Aside from being RL busy and getting the daily horror show from the US like everyone else, I did watch a couple of fictiional things. My collected reviews:

Zero Day (Miniseries, Netflix): solidly suspenseful, but ultimately fails at what it wants to be, i.e. a 70s style political thriller. Not least because it was to be a political thriller without taking a stand in rl politics. Also, there are a couple of moments where you glimpse what could have been a really good work of fiction but then the narrative swerves from what it has seemingly set up to a far less interesting turn. Starring Robert de Niro as retired President George Mullen, the last President, we're told, to command bi partisan respect. When there is a cyber attack that shuts down all online traffic on every device in the US for a solid minute, with a threat of more to come, he's put in charge of a commission to investigate the causes. Said commission is given even more extra powers and habeas corpus suspensions than the Patriot Act after 9/11, and the reason why George Mullen gets appointed by his successor, who is black and female and played by Angela Bassett, is because only he is trusted to not abuse those powers. Other players include an evil tech billionaire (female), a slimy Mr. Speaker (male), George's estranged daughter, a Congresswoman, and an populist influencer who has Tucker Carlson's mannerisms but a pseudo left wing vocabulary. No party affiliations are mentioned for anyone, but it's pretty obvious the Speaker is supposed to be Republican and George's daughter a liberal Democrat. Emphasis on "supposed", because like I said, the miniseries shies away from any actual politics. We're told, repeatedly, that the country is deeply divided and nothing can be done anymore, but no one ever mentions issues the country is divided about. There are the usual red herrings while George investigates - and like I said, technically the miniseries is solidly suspenseful, and de Niro is good in the part - but each time the show could rise above avarage, there are these frustrating turns. For example: ( Spoilers ensue. )

But what really pushed it from "suspenseful with flaws" into "failed" territory for me was the ending( . Spoilers are willing to accept stories with witches and ghosts, but not THIS type of fairy tale. ) In conclusion, you can skip this one, despite some fine actors present.

Paradise (First season, Disney + outside of the US which is where I am, Hulu inside the US): Now we're talking. This one, otoh, does everything right. It's not just suspenseful, it's twisty, with lots of interesting characters whose motivations make sense. And excellent actors, including Sterling K. Brown in the lead, James Marsden as the second most important male role, Julianne Nicholson in the most important female role and Sarah Shahi. If you're unspoiled, which I was, the pilot first makes you believe it's just a murder mystery (it opens with a dead body, so that's no spoiler) with some political trappings since the murdered man is a (former?) President, and our lead part of the team of Secret Agents responsible for his security and inevitably both an investigator and a suspect. But before the pilot is over, the first of many great twist lands, because the setting is revealed: no, we're not in some idyllic town where the President has retired after his term of office, we're really ( in a very different spoilery genre ) And more questions pop up through the season as some are answered. The mixture of twists and reveals is handled just right. Whle Xavier remains the lead throughout, the way the episodes give the central spotlight to a different character in addition to him in each episode, thus introducing the ensemble who each have their own stories and motivations reminded me a bit of Lost. As did the way the interlocking stories sometimes return to the same scene(s) from different povs.

Now, this series when it tackles politics doesn't shy away of actually going deeper than just "we're so divided, but surely a patriotic speech and an outside threat will fix it". Here, too, we have a shady female tech billionaire. (Btw, I'm not complaining that we get tech sisters instead of tech bros in those thrillers. The women might be evil, but they are far more human and interesting than You Know W'ho. Well, Samantha aka Sinatra is, not so much the lady in "Zero Day". The reason why Sam(antha) is code named "Sinatra" is because of a cruel but not inaccurate joke Cal's (also billionaire) father made, telling his son "you think you're Dean Martin, but you're not, you're just Peter Lawford, only in the Rat Pack because of who you're related to". Sinatra is the one with the actual power in the top hierarchy, but while she's the season's main antagonist (not the killer, though), we also get an entire episode focused on her early on (second or third episode, I think), learning her backstory and what made her who she is. This series gets the difference between explaining and excusing so very right, it's awesome. And each time I was afraid it would go for the easy way out - ( as with a spoilery fear ) it didn't. And everyone was so human, including those with limited screentime.

