Just watched the new Knives Out and I think it's really important you know that the scene in the Seminary's Gym is filmed in the same place Rick Astley filmed the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up. I saw the window tracery and immediately made my friends pause the film so I could tell them.

Now watching Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard

I used to manage wine programs for movie theaters and I am in the extremely unique position to say with professional certainty that the answer here is a crisp Albariño.

modesty laws prevented showing even one lousy frame of John Waters' PINK FLAMINGOS (1972) in the trailer, so the only footage in it is of people reacting to a screening they just came out of. every single type of extant queer person is contained in the specific sequences I have selected here

I have started to wonder the degree to which Miller believes what he says. I used to think he was smart enough to know eg the roles that immigrants played in these achievements, but I’m starting to wonder if he’s hateful *and* stupid

The American officer corps not reconciling with how a guy like Flynn could reach the highest levels of American military intelligence is part of the reason we’re in this mess

Trump's DOJ was monitoring all the movements of the Miami Herald reporter who was covering the Epstein case.

it is extremely funny that RFK both does not believe in the germ theory of disease and is a lab leak truther

You might ask yourself, as I did, if this piece will prove to be a pretentiously justified rejection of empathy and a denial of the trauma of rape. The answer is yes. (Paywall free link in replies.)

Utterly chilling reporting from the Prospect and NY times on trumps war in the Caribbean www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/w...

A great Terry O'Neill shot of Brigitte Bardot, taken on the set of The Legend of Frenchie King, 1971 #RIP "That was the last frame in a roll of 35 millimeter. The wind blew & I took the picture. I only had one crack at it, & it turned out to be a stunner."

Brigitte Bardot by Yousuf Karsh, May 1, 1958 #RIP Karsh portraits are always impressive, always beautifully lit. But sometimes they tend to look a bit alike. Then Bardot turns up, & you get a photo like this.

#RIP Brigitte Bardot 📷 Georges Dambier, 1954

We had congressional hearings when parents just suspected heavy metal was leading some kids to suicide.

The New York Times claims that the Trump administration, in concert with France and others, is pushing for the release of Marwan Barghouti.

This is the world Justice Kavanaugh sanctioned in his foolish & unnecessary concurring opinion to the Court’s order in Noem v Vasquez Perdomo. His hopes of cleaning up that blunder with a plaintive footnote in last week’s concurring opinion in Trump v. Illinois, demonstrates his staggering naïveté.

From my man @bilgeebiri.bsky.social's great piece on movie marketing: www.vulture.com/article/movi...

Imagine it being easier to just pay the 8 billion dollars and it won't affect you in the slightest. Man what have we done lol

Who could possibly have foreseen this.

RIP Brigitte Bardot, age 91. Farewell, beautiful.

Omg

Guillermo del Toro: "I've taken some liberties in adapting the Mary Shelly novel, I hope everyone understands." Ishiro Honda: "Frankenstein the deathless will fight a burrowing dinosaur with a glowing horn and radiation breath, signifying mankind will never understand the monsters we create."

[screaming at the top of my lungs, once again] the fundamental technology of humanity is care

This piece is a great illustration of how the long-term effect of Trump’s destruction of US institutions won’t be felt in a dramatic market collapse, but rather in permanently worse economic conditions, and lower prosperity. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... So long, American exceptionalism

We didn't survive and thrive as a species because we had warriors or hunters - pretty much every omnivore can manage that. We did so because we developed Grandmothers, and domesticated Dogs. Community is what defines us as a species, and every "self-reliant" libertarian shitweasel be damned.

It's very tedious to read only negative comments about Brigitte Bardot this morning. She wasn't crafting policy or leading a movement... so while I dislike her opinions, I prefer to remember the icon who changed everything.

Italian immigrant communities into America in the early 1900s were subjected to the most appalling degrees of racism and bigotry and it led to the USA actively moving to stop migration from Italy in a series of acts including the Emergency Quota Act (1921) and the restrictive Immigration Act (1924)

Now watching

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf / Leos Carax / 1991.

Looks like the influence campaign against Qatar and its Education City project is starting again, this time with Northwestern as the primary target (and just as NU is starting a search for a new president) www.jpost.com/opinion/arti...

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

I’ve seen Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005) a couple of times but last night I watched it, as I find myself increasingly doing more and more with any rewatch, with the intent of trying to discern, through such tools as framing, tone, and editing, what Herzog was up to. He seems to 1/3

All of the money that changed hands in the Teapot Dome scandal totaled less than $10 million after adjusting for inflation, and it was considered so corrupt we still teach it in high school government classes a century later.

All pets fall into one of two categories: faithful companion or weird little guy. Cats? Weird little guy. Dogs? Faithful companion (except very small dogs) Rats? Faithful companion. Hamsters? Weird little guy. Parrots? Weird little guy. Horses? Faithful companion.

Scrolling through Soros’s articles in the NYRB is just him being right again and again.

Israeli attacks on journalists’ families "have become a repeated & organized pattern." With 706 journalist relatives killed in Gaza since 7 Oct 2023, "the scale and consistency of the attacks indicate they are not the result of random wartime conditions." www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/li...

It’s weird that Netanyahu had taken what should be a very high risk step of aligning with one US political party but the other one refuses to punish him for if

Me when I’m put in charge of one of the largest broadcasting networks in the country “is this what it’s like to be hounded out of society?”

the graduation of a cohort of gaza’s new medical professionals in front of the ruins of al shifa hospital. No words, really.

In the US it is taken as a given within institutional liberalism that Palestinians should live under this arrangement for the rest of time— or until Israel decides to do something else.

October-7th and what followed have radicalized me very hard against ethnonationalism. Just legions of people on every side who should and absolutely do know better saying “ok but [attrocity] is good when it’s us tho” and being taken seriously for some reason. Fuck your blood and fuck your soil.

Elite free speech discourse has culminated in state action to compel labor

“it is illegal for you not to like me”

i am not going to pretend there’s a debate about what heritage american means. there is not. the debate over whether there’s a debate is a means of infiltration and normalization. if we are going to debate this then we must also debate if 2 and 2 make 5. it’s no less obviously stupid and malignant.

One of the lasting impacts of William Buckley getting dog walked by James Baldwin in the Cambridge debate in 1965 was that racial conservatism decided it was easier to dismiss Black ideas because they couldn't win the argument.

We should ask why it’s so easy for terms and concepts like “Heritage American” and “Western Chauvinism” are met with earnest analysis and exploration while academic theory produced by Black scholars are summarily dismissed by people reading introductory texts if that.

Not lost on me that the vast majority of the people who were on here in mid 2024 talking about the need to restore Lebanese sovereignty have nothing to say about the total depopulation of much of south Lebanon by the Israeli occupation or the arbitrary and totally unrestrained bombing campaign.

Jasper Nathaniel is an excellent reporter who has lived for a while in the occupied West Bank and he's right on the money here: a lot of people who are naturally predisposed towards the Israeli narrative flip entirely once they actually witness what occupation and apartheid look like with their eyes