WSJ - "The Red-Hot Book at the Center of an AI Mystery"
WSJ - "Author Whose $2 Million Book Deal Was Derailed by AI Concerns Says He’s Innocent"
Publishers Weekly - "After the Cancellation of ‘Call Me, I'll Hide the Body,’ What Comes Next?"
Saturday, August 15, 2026
The $2 Million Book That Was Maybe Written (Co-Written) By AI
WSJ - "The Red-Hot Book at the Center of an AI Mystery"
NYMag Ranks The 100 Most Powerful Directors in Hollywood
New York Magazine - "The 100 Most Powerful Directors in Hollywood 10 years ago, franchise producers dominated the movies. Now, the buzziest deals belong to auteurs."
"The balance of power has shifted, Puck’s Matt Belloni told me. It used to be that a figure like Pirates of the Caribbean’s Gore Verbinski, “a big-time commercial director,” was considered far more important to the industry than any Oscar-friendly auteur. “But because of the rise of film-fan culture, the communities built around filmmakers, that has given more power to the auteurs who can deliver an audience.” Think Ryan Coogler, Greta Gerwig, or Denis Villeneuve — “butts-in-seats directors who can also get awards,” Belloni says. IP is still king: Many of our most influential directors got that way thanks to their facility with it. However, if franchise producers were the power players of the 2010s, the buzziest deals and biggest releases of the 2020s belong to filmmakers who are attractions in their own right.
In a sense, we’re living through an echo of the 1970s, when Movie Brats like Coppola and Scorsese took over Hollywood, leveraging their own talent and reputation to get studios to bankroll their projects. The movie business is more niche today, but it’s also accessible to a wider group of directors, who now have myriad ways to wield their influence. The YouTube-to-horror pipeline is a well-trodden path to success. Indie studios like A24 and Neon dangle creative freedom in exchange for tastemaker cred. A new class of Oscar voters use their platform to elevate a host of fresh and exciting filmmakers."
Christopher Nolan's Trojan Horse
"On a vast beach in Morocco last year, waves were pummeling one of humanity’s oldest plot devices.
Christopher Nolan’s version of the Trojan Horse—35 feet tall and rearing on hind legs—was half buried in sand on the Atlantic coast. In the filmmaker’s imagination, the trick of hiding Greek warriors inside a wood contraption was more believable if it looked like a waterlogged offering to a god left by a departed army.
...
On the beach, however, it wasn’t clear if the horse would survive its scenes. Nolan’s crew watched anxiously as the surf tore pieces off their colossal prop of fiberglass, wood and steel. Later it took further beatings as they worked out how the 8,000-pound horse could be dragged over dunes and log rollers by actors with ropes."
New Look Movies
Resident Evil
Directed by Zach Cregger (Weapons)
Written by
Zach Cregger,
Shay Hatten
Starring
Austin Abrams,
Zach Cherry,
Kali Reis,
Paul Walter HauserThe Thomas Crown Affair
Directed by Michael B. Jordan Written by Drew Pearce,
Jason Hall
Starring Michael B. Jordan,
Kenneth Branagh,
Adria Arjona,
Lily Gladstone,
Danai Gurira,
Pilou Asbæk
Wednesday, July 15, 2026
Erling Haaland - the Viking
New Yorker - "Erling Haaland Plays Like a Viking"
By Zach Helfand
"Haaland’s style of play elicits not wonder but terror. He is enormous: six feet five, two hundred pounds, about the size and speed of the N.F.L. wide receiver Randy Moss. Watching him, I sometimes find myself giggling as I might over a big, obscene crash at a demolition derby. The play that did this to me most recently came in Norway’s first World Cup game, against Iraq. Haaland had already scored twice; Iraq’s Marko Farji was moving the ball across his box, with Haaland twenty yards away, until he suddenly broke into a sprint of bizarre ferocity—he has a quirk in his running form that causes his arms to thrash from side to side—heading straight at Farji, who, though still far from Haaland, seemed to abandon all soccer instinct and took off with the ball in the opposite direction, toward the sideline, while Haaland, for some reason, just kept chasing, and caught up to Farji right before they both went out of bounds, but in his overexuberance, before he could dislodge the ball, he knocked Farji to the ground and earned a foul, which caused him to let out a long scream, whether in frustration or as some battle-cry catharsis, I’m not sure. I’d never seen anything like it. I wanted to see more."
No More Millennial Bland; Gen Z Goo
NY Times - "The Glitchy, Gloppy Look of Now"
"Remember how things looked in 2016?
Direct-to-consumer brands like Warby Parker and Everlane introduced themselves in tidy, sans-serif typefaces. Pastels, especially millennial pink, surged onto Instagram feeds and Glossier mascara tubes. A “self-aware, stylized blandness” called normcore inspired art kids to reach for the drabbest of khakis. The overall effect was sterile but soothing, as if to suggest our lives might somehow absorb the cheerful legibility of a Casper mattress ad.
Fast-forward a decade, and this muted visual language — which came to be known as millennial blanding — has receded. Something misshapen and unruly is rising in its place.
Let’s call it hyper goo: a style of glitchy, gloppy maximalism that has landed on consumer culture like a wet sneeze. Text on shampoo bottles and pickle jars increasingly resembles the inner workings of a lava lamp. Negative space has grown cluttered with doodles that look as if they might have been made in Microsoft Paint."
"Remember how things looked in 2016?