Sterling K. Brown delivered a fantastic lead performance, and there wasn't a weak link in the cast, including the younger actors. And the last but one episode where we finally saw how ( a spoilery momentous event took place ) And despite the ( spoilery ) genre, as many examples of people following their better nature as there was of people following their worst. In conclusion: this one is a must.

Daredevil: Born Again (episodes 1 + 2): Which technically is a first season, except it's not, it's a fourth season of the Netflix show, now produced by the House of Mouse. Now as opposed to Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, Matt Murdoch and friends actually finished their Netflix show in a better place than where they started from, with the Netflix showing having used its third season for a reconciliation arc, so I was in two minds when I heard about this sequel. Because a state of happiness does not Daredevil drama make, so it was a given things woiuld have to get worse again. Otoh I was delighted by the Matt cameo in Spider-Man: No Way Home and his turning up in She-Hulk, and also liked The Other Guy's (to put only vaguely spoilery) appearances in Hawkeye and Echo, so concluded I was in the market for this now show.

( Spoilers for the first two episodes ensue. )

S.G. McLean: The Bookseller of Inverness: ( Jacobite tropes in search of a main character )

Andrew Roberts: George III. ( Farmer George, Just George: Roberts for the Defense )

Based not directly on history but on a historical novel, The Flight Portifolio by Julie Orringer, this is a new miniseries available on Netflix telling the story of Varian Fry and several of his co-workers in the Emergency Rescue Committee who between 1940 - 1941 saved more than 2000 refugees, mostly, though not exclusively, anti-Nazi artists, writers and intellectuals. As with most fictionalisations of rl events, some of the rl people didn't make the cut - in the series, the main rl characters other than Fry are Mary Jayne Gold, Albert Hirschmann (who is both himself and merged with another rl character who doesn't exist in this version, Gold's lover Raymond Couraud), Lisa Fittko and as the sole helpful instead of obstructive member of the US Consulate at Marseille,
Hiram Bingham. Whereas not only Couroud but Miriam Davenport don't show up. There are also fictional main characters: two ex-soldiers-turned-hotel-workers-turned-resistance fighters, Paul Kandidjo and his younger brother, Varian Fry's not-so-ex-boyfriend Thomas Lovegrove. Of the many, many famous people the ERC saved or tried to save, similarly while others are name dropped we only "meet" a tiny selection (which makes dramatic sense), to wit, Walter Benjamin, Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, Marcell Duchamps, Walter Mehring, and Marc Chagall.

(I was sad Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger as well as Heinrich and Nelly Mann didn't make the cut, or for that matter Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler Werfel, because them being saved is actually how I knew about Varian Fry, but like I said: I can understand the series limiting the cameos.)

Now I haven't read the original novel, though having watched the series, I googled and found out that when it got published in 2019, it providing Varian Fry with a (fictional) male lover was attacked in the New York Times, only for Fry's real life son to write to the NYT and say that yes, actually, his father did have (real life) male lovers. Here's an interview with the author, Julie Orringer, talking about why she made the choices she did, from the Paris Review. Not having read the novel in question, my own review is based strictly on the miniseries.

( Detailed observations of the tv series ensue )

All in all: won't become the Casablanca of tv series, but is vey watchable and hopefully will introduce more people to some rl heroes who did consider it their business to help refugees in the darkest of times.

Like I imagine a great many people I started my day yesterday with the good news from Georgia and ended it staring at various news sources in horror. If there is no consequence for the creature and his minions, this will only have been a prelude, so I really, really hope against every cynical bone I have that the arrest warrants are being prepared. Also, be safe, everyone, if you can.

This account from reporters who were inside the Capitol at the time is harrowing.

