Knocking At The Gate

Jaeah Lee writes in The New York Times about how rap lyrics affect juries and judges, and how persistent are the racial biases in American criminal justice: We have found that over the past three decades, rap — in the form of lyrics, music videos and album images — has been introduced as evidence by prosecutors in hundreds of cases, from homicide to drug possession to gang charges. Rap songs are sometimes used to argue that defendants are guilty even when there’s little other evidence linking them to the crime. What these cases reveal is a serious if lesser-known problem in the courts: how the rules of evidence contribute to racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Full article here.

Based on the book Arriving Today: From The Factory To The Front Door – Why Everything Has Changed About What And How We Buy , this Wall Street Journal documentary looks at the many confounding issues affecting each stage of the planetary supply chain, now severely disrupted by the pandemic and the war in Europe.

Julien Crockett interviews Justin E. H. Smith in The Los Angeles Review Of Book s, regarding his new book The Internet Is Not What You Think : So the “crisis moment” comes when the intrinsically neither-good-nor-bad algorithm comes to be applied for the resolution of problems, for logistical solutions, and so on in many new domains of human social life, and jumps the fence that contained it as focusing on relatively narrow questions to now structuring our social life together as a whole. That’s when the crisis starts.  Full interview here.

Dona and I watched Spielberg's remake of West Side Story yesterday. I am kicking myself hard that I didn't see this in a cinema. It's completely flawless, a sparkling gem of a movie, and it's a big movie with big themes deserving of a big canvas.   This story has been worked and reworked over the course of four centuries by some tremendously expressive people: William Shakespeare, for starters, and also Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Wise, and now Tony Kushner, Janusz Kamiński, Justin Peck, and Steven Spielberg. There are many layers on this palimpsest, many versions all reaching across time. Spielberg uses all of these contributions, remixes them, adds to them, awakens them.   The most obvious of these is Rita Moreno's marvelous turn from starring in the 1961 as Anita and returning in this film as both on-set executive producer and in a reworked role of Valentina. She brings dignity and resonance in every scene she...

Film School Rejects has compiled a convincing list of some of the better movies that somehow failed to be nominated for the coveted Best Picture Oscar. They actually came up with a hundred of them, and it's a great list. Full article here. Warning: Some of these will make you mad.

Nick Paumgarten writes in The New Yorker about a Florida retirement community built around the Jimmy Buffett mythos: More than twenty million people a year pass through the doors of a Margaritaville-branded establishment. The company, with annual system-wide sales of $1.7 billion, licenses the name to restaurants, hotels, casinos, and resorts, and sells a wide array of branded merchandise: umbrellas, towels, beach furniture, bicycles, blenders, frozen shrimp, and Key-lime-pie mix. It recently announced plans to launch a cruise line. (Before that, Buffett himself had never been on a cruise ship.) Given the age of Buffett’s fan base, and the life style he’s hawking—as well as baby-boomer demographics—the move into active living was a natural one. “Who knew people wanted to live in Margaritaville?” Buffett told me. “I thought for a while it was a myth.” Full article here.

Ross Douthat writes in The New York Times : My favored theory is that the Oscars are declining because the movies they were made to showcase have been slowly disappearing. The ideal Oscar nominee is a high-middlebrow movie, aspiring to real artistry and sometimes achieving it, that’s made to be watched on the big screen, with famous stars, vivid cinematography and a memorable score. It’s neither a difficult film for the art-house crowd nor a comic-book blockbuster but a film for the largest possible audience of serious adults — the kind of movie that was commonplace in the not-so-distant days when Oscar races regularly threw up conflicts in which every moviegoer had a stake: “Titanic” against “L.A. Confidential,” “Saving Private Ryan” against “Shakespeare in Love,” “Braveheart” against “Sense and Sensibility” against “Apollo 13.” That analysis explains why this year’s Academy Awards — reworked yet again, with various technical awards taped in advance and a trio of hosts added — have a ...