Really is that the best Madam Bondi could do? The pictures of Big Brother in the 1984 movie our Dear Leader possibly saw as a kid were really, really YUGE.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/15/u... Lede asks "Is seeing still believing?" & continues "Based on the evidence of the past week, it is hard to say." Consider unsubtle dialectic in this think piece & understand why the smarter ICE apologists are so eager to have their masked thugs equipped w body cams.

www.nytimes.com/athletic/704... This mega (MAGA?) billionaire is puzzled b/c having played for a team that crapped out of the post season, a great pitcher who's never been to the series might want to play for the best team in baseball? All he really cares about is getting a casino on NYC parkland.

rarefilmm.com/2017/07/abis... Wuthering Heights? A blatant hacienda melodrama that camps out on poverty row, pushing mediocre actors & hyperbolic montage to the max, before blasting triumphantly into the stratosphere, Luis Bunuel's 1954 Mexican version is a true surrealist classic.

a latrine for the pigeons

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/t...? Our Dear Leader is not just a monster but an embarrassment. Forget about the golf course, this egel hazahav is destined to find its home at the Trump Gaza on Kushner Family Boulevard.

“echo” is a weird way to say “are” www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/u...

The murder of Medgar Evers was an act of racial terror. That fact is not partisan. It is historical. Calling it anything else is not “restoring truth.” It is erasing it.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/m... A stylish mash-up with an offbeat cast, Michael Almereyda’s 1995 film “Nadja” opens Friday--takes its title from André Breton’s surrealist novel & transposes the premise of the 1936 chestnut “Dracula’s Daughter” to ungentrified NoHo.

www.moma.org/calendar/eve... Preservation premiere Ken Jacobs's 1963 Baud’lairian Capers (fea Flo Jacobs & Bob Fleischner) & Ken's favorite Yiddish film Zayn Vaybs Lubovnik (His Wife’s Lover, 1931) w Ludwig Satz Intro by J. Hoberman (signing books pre screening) Thu, Jan 29, 7 PM MoMA, Theater 2

Ralston Farina Unpacked... www.artforum.com/features/i-r...

artistsspace.org/exhibitions/... I shoulda skyed "Time/Time" weeks ago (kept lazily waiting for reviews). This first exhibition of a long dead object-poet cum SoHo performance-artist's notes, files, gags & chachkes is underground, Talmudic & often pretty funny, at Artists Space thru Feb 21.

Baud'lairian Capers is a restored 1964 Ken Jacobs film featuring Flo Jacobs & Bob Fleischner. Made in 1932, Zayn Vaybs Lubovnik (also restored by the Center for Jewish Film), a comedy w the great Ludwig Satz) was Ken's favorite Yiddish film. He bought a 16mm print & used to show it sans subtitles.

I would absolutely love to give you a personalized book recommendation if you promise that tomorrow, not today, you purchase from Bookshop.org to benefit a Twin Cities bookstore.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026... Sending this out to my students. We've been discussing the nature of photographic "truth claim." Note official disclaimer when deception was pointed out.

Hottest? Not quite yet, although Arizona and east Texas are getting up there.

🎤 Legendary film critic and historian J. Hoberman joins us this Monday, January 19 for a Q&A following our 35mm 🎞️ screening of Unzere Kinder's OUR CHILDREN (1948), a rarely seen classic from post-WWII Poland. OUR CHILDREN screens as part of the New York Jewish Film Festival. 🎟️: filmlinc.org/nyjff

www.nytimes.com/interactive/... "Separation"? I'd call it "The Betrayal." Trump, Putin & Netanyahu are the new Axis.

gothamist.com/news/ny-stud... This is something. “We try not to prescribe curriculum but there are a small number of events of such historical importance that we feel it necessary to ensure all public school kids in New York are taught about these events” sez state Sen. John Liu (Queens Democrat)

Just read and knocked out by Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata's early Scarlet Gang of Asakusa--a great big city novel, comparable in its hyper modernism to Berlin Alexanderplatz or Manhattan Transfer. What is its critical status? Is it being taught these days outside of Japanese lit courses?

