Sunday links

30th October 2016

Another fortnight and another missed Sunday links last weekend. Apologies, but I hope today’s list of articles and videos that I’ve found interesting recently goes some way to making amends. As usual, many of these have been highlighted on Twitter and a few have been kindly sent to me as recommendations, but I don’t quite have the energy (nor, I suspect, you the interest) to feature each person by name. We only have today and next Sunday before the US Presidential election, although I doubt that remarkable articles like the first couple I feature here will no longer be published – in fact, probably quite the reverse.

• Final days: some jaw-dropping stuff in Gabriel Sherman’s report for New York from inside the Trump campaign.

• A closer look at debate make-up: terrific analysis by Alice Bolin for Racked of the meanings of make-up at the Presidential debates this year and before.

• Home Office rules: the London Review of Books has published Will Davies’ brilliant analysis of the state of things this side of the Atlantic – I recommended this before and can only do so, with even more urgency, again.

• Brexit – how a single word became the most powerful rhetorical device in a generation: via The Conversation, interesting linguistic analysis of ‘Brexit’ and ‘the deficit’ by Kevin Morrell, Professor of Strategy, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick.

• Sketch to screen – The Passion of Joan of Arc: an exceptional Mubi.com post by Ehsan Khoshbakht about Carl Dreyer, architecture and editing.

• Ruins of Palmyra and Baalbek, 1938: a recent restoration by the BFI National Archive, with exquisite colour cinematography by Jack Cardiff.

• Ingrid Bergman’s early years: a lovely essay by Pamela Hutchinson about Bergman in Sweden and Germany, from a recent edition of Sight & Sound.

• The Executioner – by the neck: David Cairns for The Criterion Collection on Luis García Berlanga’s unique 1963 film.

• Martin Scorsese introduces a new restoration of Marlon Brando’s remarkable western One-Eyed Jacks, 1961.

• Ben Wheatley – Confusion and Carnage: an extract, courtesy of Reverse Shot, from Adam Nayman’s new book about the British auteur of the moment.

• Losing the plot: an engaging piece by Luke McKernan on narrative and cognitive film studies.

• When BBC daytime television truly arrived: a guest post by Heather Lewis for the BBC Genome Blog marking the launch of the BBC’s full daytime television schedule 30 years ago this week.

• Forget the future of sports broadcasts, here’s how social media is impacting broadcasters and rights owners now: interesting take on television learning to live with – and profit from – online activity.

• A retort to shrinking screens, in an ultra-immersive show at the Whitney: Mike Hale for The New York Times on a Manhattan show that I want to see more than any other at present: Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016; but there’s lots of stuff online, so I can return to this in future posts.

• Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare; dir. Nicolas Stemann) Kammerspiele, Munich, Oct 2016: a long, rich essay by Holger Syme about a production of Shakespeare’s play that is not so much a staging of it as an interrogation.

• Bruce Springsteen – ‘You can change a life in three minutes with the right song’: for The Observer, Michael Hann talks with The Boss; and – why not – here is Springsteen singing ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’ on the final day of the 2012 Presidential campaign:

• Lessons from the unfolding Old Masters forgery scandal: Olivia McEwan for Hyperallergic on a developing tale of disputed canvases, including ‘David contemplating the head of Goliath’ (a detail of which is above), recently exhibited at the National Gallery, that might or might not be by Orazio Gentileschi.

• Rare 19th century photographs of Shanghai: remarkable imagesby English photographer William Saunders, via BBC Arts, on show 4-12 November at the China Exchange, 32a Gerrard Street, London.

• Bookish fools: a strikingly engaging read by Frank Ferudi for Aeon on book collectors.

• A tale of a typewriter museum: there’s been lots of Twitter love, and rightly so, for this charming story of @mwichary stumbling across a magical trove of mechanical typewriters in Spain.

• When typists were feared as ‘Love Pirates’: for The Atlantic, Matt Jones on stenography and seducation at the turn of the last century.

• Revenge of the tabloids: an essential Guardian Longread by Andy Beckett:

British politics now feels relentlessly tabloid-dominated. From the daily obsession with immigrants to the rubbishing of human rights lawyers, from the march towards a “hard Brexit” to the smearing of liberal Britons as bad losers and elitists, the tabloids and the Conservative right are collaborating with a closeness and a swagger not seen since at least the early 90s.

• So long, Marianne – from the bare breast to the burkini: Robert Zaretsky for LA Review of Books asks does a naked breast a republic make?

• Pentagon video warns of ‘unavoidable’ dystopian future for world’s biggest cities: a truly strange and scary report by Nick Turse for The Intercept on the Pentagon’s vision of urban life in 2030; more analysis here from Annálee Newitz at arstechnica; and here’s the video itself, Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity