Sunday links
Links as usual to articles that I have found interesting or stimulating over the past seven days. Thanks as ever to those who have pointed me towards some of them, via Twitter and in other ways, and apologies for the absence of appropriate name-checks.
• Donald Trump and the long history of white men claiming fraud: Rebecca Traister with a long view, at The Cut.
• Make America Austria again – how Robert Musil predicted the rise of Donald Trump: an engaging essay about Robert Musil’s novel by David Auerbach for Los Angeles Review of Books.
• Independent Stardom – freelance women in the Hollywood studio system: Jan-Christopher Horak reviews Emily Carman’s new book about the careers of Janet Gaynor, Miriam Hopkins, Carole Lombard, Constance Bennett, Irene Dunne and Barbara Stanwyck, and their more or less successful attempts to forge freelance film acting careers.
• La Notte: there’s a new US restoration of Michelangelo Antonioni’s great, great film, and I need no other excuse for including it:
• Typeset in the future – Blade Runner: Dave Addey’s consideration of the type faces on view in Ridley Scott’s masterpiece is a good deal more revealing than you might imagine it to be.
• Indignation – novel into film, novelistic film: David Bordwell on James Schamus’ new adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel, as yet unreleased over here.
• The Sunday post – Billy Cotton – old school showman: a terrific profile of the great bandleader and early TV star, written by Andrew Martin for the BBC Genome blog.
• Netflix’s The Get Down is a spectacular mixed bag of a show: as you might expect Matt Zoller Seitz for New York magazine contributes one of the best responses to the Baz Luhrmann mega-series about the early days of hip-hop.
• The forgotten great theatres of London: fascinating history from Londonist about the original St James’ Theatre, the Gaiety, the Finsbury Park Empire and more.
• Young Chekhov (trans. David Hare; dir. Jonathan Kent) National Theatre, London; Aug. 2016 (and also some The Plough and the the Stars): the excellent Holger Syme comes over from Canada and writes about British theatre with more understanding than almost anyone who lives here.
• Does technological analysis destroy the romance of art history?: Noah Charney on the joys of an inexact science; image credit: detail from Extracting the Stone of Madness by Hieronymus Bosch, Prado Museum/Wikimedia.
• The great American cubist: an essential essay by Robert Storr for New York Review of Books about the painter Stuart Davis, whose retrospective In Full Swing is at the Whitney Museum until 25 September – would that I could get to see it!
• Ferrets can be gods: Katherine Rundell writes for the LRB on the short stories of Saki.
• A compulsive audience and a complicit news media: a detailed, nuanced consideration of digital addiction and journalism, by Danny Funt for Columbia Journalism Review.
• Hyper-reality: a dystopian vision of the future when the boundaries between the real and the virtual have dissolved; a project by Keiichi Matsuda.
HYPER-REALITY from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.
• From airbrush to filters to AI…the robots enter the photographic archive: a great post from Melissa Terras about airbrushing, Photoshop, machine learning and a software system called Dreambit – all of which is pretty amazing.
• What a neural network thinks about your neighbourhood – and why it matters: Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan at Fast Company on an urban design project from MIT.
• Bus spotting – or why buses are important: a truly lovely, eve-opening, pognant and politically engaged post from Jones the Planner, which along with much else includes this gorgeous Abram Games poster for London Transport:
• When words fail: on silence in movies, from David Verdeure at Filmscalpel, with a link via Fandor that lists the clips included:
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