While our long international nightmare isn't (yet) over, and there's a lot more work to do (not just in the US), yesterday still felt like being able to breathe again after four years of strangulation. On that note:





Among the many articles already out there, this is (as of Sunday morning) one of my current favourites: Kamala Harris makes history

Originally, I hear, was supposed to be directed by Steven Spielberg, and with all respect for Spielberg's superior craftsmanship as a director: I'm glad it wasn't. Sorkin has his own flaws and foibles, - does he ever - , and wasn't able to reign in one particular instinct in the final scene, but the combination of Spielberg + Sorkin very likely would have taken into wholesome reassurance territory where it really would have been no business of being.

As it is, the film presents all of Sorkin's strengths as a scriptwriter, - the witty, memorable dialogue, it flows, aided, google tells me, by several of the most memorable lines actually having been said; it' a genuine ensemble movie, and the characters are passionate about what they're doing/the cause they're pursuing (this by no means is self evident; a great many films based on history make the characters only passionate about their love lives instead). And in a most opportune meeting of subject and current day circumstances, there is a lethal anger going on. (Without, I hasten to add, this coming across as high-handed and/or smug lecturing as is the case with Sorkin at less than his best.) There is also black humor, and one character who made me conclude that what this viewer has been prone to take as satire in both the Chicago-based The Good Wife and The Good Fight re: Chicago judges was clearly hardcore realism.

( The whole world is watching )

Sometimes I wonder whether Individual 1 and the Brexiteers have some competition about most bizarre farce in politics going. Our lot tried with the endlessly drawn out drama around now finally sacked spy chief Maaßen of "there never were any xenophobic attacks! the greatest danger to Germany right now are left wing radicals in the SPD!" fame, which certainly was farcical enough, but good lord, is it ever left in the dust by Brits and Americans alike.

The Economist, itself surely as far from "left" as you can get, has chosen Boris Johnson for the worst damage causing idiot of the year award, reasoning:

In a big field, there was one outstanding candidate. He failed miserably as foreign secretary. He sniped at Mrs May while in Cabinet. He has agitated against her deal from the backbenches and in his lucrative newspaper column without presenting a real alternative. A demagogue not a statesman, he is the most irresponsible politician the country has seen for many years. Step forward, Boris Johnson!

Not that I disagree with any of this, but just look at the competition! Even if you leave aside the Orange Menace and his minions across the Atlantic and treat it as Brits only. And it doesn't show any signs of getting better any time soon, no matter whether or not May remains in office, for, as Jonathan Freedland puts it here:


The justice secretary, David Gauke, was right when he told the BBC this morning that “the parliamentary arithmetic does not change if you change the person living in Downing Street”. As prime minister, Boris Johnson or Dominic Raab might dial up the Brexit rhetoric, but the numbers in the Commons will remain obstinately the same. It will still be a government without a majority. It will still be a hung parliament with a majority of MPs who backed remain.

More to the point, the Irish border question persists no matter who is in No 10. Under the Good Friday agreement, Britain is required to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the republic. The EU is adamant on the same point, fixed in its view that there can be no hard border in Ireland, and yet equally certain that what would now be the external frontier of the EU necessarily involves customs checks and the like. No new PM will be granted a magic wand to wave away those facts, no matter how tightly they screw their eyes shut and insist they truly believe in Brexit.

Tory MPs don’t like hearing that they cannot have their cake and eat it, that there is no Brexit that comes without a severe cost, and so they are taking out their frustration on May. But any prime minister – Johnson, Davis, Raab, Mordaunt, Leadsom, Hunt, Javid – will eventually have to break the same news to them. The problem is not May. The problem is Brexit.

And thus we go for more endless reruns of the whole agonizing circus. It's like watching a friend drink themselves to death, it truly is.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Individual 1 had a temper tantrum on live camera in the reality show he's turned US politics into. this just about sums it up. You know, I've recently read Brecht's play The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui again. This is one of the plays where a few decades have completely changed my opinion on it. When I was in my early 20s, I thought it was an amusing satire on Hitler & Co., but also dated by this very fact, unable to function outside of the Third Reich context, which often is the problem with political satire. Now it's 2018, and I'm not surprised The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui is staged in the US, in Britain, and on German stages. If you don't know the play: Brecht wrote it in a few weeks, near the end of his time in Finland, waiting for US visas for himself and his entourage. It was supposed to be his debut on the American stage, using some key events of Hitler & Co. rising to power and telling them as a Chicago gangster story (in blank verse, with some witty parodies of Shakespeare scenes and scenes from Goethe's Faust to boot). This didn't work out. (In fact, the play was never staged during Brecht's life time and for years was regarded as a minor work. Not anymore, though.) According to his latest biographer, the potential US producers, far from appreciating the American location of the play, resented the implication that Americans could possibly be receptive to a fascist charlatan rising to power backed by a combination of rich industrials and thugs.

