Weekend Reads (April 26): YouTube, “Star Wars,” Pope Francis, Google Lawsuits, “The Expanse”
Recommended weekend reading material for April 26, 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.
YouTube turned 20 this week, and it’s safe to say that it has completely changed the worlds of pop culture and entertainment. Best known as a site where anyone can upload and share videos, it’s also become a popular streaming service with its own media library.
In addition to the 20 billion-plus videos uploaded over 20 years, YouTube says that on average, there are over 20 million videos uploaded daily to YouTube (as of March 2025). In 2024, YouTube users averaged over 100 million comments on videos on a daily basis — and creators “hearted” comments from an average of 10 million viewers per day. Last year, YouTube videos on average received over 3.5 billion likes from users per day.
Via 1440. Here’s the very first video ever uploaded to YouTube, courtesy of co-founder Jawed Karim.
Related: Here are the 100 most-viewed videos on YouTube. “Baby Shark Dance” holds the top spot, with 15.8 billion views to date.
Also related: YouTube currently offers a bunch of movies that are free to watch (with ads), including Arrival, Braveheart, Jurassic Park, La La Land, and Serenity.
Katherine Alejandra Cross dissects the quasi-religious view of AI held by folks like Elon Musk, and its ramifications for those of us who aren’t tech billionaires.
Laced with the vulgar utilitarianism of effective altruism and its offspring, this sci-fi theology sounds absurd to anyone not steeped in its mysteries, but it helps us understand why people like Elon Musk want to replace everything with AI — and sharpen our arguments about the technology, which is sometimes poorly understood by its critics. At every turn, what bedevils us ordinary people about generative AI is not the nuts-and-bolts of the tech, but its exterminationist applications that are designed to slash labour costs, blunt the power of workers, and insulate this cadre of far-right pseudo-geniuses from consequence or contest.
Since its release last week, Ryan Coogler’s Southern vampire film Sinners has been a decent success, raking in nearly $90 million at the box office (so far) as well as critical accolades. But it’s success has studio execs trembling in their boots.
Specifically, they say Coogler’s agreement is already recalibrating filmmakers’ expectations surrounding copyright ownership and distribution entitlements, restructuring a time-honored industry power balance and effectively imperiling the cinematic back catalogue: the core asset behind all movie-studio valuation. “Studios exist for one simple reason: to build a library,” this executive continues. “The lifetime, long-term value of our film properties is what makes a studio a studio. It’s why David Ellison wants to buy Paramount. It’s how MGM sold for $8 billion. Things like licensing and windowing these films throw off hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars a year globally. So the whole idea of building up your library — and you lose it in 25 years? Wait a second, you just gave up all your revenue down the line.”
This is a good reminder that the job of movie studio execs is not to support art and artists, but rather, to ensure that certain people (shareholders, the execs themselves) get rich.
The second and final season of Star Wars: Andor began streaming this week, so Keith Phipps shares some thoughts on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
A critical hit that’s picked up an impassioned fanbase, Andor is an offshoot of an offshoot. Released in December 2016, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story arrived just a year after Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens, the first Star Wars film released after Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm from George Lucas. As its full title suggests, The Force Awakens carried forward the storyline of the two previous trilogies. Rogue One did not. It was announced as part of a strategy that would allow Lucasfilm to alternate mainline installments with what the company dubbed “anthology” films. These would be standalone Star Wars movies that, while still recognizably of a piece with the rest of the series, could tell different sorts of stories in a variety of tones.
How did that work out? And how does it look nearly a decade on as Andor begins to bring the story it started full circle? I revisited the film for the first time since it played theaters and had some thoughts.
Todd Vaziri gets to the bottom of a unique movie mistake that’s captivated and perplexed Star Wars fans for nearly 20 years.
Movies are handmade, and just like any other art form, sometimes the seams that hold movies together become visible to the audience. For movie fans, these moments are very exciting. Catching a glimpse behind the scenes is an exhilarating experience. My favorite kind of “movie mistake” is the kind that is hiding in plain sight... but the casual viewer missed it upon first viewing. Or perhaps even the second viewing, or even the third.
