Weekend Reads (August 15, 2026): John Wick, Data Centers, Blasphemy Laws, Gen Z
Recommended weekend reading material for August 15, 2026.
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.
The John Wick movies are some of the greatest action movies in recent cinematic history. But for Matt Zoller Seitz, the appeal of John Wick isn’t so much his action chops, but something deeper.
It’s not the “gun fu” fight scenes, which had the shock of the new in the original movie, and grew so elaborate as the franchise progressed that it felt like a lethal cousin of modern dance. It’s not the chases, although there are plenty, and they’re superb (my favorite is the chase around the Arc de Triomphe in the fourth film). It isn’t the neo-noir samurai gunslinger aesthetic. It’s not the world-building, which vividly catalogs the society of criminals Wick inhabits while leaving crucial information to the imagination (such as the task that John performed to earn his freedom).
No, what makes the John Wick series special is its heart. The movies add up to an epic modern gothic love story in which one of the lovers is dead.
Related: The world-building of the John Wick movies is certainly elaborate, but it also raises all kinds of questions. “If the world’s ruled by its most violent and notorious criminals, then how do politics work? Do election disputes, international grievances, and trade deals get hammered out by hitmen like John Wick? Do political concepts like nations, borders, and democracy still matter when criminal organizations rule everything?”
Sarah Welch-Larson reviews one of my most anticipated movies of 2026: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s The Samurai and the Prisoner.
It is patient, thoughtful, and measured, willing to question the ideas we take for granted and to demand an account from something even as inevitable as death. Perhaps there are other ways around the mystery, other ways to balance the ledger, new points of view to consider. Kurosawa’s camera examines them all carefully and finds great rewards in the investigation.
I just found out that The Samurai and the Prisoner is coming to Lincoln’s own Ross theater next month, so I’m very happy about that.
If you bought a copy of the Lord of the Rings movies from Google, did you really buy them? Apparently not.
This eerily echoes what happened earlier in the year, when patrons of Sony PlayStation’s movie store had access to legally-bought Studiocanal movies removed without warning. The corporate reasoning presumably being that Sony didn’t renew its Studiocanal deal, and thus not only did it stop selling the firm’s films, but also withdrew access to those that had already been bought.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this is unacceptable.
Streaming is certainly more convenient than physical media in a lot of ways, until it’s not.
Google has since offered a refund to the customer who lost access to their purchase of the Lord of the Rings movies, but it was pretty half-assed.
I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating: As Google continues to more fully embrace AI in search results, it could change how we use the internet — and not necessarily for the better.
Across most of this 21st century, googling something has meant issuing a command and receiving a timely answer. But lately, it’s felt like initiating a conversation with a time-share salesman. I’m old enough to remember when using a search engine was like ordering a sandwich at an efficient, no-fuss deli! Now it’s more like being trapped in one of those novelty restaurants where everyone smirks and insists: We do things a little differently around here!
Via Kottke.
Related: Back in July, I wrote about Google’s war on curiosity as a result of its increasingly AI-enhanced search.
One side-effect of AI’s growing ubiquity is that it’s “popping the workism bubble” and forcing a lot of people in the tech industry to realize the emptiness of their jobs.
Adding AI to the spectacle feels existentially daunting because it moves us even further from the work we do, and its value. I don’t build the pitch that wins the client; I write the query that tells the AI to write it, and then I check the work afterward. I don’t gather the materials and write the industry newsletter; my agent does it. Before, that work might’ve felt cheap and unsatisfying, deep down, but it was still ours. Now AI is being forced on organizations in ways that call the value of the entire enterprise of Workism itself into question.
And this is where things get particularly interesting. I don’t think Debord imagined something so seismically paradigm-shifting that it could abstract work to an extent that it would shake the working class, or, in the case of Knowledge Workers, enough to rupture a spectacle like Workism. But with the introduction of AI, it is as if, over the past 30 years, we have been slowly taking steps away from the direct experience of life and work, and AI risks pushing us far enough that the illusion becomes entirely visible.
This, in part, helps to explain why I’m both underwhelmed and disappointed by people extolling the virtues of AI-generated websites. Sure, they may be faster to build, but at what cost in terms of performance, accessibility, and support? Furthermore, what about those of us who actually like writing HTML and CSS, who enjoy puzzling our way through the code and the pixels to bring a website to life? Maybe we’ll get left in the dust, but I’d like to believe that our work will last longer and be more reliable and successful than anything derived from a prompt.
A tech company is proposing the launch of a giant space mirror to provide sunlight on demand — and they’re ripping a page out of Tolkien for the name.
The California-based company Reflect Orbital wants to try this idea again, launching a test satellite named Eärendil-1 as a precursor to a fleet of up to 50,000 space mirrors that would provide sunlight on demand as a service. The 18-square-meter mirror satellite has recently been approved for launch by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and will create what the company has said will be a 5-kilometer-wide beam of light that could be used for capturing solar energy in so-called solar farms, for boosting agricultural yields, or assisting in search and rescue operations during nighttime emergencies.
Tech bros, it seems, loving nothing so much as co-opting Tolkien’s mythos for things that Tolkien would’ve hated. (See also Anduril Industries, Palantir, and Sauron. Yes, Sauron.)
