Weekend Reads (June 13): Rush, Clint Eastwood, Charles Dickens, “Doctor Who,” Reviewing Bad Movies
Recommended weekend reading material for June 13, 2026.
My apologies: For some reason, the June 6 newsletter never got sent out last week. So here’s an extended edition for June 13.
Prog-rock legends Rush returned to the stage for the first time in eleven years as they kick off their “Fifty Something” reunion tour. Notably, Anika Nilles sat in for drummer Neil Peart, who died in 2020. But as David Jenkins notes, that was no cause for alarm.
The show equalled or exceeded any of the eight times I’ve had the pleasure to see the band. There has been a lot of online chatter amongst fans as to newcomer Anika Nilles and her ability to handle the drum chair. I’m here to say that she has it all going on in her full commitment to both honoring the late Neil Peart and also adding her own personality. The smiles, the love for each other, and their history was very much on display tonight.
Related: Watch Nilles absolutely destroy the fills on “Tom Sawyer.”
I was pleasantly surprised to see the 77s appear on Spin’s list of the best albums of 2026 (so far). Other artists featured include American Football, Blackwater Holylight, Kim Gordon, Megadeth, and The Twilight Sad.
Related: My review of The Twilight Sad’s It’s the Long Goodbye. “The Scottish band’s sixth album is their most cathartic and triumphant work yet, featuring ten songs that explore grief, loss, and mental illness.”
The Treble staff have also their list of the 48 best albums of 2026 so far.
This year, it’s just two entries shy from the length of our actual year-end list, which is an arbitrary decision, we grant you, but it feels like it should be a little bit shorter, right? The fact that we came so close to 50 only tells you how much great music has been released in this still-young year, which means it’ll only get that much more difficult to narrow down at the end of the year. But that’s a problem to be worked out later. For now, enjoy our picks for the best albums of 2026 so far.
Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind is widely considered one of his greatest films, and one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time. But what if, argues Ryan Britt, it’s not as great as you remembered?
In 1978, nearly 50 years ago, Close Encounters of the Third Kind became a watershed moment in cinema history. It broke box office records and demonstrated that a film about human emotions could be braided together with a paranoid thriller about alien abductions and UFOs. It’s also an overrated, incongruent, slogging mess, which, if released now, would probably not have garnered the praise and adoration it got in 1978.
Related: Whatever its flaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is noteworthy for this moment of insight, courtesy of Inside the Actors Studio’s James Lipton.
Steven D. Greydanus writes about sci-fi movies and the search for transcendence, beginning with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In cinema history, the one science-fiction work that, so to speak, flung open the stable doors for audiences and later filmmakers was Stanley Kubrick’s towering 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, released 55 years ago. Science fiction in movies is essentially as old as cinema itself, and 1950s movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet used science-fiction tropes in thoughtful ways to explore or cross-examine human nature. But Kubrick’s landmark film, co-written with Arthur C. Clarke and based on his short story, contemplated sweeping philosophical and metaphysical questions about human origins and destiny in revolutionary ways, expanding the boundaries not only of what science fiction can say, but even of how it can say it.
Related: My review of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I recently watched with one of my kids. “[I]t’s one of those rare sci-fi movies that will still seem futuristic even 500 years from now, thanks to its heady script, immaculate production design, and Kubrick’s eye for detail.”
One of the great filmmakers and actors of all time, Clint Eastwood has officially retired at the age of 95.
In a recent interview with a French outlet, France 3, Eastwood’s son Kyle Eastwood (a professional musician in his own right) has revealed that his father has officially retired at the ripe age of 95. “I have a lot of good memories of working with him. Now he’s retired, he’s 95 years old. But I’ve been very lucky to be able to work with him on a lot of films,” Eastwood said of working with his father over the years. “It was a great experience for me.”