I’m particularly obsessed with moments that reveal the craft and artistry of the magic trick of a shot that slightly shatters the illusion of cinema. These revealing moments have been in movies since the dawn of cinema, and are everywhere (if you know exactly where to look).
Via Kottke.
Hollywood movies have dominated our media and cultural landscape for decades. Following the pandemic, however, that landscape — and its politics — have been completely upended as people flock to alternatives like YouTube slop and right-wing podcasts.
But Hollywood’s failure to stay relevant has less to do with the political valence of its content than with the complete transformation of the media ecosystem. Woke was Hollywood’s most recent gambit to appeal to people; a right-wing turn may be its next. And yet conservative dominance of Hollywood may prove to be a much rosier future than the one we’re actually going to get: a future where pop culture is little more than a careless swirl of stock images, slapped together with no rationale beyond ginning up engagement — the wholesale replacement of storytelling with slop. To an extent, this future is already here, and it’s impossible to make sense of the extraordinary power held by right-wing podcasters in American politics or understand the meaning of Hollywood’s “unwokening” without recognizing that slop — content shaped by data, optimized for clicks, intellectually bereft, and emotionally sterile — has been overwhelming Hollywood’s cultural impact and destroying its business model, not to mention countless careers along with it, for years.
Ana Marie Cox’s sprawling piece makes a lot of points, but I think her most poignant observation is that right-wing podcasts and influencers offer a semblance of human connection even as media is increasingly dominated by AI-generated blandness.
What we’ve learned in the past eight years is not so much that conservative content is more appealing, but that it is still trying to make an appeal. It’s trying to hit emotional buttons and, astonishingly, connect with people away from the screens they’re in front of. It might even get them to do something while not in front of a screen. Pink slime doesn’t seek to connect, it just glides right over. It has no intuition. It can’t answer some need. Only humans can do this. In fact, much of the conservative entertainment that’s broken through to the mainstream works because it seeks to do more than soothe. For better or worse, the bros and their trad-wife cousins in this quasi-counterculture inspire loyalty based on a sense of community.
Following the Trump administration’s anti-DEI measures, the U.S. Naval Academy has removed 381 books from its library that deal with topics like racism and gender identity. A retired Navy commander has partnered with an Annapolis bookstore to ensure that Naval Academy midshipmen still have access to those books.
Marks and other volunteers will be distributing books outside of Naval Academy entrances, in coffee shops and at booths throughout Annapolis on May 20, 21 and 22. Marks and Amundson also intend to provide books for midshipmen through the end of Trump’s term in January 2029 and offer lesser-known removed books by request of midshipmen.
“It’s not about protecting anyone, midshipmen don’t need protecting,” Marks said. “This is about suppressing knowledge, about limiting education, about diminishing viewpoints.”
This is the sort of “good trouble” that John Lewis (RIP) talked about.
After 20 years of pop culture coverage, Think Christian is shutting down due to budgetary issues.
We’ve had a good run, expanding in my time from a web magazine to include a podcast, multiple social media channels, and regular video content. Not to mention the Movie Club, various ebooks, and other projects along the way. But the reality is that it takes resources — beyond blood, sweat, and time — to create such offerings and we no longer have the funding to do so.
It’s always sad to see this happen to a good site. Fortunately, Think Christian isn’t simply vanishing into the ether: “We’ll be suspending TC production immediately, although the current website, podcasts, and videos will remain available for the time being.”
Russell Moore, who is decidedly not Catholic, has penned a thoughtful tribute to Pope Francis, who died earlier this week.
It was hard, then, for the world or the church to fit Francis into an ideological niche of traditionalist versus progressive, much less into American red versus blue. In the end, that leaves any observer of Francis to make a choice — either to shoehorn him into one tribe or another, and thus to valorize or villainize him, or to see him not as a set of ideas but as a man.