Or, as my friend Kevin McLenithan put it, “We Tolkien fans occasionally indulge in condescension toward fans of other fantasy works, but at least those people don’t have to share their fandom with dopey tech bros like this.”
Isaac Greene lashes out at the data centers that threaten to disrupt his brother’s farm, and the forces that make them necessary.
Are we expected to make our memes by hand? We couldn’t live in a world that doesn’t know what Donald Trump Jesus would have looked like. We couldn’t create fake versions of loved one’s voices to scam grandmothers out of their life savings without these vital calls. Who will make all these robocalls? People? The indignity. We couldn’t surveil our citizens going about their days with flock cameras, or permanently save the footage of everyone who appears on our ring cameras. What would we do without these data centers? Do we expect corporations to employ humans (with their expectations of salary and benefits) to do their work? There would be no slop to post to Facebook, no way to adjust our faces and bodies so they look their best when we post our selfies and gym mirror shots. Someone must pay the cost for these essentials, and that someone is a family in Pennsylvania trying to live their life on a little bit of land.
Via Canned Dragons.
If you want to know who’s really collecting all of that data on you, maybe don’t look at the government. Reece Rogers asked McDonald’s to send him all of the data they had on him, and got a 515-page document in return.
Much of my data report contains a detailed account of past McDonald’s transactions as well as offers the fast-food company sent me and how many loyalty points I accumulated. Essentially, every time I opened up the app to grab a bite to eat, it created a detailed record about when, where, and what I purchased. The log was even more thorough than I anticipated, including a record of every time I’ve scanned a code as part of its returning Monopoly sweepstakes along with the prize I received.
While the sheer amount of data McDonald’s stored over the years caught me off guard at first, the way it was used by the company’s predictive algorithms was what I found most concerning. The company predicted how often I would visit in the next six weeks (2.16 times), what I would spend on average ($13.49), and what I would spend in total ($29.15). One reporter at WIRED joked that McDonald’s had created a Minority Report-style dossier to predict my next snack wrap purchase.
Via Gizmodo.
Last week, I wrote about the closing of several well-known music publications, including Alternative Press and BrooklynVegan. The Line of Best Fit — another excellent publication — explains the loss that such closings represent.
What these archives provide is much more holistic than sales figures can tell you — they’re part of a larger ecosystem that helps us define our own cultural history now and for generations to come. Those taking charge of those archives need to understand the level of stewardship that they inherit when doing so. Music publications are not assets that can be dropped as soon as they’ve been run dry. They are resources for the present and the future; investing in them is investing in the fibres of culture that have grown and mutated over time, informing and inspiring emerging leaders of that culture to create art of their own that references scenes before them. Platforms as essential as these should be protected by those that acquire them.
Kotaku has published an oral history of GameTrailers.com, a video-hosting site that “changed video game hype forever” back in the ’00s.
Video game promos were hardly as sophisticated. You had whip-crack, often gross-out TV commercials, and then lengthier hype reels for exclusive industry events and presentations. Beyond that, juicier trailers and gameplay footage were bound to demo discs or IGN’s bygone paywall.
“I asked my friends, ‘Why can I get movie trailers for free, but I have to pay money for video games?’” Jones tells me on a call. He and Grotz began hoovering up dirt cheap URLs. “My buddy suggested GameTrailers dot com, and just as a larp we should just start uploading stuff. Unapologetically stealing from IGN and GameSpot. If it was widescreen enough we would crop out the watermark. Yoink.”
I spent many an hour on GameTrailers.com back in the day. The trailers were the obvious attraction, but I also loved watching their video game reviews, which were both entertaining and in-depth.
Russell Moore calls out the blasphemy of blasphemy laws.
They cannot change what people actually believe, only what is safe for them to say out loud. The threat of punishment doesn’t have to be a concentration camp or execution. It can be more civilized: exclusion from the tribe, whatever that is defined to be. Blasphemy laws — of the hard or soft kind — require people to be doublespeakers.
Laws like this would be wrong in any case, but at least theoretically you can see how certain sects of some world religions could get there. In a religious system where what’s important is not personal, internal new birth but submission to an external law, a blasphemy law makes logical if not moral sense, because it can be enforced. A judge or a jury or a chieftain or a bureaucrat can see into whatever external law to which a person conforms. A political leader cannot see what internal reality a person loves.
Finally, the term “larping” usually brings to mind folks in fake armor and wizard robes running around the local park, but it’s become the latest Gen Z insult, and it reflects the generation’s perpetually online nature.
Most people use the phrase jokingly. But when creators exaggerate aspects of their identity to boost their online presence — say, by pretending they have more wealth, friends or exotic trips planned than they actually do — it can reinforce unhealthy comparisons, says Don Grant, a media psychologist who is the National Adviser of Healthy Device Management for Newport Healthcare.
As the first generation to grow up entirely online, Gen Z developed with “comparing and despairing,” Grant says.
“We learn about ourselves and where we stand in the world only from the reactions and responses we get from others,” Grant says. For Gen Z and Gen Alpha, that public sphere is online. “They grew up with everything online becoming their social currency and the litmus of who they are.”
Via 1440.
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