...Yeah. Anyway, read today, I think the play would work best if you ditch the explanation signs as to which event in the fictional Chicago matches which in German history altogether and don't let your Arturo do a Hitler imitation. The Cauliflower Trust and old Dogsborough, that supposedly honorable white haired man corrupted by a mixture of money and vanity, thinking they can use small time gangster Arturo Ui and then, when it turns out they are the ones used by him, cravenly falling in line; Ui's mixture of lethargy and temper tantrums; the matching of gangsters and their crooked schemes with grandiose overblown rethoric; no, you don't need to look at the past for this to work at all. There are no heroes in this play, and no larger than life villains; that the lot of them are pathetic and still gain power, wrecking terrible havoc, was part of Brecht's point. No wonder the last lines of the play these days are among the most regularly quoted Brecht lines (here in the translation by George Tabori):

“If we could learn to look instead of gawking,
We'd see the horror in the heart of farce,
If only we could act instead of talking,
We wouldn't always end up on our arse.
This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.”

Last week I noticed that several of our major news media - the FAZ and the SZ, who are our equivalent to the Washington Post and the New York Times, basically - did major stories about the My Lai Massacre, due to the anniversary. Whereas I didn't see anything in my admittedly limited look at the US media, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, it's entirely possible that I missed several articles.

Now, given all that's happening in the US in the present, I'm aware there's no lack of stories about current day calamities. However, I couldn't help but feel reminded of something someone in my circle observed a while ago: the sense that the Vietnam War, which used to be very present in (American as well as non-American) pop culture when I grew up in the 80s, seems to have all but disappeared. And I can't help but speculate, and connect it with a couple of things. 9/11 being one of them. (Which reminds me: the NY Times last week also had an enraged opinion piece by an Iraqui writer on it being the 15th anniversary of W's invasion of Iraq. Someone in the comments observed on the depressing fact that according to current day polls, a lot of US citizens seem to think Saddam had something to do with 9/11. This despite the fact this was one lie too big even for Dubya and his neocons, who stuck to non-existent weapons of mass destruction back in the day. It's not like Saddam is lacking in villainous deeds to be blamed for, but not this one.) And because in recent weeks I finished my Star Trek: Enterprise marathon, my brain made some weird connections, to wit:

1) The Xindi arc in s3 of ENT was an obvious attempt to grapple with 9/11 in fiction. (And the result was, err, less than stellar storytelling.) S4 offered something a bit more nuanced in the form of the the Vulcan three parter. By which I mean that wereas the Xindi arc started by Earth attacked out of the blue by a previously unknown race (who, as it turned out, themselves were manipulated into doing it) , and our heroes deciding that the Jack Bauer way of morality was the way to go, the Vulcan trilogy, written by the Garfield-Stevenses of many a TOS novel fame, had the Vulcans Command dominated by a guy who clamed that the Andorians were in possession of a weapon of mass destruction and that totally asked for a preemptive strike at Andoria. Rather satisfyingly, it ended with the guy in question being deposed and Vulcan society undergoing a moral reformation. But then, it was clearly fiction.

2.) Another attempt to deal with the emotional impact of 9/11 by then ongoing genre shows that I can recall were, of course, the rebooted Battlestar Galactica (the scene of the pilots touching the photos of people who died during the Cylon attack on the colonies was meant as a direct evocation, for example).

