Weekend Reads (May 10): Papal Typography, Pope Leo XIV, Radiohead & Shakespeare, “Andor”
Recommended weekend reading material for May 10, 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.
As befitting the way he lived, Pope Francis’ tomb is a simple affair that, unfortunately, also boasts some truly atrocious kerning (i.e., the spacing between the letters is ungainly and inconsistent).
While some have argued that the bad kerning is actually a gesture of humility under God, there’s no evidence of similar kerning errors in other papal tombs. Cheryl Jacobsen, a calligrapher and adjunct assistant professor at the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa, calls the engraving “horrifically bad,” noting that “there is no historical reason for spacing that bad.”
It’s a sentiment also shared by Christopher Calderhead, editor and designer of Letter Arts Review, who has written several books on ancient and religious letterforms. “No, there is no historical or aesthetic reason why the kerning is so poor,” he writes via email, while also pointing out that the inscription was set in Times New Roman and then carved.
Via TLDR Design.
Before he was elected Pope Leo XIV earlier this week, Robert Prevost had a social media presence, which offers the world a surprising amount of insight into his life, achievements, and even his political views.
I’m not a Catholic, and didn’t grow up one. The best description of my religious affiliation is probably “lapsed Buddhist.” But I’ve always been intrigued by the Catholic Church as an institution: its deep history, its vast theology, its artistic influence and societal dominance, the internal politics and external diplomacy of the modern Vatican. I sometimes joke that I treat and exoticize Catholicism the same way that white men exoticize Japan, but my fascination itself is sincere: I am astonished that somehow, the Vatican has maintained its mysticism in the modern era — an earthly waypoint between the physical and the divine.
Which is why I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that less than two hours into his papacy, I learned more about the pope through his digital footprint than I did through the information filtered through Vatican press releases or interviews with his friends and family.
I appreciate Tina Nguyen’s closing point about this obsession over the pope’s social media profiles being “a uniquely secular, American way to assess an American pope,” a way to try and understand — and forecast — his papal opinions and actions.
Related: Steven D. Greydanus reflects on the legacy of Pope Leo XIII, and what it could mean for Pope Leo XIV. “Leo XIII stands out for his intellectualism and his appreciation of scholarship, along with his less confrontational, more constructive style of engagement with modernity, including changing political and economic realities and scientific progress.”
Also related: MAGA types like Steve Bannon, Laura Loomer, and Joey Mannarino have started criticizing Pope Leo XIV as a progressive, Marxist, “liberal piece of shit” who’s an enemy of Trump. (You’re telling me the newly elected leader of a worldwide church with over a billion adherents might have more important things on his mind than falling in lockstep with Trump’s agenda?! I’m shocked. Absolutely shocked.)
It’s official, Skype is dead. But in its time, it completely changed how we communicated with each other.
Skype still had users until the bitter end, but both Microsoft and the world had more or less moved on. Microsoft has shifted all its investment to Teams, a corporate-focused app that the company swears will someday catch on with regular people. Zoom and Meet and countless other apps do video chat perfectly well. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and dozens of other messaging services offer high-quality video and audio in addition to text. The technology that made Skype special two decades ago is now utterly commoditized, and maybe the world just no longer needed the company that made it all possible.
Researchers have revealed that X’s AI chatbot, called Grok, makes it incredibly easy to undress photos of women that have been posted on X.
Musk has repeatedly positioned Grok as a less restricted and “based” alternative to other large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which are known for having strong guardrails that prevent users from generating some controversial content, including nudity or adult content. We’ve reported on “undress” and “nudify” bots and apps many times over the years, and they are usually more exploitative in the sense that they will produce full nude images of anyone a user provides an image of. But Grok’s “remove her clothes” function is particularly bad even if it only produces images of people in swimsuits and lingerie because of how accessible the tool is, because it allows users to reply to publicly posted images on X with a prompt that will undress them, and because the nonconsensual image if often posted in reply to the user’s original image.
For real, y’all… stop using X.
Related: I stopped using X back in January after Elon’s Nazi salutes, and I’ve never regretted leaving.
Trump recently announced a 100% tariff on all foreign films produced outside of the United States. However, legal experts point out the difficulties of enforcing such a tariff.
Since his tariff spree began in February, Trump has relied on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which gives him broad authority to regulate international trade in times of national emergency.
But the law includes specific allowances — called the Berman amendments — for the free flow of informational materials, including films.
“The 1994 amendment made crystal clear that the president did not have the power under [IEEPA] to stop the flow of foreign audiovisual media,” says Anupam Chander, a Georgetown University law professor.
Perhaps that’s why the Trump administration already seems to be waffling on the tariff.
Once upon a time, albums didn’t come with cover artwork, but instead, came in brown plastic sleeves that were primarily intended to protect the record. Here’s a brief history of how album artwork came about, the people who made it, and its aesthetic impact.
The invention of album art can get lost in the story of technological mastery. But among all the factors that contributed to the rise of recorded music, it stands as one of the few that was wholly driven by creators themselves. Album art — first as marketing material, then as pure creative expression — turned an audio-only medium into a multi-sensory experience.
Via Kottke. Matthew Ström’s article is filled with classic examples of album art, from Alex Steinweiss’ early work for Columbia to the iconic covers for Blue Note Records.
Daniel Dylan Wray reviews Hamlet Hail to the Thief, a new production of Shakespeare’s iconic play that, as its title suggests, employs Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief as a soundtrack of sorts.