Eastwood’s filmography is the very definition of “iconic.” In front of the camera, he starred in spaghetti westerns like A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly; comedies like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Every Which Way but Loose; and action films like the Dirty Harry series. Behind the camera, he’s directed multiple acclaimed films including Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, and American Sniper. Eastwood’s final film was 2024’s Juror #2.
Anthony Head, the English actor best known for his performances as Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Rupert Giles and Ted Lasso’s Rupert Mannion, passed away due to pneumonia complications. He was 72 years old.
His daughters’ statement said “it is with heavy hearts that we announce the death of our extraordinary father”.
“It has been, and forever will be, an honour and a privilege to be his daughters, and to have witnessed firsthand the impact both he and his work have had on so many.”
They also said they knew “how dearly he will be missed by friends, colleagues and fans of the show he was in”, adding that he “loved his job very much” and “always considered himself incredibly lucky”.
Head’s other credits include Doctor Who, Merlin, and Little Britain. Tributes to the actor have come in from his Buffy co-stars, including Sarah Michelle Gellar and James Marsters, among others.
Also related: Ars Technica’s Jennifer Ouellette shares her 10 favorite Giles moments from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Marjane Satrapi, who wrote the acclaimed graphic novel Persepolis and later, co-wrote and directed an animated adaptation of it, died this week at the age of 56.
Satrapi was born in Tehran in 1969. Her childhood was one shadowed by polarization: Though she grew up in a communist-leaning household and studied abroad in Vienna and France as a young adult, the 1979 Iranian Revolution and its resulting theocratic regime indelibly altered her life.
Satrapi wrote about her adolescence in the new Islamic Republic — her rebellion, exile, return, and permanent departure — in Persepolis. Published in four French volumes between 2000 and 2003, Satrapi’s autobiographical comic book became an international bestseller. It has since been translated into more than 20 languages.
In light of the pope’s recent encyclical, which addresses the moral and ethical ramifications of AI, Brian Phillips presents his list of the 40 most rage-inducing problems in tech.
I say this with all due respect to the leader of the world’s largest religious organization: He missed some stuff. To truly teach big tech to put humanity first, it is necessary to catalog all the ways that big tech is currently putting humanity last. And because we are living in a time of historically unprecedented exasperation — a time in which many of us go through the day filled with a sort of half-repressed and unacknowledged fury that threatens to burst out every time the app we’re trying to use sends us to a website to log in, but the website won’t allow us to paste the password from our password manager, and clicking “forgot password” sends us back to the app, which immediately crashes — any account of tech’s antihuman tendencies must necessarily include a detailed breakdown of how its products are truly just a colossal goddamn pain in the ass.
Phillips’ list is pretty comprehensive, meaning you might start to experience some low-grade PTSD while reading about text-hiding banners, touch screens in cars, formatting in Google Docs, and QR codes — to name but a few.
Related: John Gruber really hates dickovers, i.e., those annoyingly ubiquitous popovers on websites that ask us to sign up for newsletters, allow cookies, and perform other stupid tasks. “It is no different from snatching a physical copy of a book or magazine out of a reader’s hands in order to badger them for something other than the attention they were already granting your work, except that the physical act of snatching a publication from a reader’s hands would subject you to being punched in the face.” (Also, “dickover” is a fantastic term.)
Also related: There’s now precedent for getting a religious exemption from using AI at your job. “Maus is a Unitarian Universalist, a pluralistic religion that’s rooted in the inherent worth of every person. In April, she argued that AI didn’t align with her religious beliefs, citing environmental and ethical concerns.” Via 1440.
Whoopsie-daisy… Hackers were able to use Instagram’s AI chat to change account passwords.
Hackers simply told Meta’s AI chatbot that they were the owners of the target’s account, and asked the bot to link that person’s account to an email they controlled. The chatbot complied with the request, allowing the hacker to reset the target account’s password and take control of the account — in some cases locking out the victims. At no point were Meta employees or contractors involved in the chat.
Via Pixel Envy.
