If you loved HBO’s Industry, read this amazing piece by Anirbaan Banerjee, focused on the under-analyzed character of Rishi, @publicbooks.bsky.social www.publicbooks.org/diaspora-ind...

“Watched today, this flare of an episode from 2024 flashes even more brightly. It burns an afterimage onto the eyes that stays long after Rishi is no longer the camera’s primary subject.” A. Banerjee discusses the episode of “Industry” told from Rishi’s POV:

“Perhaps what makes the analogy between Rishi and Britain work despite the snags of racial difference is what Grace Blakeley calls ‘the financialisation of everyday life’ in contemporary Britain.” A. Banerjee on “Industry”:

“The irony of a brown man claiming this colonial slogan is worth noting, and the irony doesn’t run out in this racial register.” New at PB: In an episode of “Industry,” the character Rishi bets big on sterling. How deep does his identification with Britain go?

“The condition of debt once marked the divide between the diasporic and the host nation. This condition now seems to be what connects them.”

“Might the identification implied in Rishi’s statement ‘I am long sterling’ go deeper still?” New at PB: Through an analysis of “Industry,” A. Banerjee looks at diaspora, indebted.

“Gambling with big bets against challenging odds, regarded warily by moneylenders, questioned about the ability to balance the books, needing to take on more debt to pay back older debt. Who exactly are we talking about here: Rishi or Britain?”

A. Banerjee looks at an episode of HBO's industry, in which the character Rishi takes center stage. That episode sheds a “fascinating light on the changing shapes and shadows of race in contemporary Britain that are worth returning to and lingering upon.”

New at PB: @ryancarroll.bsky.social reviews “The Pitt.” Although the show is “chained to the social discourse beyond it,” there is truth in the fact that “we cringe at having to face issues that we must consider but have already considered a million times.”

“What might it look like to think of the show’s clumsy corniness as operative in its own right? What might we learn from a series that can be both moving and goofy?” The Season 2 finale of “The Pitt” airs tonight on HBO. Ryan Carroll reviews the show:

“What we have, then, is a show that is both powerful and insipid. The Pitt burns with the desire to represent totality, but its corny obviousness often quenches its own flame.”

“From lonely young men to measles, from fentanyl to brain worms, from violence against immigrants to painkiller-swiping doctors, the show feels like a news digest come to life.” New at PB: Ryan Carroll reviews “The Pitt.”

“It’s powerful, even as it’s corny.” HBO’s “The Pitt” packs scores of social problems into a single shift. Still, Ryan Carroll writes, the show’s aesthetic foibles shed light on the very mediation problems that concern it.

“Critics have since hailed his sermonizing as incredibly timely—but in another way, it feels calculated for precision timeliness.”

New at PB: Steacy Easton looks at 3 shows starring Joshua Jackson. The way he “plays sex,” Easton argues, “corrects normative desire for closure”—which makes the ending of “Doctor Odyssey” all the more disappointing.

“The emergency room in The Pitt is the imaginative material for performing what Fredric Jameson calls cognitive mapping.” New at PB: Ryan Carroll on “The Pitt.”

“Who the father is is one of the least interesting questions.” New at PB: Steacy Easton on the collapse of the threesome in “Doctor Odyssey,” starring Joshua Jackson.

“The episodes immediately after the threesome do not allow for the potential of pleasure, or even bisexuality.”

“There is no real talk about the potential for all three to love her; the splitting must take place in favor of the heterosexual pairing.” New at PB: Steacy Easton on the disappointment of “Doctor Odyssey’s” heteronormative turn.

“It is impossible to imagine Jackson working in anything but a domestic context—but his work is to disrupt it.” New at PB: Steacy Easton on Joshua Jackson.

“One of the ways that ‘The Affair’ seems like a shadow of ‘Dawson’s Creek’ is that if the first ends at love, a successful relationship after years of will they or won’t they, then the other shows what happens after they say I do.”

Read the brilliant @storti.bsky.social on S03 of White Lotus @publicbooks.bsky.social immediately www.publicbooks.org/could-i-be-a...

New at PB: Anna Storti (@storti.bsky.social) revisits “The White Lotus,” and in particular season 3's headline-making scene where Frank, played by Sam Rockwell, delivers a five-minute-long monologue where he asks, "Could I be an Asian girl?"

What is the function of satire, @storti.bsky.social asks, in the representation of racist fantasy?

New at PB: @storti.bsky.social publishes a reflection of racist fantasy in HBO’s “The White Lotus.” Storti’s book, “Torn: Asian/white Life and the Intimacy of Violence”, is out today with @dukepress.bsky.social !

