Weekend Reads (April 12): Dire Wolves, “Severance,” Russian Animation, the Sin of Empathy
Recommended weekend reading material for April 12, 2025.
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.
This week’s big science headline is that a company called Colossal Biosciences claims to have restored the once-extinct dire wolf species. Don’t believe the hype, though.
It all comes down to how you define species, says Shapiro. “Species concepts are human classification systems, and everybody can disagree and everyone can be right,” she says. “You can use the phylogenetic [evolutionary relationships] species concept to determine what you’re going to call a species, which is what you are implying… We are using the morphological species concept and saying, if they look like this animal, then they are the animal.”
With apologies to Game of Thrones fans who were looking forward to finally having their very own Ghost, “if they look like this animal, then they are the animal” seems like a pretty low bar for resurrecting an extinct species. And in any case, the fact that Colossal has no plans to let their “dire wolves” breed still means the species is effectively extinct.
Related: Experts are disputing Colossal’s claims, pointing out that there are “important biological differences” between Colossal’s animal and the dire wolves that last lived 10,000 years ago.
Miloš Hroch reflects on the Czech shoegaze band Here, and their unlikely rise to fame in the early ’90s UK.
In the capital city of Prague, shoegaze and indie were already a scene, with bands like Ecstasy of St. Theresa, Toyen, and Naked Souls — Here were fellow travellers from Moravia, from the eastern part of the country. Their debut album Swirl was recorded in 1993 in a studio nestled amidst gardening sheds and summer cottages near Brno, where they would spend their free time taking walks in the meadows, strolling by a fox breeder’s and corralled horses. They were composing directly in the studio and enjoyed that more than live gigs. What fascinated them about shoegaze were the dreamlike soundscapes and sonic spaciousness: “As opposed to other music, which sketches sound in distinct contours, noise spreads and multiplies… Noise and shoegaze are for people with imagination,” says drummer Martin Pecka.
Chris Riemenschneider catches up with Alan Sparhawk, formerly of Low, who has continued to make music after the 2022 death of his wife and bandmate Mimi Parker.
After a fascinating three-decade music career already loaded with many unexpected turns, the Minnesota indie-rock vet’s most exploratory phase yet has resulted in two solo albums that are as different from each other as they are from his old band Low.
Last fall, Sub Pop Records released his truly solo LP, White Roses, My God, laced with electronic grooves and eerily soulful vocal effects. Next month, Sub Pop is issuing another, far more accessible but equally emotional Sparhawk album titled With Trampled by Turtles, featuring his old buds as his backing band and harmony partners.
I’d be remiss as a music nerd if I didn’t point out that White Roses, My God is not Alan Sparhawk’s first solo album. Back in 2006, he released a collection of ambient and drone-oriented material titled Solo Guitar on Silber Records.
Related: Shortly after Mimi Parker’s death, I posted this tribute on Opus. “Parker’s voice could be world-weary, heart-breaking, and transcendent all at once, and brought so much beauty, grace, and light into the world.”
The National Recording Registry has added 25 new recordings, including Roy Rogers and Dale Evans’ “Happy Trails,” Don Rickles’ Hello Dummy!, the “Microsoft Windows Reboot Chime” by Brian Eno, the Minecraft soundtrack, and the original Broadway cast recording of Hamilton.
“These are the sounds of America — our wide-ranging history and culture. The National Recording Registry is our evolving nation's playlist,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden in a statement. “The Library of Congress is proud and honored to select these audio treasures worthy of preservation, including iconic music across a variety of genres, field recordings, sports history and even the sounds of our daily lives with technology.”
Among the many intriguing details in Severance is the artwork that appears throughout the series, which often depicts Lumon’s godlike founder Kier Eagan. Tenacity Plys analyzes the artwork, and what it could mean for Severance’s storyline.
“Kier Pardons His Betrayers” is mostly painted in red and blue, two significant colors within the visual language of Severance as a whole. Blue signifies “innies,” the split-off consciousness that inhabits a character’s body while they are at work, while red signifies “outies,” the external personalities of the characters. Innies and outies cannot communicate with each other, and are only the same person in a technical sense. In the show, this is communicated through the blue and/or cold tones on the severed floor, while warm tones such as red are shown in the outside world, where severed employees exist as their “outies.”
Related: My review of Severance’s second season. “[It] felt very much like a transitional season, with episodes veering off into the mysteries of Lumon and characters coming and going.”