In a world that wasn’t obsessed with AI-ifying anything and everything, this would be the sort of thing that’d get someone fired.
Also, let this be a reminder to always enable two-factor authentication.
A Chinese company is developing AI technology that would enable the government to predict who could become a political dissident.
In the first months of 2024, according to the Geedge documents, the company’s researchers were working to develop behavioral profiles of people based on telecommunications, social media and location data. A.I. models were used to classify people and to “detect harmful information,” often a euphemism used by the Chinese Community Party to identify political dissent or other material the government wants suppressed.
[…]
The Geedge researchers appeared to be developing tools to use artificial intelligence to predict who could become critics of the Chinese government, based on the data patterns the company’s surveillance technology collected.
This article is about China’s efforts, but you better believe we have a similar threat here in the U.S. Case in point: Earlier this year, the Trump administration got mad at Anthropic because it refused to let the government use its Claude AI tool for mass surveillance.
Apple held their annual Worldwide Developer Conference this week, and as always, announced a bunch of new software updates. Not surprisingly, the biggest announcement concerned an AI-powered update to Siri.
Ahead of WWDC, it was widely expected that Apple would place a heavy emphasis on its (delayed) overhaul of Siri, which it first demoed at the 2024 edition of the event. The company confirmed back in January that a “more personalized Siri” was coming this year, and that it would be powered by Google’s Gemini models. This updated version of the assistant is called Siri AI.
My friend Gina Dalfonzo tackles the age-old issue of enjoying art created by despicable human beings.
“Every partaker of his magnificent feasts would be seen to have been a sharer in the plunder of innumerable homes,” as Dickens wrote of Mr. Merdle. Dickens, in his own way, gives us feasts — great feasts of words that fill readers with delight, indignation, pity, distress, a whole host of emotions — but knowing what we know of his personal life, are we tainted if we partake? Will those feasts poison our minds and souls?
Everyone will need to exercise wisdom and discern who and what they can stomach. But if someone says that they can no longer enjoy the works of, say, Neil Gaiman because of his lecherous behavior, then I’m certainly not going to blame them.
Related: A British museum has been criticized for its efforts to be sensitive about Charles Dickens’ more offensive views. “Medway Council, which runs the museum, said the aim was ‘not to diminish his importance, but to ensure staff are equipped to address historical issues accurately and sensitively where they arise in conversation with visitors’.”
The long-running Doctor Who TV series has fallen on hard times, and it might be a long time before any new episodes are produced. Which is totally fine with Aimee Hart.
While the franchise’s reputation has garnered some valid criticism over the years, it has also faced the hurdle of trying to grow in a time when social media seems dominated by hate-mongering against minorities, which seems particularly ironic coming from fans of a TV show with a genderfluid alien as its protagonist. With a rise in hate and, keeping the Disney rumors of internal concerns about the franchise being “too woke” in mind, perhaps it really was best for the BBC to shelve the series for now. As in 1989, it seems clear that neither the powers that be nor Davies were willing to take a risk on something new.
Sometimes, you just want to read an excoriating movie review, that’s precisely what Matt Zoller Seitz proffers in his half-star review of The Breadwinner, in which comedian Nate Bargatze plays a man who must switch to becoming a stay-at-home parent à la 1983’s Mr. Mom.
Though Mr. Mom was a sleeper hit, it was criticized at the time (the Reagan/Thatcher era) for basing its comedy on the assumption that men are innately bad at raising kids and running a household, as if no man in history had previously been called upon to do those things. Everybody Loves Raymond extracted 210 episodes from this premise, which is repeated and reinforced today in movies like this one; in contemporary TV sitcoms, a few of which star the same people who were doing this stuff decades earlier; and in stand-up routines where a guy acts bewildered by the existence of throw pillows.
Seitz’s last line is brutal: “These sorts of movies do more damage to the culture than any bloody horror flick you can name, because they make the unforgivable adorable.”
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