[a pleasurable headache] broken and late edition
Apparently the last three editions of this newsletter have not gone out. This is the one that was supposed to have gone out on the Sunday just gone.
Reading/Watching/Listening
-
I finished The Five, mentioned in the last newsletter. One point that stuck out is the fact that the first two victims of the Ripper were not sex workers as is the long held view. Instead, due to their lower economic standing, they were just assumed to be. The book artfully deconstructs many myths about women in the Victorian Age as well as giving the victims a voice, depth and baggage. Most of them went through absolutely awful experiences in their lives which led to alcohol abuse and spiraling into further addiction and destitution. Poverty killed, and continues to kill, far more than Jack ever did.
-
I am currently about halfway through the first season of Netflix's Ganglands, a very stripped back and visceral crime thriller. The French have a good track record of no-frills action/crime entertainment (Sentinelle, the Lost Bullet movies, etc.) As expected the action and set pieces in this are spot on.
-
I am also, finally, working my way through two older shows The Americans and Babylon Berlin. Both are great and I am savouring every episode.
-
Listening-wise, I am loving the recent Srsly Wrong podcast's two part episode on AI.
===
The past week or so has been all about that hellish period after you submit a story. It's just over 4K words and I submitted it around a week or so before the deadline. It had been edited and finessed to within an inch of its life at that point, so why delay?
I got an email back a few days later that they liked the story but that they had to wait until the deadline had passed and they could read all of the submissions. I would love to be in the anthology, but I'm trying to temper my expectations. Fingers crossed!
===
Links
Mission Impossible revisited: Brian de Palma’s Mission Impossible
https://filmstories.co.uk/features/mission-impossible-revisited-brian-de-palmas-mission-impossible/
Film Stories have been doing a series of retrospective posts on the Mission Impossible series. Here's the first on the Brian De Palma movie, a vastly different movie than everything that came after.
===
Who killed Google Reader?
https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social
You could have had it all, Google.
===
We Need To Name and Shame Bad Climate Journalism
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/07/we-need-to-name-and-shame-bad-climate-journalism
"This is all too common. There was a major Berkeley study of the Times’ climate coverage in 2019, which looked at whether the paper mentioned basic facts about what was happening. Generally, it didn’t, and “of the 600 news articles mentioning climate change over the 38-year period, the vast majority contained none of the five basic climate facts.” That’s pretty incredible, but most appalling is probably the fact that out of articles that mentioned climate change, almost none (0.1 percent) mentioned the fact that it is caused by the burning of fossil fuels"
===
After “Barbie,” Mattel Is Raiding Its Entire Toybox
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/after-barbie-mattel-is-raiding-its-entire-toy-box
Apparently there's a Barney movie in the works with Daniel Kaluuya. What a time to be alive!
===
Caitlin Moran: what’s gone wrong for men – and the thing that can fix them
"The men of my age, however? When I look at my roughly equivalent male peers – progressive, leftwing, liberal men with public platforms – there is no such culture when it comes to the issues that concern men and boys. There is no semi-organised, progressive movement that habitually raises, and then campaigns in support of, solutions for male problems: educational underachievement and exclusion; sky-high mental ill-health and suicide rates; porn-influenced strangulation; fatherhood being seen as the “lesser” parenting role; and the epidemic of loneliness in older men (nearly a third of men say they have no close friends.) There is no sense of these all being folded in together, under the subject “How things needs to change for boys, and men” in the way they have in feminism. And into this vacuum created by the progressive left: the advent of Tate, Jordan B Peterson and the “incel” movement."
===
I'm off to rest my knee. Apparently sitting in an uncomfortable position now for a few hours has repercussions. See you in two!