Weekend Reads (Jul 1): “Star Trek,” “Piranesi,” Typography, Google vs. Canada, Alan Arkin (RIP)
Recommended weekend reading material for July 1, 2023.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Star Trek is one of Paramount’s most iconic titles, and the franchise is arguably on a really strong footing following Picard’s third and (presumably) final season and the buzz surrounding a potential Legacy series. So why is Paramount’s handling of the franchise so bad?
Paramount+, née CBS All Access, didn’t have the smoothest of launches out of spacedock in the rise, and now fall, of its quest to become the definitive online home of Star Trek content. But today the streamer’s attempts came to a crashing, messy conclusion with the controversial removal of Star Trek: Prodigy. This time last year, the series was the bold vanguard of an attempt to bring the venerable sci-fi franchise to new audiences in a way Star Trek hadn’t attempted in years, and the latest in what was now a whole fleet of Star Trek shows on the platform. In a swift, single move — not just the takeback of a second season renewal, but the complete erasure of the series from its platform — the studio’s stratospheric ascent seems to have come crashing down all around it.
This is yet another reminder that if possible, buy physical copies of your favorite movies and TV series. “We all know, deep down, that studios are money-making machines focused primarily on protecting their intellectual property and increasing shareholder value, not faithful stewards of art and culture.”
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is a visually astonishing piece of animation, but according to several animators, working on the film was a nightmare.
According to people who worked on the sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, it’s because the working conditions required to produce such artistry are not sustainable. Multiple Across the Spider-Verse crew members — ranging from artists to production executives who have worked anywhere from five to a dozen years in the animation business — describe the process of making the the $150 million Sony project as uniquely arduous, involving a relentless kind of revisionism that compelled approximately 100 artists to flee the movie before its completion. Four of these crew members agreed to speak pseudonymously about the sprint to finish the movie three years into the sequel’s development and production, a period whose franticness they attribute to Lord’s management style — in particular, his seeming inability to conceptualize 3-D animation during the early planning stages and his preference to edit fully rendered work instead.
Related: Visual effects artists are critical to the success of the effects-filled movies coming from Marvel and DC, but they often have to work demanding, extra-long hours to meet incredibly tight studio schedules. Some are now pushing to unionize in order to improve their working conditions.
The fifth and final Indiana Jones movie is now in theaters, but did you know that there were other Indiana Jones movies that never got made?
We decided to grab our fedoras and leather jackets to do some excavating of our own. Turns out that some of these unfinished films about everyone’s favorite Nazi-punching archeologist are just as interesting and ambitious as those that reached theaters — and one of them, arguably, is even better. And in several cases, ideas from these lost projects ended up on screen in other films.
Indiana Jones and the Monkey King sounds like it would’ve been particularly wild.
Related: My roundup of reviews and reactions to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
It’s the end of an era: National Geographic reportedly laid off its last remaining staff writers and starting next year, will no longer be sold on newsstands.
The outlet, which has documented the natural world and global humanity for over a century, told CNN in a statement that it would continue to publish monthly issues.
“Staffing changes will not change our ability to do this work, but rather give us more flexibility to tell different stories and meet our audiences where they are across our many platforms,” the spokesperson told the outlet. “Any insinuation that the recent changes will negatively impact the magazine, or the quality of our storytelling, is simply incorrect.”
Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (2020) is a delightful little gem of a novel, and it’s an interesting introduction to the Renaissance concept of memory palaces.
A Renaissance memory palace is a mnemonic device where you construct a multi-roomed house in your mind. Then you put an image linked to a specific idea into each room. So if you want to recall a battle that took place over Christmas, for example, you could put a sword (representing battle) in a hall decorated with evergreens and holly (representing Christmas). When you wish to retrieve that idea, you simply walk through your memory palace to the appropriate room and retrieve it. Memory palaces are not strictly a Renaissance invention, though as Aysegul Savas writes in “The Celestial Memory Palace,” “[d]uring the Renaissance, the technique took on mystical dimensions, and the memory palaces of the mind became systems for accessing a celestial consciousness.”
