Weekend Reads (May 31): Arcade Fire, Cannes, Wes Anderson, Jordan Peterson, Apple
Recommended weekend reading material for May 31, 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.
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Jill Mapes used to be a massive Arcade Fire fan, but following the allegations of sexual assault levied on frontman Win Butler in 2022, she just can’t hear their music in the same way anymore.
“Now that I’m older/My heart’s colder/And I can see that it’s a lie,” screamed Butler on 2004’s “Wake Up,” the Arcade Fire anthem to end all anthems. On Pink Elephant, he whispers about a feared reality where his child turns against him and he loses his family. It’s hard not to twist Win’s lines back on him now, to un-know what I know. Like on “The Suburbs” when he goes, “So can you understand/why I want a daughter while I’m still young/Want to hold her hand and show her some beauty before the damage is done.” I can’t hear those words in the warm, paternal way I once did, knowing that someone else’s daughter claims he damaged her. It’s as simple as that when it comes to these matters of art vs. artist: Can you listen to the music without hearing ghosts in it?
I lost interest in Arcade Fire’s music with 2017’s Everything Now. There’s no denying, however, that their first albums, and especially 2004’s Funeral, were incredible, even generation-defining albums. And in concert, they were a force of nature. But here in 2025, I’m in the same boat as Mapes. I just can’t bring myself to listen to their music anymore.
The Pitchfork staff has compiled a list of their most anticipated albums of summer 2025, including new releases from A$AP Rocky, Lana Del Rey, LCD Soundsystem, Lorde, and Pulp (to name a few).
The 2025 Cannes Film Festival recently finished, and here are all of this year’s winners, with Jafar Panahi’s Un Simple Accident taking top honors with the Palme d’Or.
Related: Vulture and IndieWire have shared their picks for the festival’s best films.
Jacob Oller offers a primer on the “immediately identifiable comedies” and “intricate, indulgent dioramas” of Wes Anderson.
The rare modern American auteur to have created and maintained a filmmaking style so recognizable that it’s mimicked, mocked, and admired in equal measure, Wes Anderson has only doubled down on his idiosyncrasies as he’s developed as a director. The more established he becomes as an artist, the more complex and distinct his immediately identifiable comedies become. His recurring key collaborators — from cinematographer Robert Yeoman and music supervisor Randall Poster to production designer Adam Stockhausen and Anderson’s ever-expanding troupe of actors — are some of the industry’s most talented, but they seem to function in Anderson’s films as artisanal translators of impeccable skill. Working in symmetrical harmony, this group fussily arranges a recursive world of paternal letdowns, frustrated geniuses, stifled emotion, dry dialogue, ornate design, and meticulous composition, all of which seems to barely contain the comic chaos and wounded melancholy raging within.
Anderson’s latest film, The Phoenician Scheme, is currently in theaters.
Loretta Swit, best known for playing Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan in M*A*S*H (one of my favorite TV series of all time) died this week of suspected natural causes. She was 87 years old. Although Houlihan was frequently the series’ antagonist and the target of Hawkeye’s pranks, Swit imbued her with a dignity that was slowly revealed throughout the series.
Related: Back in 2023, I wrote about some of my favorite M*A*S*H moments, including one that featured a post-divorce Houlihan.
Matt Whiteley chronicles the sad demise of Jordan Peterson, as evidenced by his recent YouTube debate with a group of atheists.
Within a few minutes you see precisely why Jordan Peterson has failed over recent years as an advocate of religion. Peterson has a pragmatic view of religion, that rather than interpreting “God” as Christians generally have, or as theologians generally have, Peterson looks at it through a psychological lens and comes up with things that we might “mean by God,” with mixed results. The fundamental reason his results are so mixed is because his own definitions are so vague and self-indulgent that they meander from the objectionable to the meaningless. Pre-2020 breakdown Peterson may have dealt with objection to this by engaging more, post-2020 Peterson deals with this by getting angry.
