Weekend Reads (January 11): Mark Zuckerberg, Golden Globes, Anime Industry, CES Highlights
Recommended weekend reading material for January 11, 2025.
I compile a list of articles every week in order to give my subscribers something interesting and thought-provoking to read over the weekend.
In his inimitable fashion, John Gruber breaks down Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement concerning Meta’s updated approach to content moderation of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
The question isn’t what sort of posts Meta is now going to allow, but rather, what sort of posts are their algorithms going to promote, and to whom. I’m not trying to be a Pollyanna here — I’m fully aware that the sort of people who think that Twitter/X has improved, not declined, under Elon Musk’s ownership are the sort of people who not only think their posts should be permitted, but that they should be promoted to a wide audience, and that anything less than wide algorithmic promotion is the result of nefarious “shadowbanning”.
Also, Zuckerberg’s announcement is a good reminder that Bluesky remains the only major social media platform that actually gives a meaningful amount of control over what you see and experience.
Related: Platformer’s Casey Newton is a bit more pointed in his assessment of Zuckerberg’s announcement. “These changes are likely to substantially increase the amount of harmful speech on Meta’s platforms, according to 10 current and former employees who spoke to Platformer on Tuesday.”
Also related: On the other hand, Derek Robertson argues that Zuckerberg’s various statements aren’t simply kowtowing to Trump, but rather, “underline how politics has always shaped the public expression of those platforms’ values.”
After the January 6th insurrection, John Williams set out to do something about his growing concern over domestic terrorism. So he infiltrated the ranks of the nation’s militia groups on his own to expose their agendas.
Posing as an ideological compatriot, Williams had penetrated the top ranks of two of the most prominent right-wing militias in the country. He’d slept in the home of the man who claims to be the new head of the Oath Keepers, rifling through his files in the middle of the night. He’d devised elaborate ruses to gather evidence of militias’ ties to high-ranking law enforcement officials. He’d uncovered secret operations like the surveillance of a young journalist, then improvised ways to sabotage the militants’ schemes. In one group, his ploys were so successful that he became the militia’s top commander in the state of Utah.
In light of the terrible story of Gisèle Pelicot — a French woman whose husband drugged her and invited dozens of men to rape her over the course of nine years — Anna Wharton wonders: What would a woman do to an unconscious man if she thought no-one would find out?
[W]e know now what men would do. And not just some men. Many men. So many men in fact, they had a nickname for them during the trial, Monsieur Tout Le Monde — Mr Everyman. Because the men who joined Pelicot in the dock were bakers, they were journalists, they were prison officers, they were accountants, they were young, they were old, they were single, they were married, they were fathers to daughters. But they all had one thing in common, a desire to dominate, to defile, to control, to penetrate, to humiliate. A love of rape.
The 2025 Golden Globes were this past weekend, celebrating the best in film and television. Here are all of the winners, including The Brutalist (Best Film, Drama), Flow (Best Film, Animated), and Shōgun (Best TV Series, Drama).
One thing you probably won’t find discussed at a ceremony like the Golden Globes is action, but Mubi’s Jonah Jeng has us covered with a list of 2024’s best action scenes.
This past year may have been the decade’s strongest yet for action scenes. Half of the honorable mentions could’ve held their own against most main-list entries from previous years, and some of this year’s scenes rank among the best I’ve ever seen within their respective set-piece categories (two car chases, a two-on-one elevator brawl, and a subterranean melee are standouts).
Related: Back in July 2024, Jeng delved into the history of stunt performers and the movies that have been made about their thrilling-yet-dangerous profession. “Movies about stunt performers invite us to be more attentive to the profession’s craft, the embodied experience of stuntpeople, and how these fit within a rapidly transforming film industry.”
A number of cinematic landmarks have been destroyed by the California wildfires, including Palisades Charter High School (seen in Carrie and Freaky Friday), Will Rogers’ ranch house, and the Topanga Ranch Motel (seen in Mannix and Remington Steele).
Last year, the United Nations published a human rights report criticizing exploitative labor practices in Japan’s anime industry.
An article from Nikkei Business Publication revealed that the July 2024 United Nations Human Rights Council’s visit to Japan has given rise to “deeply troubling issues within the media and entertainment industry, especially in the idol and animation sector,” as published in the Council’s subsequent report. Concerns included insufficient animator salaries, excessive working hours, severe labor shortages and a lack of any legal protection for contract workers, who account for roughly 30% of the industry’s talent. The Council stated that “it is imperative that businesses in this sector, including anime production committees, address these issues and exercise leverage to enhance decent work for animators and prevent the potential collapse of this industry.”
Animenomics has some additional analysis, including differing responses from two leading anime industry trade groups.
Now that we’re half-way through the 2020s, the Treble staff have highlighted the decade’s 100 best albums (so far).
It sometimes seems like a trivial exercise, compiling a list of the best albums of half a decade, until you realize just how much great music there was. And believe us: There was a lot. This list of 100 only scratches the surface, but it offers a plentiful sampling of the best music of the past five years, from electronic to metal, pop to punk, hip-hop to folk.
Related: Josh Hurst shares his top 10 albums of the decade so far. “I think this has been a fruitful and rewarding season for new music, with plenty of albums that could assume the stature of classics (indeed, some already have).”
The Art of Cover Art offers up a treasure trove of LP artwork from Panart Records, which helped popularize Cuban music throughout the ’50s and ’60s.
Panart was the first label to produce four-color printed covers in Havana. The label’s previous illustrated covers were phased out for ones featuring more eye-catching color photos commissioned by the label. Photos taken in the countryside and around the city, many on the grounds of the Tropicana nightclub, were shot by Charlie Varon, a New York photographer who that same year would capture a sloe-eyed Marilyn Monroe in a sequined halter dress seated at a table in Manhattan’s Astoria Hotel ballroom. While some Panart covers fed stereotypes of the "exotic" to market its groundbreaking recordings of Afro-Cuban music, on other albums, the label transcended the racist tropes of the times with portraits that put black Cuban artists center stage.
Tim Carmody argues that HTML is the most significant programming language of all time.
HTML is somehow simultaneously paper and the printing press for the electronic age. It’s both how we write and what we read. It’s the most democratic computer language and the most global. It’s the medium we use to connect with each other and publish to the world. It makes perfect sense that it was developed to serve as a library — an archive, a directory, a set of connections — for all digital knowledge.
Via Kottke.
Carmody’s absolutely right about the joy of hand-coded HTML. I use CMSs all the time. (For what it’s worth, Opus runs on Craft, and before that, ExpressionEngine.) But there’s something very relaxing and freeing about writing HTML by hand, be it determining the best (i.e., most semantically correct) tag for a specific purpose or figuring out how to accomplish a desired layout or functionality with the least amount of HTML possible. Sometimes, when I need to still my mind, I’ll relax by writing HTML in my head to work through different layouts or patterns.
Put simply, if you want to become a web developer, then learn how to write your own HTML instead of relying on CMSs, code generators, build processes, or AI. A builder should know their tools, and HTML is the most important tool when it comes to building for the web.
Finally, The Verge’s Andrew Liszewski reports on the best things he’s seen at this year’s CES tradeshow. They include a personal AI supercomputer, advanced displays, a robot vacuum, phone chargers, and an air purifier that also doubles as a cat tower.
From the Blog
As is always the case with January, I’m in a bit of reflective mood concerning Opus. Therefore, I’ve shared my favorite posts from 2024 as well as a breakdown of how the site did, traffic wise.
In all, I published 463(!) posts on Opus last year, which correlated with some increased traffic, making it Opus’ busiest year in maybe ever.
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.