"Life in The Grim Old Days" (Robert Zubrin): a review of Chelsea Follett's The Grim Old Days, arguing that nostalgia for pre-industrial life falls apart once you look at the everyday details. Those include infant mortality, filth, quack medicine and constant contact with death.
Thomas Doherty reviews the recent City Center run of Eric Bentley's 1972 docudrama, whose dialogue is drawn word-for-word from the HUAC transcripts. He admires the staging and the performances (Bob Odenkirk as Lionel Stander, Harry Lennix as Paul Robeson) but argues that the verbatim format lets the audience feel righteous while editing out the messier history e.g. Lillian Hellman cutting her conscience to follow the Party line after the Hitler–Stalin Pact.
This is a fun piece. The author spent two years picking up discarded cigarette packs around Canberra (972 of them) and found roughly three in four were illegally imported rather than plain-packaged, taxed product. His argument is that Australia's sky-high tobacco excise hasn't stamped out smoking so much as handed the market to illicit importers, while government revenue collapses.
In 1940 Orwell devoted a 10,000-word Horizon piece to dismissing the Magnet and Gem boys' weeklies — and their creator "Frank Richards" — as snobbish propaganda selling working-class boys a fantasy of wealth and empire, while doubting one author could possibly have written them all. Charles Hamilton's published reply (yes, one man) argued that entertainment isn't propaganda and that childhood happiness is worth defending, and it's widely seen as one of the rare debates Orwell clearly lost. Reading it now, with the 1980s library purges and today's sensitivity edits in mind: does fiction owe us realism, or is there a real defence for stories that simply let readers be happy?
This essay revisits Breaking the Waves on its 30th anniversary, reading Bess's martyrdom through Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, Calvinist predestination, and the long lineage of the "sacrificed virgin."
This is the 30th instalment of Quillette's Nations of Canada series. It traces how a new Jesuit administrator, Jérôme Lalement, tried to run the Huronia mission like a French college — strict schedules, a walled settlement at Sainte-Marie, and a year-plus vetting process before baptism — over the objections of Jean de Brébeuf, who'd learned the mission only worked through daily immersion in Wendat life. Then the 1640 smallpox epidemic hit.
A coalition of online-right influencers spent seven months urging a boycott of Nolan's Odyssey — over a Black Helen of Troy, a false rumour that Elliot Page was cast as Achilles, and general "woke" charges — and the film still opened to $264M worldwide. Sopo argues this "grift industrial complex" runs on an unfalsifiable model (if a film flops, the boycott worked; if it succeeds, the conspiracy must be real) and separates genuine conservatism, rooted in Scruton's "love of home," from a reaction built entirely on grievance.
Rachel Moiselle — a Trinity College linguist of paternal Jewish heritage — argues that Ireland's core antisemitism problem isn't violence but denial: a country with fewer than 3,000 Jews pours enormous media and political energy into Israel, and anti-Zionism has taken on an almost religious fervour in post-Catholic Ireland. She recounts being hounded for weeks by an anonymous account later traced to a well-known Sinn Féin politician, despite holding moderate, pro-two-state, pro-ceasefire views.
The essay's hook is the "blimp" — the sound-dampening housing Nolan's team built so the notoriously loud IMAX camera could finally record whispered dialogue inches from an actor's face, making The Odyssey the first narrative feature shot entirely on IMAX. Claire Lehmann sets that against a longer pattern in art history, where a new tool (paint tubes, the iron-framed piano, the electric bass) repeatedly unlocks a new kind of expression.
Pop economist Gary Stevenson 's schtick is that that UK wealth inequality is spiralling out of control, but the data doesn't actually show that.
The top 1%'s share of British wealth has been roughly flat at ~22% for two decades and is actually low by both historical and international standards (lower than the European average, well below Germany or Sweden). Even left-leaning think tanks like the Resolution Foundation don't back Stevenson's framing.
Despite that, Channel 4 is featuring him and his narrative in his new documentary How to Get Filthy Rich. Clearly no one had a serious look at the data.
Interesting podcast (with transcript) between two of my favourite female political commentators in Australia.
Claire Lehmann sits down with Parnell Palme McGuinness **(**columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and senior research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies) to unpack her landmark report, Generation Trapped, on the collapsing life satisfaction of Australians aged 18–34.
Parnell identifies six distinct “tribes” among young Australians—from disillusioned Progressive Identitarians to optimistic Strivers—and explains why a sense of control, not income, is the strongest predictor of happiness. The conversation ranges across why women are swinging toward One Nation, the missing men in the marriage debate, the manosphere and the collapse of dating culture, and why the government’s new budget may be actively hurting the young people it claims to help.
This essay uses Pauline Kael's take-no-prisoners film criticism and F.R. Leavis's rigid "Great Tradition" as cautionary examples of critics who issue verdicts rather than illuminate, and holds up Northrop Frye's more expansive, non-judgmental framework as the alternative. Curious what this sub thinks: is a critic's real job to render verdicts (Kael, Leavis), or to map and illuminate without ruling things in or out (Frye)? And can aesthetic judgment ever really be separated from moral judgment, as the piece struggles with re: Dirty Harry and Bill T.
This is a review of Claudia Verhoeven's new book Love and Terror, which pushes back on Bugliosi's official "race war" motive — arguing the killings were more likely an improvised cover-up for an earlier murder than a calculated plot to start Helter Skelter. It also traces how Manson has since been recast by different fringe groups as an environmentalist prophet and, separately, a white-power icon — readings the reviewer thinks give him too much credit.
Really enjoyed this podcast with Aaron Pete.