The Washington Post wants to help you find your perfect font, er, typeface.
You make font choices every day. You pick type designs each time you use a word processor, read an e-book, send an email, prepare a presentation, craft a wedding invite and make an Instagram story.
It might seem like just a question of style, but research reveals fonts can dramatically shape what you communicate and how you read.
Via The Verge.
In other typographic news, Mark Wilson dives deep into LoveFrom Serif, a typeface painstakingly developed by Jony Ive’s new company, also called LoveFrom. (Ive is the designer behind some of Apple’s most iconic products.)
The typeface… has become an apt symbol to represent the firm’s raison d’être: namely, a devotion to craftsmanship, regardless of how protracted the process. LoveFrom built its foundation on the premise that the almost imperceptible intricacies that make a designed object great can elevate our world to a place where things feel more than beautiful — they feel necessary — and by getting more designers with different disciplines working together on these projects, they can move the needle forward across the field as a whole.
Via Daring Fireball.
The level of detail in LoveFrom Serif is pretty incredible; just check out the continuous curves on the tips of the serifs and the terminals on certain italicized lowercase letters.
Google and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) will begin blocking and removing links to Canadian news sites in response to recently passed legislation that would force them to pay publishers for content.
The two tech giants have been battling the Canadian government over the law that would force them to negotiate compensation deals with news organizations for distributing links to news stories.
The law, called the Online News Act, passed last week. But it could take months for it to take effect. Once it does, Google and Meta say they will start removing news articles by Canadian news outlets from their services in the country.
Supporters of the legislation have argued that it could provide a much-needed lifeline to the ailing news industry, which has been gutted by Silicon Valley's ironclad control of digital advertising.
On the one hand, I understand publishers being frustrated with tech giants running roughshod over them and getting super-rich in the process. (Just look at how Facebook’s decisions over the years have affected publishers.) On the other hand, levying a tax on merely linking to a site — as Google does in their search results — is bone-headed and completely antithetical to how the web works.
Speaking of Google, it was ten years ago today that Google Reader was shut down (and it still hurts). The Verge talks with some of the people who worked on Reader to find out why it went south, and to dream about what might’ve been.
Google’s bad reputation for killing and abandoning products started with Reader and has only gotten worse over time. But the real tragedy of Reader was that it had all the signs of being something big, and Google just couldn’t see it. Desperate to play catch-up to Facebook and Twitter, the company shut down one of its most prescient projects; you can see in Reader shades of everything from Twitter to the newsletter boom to the rising social web. To executives, Google Reader may have seemed like a humble feed aggregator built on boring technology. But for users, it was a way of organizing the internet, for making sense of the web, for collecting all the things you care about no matter its location or type, and helping you make the most of it.
Finally, Alan Arkin, who won an Oscar for his performance in Little Miss Sunshine, died this week at the age of 89.
Arkin was an actor whose gifts were recognized early. After his Tony in 1963, he earned his first Emmy nomination, for the “ABC Stage 67” episode “The Love Song of Barney Kempinski,” in 1967, the same year he earned his first Oscar nomination. Arkin never really left television despite the success of his film career. His next Emmy nomination came in 1987 for the Holocaust-themed CBS telepic “Escape From Sobibor”; the third was in 1997 for a guest appearance on “Chicago Hope” and another in 2003 for telepic “The Pentagon Papers.”
Remarkably, Arkin earned his first Oscar nomination for his first credited feature performance. Norman Jewison’s “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming” was a Cold War comedy in which a Soviet sub runs aground on a New England island; Arkin played the leader of the Russian party set to scout out the area. Hilarity ensues as Russians and Americans make wild encounters. The New York Times noted that it was Arkin’s debut film and said he gave “a particularly wonderful performance.”
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