The Sunday dozen
John Wyver writes: My weekly round-up of stuff that has engaged me over the past seven days begins with a selection with rather less film and television than usual, although both feature, and a perhaps more eclectic range including the Bayeux Tapestry, AI and cricket. Some great music too.
This week’s image above is Max Beckmann’s Dream of Monte Carlo, 1939-43, which I marvelled at in the Neue Stattsgalerie Stuttgart last summer.
• Introduction: I really appreciated critic Michael Brooke’s tale of his journey into central and eastern European film, and the importance of BBC2 and Channel 4 to this, which he posted this week by way of trailing his series of (very) regular posts on the topic, which I am already enjoying; click on the link to find out how to subscribe.
• about that December 28th anniversary: for anyone with an interest in early cinema, Dan Streible’s richly illustrated revisionist reflection on the first commercial, public screening of cinematographic films is a goldmine.
• Soderblog – Seen, Read 2025: filmmaker Steven Soderbergh produces one of the very best end-of-year-lists in his distinctive record of all that he has watched and read during the year, complete with the dates when he did so (along with occasional notes about scripts and filming).
• Evoking John le Carré in The Night Manager Season 2: I’m definitely hooked after the first two episodes, and my pleasure in the series was enhanced by this Calum Marsh report for The New York Times [gift link], which includes this tantalising paragraph:
[Scriptwriter David] Farr kept true to the spirit of the author’s work by grounding Season 2 in “the wonderfully unglamorous le Carré spy world,” Farr explained, and by cleaving to some of le Carré’s abiding interests, including German philosophy, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the writings of Sigmund Freud. “All of that is in there,” Farr said.
• Sex object, animal rights activist, racist: the paradox that was Brigitte Bardot: such a good Guardian ‘Sunday Read’ by Esther Addley.
• Mug shot matriarchy: Jake Flanigin for The LA Review of Books with a terrific essay about the Real Housewives franchise and how ‘ in the attention economy, fame and infamy are increasingly indistinguishable currencies.’
• Chewing over the Norman Conquest: the Bayeux Tapestry as monastic mealtime reading: an accessible (in boith senses) and rich academic article from Historical Research by Benjamin Pohl which is great background for the arrival of the tapestry at the BM this year.
• Crime Chronicles part 11: the heist of the millennium: I had no idea about this still unsolved theft at the turn of the century of a Cezanne from Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum; Rowan Finch for Central Bylines recounts the tale.
• Joan Lowell and the birth of the modern literary fraud: Michael Waters for The New Yorker [£; limited free access] with a fascinating tale from the 1920s, with echoes perhaps of one of the most notorious books of 2025.
• New Order – Blue Monday 88 (Official Music Video): on December 31 Paramount Skydance shut down the music-only MTV channels, signalling one end to the music video; here’s one of my all time favourites, made for New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ by animator Robert Breer and artist William Wegman, with among others his Weimaraner dog, Fay Ray:
• Watching Bari Weiss murder investigative journalism at CBS: Spencer Ackerman is very good on the 60 Minutes scandal, but even if you haven’t been following that story it’s well worth your time for its broader reflections about newspaper and television journalism.
• The ‘crisis of the humanities’ is over. That’s not a good thing: Eric Hayor and Matt Seybold for The Chronicle of Higher Education [registration necessary] offer a passionate and compelling argument about the state of higher education in the USA and the links to attacks on the public sphere more generally; worth reading as a warning for how things are going here too.
• Aretha Franklin sings ‘(You make me feel like) a natural woman’: the furore about Tr*mp’s desecration of the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. led to people posting this clip from 2016, which is great not only for the singer and the song, but also for co-composer Carole King’s reaction:
• King of cannibal island: in another of his wide-ranging and essential LRB essays [£; limited free access] John Lanchester ranges across Nvidia, Sam Altman, ChatGPT and more, and asks, will the AI bubble burst?
• The enshittifinancial crisis: … and if you want more about AI and related topics, Edward Zitron’s compendious 19,000-word post is well worth the time it takes to read.
• Beyond Bazball: are class and culture the root cause of England’s Ashes failure?: that’ll be a Yes from Duncan Stone, author of the very fine Different Class: The Untold Story of English Cricket.
• And finally… what else this week? Lucy Dacus performs ‘Bread and Roses’ beautifully at the the New York Inauguration of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, with added Bernie Sanders afterwards, courtesy of DRM News:
Leave a Reply