The Magpie #011: Can you lick it?
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Magpie, a wire service for the weird compiled from the open tabs of writer Alex de Campi. Here’s what’s going on:
Coming at you live from the dying embers of 2024, it’s Tuesday afternoon! This is what my brain feels like:
TABS
The Blake Lively/Justin Baldoni/It Ends With Us smear campaign and subsequent lawsuit is the holiday gift that keeps on giving, holy shitshow, Batman! Here’s a summary for those of you who are not terminally online. The writer Colleen Hoover made a bunch of her books free at the beginning of the Pandemic, massive W on her part, they all became hugely popular—and of course a film was then developed from her book. Director was a guy called Justin Baldoni, who is the kind of dude who always talks about what a feminist he is but who hugs you a little too long for it to be cool, and will eventually ask you for a threesome. (He literally has a podcast about What A Good Ally he is. Run, don’t walk, ladies.) He was apparently a real creep on set and tried to shoehorn in a LOT more sex scenes into a locked script, to the point that even Hoover was like “uh… no.” Blake Lively, starring, complained, and got a signed contractual agreement for Baldoni to stop—and also, crucially, that he nor the production company could retaliate against her for that agreement. Now, all ol’boy had to do at that point was to sit down and eat his food and smile through the publicity tour. But no, instead Baldoni mounted a massive smear campaign against Lively, but oopsie, she got all the texts because the PR agent who Baldoni hired to do it tried to quit her firm to start up on her own, and HER boss (a legendarily vindictive person) confiscated her phone and basically called up Lively and was like “you really should subpoena me.” Anyway, nobody looks great, but Lively is contractually in the right here, and Baldoni’s been dropped by his agent and will probably not work again. All because a bunch of PR flacks decided to just text and email incredibly incriminating things to each other instead of, y’know, using Signal, or realizing that the first rule of crime is do not tell people you are doing the crime!
Or alternatively you can tell everyone all about the wild crimes you did while not actually doing any crimes at all, get a hit movie made from your story, and retire rich. Yes, it looks like Catch Me If You Can was a fantasia after all.
Is it bad if I consider “influencer scamming” a victimless crime? Anyhow, this brand-new deep dive on the scam browser extension Honey (owned by Paypal) is buckwild:
An investigation into the “ghost musicians” of Spotify, who get millions of streams of their songs on popular lo-fi/chill mixes.
This is not a horror story, but it feels like a horror story: Missing Texas congresswoman found living in dementia care home.
The mystery of the first modern humans in Europe: less than 1,000 people who split off from African groups and came north 45,000 years ago.
Interesting interview with the Black poet Dionne Brand, discussing her book Salvage and the almost ghostly existence of Black characters in the Western canon, as they are often the disregarded foundation upon which white colonial fortunes (and their stories) are built.
King shit: In the late 1950s, Harry Belafonte got so mad about being turned down for a Manhattan apartment despite his fame, he bought the building… and then rented apartments to all his friends.
The presence of whiteness as a determinant of a Black film’s success.
A Texas prisoner writes about fashion in prison and how it represents pride and individuality and life
Dr Adrienne Boyarin is one of my favorite historians and here she does a short video on the robust history of Jewish women in Medieval England.
On the film The Brutalist and how to make the most of a small budget. This is real filmmaking, kids. This is how you do it.
Thoughtful piece in the Irish Times on whether recent experiences of violent colonialism are at the heart of the country’s overwhelming sympathy for Palestine… and a Palestinian’s tale of being buried alive in an Israeli bomb attack a year ago.
Star Trek’s pets and the history of expeditionary companion animals.
Remember how there was a big kerfuffle about the toxic nature of black plastic utensils and food containers? Turns out the researcher made a math mistake. 60 × 7,000 isn’t 42,000, dog… and your bodega black plastic food storage container is FINE.
Possibly the GREATEST NOTEPAD DESIGN EVER
We did it, we actually cured AIDS.
I screamed at the title of this (very good) interview with Robert Eggers on his Nosferatu film and its influences.
Literary analysis of Wagner’s Ring Cycle? Look, trust me, this is great.
An oddly moving meditation on an everyday object: a woman’s face as she ages.
The internet is forever, except in all the cases that it’s ephemeral.
Kylie Kelce (of the football Kelces) seems fun, actually, and Joe Rogan being beat out of his number-one podcast slot by her 45-minute women-focused show is delicious.
The social ideology of the motorcar—an essay from 1973 that’s still correct 50 years later.
MUSIC
Chill holiday tunes, not made by ghosts:
As a reminder, you can always find all the songs I post on this playlist.
RECIPE
French onion soup is the perfect cold-weather food, and it’s really easy to make—as long as you are okay hanging out in or near the kitchen for a while, because caramelizing onions takes a couple hours. Use the heaviest pot you can, a Le Creuset-style dutch oven works really well because of the way it distributes heat to slow-cook the onions rather than browning them.
Happy holidays! No newsletter next week but I’ll be back the week of the 6th with edition 12 of this here periodical. xx
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It's right down there with "CEO murder" in my ranking.