Weekend Reads (February 22): Gulf of America, “Saturday Night Live,” James Bond, Korean Celebrities
Recommended weekend reading material for February 22, 2025.
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Every week, I compile a list of articles in order to give subscribers like you something interesting and thought-provoking to read over the weekend.
John Gruber dives deep into Apple and Google’s updates to their respective map tools to replace “Gulf of Mexico” with Trump’s bone-headed “Gulf of America.”
It’s absurd that users here in the US no longer see “Gulf of Mexico” at all. You can search for that term, and the “Gulf of America” will be the first result, but the 400-year-old name “Gulf of Mexico” no longer appears as a label on maps to US-region users for either Google Maps or Apple Maps. In any even vaguely reasonable political climate, even those in favor of the name change would endorse, perhaps even insist upon, a transitional period where the previous, familiar name appears in parentheses. Insisting that the name be changed in a snap, with no parenthetical reference to the previous name (a name that, again, has been recognized globally for over 400 years, and remains on every single printed map in existence, and every single work of literature and history referencing the Gulf) has some truly Orwellian memory hole vibes. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia. It’s always been the Gulf of America.
Wes Anderson’s latest film, the spy-themed The Phoenician Scheme starring Benicio del Toro, Bill Murray, Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and many more, will debut on May 30, 2025. In preparation, Keith Nelson, Jr. highlights some of the director’s most beloved characters.
Anderson is one of the greatest filmmakers ever, and that’s in no small part because he’s created characters we find simultaneously surreal and relatable, even if we don’t understand why. Why do we admire people like Bottle Rocket’s Dignan (Owen Wilson), who refuse to accept reality, even when it’s slapping them in the face? Why do we sometimes cling to a version of ourselves that no longer exists like Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou? Anderson knows why, and he tells us through these unforgettable characters.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live, and the Ars Technica staff picks some of their favorite sketches from the show’s iconic run.
I’ve long been a big fan of the show, since I was a kid in the late 1980s watching cast members such as Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, and Jan Hooks. By then, the show was more than a decade old. It had already spawned huge Hollywood stars like Chevy Chase and Eddie Murphy and had gone through some near-death experiences as it struggled to find its footing.
The show most definitely does not appeal to some people. When I asked the Ars editorial team to share their favorite sketches, a few writers told me they had never found Saturday Night Live funny, hadn’t watched it in decades, or just did not get the premise of the show. Others, of course, love the show’s ability to poke fun at the cultural and political zeitgeist of the moment.
Related: One of my favorite SNL bits is this parody of an Apple Macintosh commercial. “We got crummy dads.”
Caroline Siede argues that Pam Grier is the definitive Blaxploitation star.
Grier’s gift as an actor is her ability to combine girlish sweetness with a tough, brassy sense of strength. She can sweet talk a bad guy one minute and cut him down with a razor blade she hid in her afro the next. Her starring Blaxploitation roles combine over-the-top dialogue, stunning costumes, and heaps of sex and violence into an unforgettable package. Yet in the rush to praise Grier as the badass she is, we can also risk repackaging her ’70s legacy into something much simpler and more straightforward than it actually was. That does a disservice not only to Grier, but to the complex roles she played on screen.
James Bond is one of the most iconic movie franchises around, and for decades, its been overseen by Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli. But now they’re stepping back and ceding control to Amazon.
The shock announcement — which is sure to shake and, indeed, stir the industry — was made Thursday, alongside the news that long-time producers and custodians of 007, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, would be stepping back.
As per details of the historic agreement, Amazon MGM Studios, Wilson and Broccoli have formed a new joint venture to house the James Bond intellectual property rights. The three parties will remain co-owners of the iconic franchise but Amazon MGM will have creative control.
The Bond franchise is about to have all kinds of corporate synergy.
Related: John Gruber is concerned about the Amazon-ified 007: “I expect they’ll make the same fundamental mistake Disney has made with Star Wars — instead of leaving us craving more, they’ll produce as much dreck as they can and leave us saying “enough, stop.”
Also related: Amazon coughed up an extra $1 billion to own the James Bond franchise, but even that much money can only buy so much. “In any event, Amazon will need a big-time creative producer to fill Broccoli and Wilson’s role, and those are in short supply.”
Korean actress Kim Sae-ron died earlier this month in an apparent suicide. Her death has shone a light on the immense pressure placed on Korean celebrities, and especially female celebrities.