The Oscars are finally adding a category for movie stunts. The new category will debut in the 2028 ceremony for films released in 2027.
“Since the early days of cinema, stunt design has been an integral part of filmmaking,” said Academy CEO Bill Kramer and Academy president Janet Yang. “We are proud to honor the innovative work of these technical and creative artists, and we congratulate them for their commitment and dedication in reaching this momentous occasion.”
The lineup for the 2025 Cannes Film Festival has been announced, and includes new films from Wes Anderson (The Phoenician Scheme), Richard Linklater (New Wave), Spike Lee (Highest 2 Lowest), Christopher McQuarrie (Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning), and many more.
Via 1440.
Animation Obsessive looks at the state of Russian animation in the years following the invasion of Ukraine.
Since 2022, Russia’s animation scene has been shrinking. Everything changed with the invasion of Ukraine: artists got out of Russia in massive numbers. And, as journalist Ethan Bien reported in 2023, that’s given rise to “diasporic Russian animation collectives in Turkey, Georgia, Armenia and elsewhere.”
The Trump administration’s efforts to make government more “efficient” misunderstand the vital link between work, vocation, and what it means to be human, writes Hannah Anderson.
One of the tragedies of this moment is the degree to which federal job cuts are leveraging people’s vocations as a way to enact the will of a select powerful few, bypassing the representative process almost entirely. That this work is being done through executive order and outside explicit congressional oversight means that the Trump administration is using executive powers not to enact the will of the people as expressed through the congressional delegation sent to Washington, but to reshape the federal government on its own terms. Trump is daring the other branches of government to try to stop him and threatening them when they do. Whether it is the promise to primary Republicans who oppose Trump’s agenda, naming judges “dangerous” when they order fired workers to be reinstated, or strong-arming independent government agencies with police presence, the administration is using workers’ lives and well-being as political pawns.
Members of Congress are attempting to pass new site-blocking legislation under the guise of battling piracy. But this legislation would effectively create a legally suspect “internet kill switch.”
Site-blocking is both dangerously blunt and trivially easy to evade. Determined evaders can create the same content on a new domain within hours. Users who want to see blocked content can fire up a VPN or change a single DNS setting to get back online.
These workarounds aren’t just popular — they’re essential tools in countries that suppress dissent. It’s shocking that Congress is on the verge of forcing Americans to rely on the same workarounds that internet users in authoritarian regimes must rely on just to reach mislabeled content. It will force Americans to rely on riskier, less trustworthy online services.
Congress tried this over a decade ago with SOPA and PIPA, which were thankfully shot down after intense backlash. Here’s hoping that something similar happens with this latest round of legislation.
This week, President Trump imposed a 145% tariff on goods coming in from China. Price Johnson, the COO of Cephalofair Games (makers of Gloomhaven and Frosthaven) explains how Trump’s tariffs could devastate America’s tabletop games industry.
To make games viable for nationwide distribution in retail stores (where most of our sales occur) publishers traditionally need to apply a x5 to x7 multiplier to our cost of goods to make wholesale pricing discounts viable and still provide us with a razor thin margin in which to cover additional costs and overhead such as freight, warehousing, staffing, product development, designer royalties, reprints, etc.
[…]
If 54% or 104% tariffs hold and we don’t see reverse steps taken, this will all but eliminate our wholesale business as we know it today leading to some incredibly hard and scary choices to make.
Although the gaming industry might not garner headlines like other industries, I think it presents a pretty good picture of just how bone-headed these tariffs are turning out to be. If Trump was truly serious about bringing production back to America, then you’d think he would’ve spent some time shoring up American factories, supply chains, etc., before imposing tariffs.
Related: A burgeoning trade war caused by Trump’s tariffs “could push Japan’s anime companies to shift growth efforts from North America to emerging markets with fewer trade barriers.”
Finally, Mere Orthodoxy’s Danielle Treweek reviews Joe Rigney’s The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits and pulls absolutely zero punches.
[I]t is empathy itself — not the sinful hearts and minds of men and women alike — that must remain the ultimate culprit behind the contemporary church’s failures, tragedies, and threats. Why? Because beneath the surface, Rigney’s all-consuming sin of empathy is, in reality, the sin of being a woman.
Yes, some Christians really are warning their followers against being too empathetic concerning the plight of others — and it’s so hard to take them seriously. Whenever I see one of their condemnations on social media, I need to look twice to make sure I’m not actually seeing an Onion headline.
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