Snowy Wednesday Things
Hello there. In New York we are staring down the barrel of a blizzard, the kind we don’t often get — last winter we didn’t get any snow at all, in fact. I had hoped we might have another mild one, climate change withstanding, since restaurants are depending on outdoor dining to stay afloat right now. Everything is so much more difficult than it used to be.
But in the meantime, we might get a foot of snow, which on balance I mind much less than usual, since I don’t have any travel plans that can get foiled or commutes to wrangle. Tomorrow is the last day of classes for me, but we’d already planned to take it to Zoom. So I’ll just be here with my space heater and my mug and my webcam, which is strikingly like every other day this year (give or take a space heater).
In lieu of my usual essayistic forays, I have been sending some year-end culture picks to subscribers to this newsletter (for things outside my beat, naturally). My big year-end lists of films will be up at Vox over the next few days (the first tomorrow morning!). And there are more lists out there than you can really shake a fist at right now.
But I just wanted to point to a few things you might like.
McKay Coppins, who is just one of the best writers around and a journalist at the Atlantic, wrote about the future of Mormonism in America. (Coppins is LDS himself.) It’s great.
My favorite documentarian, Frederick Wiseman, who is the elderest of elder statesmen, was profiled in the New York Times now that his newest film, City Hall, has been released. (He makes a film a year, roughly, and he’s turning 91 in January, so there’s always a new Wiseman.) The title: “What if the Great American Novelist Doesn’t Write Novels?” I got to chat with Wiseman a couple of years ago and he’s truly an inspiration: spry, sharp as a tack, and incredibly curious about people and institutions.
This has nothing to do with reading, but the Athletic Brewing Company, which exclusively makes (truly excellent) non-alcoholic beers, has a chocolate cherry stout for the holidays, in limited supply. I’m sipping one now. Would recommend.
I continued my conversation/correspondence with my friend Leah Libresco Sargeant about Star Wars, acting, and the move away from “real” actors and toward fully digitized ones that I promise you is absolutely happening right now, under our noses. You can read it here! It was great fun.
And my podcast co-host Sam Thielman and I recorded an episode with my co-worker and friend Emily VanDerWerff on A Charlie Brown Christmas, which we all love for different but overlapping reasons. Sam and I also did a subscribers-only episode on It’s a Wonderful Life, and we have a very exciting crossover episode coming soon. (What’s a crossover episode, you ask? You’ll see.)
Also, Emily and I do a mini-podcast called “What to Watch” that goes out on Vox’s “Quick Hits” podcast channel. If you have a device that uses the Google Home assistant (like one of these) then we also pop up on there every Friday. I confess I don’t really know how that works but we’ll be pushing it through regular podcast channels starting mid-January; in the meantime, you can click through and hear us and a bunch of our other cool colleagues doing pods that last 10 minutes or less.
The weather outside is frightful, so I’m going to go make something warm to drink and watch something on my screener stack. Stay safe.