Saturday Night/Sunday Warning S2E17: Legal Eagle's Nest
Another instalment of weekly recommendations and miscellaneous items.
This is the weekly round-up of things I liked in the past seven days + extra content for paid subscribers.
5 Things I Actually Enjoyed This Week
1. ARTICLE
Theory Will Take You Only So Far by Brian Phillips for The Ringer
One writer’s journey to understand Christopher Nolan, ‘Oppenheimer,’ and the bomb in the desert…
I haven’t seen Oppenheimer yet — like all sensible humans, I prioritised the Barbie movie over old cheekbones doing bomb genius pensiveness — but I’ve obviously seen a lot of takes, counter-takes, reviews, and general navel navigation. This one from The Ringer is excellent because it grapples with Christopher Nolan generally:
“Theory will take you only so far,” Oppenheimer says in the experimental physics lab at Berkeley. He means that what the math says on paper can’t always predict what will happen in real life. The man finally puts his phone away. Kids in the front few rows are chattering and knocking into one another’s shoulders. The first time the movie drops Einstein’s most famous quote, I think, How could anyone spend five minutes around human beings and think God does not play dice with the universe? God loves dice. But the movie is so riveting that I only half notice what the teens are doing. Like all Nolan films, it’s sleek, refined, immaculately paced, flawlessly edited. Nolan movies have a way of making other directors’ movies look, on a basic level, unprofessional. The hits of information, emotion, and adrenaline land at just the right moments. Over three hours, I’m never bored, and I’m never confused despite a density of biographical and scientific material that seems sufficient to start a fusion reaction by itself. The movie’s symbols (apple for original sin, hat flying off Einstein’s head for quantum uncertainty) all fit together with total precision. I probably miss half the brilliant little touches, especially given that so much dialogue is bass-clarineted out of audibility, but what I do notice is deeply impressive. I make a mental note that during the run-up to the Trinity explosion, Ludwig Göransson’s score obliquely references Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. After the Trinity test, it references the “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem.
2. ALBUM
Soft Action by Other Half
Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
A great band whose by-all-accounts killer gig at Norwich Arts Centre I missed last night. Next time.
3. ARTICLE
What one journalism school learned after taking over a rural weekly newspaper
by Amanda Bright for NiemanLab
Community-submitted content isn’t the focus of j-school training, but we’ve learned that it’s sacred to the Echo audience: who was visiting whom, the topic of last week’s sermon, and relatives who are improving after illness. “I think the Echo does a great job … except it seems that there is difficulty in getting someone to provide dots from Crawford,” one survey respondent noted. So, we’ve kept community content like “dots” (short writings from residents), local columnists, submitted photos, and even rainfall totals from readers.
Our policy of running content only after journalistic editing, however, is challenging for many. “Sadly, it doesn’t seem as much of a community paper anymore. You seem to stop including citizens’ stories turned into the paper,” one respondent said.
Also sacred were the long, unsubstantiated police report narratives. Our decision to cut those and leave only the bulleted arrest report is the most frequently mentioned loss of “the new” Echo.
“You no longer do the police blotter, like Ralph Maxwell [former publisher] used to do it,” one person said. “Listing traffic stops, arrests, drug busts … I’ve been here all my life and appreciated all the work Ralph put in to keep the paper going. You should follow his lead.”
4. NOVEL
Ordinary Human Failings by Meghan Nolan
Bookshop.org | £16.14
One of the central characters in this novel is a total prick tabloid journalist. Of course, I was going to find it irresistible. Get this and Nolan’s first novel Acts of Desperation if you haven’t read that yet.
5. ARTICLE
‘I’ve played for 60 years. That’s long enough’: guitar hero Vini Reilly on PTSD, life on the streets and the little girl who saved him
by Daniel Dylan Wray for The Guardian
Reilly is dismissive about his own music. “When I listen back to it, it’s boring,” he says. “It’s done. I’ve already expressed everything I needed to when I was playing it.” I tell him that a colleague told me they wanted the 1989 track Otis playing at their funeral. “Give him my apologies,” he laughs, before downplaying the beauty of the track, in which sparkling guitar swirls around dreamy vocal samples from Tracy Chapman and Otis Redding. “It was just messing about.”
Updates, Corrections & Clarifications
None this week. I’m going to be causing a lot of shenanigans next week though.
From here on, there be dragons… or rather, it’s bonus material for paid subscribers.
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