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/o... "Mamdani is part of a long tradition in New York City that has framed itself as seeking to reclaim the demyocratic community of the city from wealth, power and greed" which is to say the likes of Donald Trump

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/w... Why are we not surprised?

us18.campaign-archive.com?e=68e7433329... Could this be the end of Bibi?

reverseshot.org/interviews/e... Very granular interview conducted by Jordan Crank when I was in LA in late September.

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/u... "The data shows otherwise" but Miller himself is an example.

www.nytimes.com/1958/05/14/a... Trump remembers this

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/m... Xmas in German-occupied France was... weird.

The fascist moment is global. Models self on Trump, reveres Pinochet, is a gender nationalist. Oh and his dad was a Nazi. Literally. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

What do Venezuela, Iraq, and Iran (and Greenland) have in common?

newrepublic.com/article/2042... It only took them a year to figure this out--should have been obvious to anyone looking at the numbers.

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/w... In addition to glamorous Malevich, Ukraine could claim the Jewish writers Isaac Babel, Vasily Grossman, Mendele Mocher Sforim, Der Nister, & Sholom Aleichem.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d... “They haven’t had an election in a long time,” said the US president. “You know, they talk about a democracy, but it gets to a point where it’s not a democracy any more.” Spoken like Putin's sock puppet.

jewishcurrents.org/how-trumps-g... As w previous “international” plans—from Oslo to Jared Kushner’s “Deal of the Century”—the Trump plan presents Israeli gains as concessions & Palestinian losses as rewards [along] w outsiders’ shameless pursuit of their own political & financial interests.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzTj... A footnote to the Steve Cropper fest--this cover of his great song (written w Wilson Pickett), 5 1/2 minutes of soaring gospel energy, ending in 2 minutes of joyful call & response. No knock on the single but this version is pure uplift (& was astounding live)

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d... “Europe is preventing the US administration from achieving peace on Ukraine,” Putin said, adding: “Russia does not intend to fight Europe, but if Europe starts, we are ready right now.” Taco time! Blaming Europe, Putin will play our Dear Leader once again.

Off the pile #5: The Gracie Allen Murder Case Laugh out loud funny. Working solo, Gracie is the most disruptive comic force since Harpo Marx. Her straight man is the overbearing & lubricious Warren William as detective Philo Vance (whom she insists on calling "Fido"). Did she write her own stuff?

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/u... Maybe I'm being too 20th Century here but isn't the real point that Venezuela produces... oil? Like the largest proven reserves in the world?

Republicans Prove Irony Is Dead With Vote on Condemning Fascism newrepublic.com/post/203347/... via @newrepublic.com

Maida Rosenstein 2110 still going strong hyperallergic.com/1057800/met-...

Off the Pile #4 James Whale makes this pre-Code job--an upstairs-downstairs bedroom farce predicated on class privilege & mistaken identity--most watchable. Not Lubitsch (altho Hanns Kräly had a hand) but not bad. Casting e.g. Bela Lugosi & Lupe Velez would've made for wackier Ruritarian screwball.

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/m... New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther found the film “an ugly, depressing view of life.” Perhaps one had to be 16 to see “Viridiana” as a grown-up version of Mad magazine. Call mine a case of arrested development, but I still do.

Fuck yeah

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS

Desperate Character www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Read every word & share with everyone you know. This is real life here in Chicago. Americans need to know this grotesque reality & stand with us.

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/m... My (or rather his) class notes in the penultimate graf.

Xi has been repressing China's independent film scene for the last dozen years but, so far as I know, this is the first time he exercised dictatorial power in NYC. Between emperor Xi and idiot Trump, the often brilliant international students who come here to study are going to have a tough time.