This week’s breezier new release playlist includes St. Vincent, the Black Keys, Jorja Smith, J. Cole, Matt Berry, Eades, Sons of Kemet, Paul Weller, and more, plus a CSNY boxset. [Spotify]
“While the Fall’s songs were suffused with hauntings and the occult, it is only now that Smith’s talent for strange fiction, in the form of an unmade film The Otherwise, has been revealed.” [The Guardian]
Film / TV
“The best Gore Vidal story I have you’ll probably find unprintable, but it amuses me. I was visiting him in America at one point, and he was coming to England….” Don’t miss this great prostitution anecdote (!) and the full interview with Stephen Fry. [NY Times]
Someone is putting together a list of all the incredible talent that Saturday Night Live has turned down over the years (as well as the handful of greats they accepted.) Check it out and feel better about your own rejections. [Saturday Night Project]
Books
Senator Amy Klobuchar has a new book out about antitrust issues (wait, don’t skip ahead!), a subject that should have come up years ago, especially during the George W. Bush nightmare. Here’s the Times review so you can see why this is crucial. [NYT Book Review]
Hannah Arendt and Phillip Roth seem unlikely bedfellows, pardon the term, but “despite very different lives, the two writers not only knew and liked each other, but also found common cause in the great concerns that animated their work.” Also, and this one really shocked us: “In 1959, Roth wrote a television play, ‘A Coffin in Egypt,” for NBC. He based the story on Jacob Gens, the Jewish head of the Vilna ghetto whom the Nazis deputized to make the monthly selection of a thousand Jews for the death camps.’” Read an excerpt from that mind-boggling script here: [New York Review of Books]
Politics
His final words: “I am an innocent man.” “Four years later, lawyers affiliated with the Innocence Project and the American Civil Liberties Union say DNA testing has revealed that genetic material on the murder weapon — which was never previously tested — in fact belongs to another man. In a highly unusual development for a case in which a person has already been convicted and executed, the new genetic profile has been uploaded to a national criminal database in an attempt to identify the mystery man.” [New York Times]
“I think what the reality is as a party we have to have an internal look and a full accounting as to what led to January 6. Right now it’s basically the Titanic.” [IJR]
Thanks for your tips this week! See you next Friday.