative essay by Peter Hitchens for The Lamp about the power of old guidebooks and timetables (h/t Billy Smart, with thanks).
• And finally…: Bruce Springsteen – Streets of Minneapolis live from First Ave, Minneapolis, Jan 30th 2026.
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