In the state of Denmark, figures writhe in darkness, strobes flash, blades swing, blood spews, and chaos ensues as the glitchy electronic charge of Radiohead’s “Sit Down. Stand Up” blasts while bodies drop dead on the stage. The play’s the thing when you fuse Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief and stage it as: Hamlet to the Thief.
Adapted and directed by Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett, the idea came to Jones 20-odd years ago when she was working on another production of Hamlet while listening to the album and began picking up on similar moods in the lyrics, ones that included references to witching hours and murders.
One of the things that makes Star Wars: Andor so great is its amazing visuals. Cinematographer Christophe Nuyens breaks down the series’ visual style and influences.
But despite the fidelity to the visual palette of the Star Wars canon, Nuyens admits, like showrunner Tony Gilroy, there were plenty of non Star Wars influences at work on the show. “Wong Kar-wai was on the mood board for the Coruscant,” he says. “I had two days of pre-lighting, just to get the right tone for everything. That’s a set where we worked a lot on getting it right.”
While one might assume that the visual scope of these rainy sci-fi cityscapes was inspired by Blade Runner or other sci-fi, Nuyens says that wasn’t really in his mind while filming. “You say it now, and it’s a compliment, and it makes sense. But honestly, along with Wong Kar-wai, I was also thinking about Roger Deakins’ work in James Bond movies; the night scene in Macau in Skyfall was an inspiration.”
Inspired by Andor’s wedding dance sequence, Zac Johnson explores the funky, futuristic, and featherbrained universe of sci-fi dance music.
Andor was by no means the first Star Wars music cue to invade the pop culture airwaves. The megablockbuster took over everything from breakfast cereals to The Donny and Marie Show, but the horrific collision of John Williams’ theme and the already-imploding disco mainstream was inevitable, and nobody did it bigger than producer and apparent visionary Meco. His booty-bumping “Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band” was the unabashed highlight of the album Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk, and the track eventually hit #1 in October 1977.
For Steven Santos, the character Waingro from Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) is a perfect metaphor for the challenges facing today’s society thanks to certain men.
Waingros have infiltrated every part of the world through a combination of relentless self-promotion fueled by unearned self-confidence. They walk into any situation that requires teamwork and community, asking, “How could I make this about me?” They declare themselves experts on any subject because they saw somebody else, who is also a Waingro, post about it online. They cosplay as visionaries even though they don’t have a single, original or interesting idea to offer. They suggest problems are easy to solve and don’t require work, time and thought. They have long lost the capacity to learn. They have it all figured out, so you don’t have to worry. And by “all figured out”, I mean absolutely none of it.
The Fallout series contains some of the most popular video games ever released. Thus, you’d think the company who made them would be interested in preserving their code for posterity’s sake. But when the company lost the Fallout code, they actually had to turn to a former employee.
On May 5, Videogamer reported that it had heard from Interplay founder and game designer Rebecca Heineman that she had the source code for both Fallout and its sequel, as well as many other Interplay classics. She started preserving every Interplay game after working on the studio’s 10 Year Anthology: Classic Collection and realizing how poorly the company’s past work was being saved for the future.
“I made it a quest to snapshot everything and archive it on CD-ROMs,” Heineman explained. “When I left Interplay in 1995, I had copies of every game we did. No exceptions. When I did MacPlay, which existed beyond my tenure at Interplay, every game we ported, I snapshotted. It included Fallout 1 and 2.”
Via Techdirt.
Despite their important cultural impact, video games are sorely lacking in preservation, mainly because such efforts are expensive and not exactly profitable.
Finally, making America great again apparently means no more funding to save babies born with birth defects.
Approximately 40,000 children born every year have some type of heart condition, Antaki said, but that isn’t a large enough number to incentivize medical device companies to invest in the development and testing required to bring the PediaFlow to market.
“For that reason,” Antaki said, “our only option is federal funding, and it also explains why devices like this are not being developed in other countries because they don’t have the benefit of federal funding. We’ve been very fortunate to make it as far as we have because of federal funding.”
I know folks like to focus on wasteful government spending, like the military spending $20,000 on a hammer or whatever. And folks like to think the private sector can/should handle everything. The private sector’s great, but there are some things it can’t or won’t do, especially if there’s no obvious or immediate profit involved, as is the case here. Which is precisely when government spending becomes a good and even necessary thing.
And I shouldn’t need to say this, but if you call yourself “pro-life,” then saving babies from birth defects should be pretty high on your list of priorities.
From the Blog
Pope Francis died several weeks ago, at the age of 88. But even as the cardinals were meeting to elect the new pope, Donald Trump tossed his own name into the hat, joking that he’d like to be pope. And then he posted an image of himself in papal garments on his Truth Social account.
When our nation’s leader promotes himself as a revered religious figure or golden idol, that should concern anyone who claims to follow Christ. (Not to mention anyone who cares about the separation of church and state.) Far from being mere jokes or memes, such images suggest that Trump, who flaunts an opulent lifestyle, praises dictators, and encourages violence, cares not one whit about their religious significance and implications. (A golden idol placed in the Holy Land? Really?) Rather, he posts them because the images communicate worldly power and wealth — things that Trump obviously loves but are criticized throughout the Bible.
Trump has since dismissed the image, claiming he had nothing to do with it — even though it was posted on his own personal social media account. Once again, Trump wants us to pretend we don’t see that which we all see.
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