Direct-to-consumer brands like Warby Parker and Everlane introduced themselves in tidy, sans-serif typefaces. Pastels, especially millennial pink, surged onto Instagram feeds and Glossier mascara tubes. A “self-aware, stylized blandness” called normcore inspired art kids to reach for the drabbest of khakis. The overall effect was sterile but soothing, as if to suggest our lives might somehow absorb the cheerful legibility of a Casper mattress ad.
Fast-forward a decade, and this muted visual language — which came to be known as millennial blanding — has receded. Something misshapen and unruly is rising in its place.
Let’s call it hyper goo: a style of glitchy, gloppy maximalism that has landed on consumer culture like a wet sneeze. Text on shampoo bottles and pickle jars increasingly resembles the inner workings of a lava lamp. Negative space has grown cluttered with doodles that look as if they might have been made in Microsoft Paint."
Werewulf
Written & Directed by Robert Eggers
Starring
Aaron Taylor-Johnson,
Willem Dafoe,
Lily-Rose Depp
Sunday, June 14, 2026
2026 World Cup Preview
FT - "Simon Kuper’s World Cup: Who will win?"
WSJ - "Can America’s Golden Generation Avoid the World Cup Curse?"
The Athletic - "A near-perfect World Cup opener takes the USMNT into uncharted territory"
WSJ - "The ‘Colosseum’ of Ear-Splitting Noise and Flying Trash That Will Open the World Cup"
BBC - "When will an African side win the World Cup?"
New Yorker - "How the Moroccan World Cup Team Became a Symbol of the Global South"
The Athletic - "Inside the making of Norway’s ‘Viking’ photo for World Cup"
2030 World Cup and the World's Largest Football Stadium in Casablanca Morocco
Arsenal's Path and Tactics to the EPL Title
Quentin Tarantion Names Black Hawk Down Best Movie of the Past 25+ Years
Variety - "Quentin Tarantino Names ‘Black Hawk Down’ the Best Movie of the 21st Century; His Top 10 Includes ‘Dunkirk,’ ‘Toy Story 3,’ ‘Zodiac’ and More"
"“I liked it when I first saw it, but I actually think it was so intense that it stopped working for me, and I didn’t carry it with me the way that I should’ve,” Tarantino said about selecting “Black Hawk Down” as his top pick. “Since then, I’ve seen it a couple of times, not a bunch of times, but I think it’s a masterwork, and one of the things I love so much about it is […] this is the only movie that actually goes completely for an ‘Apocalypse Now’ sense of purpose and visual effect and feeling, and I think it achieves it. It keeps up the intensity for 2 hours 45 minutes, or whatever it is, and I watched it again recently, my heart was going through the entire runtime of the movie; it had me and never let me go, and I hadn’t seen it in a while. The feat of direction is beyond extraordinary.”"
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
Who is Satoshi?
New York Times - "My Quest to Solve Bitcoin’s Great Mystery"
"So I decided to ask Mr. Back for the emails’ metadata. Metadata is to an email what an envelope, postmark and seal are to a physical letter: It shows where the email came from, when it was sent and whether it was altered. The copies of Mr. Back’s email exchanges with Satoshi made public during Mr. Wright’s London trial hadn’t included this information.
I didn’t have high hopes the metadata would tell me anything useful because Satoshi had used the Tokyo-registered anonymous email service, which would have masked his I.P. address. Not only that, Satoshi had probably used Tor to connect to the service to further insulate himself. I still wanted to see it, though, on the off chance I could glean some clue.
But when I emailed Mr. Back my request, he did not reply. I wasn’t sure if he was ghosting me or just busy and I didn’t want to spook him by immediately following up, so I waited eight days to send him another email. Again, radio silence.
I had clearly touched a nerve. But why? With the precautions Satoshi had taken, what was there to even hide? Unless Satoshi had made some sort of mistake?"
The Magic City Night That Never Happened
The Ringer - "A Magic City Night to Remember"
New York Times - "It Was Going to Be Magic City Night at the Atlanta Hawks. Then the Outrage Poured In."
Atlanta Hawks - "Hawks to Celebrate Atlanta's Iconic Cultural Institution ‘Magic City’ During the Team's “Magic City Monday” Game Against the Orlando Magic on Monday, March 16"
Sunday, March 8, 2026
The rise and fall of monoculture
WSJ - "The Rise and Fall of the American Monoculture"
"Everyone my age remembers “Jurassic Park,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the early seasons of “The Simpsons.” My teenage son and his friends watch and listen and play different things, sometimes even when they’re in the same room. Whatever it one day means to have grown up in the 2020s, it won’t have much to do with pop culture."
...
"To understand how things have changed, consider the case of anime, the Japanese animation style that used to live in the remotest corners of video stores and is now one of the hottest businesses in Hollywood. There may not be a lot of anime fans, but they’re a passionate group who turn out to theaters for hits like “Demon Slayer” and all subscribe to Sony’s streaming service Crunchyroll, which caters specifically to them.
Anime fans were always willing to spend lots of money, it turns out. Before digital distribution, there wasn’t a way to market or deliver content specifically to them, so the business wasn’t viable.
Building a mass audience, meanwhile, is harder than ever, because Hollywood can no longer force content on the country by giving it the best time slot or the best position on the shelves of Best Buy."
The Mandalorian and Grogu
May 22, 2026
Written by Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni
Directed by Jon Favreau
Starring Pedro Pascal, Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Allen White
Written by Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni
Directed by Jon Favreau
Starring Pedro Pascal, Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Allen White
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