Kwon Young-chan, a comedian-turned-scholar who leads a group helping celebrities with mental health issues, said celebrities often feel helpless when the coverage turns negative after spending years carefully cultivating their public image. Kwon, who stayed with Kim’s relatives during a traditional three-day funeral process, said her family is considering legal action against a YouTube creator with hundreds of thousands of subscribers for what they describe as groundless attacks on Kim’s private life.
Peter Jongho Na, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, lamented on Facebook that South Korean society had become a giant version of Squid Game, the brutal Netflix survival drama, “abandoning people who make mistakes or fall behind, acting as though nothing happened.”
I first became aware of Kim through her affecting performance in 2010’s The Man from Nowhere, which she filmed when she was just nine(!) years old. (The film opened in theaters shortly after her 10th birthday.) More recently, she starred in Netflix’s Bloodhounds, though her character was abruptly removed mid-way through the series’ first season as a result of her legal issues. Kim’s final films, Guitar Man and Urineun Maeil Maeil (Day by Day), will be released later this year.
Apple just announced the iPhone 16e, their highly anticipated replacement of the lower-cost iPhone SE. But as Jason Snell points out, it’s not exactly an SE redux.
At $599, the iPhone 16e is the cheapest new iPhone you can buy, but its starting price is 40 percent higher than the $429 iPhone SE. There’s been a lot of talk about the iPhone SE being an important phone for Apple to use in emerging markets that are much more price sensitive, but after this move, it’s hard to imagine that such a strategy is still in effect. Using older models and this new 16e, Apple now sells iPhones at $599, $699, $799, $899, $999, and $1199.
Apple has generally resisted raising its base prices despite the recent bout of inflation. But this indicates that, on its most important product, it is unwilling to sacrifice margin just to offer a bargain-basement phone in emerging markets.
Also, if you were like me, and hoping that the next iPhone would be a smaller one, prepare to be disappointed. As Snell writes, the 16e makes it clear that “the days of the tiny iPhone ain’t never coming back.” I’m still using an iPhone 12 mini, and it’s the perfect size. I know I’ll need to upgrade eventually, but I’m holding on to it for as long as possible.
I’m a fan of Hoopla, an online book and movie lending service that’s connected to your public library card. As such, I’m glad to see them take a stand against AI-generated slop.
While the exact details of the plan Hoopla is putting together to prevent low quality AI-generated books from flooding its platform are still not clear, Hoopla emailed librarians again on February 14 to share more information on actions it has already implemented. This includes revising its “collection development policy to ensure we adhere to and evolve with industry best practices,” offering librarians better ways to manage the Hoopla catalog by contacting Hoopla directly, and the removal of all “summary titles from all vendors, with some exceptions,” such as HMH Books, the publisher of the popular CliffNotes series. 404 Media also obtained a copy of this second email.
In the past, Hoopla’s catalog has contained numerous “summary books” that, as the name implies, simply summarize pre-existing human-written books. They’ve begun cracking down on such content and the folks who generate it.
Related: Here are my picks for the best movies and best comics currently available on Hoopla.
There’s been a lot of talk about bringing manufacturing back to American shores, including computer chips, which were produced here in the 1970s. But there’s a dark side to the history of American computer chip manufacturing.
For some time, miscarriages associated with the chip manufacturing industry were well documented in research papers. The risks discovered by scientists prompted companies to pledge to stop using certain chemicals — at least in the United States. After that, though, the industry did an about-face on transparency with researchers. As personnel data dried up, it became harder to show adverse reproductive health outcomes among employees on paper, even as many parents said their kids were living with the consequences.
US-based research into these health risks slowed down as semiconductor manufacturing moved to Asia in the 1980s. But with the new push to revive chip manufacturing in the US, these concerns are bubbling back up to the surface. In recent years, as diplomatic relations with China have deteriorated, and with the AI arms race continuing to accelerate, the Biden administration poured billions of dollars into subsidizing a domestic chip industry. Now, unions and health and environmental advocates are once again fighting to protect workers to make sure that Silicon Valley’s toxic history doesn’t repeat itself.
From the Blog
Earlier this week, I wrote about the cruelty of the Trump administration and shared it on various social media platforms, only for my post to be removed from Facebook and Threads.
Since plenty of criticism has been levied at Meta concerning censorship, let me clear: I do not think this is evidence that I am being censored or otherwise targeted. I’ve shared several posts from Opus in recent weeks and months that are critical of Trump and the Right, none of which have been flagged as spam or any other community violation.
I do think, however, that this is evidence of Meta’s incoherent and inconsistent application of their community standards. Which, in its own way, is just as annoying and frustrating as outright censorship.
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