Weekend Reads (Jan 27): Oscars, James Bond, Apple’s Macintosh, Hip-Hop Cheese
Recommended weekend reading for January 27, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
The full list of 2024 Oscar nominations has been released, and not surprisingly, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer leads the pack.
Oppenheimer, a sprawling examination of the dawn of the Atomic Age, kicked off the race for the 96th Academy Awards on Tuesday, earning 13 nominations. It was followed closely behind by Poor Things, a feminist fantasy set in a steampunk world of mutants and male chauvinist pigs, which earned 11 nominations.
Killers of the Flower Moon, a crime drama about a vast conspiracy cooked up to rob the Osage Nation of its oil wealth, received 10 nominations. Both Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon, drawn from painful chapters of American history, were recognized at a moment of political unrest and division in the country, which seemed to give their dark subject matter an added resonance.
As a nerd, I’m pleased to see that Godzilla Minus One was nominated for “Visual Effects,” though I honestly would like to see The Creator win that award. Although its story was pretty underwhelming, the film’s visual effects were immersive and world-building, and all the more impressive given the film’s (relatively) low budget and guerilla approach to filmmaking. I’m also pleased to see Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron nominated for “Animated Feature Film” but I think it’ll lose out to Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
One of my favorite parts of the Oscars is the “In Memoriam” segment that pays tribute to the actors, directors, and other movie-related personalities who’ve died in the last year. Next year, you can expect to see Norman Jewison in the segment; the acclaimed filmmaker died this week; he was 97 years old.
Jewison’s film career spanned more than four decades and seven Oscar nominations — three for Best Director (In the Heat of the Night, Fiddler on the Roof and Moonstruck) and the four for Best Picture. His films received a total of 46 nominations and 12 Academy Awards. In 1999, Jewison was honored with the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Award at the Academy Awards. He also collected three Emmy Awards for his work in television.
[…]
Jewison received scores of other prestigious awards during his long career, including the Best Director award at the Berlin Film Festival, a BAFTA Awards, the Donatello Award from Italy and the Genie Award from the Canadian Academy.
In January 2010, he was presented with the coveted Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of America. The Film Society of Lincoln Center presented a retrospective in Jewison’s honor in May 2011. The Toronto International Film Festival had a retrospective for Jewison in August 2011.
In his various incarnations, James Bond was the prototypical Cold War warrior. Not surprisingly, this was a source of both controversy and fixation within Russia.
Only one samizdat copy of a Bond novel is known to exist; an error-strewn and laboriously typed-out version of Dr No, annotated with notes which suggest it was used to warn impressionable young apparatchiks of the beguiling danger it contained. As one Soviet critic put it in Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper: “James Bond lives in a nightmarish world where laws are written at the point of a gun, where coercion and rape is considered valour, and murder is a funny trick.”
The Soviet Union responded to Bond in various ways, from outright condemnation to supporting the production of rival novels and TV programs.
The publishing industry is experiencing a lot of turmoil these days, but even so, this is surprising: following massive layoffs, the iconic Sports Illustrated now faces an uncertain future.
Authentic, the licensing group that purchased Sports Illustrated for $110 million from Meredith five years ago, has terminated the agreement it holds with The Arena Group to publish SI in print and digital, according to an email obtained by Front Office Sports. That move comes three weeks after Arena missed a $3.75 million payment that breached the company’s SI licensing deal, which began in 2019. (Authentic’s notice of termination, meanwhile, triggered a $45 million fee due immediately to Authentic, according to an SEC filing on Friday.)
The fallout: On Friday Arena told SI employees in an email “… We were notified by Authentic Brands Group (ABG) that the license under which the Arena Group operates the Sports Illustrated (SI) brand and SI related properties has been officially revoked by ABG. As a result of this license revocation, we will be laying off staff that work on the SI brand.”
Related: MSNBC’s Dave Zirin mourns the potential loss and what it represents: “As a kid, I never could have imagined that Sports Illustrated would ever go away. Now I can’t imagine what, in this media environment, could possibly replace it.”
Also related: Derek Thompson and Bryan Curtis dive into the problems facing the American media industry. “What’s so sad to me is that the very fact that Sports Illustrated had become something licensed, to be licensed, to be published, is emblematic of how far a storied brand like this, a storied magazine like this, has fallen in the last few decades.”
It’s not just the publishing industry that’s been experiencing some hard times as of late. The video game industry has also been experiencing its own hardships.