As a web UX/UI designer, I naturally gravitate towards a minimal, “less is more” aesthetic. But Michael F. Buckley argues that minimal design aesthetics may be unwittingly oppressive.
Minimalism is often celebrated for its elegance, restraint, and efficiency. In the design industry, it’s treated like gospel — remove the unnecessary, emphasize hierarchy, and let form follow function. But beneath this aesthetic lies a deeper inquiry — one rarely discussed in design circles. Whose values are we actually glorifying when we praise minimalism?
And more provocatively, is minimalist design, in all its refined simplicity, a quiet form of oppression — a systematic vehicle for cultural exclusion? An exclusion that determines whose aesthetics are elevated, whose are silently dismissed, and who is left to navigate the system as an outsider.
Via TLDR Design. I’m not sure I agree with everything Buckley’s written here. For starters, I wish he’d included some more real-world examples of alternatives. Still, he’s certainly given me something to think about as I work on various mockups.
An enterprising developer is currently hosting his blog on an old Nintendo Wii.
While browsing the NetBSD website recently, I noticed the fact that there was a “Wii” option listed right there on the front page in the ‘Install Media’ section, nestled right next to the other first-class targets like the Raspberry Pi, and generic x86 machines.
Unlike the other outdated and unmaintained examples above, clicking through to the NetBSD Wii port takes you to the latest stable NetBSD 10.1 release from Dec 2024. Even the daily HEAD builds are composed for the Wii.
As soon as I discovered this was fully supported and maintained, I knew I had to try deploying an actual production workload on it. That workload is the blog you’re reading now.
Via TLDR Web Dev. I love reading about ultra-geeky stuff like this. It’s a reminder that technology should ultimately be a tool that’s mastered by us, not the other way around.
Following a federal judge’s ruling that Google has an illegal monopoly in the online advertising market, there’s a very good chance that the tech giant — which has dominated online search and advertising for years — may be forced to change how it does business. Casey Newton considers some of the possible outcomes.
In short: I see little evidence that transferring Chrome to another giant tech company would significantly change the search market, since most people will continue to choose Google as their search engine. But some of the government’s other proposals could have a meaningful effect.
One such proposal is to force Google to license data about its search queries, results, and what users click on to its rivals. Today, Google controls so much of the search market that other companies struggle to match its quality. Without a critical mass of clicks, their indexes of the web are inferior.
The European Union’s Digital Markets Act already requires Google to share search data on more than 1 billion historical queries. Google competitors like DuckDuckGo have called on the US government to go further, offering an API of real-time searches.
Related: Several companies have expressed interest in purchasing Google’s Chrome browser, including OpenAI, Perplexity, and Yahoo.
Also related: Chrome is the world’s most popular web browser, accounting for two-thirds of the world’s browsing activity. However, there are lots of other browsers out there, even after you get past the likes of Safari, Edge, and Firefox. I’ve previously written about Brave and DuckDuckGo. Via Frontend Focus.
Finally, scientists claim to have discovered a new color that no one else has ever seen before.
The research follows an experiment in which researchers in the US had laser pulses fired into their eyes.
By stimulating specific cells in the retina, the participants claim to have witnessed a blue-green colour that scientists have called “olo,” but some experts have said the existence of a new colour is “open to argument.”
Via 1440. The scientists believe that this development could improve our understanding of color blindness. Others, however, have pushed back on the claim.
From the Blog
I recently started rewatching The Expanse with my oldest, and it sure feels good to be back onboard the Rocinante. Back in 2020, I called it the best sci-fi show on TV, a claim that I still hold onto, five years later.
For all of the grittiness, violence, and cynicism of characters like Josephus Miller — The Expanse, by the way, is definitely not something to watch with young kids — I find it to be a deeply moral and even optimistic series. It celebrates sacrifice, diversity, community, heroism, and exploration while condemning corporate greed, political corruption and cowardice, opportunism, and prejudice.
Related: James S. A. Corey’s original novels are pretty awesome, too.
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