Here’s why the VFX world of the movies is so extremely broken.

Color-blind casting is supposed to create a fantasy world for a broader set of audiences. But it comes with its own problems. See also: “Does colonialism exist in Bridgerton’s world?”

The wonderful Gabrielle Bellot considers Netflix’s Sandman.

Conspiracy theories about celebrity pregnancies are unalloyed misogyny.

The CEO who (allegedly) raised everyone’s salary to $70,000 is an abuser, and he has been known to be one for quite some time. Please stop RTing his content!

What makes a dumpling a dumpling? (Challenge: Read this story without achieving semantic satiation on the word “dumpling.”)

“[She] sometimes converses like she has a tiny Bachelor producer in her brain” is the funniest description I can imagine. Anyway, here is a compassionate and smart profile of Meghan Markle!

I am obsessed with this London Underground-style map of the human body.

Why have US universities let themselves become pipelines to Lockheed Martin and similar defense contractors?

JK Rowling has uh. has written a new book. of sorts.

How Normal Gossip (a newish favorite podcast of mine!) gets made.

Masiyaleti Mbewe considers the state of African millennial fiction — though tragically without mentioning the very millennial (in my opinion) The Eternal Audience of One.

Charlie Warzel reflects on the mistake that led to him being Twitter’s main character for a day, and considers what we can learn from it.

Add this to the list of Scientology’s abuses: It relies on a steady stream of immigrant labor that it acquires by cheating the R1 visa system and abusing immigrant workers.

One of my favorite genres of article is “THIS SYSTEM IS TOTALLY UNREGULATED.” For your consideration today: dog training.

“Hollow moral leadership upheld by a spectacle of extravagant, ill-gotten wealth has enabled Britons to remain proud of rather than reflective about empire and its destructive impact today.”

“The Queen is not entitled to your grief.” Ayan Artan, a Somali-British writer, considers the marketing effort on behalf of the monarchy to conceal and erase the damage of British imperialism.

“People like Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder who has gone all in on The Rings of Power, have more wealth than they could possibly use in a single lifetime, and in many respects more power than any king could ever have dreamed of; the rest of us face rising rents, inflation, and a gig economy that affords few protections when we get sick or injured.” On the new crop of fantasy TV shows.

Chinelo Okparanto considers the ethics and aesthetics of writing across racial identities.

Sarah Weinman reflects on Serial and all that it did and didn’t do.

Tips and tricks to run a good book club.

It’s always a cause for celebration when Lamar Giles has a new book out! He has a new book out AND he’s writing about social horror, yay!

Scaachi Coul is terrific as ever on the downfall of the Wife Guy. Linda Holmes on audience entitlement re: same.

This is superb TikTok journalism and I think Kady Ruth Ashcraft for doing it.

“The Very Online never leave: they hate it here but they’re never anywhere else.” On the digital afterlife of my beloved Constantine Cavafy.

So-called “secret menus” that go viral on TikTok are making the lives of fast food workers hell.

Hell of a kicker on this piece about how India’s movie industry has been affected by the rise of Hindu nationalism.

Maori polar explorers!

Happy weekend, friends!

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What I Read Last Week:

A bunch of stuff! I finished up Han Kang’s The White Book, which was strange and beautiful as translated by Deborah Smith. A favorite line:

A person who had met the same fate as that city. Who had at once time died or been destroyed. Who had painstakingly rebuilt themselves on a foundation of fire-scoured ruins. Who was therefore something new. Who, some broken pediment having survived, has ended up bearing a strange pattern, the new distinct from the old.

I also accidentally read the third in a mystery series (oops), which was bad from a knowing-who-the-characters-are perspective, but good in the sense that an author tends to have found their feet by a few books in. The book was Abir Mukherjee’s Smoke and Ashes, and it is set in interwar Calcutta. It has many critical things to say about the British occupation of India, so naturally I was here for that.

I read Lamar Giles’s latest book, Spin, a terrific and suspenseful YA novel about the mysterious death of an up-and-coming artist and her estranged best friends’ efforts to find out what happened. Lamar Giles’s books are always a real treat, the exact right YA balance among plot and characters and feelings. Plus, there is no romance! It’s really a book about the uneasy friendship between these two young women who lost one of the most important people in their lives.

What I’m Reading Now:

I am hashtag blessed because Tor sent me a review copy of Lara Elena Donnelly’s book Amnesty, the final entry in the Amberlough Dossier series. It’s set in a world that’s not ours, so it’s officially fantasy, but really it’s mainly just quite sociological and political, but with fishnet stockings. Cabaret but even gayer, as my wonderful pal Audra described it. I am mondo excited.

Up Next:

I think it’ll probably be Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds, which we’re reading for podcast. But we’ll see! The spirit might move me elsewhere!

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