No game-makers budgeted for 40-year highs in inflation. Nor did they budget for revenue stagnation. Most internal and external market forecasts suggested uninterrupted secular growth and at a rate faster than real GDP (one top consultancy has a 2022 forecast for 2025 that will be 25% too high, one top investment bank has a forecast from 2021 that overshoots 2025 by 30%, there are others but it’s gratuitous to call them all out). After all, few industries ride Moore’s Law as hard as video gaming! But not only has gaming underperformed most sectors, it’s one of few media categories to shrink. The “streaming wars” are causing pain across film and TV, yet consumer spending continues to grow year-over-year. Revenue for audio, inclusive of the secularly declining terrestrial radio segment, is up 20% from 2020. Book publishing, too, is up 14%. The only decliner is newspapers and magazines, which have been in free fall for more than a decade, and no one is expecting a sudden return to growth (the decline did slow, however).
Via TLDR Web Dev.
Related: Speaking of video game industry hardships, Microsoft recently announced that they’re laying off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees. This comes just months after Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard back in October for $68.7 billion. Activision Blizzard’s games include Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch.
Popular YouTubers with audiences in the millions are now calling it quits and shutting down their channels due to the burnout caused by having to create and publish new content all the time.
In the world of content creation, consistency is key. Algorithms favor regular uploads, and audiences expect frequent, high-quality content. This demand creates a treadmill effect for creators, where taking a break can feel like falling behind. The fear of losing relevance or disappointing fans adds immense pressure, leading many creators to sacrifice their personal time and well-being.
Earlier this month, sexually explicit AI-generated images of Taylor Swift flooding X/Twitter, highlighting both the dark side of AI tools and the massive challenges involved in regulating and policing such content.
It would be a gift if this were a story about content moderation: about platforms moving to remove harmful material, whether out of a sense of responsibility or legal obligation.
But generative AI tools are already free to anyone with a computer, and they are becoming more broadly accessible every day. The fact that we now have scaled-up social platforms that enable the spread of harmful content through a combination of policy and negligence only compounds the risk.
And we should not make the mistake of thinking that it is only celebrities like Swift who will suffer.
Related: Universal Music has sued an AI company for illegally distributing copyrighted lyrics. “The complaint used the example prompt ‘Write me a song about the death of Buddy Holly,’ which led the large language model to spit out the lyrics to Don Mclean’s ‘American Pie’ word for word.”
Also related: I previously shared the story of an AI-generated George Carlin special. The Carlin estate has filed a lawsuit against the people behind the special, claiming that it violates “Carlin’s right of publicity and copyright.”
Christ and Pop Culture published a bunch of 2023 coverage this week, including our favorite films, TV shows, music, books, and other pop culture moments of the past year. I contributed several blurbs myself, including reviews of Godzilla Minus One, Abbott Elementary, and a Cure concert.
This week marked the 40th anniversary of Apple’s Macintosh computer, and Jason Snell reflects on the computer’s four different eras, starting with the Motorola days.
During this era, the Mac expanded, perhaps most notably with the Mac II, which was a more traditional standalone box with card slots and support for external monitors. The System, as Mac OS was called back then, also continued to advance, reaching a pinnacle with version 6.0.8 and then blowing right through it with the next milestone release.
System 7 was this era’s major reinvention of the Mac, and its introduction in 1991 gave the original Mac OS a decade of additional life. It was a game-changer, with proper multitasking support, system extensions, a revamped Apple Menu, file sharing, aliases, AppleScript, and a new full-color interface.
Over on The Verge, Snell also wrote about the Macintosh’s evolving success, even after all these decades.
Next week, Apple will release financial results that will reinforce that Mac sales are among the best they’ve been in the product’s history. Then, a day later, Apple will release a new device, the Vision Pro, that will join the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch in an ever-expanding lineup of which the Mac is only one small part.
As the Mac turns 40, it’s never been more successful — or more irrelevant to Apple’s bottom line. It’s undergone massive changes in the past few years that ensure its survival but also lash it to a hardware design process dominated by the iPhone. Being middle-aged can be complicated.
Finally, this article’s from 2019 but I just discovered it, and I couldn’t not share it: Scientists Played Music to Cheese as It Aged. Hip-Hop Produced the Funkiest Flavor.
The “classical” cheese mellowed to the sounds of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The “rock” cheese listened to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” An ambient cheese listened to Yello’s “Monolith,” the hip-hop cheese was exposed to A Tribe Called Quest’s “Jazz (We’ve Got),” and the techno fromage raved to Vril’s “UV.” A control cheese aged in silence, while three other wheels were exposed to simple high-, medium- and low-frequency tones.
According to a press release, the cheese was then examined by food technologists from the ZHAW Food Perception Research Group, which concluded that the cheese exposed to music had a milder flavor compared to the non-musical cheese. They also found that the hip-hop cheese had a stronger aroma and stronger flavor than other samples.
This post is available to everyone (so feel free to share it). However, paying subscribers also get access to exclusives including playlists, podcasts, and sneak previews. If you’d like to receive those exclusives — and support my writing on Opus — then become a paid subscriber today for just $5/month or $50/year.