You might ask the question at the outset why Peterson is even doing videos like this. It has become clear over recent years that when it comes to religion he is personally not able to believe or practice in any meaningful sense, I recently had a conversation with his friend Jonathan Pageau and even he admitted that Peterson is “lost” when it comes to actually adopting any practical religious belief, so why is Peterson brazenly and increasingly forthrightly selling himself as an advocate of it?
I watched several portions of the debate, and Peterson’s arguments were so vague and amorphous that it’s difficult to see how anyone can take him seriously as some sort of intellectual powerhouse.
Related: Russell Moore offers a slightly more charitable assessment of Peterson’s debate. “[P]erhaps, like C. S. Lewis at the first stages of his grappling with God, Peterson is becoming broadly convinced that something or someone is out there beyond his sight, but he’s not yet sure what or who that is.”
Jake Meador investigates a recent controversy in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) — which just so happens to be our denomination — and what it says about leadership and denominational authority.
[I]n low-trust environments, as the PCA is right now, it is easy to treat every dispute as basically being a dispute about power. If every dispute is basically a power dispute, it follows that every dispute is basically a fight between competing power blocs. Once this is accepted, you never actually talk about substance or the specifics of a case. Every issue is essentially pre-decided according to political interests, and the resolution of the debate is no more than a function of which side possesses power.
This is a very poor way to run a denomination.
Related: Bryan Chapell, the man at the center of the controversy, has since apologized for his poor judgment and indicated his decision to retire from his position as the PCA’s stated clerk.
(For those of you unfamiliar with the PCA, the stated clerk is a high-ranking official for the General Assembly, which is the annual meeting where representatives from PCA churches gather to hash out denomination business, vote on important issues, and so on. In other words, it’s a pretty big deal.)
Unlike traditional search results, Google’s new AI-enhanced results effectively do away with the need to visit other websites for information. Which is great for Google, but as John Herrman writes, any such traffic reduction could harm the very websites upon which Google’s AI depends.
In its drive to embrace AI, Google is further concealing the raw material that fuels it, demoting links as it continues to ingest them for abstraction. Google may still retain plenty of attention to monetize and perhaps keep even more of it for itself, now that it doesn’t need to send people elsewhere; in the process, however, it really is starving the web that supplies it with data on which to train and from which to draw up-to-date details.
Via Pixel Envy.
Interestingly, I was just reading Google’s new recommendations for site owners to ensure that their content performs well in AI search experiences. By and large, the recommendations are the same as what Google has always advised for SEO (e.g., write unique content, make your site as performant as possible).
There’s always been a sort of contract between Google and site owners. If site owners followed Google’s recommendations for improving their site and their content, then they would see more traffic from Google (which could mean more revenue). But now that Google’s AI tools and content summaries are explicitly designed to downplay traditional search results and reduce the need to ever leave Google, there’s less reason for site owners to do all of this work.
Which is tricky because some of Google’s recommendations are, in fact, objectively good ideas and legitimate best practices. In other words, you should ensure that your site loads as quickly as possible and that your content is written for actual human beings. Just don’t expect to see any real benefit from Google for doing so… not any more.
30 years ago, Apple made the dubious (and short-lived) decision to allow Mac clones, i.e., allow other companies to build computers that ran the Macintosh operating system.
The mid-’90s were a weird time for Apple. Microsoft and Intel dominated the computer industry so much that Apple’s tiny market share just kept shrinking, and Apple struggled to make money. You might think that allowing other companies to compete with Apple would just make things worse, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and Apple CEO Michael Spindler (who had taken over for the deposed longtime CEO John Sculley) decided to take those measures.
The clone strategy was designed to allow third-party hardware makers to create systems to serve markets that Apple didn’t serve very well, allowing Mac OS to penetrate into areas where Windows was winning and turn the tide. But that didn’t really happen. Instead, Apple found itself boxed in on both sides.
Fun fact: My very first computer was a Power Computing PowerBase 180 that I bought around 1997 and still have tucked away in the storage room. It has a massive 1.2 GB hard drive as well as a whopping 96 MB of RAM to ensure that Photoshop 4 runs as smoothly as possible. (By contrast, my 2017 iMac 5K has a 500 GB hard drive and 40 GB of RAM.)
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