November 5, 2025 History The Long March of Basic Trust By Alexander Kluge Film stills from Die Macht der Gefühle (The power of emotion), final sequence: “Undoing of a crime by means of cooperation,” 1983. All images courtesy of Alexander Kluge. ARRIVAL OF SUNDAY’S CHILD Things went on until three in the morning. The child, arriving in the world at 11:55 P.M., bathed, photographed, placed in the young mother’s arms, still counts as a Sunday child. At this point the servant girls are in their rooms, too. All the drunk well-wishers have sunk down onto the sofas and across the floor of the salons and are fast asleep. The day following the excitement is a Monday. The girls clean up the remains of the feast. The head doctor is already in his office. Patients are coming up the stairs to the waiting room. The female doctor is asleep. The child in the room next to the female doctor has been “forgotten” for a few hours. Although all carry the “news of the happy event” in their excited hearts, the basket with the child itself has been put away and it will be noon before anyone thinks to ask about the new arrival’s regularities. First, the flowers in the winter garden need to be stowed away. Stocks from the pantry brought to the cleaning woman’s family. They are considered to have been “used yesterday.” The young doctor can hardly believe that, at all of twenty-four years of age, she managed a birth. She’s got earplugs in, is fast asleep. Were visitors not expected to come to congratulate the “Sunday child” during the afternoon, you could easily forget that piece of meat in the basket, even if it screamed. Read More
November 4, 2025 Bookmarks Rotten Tomatoes By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From A. S. Hamrah’s Last Week in End Times Cinema (Semiotexte), a daily bulletin of movie news: April 28, 2024 Selling point of Deadpool & Wolverine is that it doesn’t require any “Marvel homework” WBD and Amazon “may have unknowingly” used North Korean companies for animation work on two of their TV series Studios have begun hiring some directors based on the Rotten Tomatoes scores of their recent movies Kalshi, a financial exchange and predictive-market company, offers a betting product for Rotten Tomatoes scores. “Now anyone can make money by being a movie critic,” is how they sell it WBD CEO David Zaslav’s $49.7 million salary is more than the entire operating budget of WBD’s Turner Classic Movies, flagship channel of American film history Instead of reporting subscriber numbers, Netflix will use a new metric they call “Fandom,” which is based on how many people watch trailers or parts of trailers on their platform. “Over six billion impressions every month,” they claim, as if that means anything Comedian–Unfrosted director Jerry Seinfeld says “the movie business is over,” replaced by “depression, malaise, confusion—disorientation.” This succinct, not untrue statement has got him mocked on social media Jean-Luc Godard’s last film, Scénarios, completed the day before he died, will debut at Cannes, then be distributed and sold by an NFT company, Roadstead Rapper-director Kanye West launching adult entertainment studio, Yeezy Porn Writer-director Aaron Sorkin is planning an antidisinformation J6 movie that is also a sequel to The Social Network Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom star Chris Pratt and wife Katherine Schwarzenegger, author of the book The Gift of Forgiveness: Inspiring Stories from Those Who Have Overcome the Unforgivable, have torn down the architecturally significant modernist Zimmerman House in Brentwood, built 1950. The couple purchased the house for $12.5 million and will replace it with a 15,000-square-foot “modern farmhouse”-style mansion A saggy, older, deflated appearance is characteristic of the emaciation now known in Hollywood as “Ozempic face,” named after the prescription weight-loss drug that’s overprescribed in Los Angeles. Using too much of it too quickly is causing an endemic zombielike look, with sunken eyes and gaunt cheeks Things Change writer-director David Mamet insists his two actor daughters, Zosia and Clara, are not nepo babies, because learning from being on set earned them a spot in the bigs. “They haven’t benefited from any type of privilege,” he says Writer-director-actor Ben Stiller announces he was shocked no one liked Zoolander 2. The comedy sequel came out in 2016 Lucasfilm has partnered with a dairy company to make and sell Star Wars Blue Milk. Formerly only available at Disney theme parks, the liquid food product will be sold in grocery stores and through DoorDash Tram derails at Universal Studios Hollywood as it passes too quickly through the Jurassic Park exhibit. Fifteen injured, some seriously. California Highway Patrol investigating. Read More
November 3, 2025 Car Crushes Car Talk By Cynthia Zarin 2005 Saab sedan. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC by 3.0. I learned to drive in the parking lot of what was then called the A&P supermarket, which marked the turnoff to a house my family owned then, by a cove and across from a small harbor. The idea was that my father would teach me. During the summers I spent a good deal of time alone with my father on a nineteen-foot sailboat called the Nausicaa. In the Odyssey, Nausicaa, the daughter of King Alcinous and Queen Arete, is washing clothes by an inlet on the island of Phaeacia, near where Odysseus, after a shipwreck, has washed ashore. When he appears, roused from slumber by the splash in a tidepool engineered by the goddess Athena, Nausicaa’s startled handmaidens flee, but “Alcinous’ daughter held fast, for Athena planted courage within her heart.” Odysseus is naked. Nausicaa lends him some laundry to wear and takes him home to meet her parents, whom he entertains by telling stories: The Nausicaa episode is a frame for many of the tales of the Odyssey. Oddly, her name is often translated as “ship burner.” The boat had come with that moniker, and it didn’t occur to my father to change it. On calm days, I liked to lie prostrate on the prow, my cheek against the boat’s warm skin, which smelled of salt, sun, rubber, and seagull. When a storm blew, the boom swung around, lines cut into my fingers, and my father shouted imprecations. Decades later, he took one of my daughters out on a Sunfish on a nearby pond. The wind came up. We may not make it back, he said. She returned white-faced and never went sailing with him again. At her age, I did not have that prerogative. When it came time for me to obtain my learner’s permit, my father announced that since he’d taught me to sail, he’d teach me to drive. My mother was the much better driver, but no matter. Rather than Port! Starboard! my father yelled Left! Right! On the empty black tarmac of the shopping plaza, I clutched the wheel of our old Ford Country Squire station wagon as if we were tacking into the breakers. Read More
October 31, 2025 Home Improvements Weatherizing Salem By Nathan Dragon All photographs courtesy of the author. I usually tell people I don’t know well that my work is roofing and siding. I also tell people this when I, correctly or incorrectly, assume they don’t know what weatherization is. When I type out weatherization, a red line appears underneath the word, indicating that the program I use to write doesn’t know what it is either. I don’t explain that I’m usually crawling, crouching, and squirming around an attic, air-sealing; or a knee wall, air-sealing; or in a crawl space, air-sealing. In other words, blasting spray foam in a small, gross space. Sometimes I explain that I’m up on a ladder—anything from a sixteen-footer to a thirty-two- and, sometimes, but rarely, a forty-footer—drilling holes into the wall between each bay, from the outside, underneath siding that has been taken off to expose the home’s sheathing. Sometimes holes have to be drilled inside a house—interior drill and blow—because of asbestos or because there’s a dormer on a third or fourth floor sticking out from a too-steep roof. Sometimes I mix up the job’s jargon—strats, rafters, studs, strapping, joists. Something like foam could mean spray foam or foam board, it all depends on the context. I’m usually covered in dust, mold, and rat shit, squeezing through knee walls, attics, crawl spaces. This is all considered unskilled labor. After holes are drilled into the wall, or the attic’s prepped, the necessary spaces get filled with cellulose, a kind of insulation made of things like shredded newspaper. When I’m cutting open the bags to load it into the blower machine (versus into the truck to transport it), I think: What history or literature is being blown into these walls? Returns that got pulped? My book? My friends’ books, my foes’? Sometimes you can catch a few words from things like grocery-store flyers—FROZEN LASAGNA MEALS $6.99. Read More
October 31, 2025 Rereading The Visionary Company of Kathryn Davis By Alex Andriesse Photograph by Alex Andriesse. I used to live in a bungalow in Shattuckville, Massachusetts. It was a ramshackle bungalow, built during the Great Depression and renovated, desultorily, by hippies—the floorboards were stoppered with wine corks; a torn flannel shirt plugged a hole in the wall—and Shattuckville was a ramshackle town. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a town at all but a hamlet on a hill, home to about thirty people. At the bottom of this hill lay the North River, some houses and trailers, and a fluctuating troupe of cats and dogs. The road to the river had once had a bridge at the end of it, until about a hundred years ago a flood came and washed the bridge away. It was never rebuilt. In winter, when the leaves were down, you could see a remnant of it sitting on the far bank, over where a country store out of operation since Reagan’s first term still advertised Ice-Cold Coca-Cola. That bungalow was where I first read Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place—a chorus of a novel about a small town in New England called Varennes. It features the voices of all kinds of creatures that live there: humans, yes, but also cats and dogs, beavers and moose, even lichen. You could call it ecofiction if you like the sound of that word, but I do not, so I will call it visionary, which is how I would describe pretty much everything that Kathryn Davis has written. Read More
October 29, 2025 First Person My Truck Desk By Bud Smith Photograph courtesy of Bud Smith. After eight glorious weeks of freedom, I got rehired. First thing I did was walk over to the machine shop to look for my F-150. The oil stain was there but the truck wasn’t. It wasn’t in the rock lot where the bulldozers parked either. Who would have stooped so low as to co-opt that piece of shit? It had no heat and no air-conditioning. The radio bubbled static. Door handles were missing. Floorboards, fenders, and frame all rusted and rotted. It certainly hadn’t been what could be called roadworthy. And, my God, the smell. I went into the machine shop. One of the welders lifted his hood and told me the bad news—they’d had to move the truck for a rebar delivery and the engine on that old thing finally blew, so the truck got dragged to the scrapyard. In a dusty corner, I saw a pile of salvaged tools from the truck. I took some wrenches and my tape measure but didn’t see what I was really looking for—my Truck Desk®. Oh well. Read More