“Portraying the fall of the mighty is easy money, low-hanging fruit. Eat the rich! What’s riskier and harder to swallow are the moments when the viewer comes into contact with the white elite’s racist fantasies.”

“If satire mobilizes critique through emotion, to what extent does the genre fail when the subject is racist fantasy?” New at PB: @storti.bsky.social revisits the reactions to Frank’s (Sam Rockwell) season 3 monologue about sexual desire in “The White Lotus.”

Wrote a piece for LIMN about working for certain people at a certain art museum in New York in my 20s - can you guess which one? limn.press/article/conf...

The bubble of prestige TV has burst. Netflix serves up good and bad shows, and its algorithm doesn’t editorialize. In recent years, AppleTV+ has emerged as “the new HBO.” But take a closer look, and you see it as a platform for advertising Apple products.

“Apple’s ‘Price-Tag TV,’ to propose a new entrant to the TV name game, is expensive programming about folks who like expensive things, made for viewers who either can’t see or don’t care about the difference between good and expensive.”

New at PB: Michael Szalay considers how AppleTV+, dubbed the new HBO, actually isn't. Rather, its expensively produced offerings prop up Apple’s prestige play, lazy watches for the affluent and self-satisfied.

Check out I Kissed a Girl on BBC and read Tori McCandless’s excellent essay thereon in @publicbooks.bsky.social!

New at PB, Tori McCandless reviews BBC’s reality show “I Kissed a Girl,” where the “most heartwarming moments correspond to the girls being vulnerable with one another and sharing difficult life experiences underwritten by homophobia, external or internalized.”

Witnessing the happiness of “I Kissed a Girl’s contestants is possible, Tori McCandless writes, because we also witness their successful navigation of a world that is unwelcoming of difference––which includes navigating a lot of big, often bad feelings.

Though similar in premise to “Love Island,” BBC’s “I Kissed a Girl” has more wholesome “teachable moments” that aim to present and explore some aspect of queer culture.

To view “I Kissed a Girl” as predominantly upbeat, Tori McCandless argues, is to miss why it’s important how the show represents bad feelings. It misses how such bad feelings necessarily correspond to any joy the show represents.

“What makes ‘I Kissed a Girl’ so great is that it foregrounds queers who openly relay their traumas. And they do so, crucially, without being consumed by such traumas, or erasing the essential differences they reveal.”

“The good feelings are contingent on a history of listening to her body and realizing that her embodied experience of racism and homophobia offers evidence of what is wrong with the world.”

“I Kissed a Girl” is full of chaotic gay energy, sex jokes, and campy moments. But it also beautifully honors the ways in which queer joy is earned.

Fantastic piece by Jannat Suleiman out today in @publicbooks.bsky.social www.publicbooks.org/hijabs-on-th...

“Despite the persistent modern dilemma around the diversity and inclusion of Muslim women and hijabi women as a right-wing red herring, it’s the streaming platforms—not the Hollywood executives—that have consistently taken a chance on such characters.”

New at PB: Jannat Suleman (@theamateurstake.bsky.social) tracks the differences in hijabi representation on TV and in films. Hollywood studios, she concludes, rarely portray hijabi women, and when they do, there’s often much that’s misrepresented.

New at PB: Jannat Suleman (@theamateurstake.bsky.social) asks: Why is hijabi representation divided between small-screen success and big-screen blunders?

The notion that dissent should be peaceful is liberal brainwashing at best but I was doing supply runs at the action in DTLA yesterday & it was as usual the cops & the national guard inciting violence against people justifiably angry about being terrorized & deported by ICE.

We are mourning the loss of Jonathan Sterne: author, editor, contributor, mentor, and friend. buff.ly/HcoVX9x

Rest well Jonathan Sterne, a truly wonderful human in addition to being a brilliant intellect. When I met him he told me he didn’t go to any conference or invited gig unless it promised to be a good time & every time I saw him after that was indeed a good time. Lots of love to all who loved him. 💖

“By these actions, by their willingness to scapegoat and vilify the pro-Palestine student movement, these institutions have invited their enemies in, becoming testing grounds for the authoritarianism that threatens our nation.” truthout.org/articles/as-...

All out to free Mahmoud Khalil in Federal Plaza today! 🔥

A crowd has gathered for the NYC protest against the illegal ICE arrest of Columbia grad student Mahmoud Khalil. Protesters are chanting and calling for his immediate release. Multiple helicopters overhead.

re the previous repost: if they can disappear permanent residents they can disappear citizens