3.) And then there was the (in)famous review of the newly released The Two Towers in TIME Magazine by Richard Schickel which read the movie as basically Saruman = Osama bin Laden, Aragorn's speech to Theoden = directed at nations unwilling to back the US in its Iraq venture, which enraged Viggo Mortensen to no end. (He wrote a letter of protest to TIME and showed up in every public appearance he had to promote the movie wearing a T-Shirt saying "no blood for oil".)

What all these attempts and interpretations have in common is this: in all of them, the society coded as "us" (as in "the US") is the attacked-by-overwhelming-forces plucky little guy. I mean, technically you couild argue the humans of the twelve colonies on BSG outnumbered the invading Cylons, but the Cylons, at least at this early point in the show, were presented as technically superior and as the relentless hunters whereas the humans were on the run and fleeing, definitely outmached in weaponry. Not a single one of them has the society/group the audience is supposed to identify with as a superpower outmatching their attackers in weaponry, numbers and economic strength. And most definitely not as a superpower with a history of invasions of its own.

Partly I suppose this is because everyone wants to see themselves as the little guy, the plucky rebel/victim of injustice, and not as The Man defending the status quo. But part of it... well, this brings me back to where I started, the My Lai Massacre and all it symbolizes, the Vietnam War. Because my current interpretation is this: the story the Vietnam War told for a while, in the 70s and 80s, was unbearable post 9/11. It amounted to: the US fought a war which not only it did not win but lost both in the moral and the pragmatic sense. None of the aims it set out to achieve was in fact achieved; the end result was Vietnam as a Communist state. In the process, the image of "defender of the free" etc. was torn to shreds; instead of GI's storming the Beach of Normandy, the enduring iconic image was of a naked little girl running because she got bombed with Napalm, instead of flags being put into the sand of Iwo Jima, you got "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" as a summary of US military strategy, between Johnson and Nixon, both parties in a two party system were tainted by leading this war (and lying about it to the public). It was all for worse than nothing. The US soldiers killed for nothing and were killed for nothing. They got addicted to drugs and committed massacres for nothing. Now you can do the Rambo thing and get a still pleasing to to conservatives story of a brave soldier/brave soldiers let down by their government during and after the war in question, yet good by themselves. You can try the "a few rotten apples" explanation for the likes of My Lai. But by and large, you're still left with: the war was lost on every level it could be lost, and nothing good, no grand final justification came out of it. And that's just completely alien to the narrative US Americans are taught about themselves.

Mind you: there's a sci fi saga created at the time in which the narrative "we" and "us" are in fact a superpower, involved in a conflict with what appears to be an inferior foe under false pretenses, a republic which is rotting from within though there are also people in it who do live according to their ideals. A story with heroes who make moral compromises which end up making everything worse, not better, and with a central character who might start out as an innocent thinking the task of his chosen profession is to free people but who ends up committing massacres....why yes, I'm thinking of the Star Wars Prequels. Which have their flaws, sure enough. But in this, they have a bit more narrative honesty than all those other reflections. (Also more than the sequels who avoid the inconvenience of having to depict main characters defending a functioning state and the status quo by destroying the new Republic off screen and presenting its heroes in a brand new rebellion against a superior foe.)

And since I'm ending on a Star Wars note anyway: my favourite WIP has been finished as of last week. I've reccommended it here before, despite usually avoiding WiPs, because it's that good an AU, encompassing Prequel and OT era alike. It uses its time travel element at the start not as a cheat but as a great way to explore the characters, because Vader regretting Padmé's death and his own physical state and wanting to change this isn't the same as Anakin being redeemed, the way Anakin later, at a point when he thinks he's escaped his past, gets confronted with what he did in both the original and the altered time line is enough to satisfy the strictest critic, Leia-as-raised-by-Anakin-and-Padmé is both intriguingly different and yet recognizably herself and has a heartrendering, fantastic arc once she finds out about certain things, Luke is the most humane character as he should be, there's Ahsoka to make my fannish heart happy, and while I'm usually not really into the EU bookverse characters, the way this story uses Mara Jade is awesome. (Especially an angle which the novels she hails from to my knowledge didn't consider, to wit, that she and Anakin share the experience of being groomed by Palpatine from childhood onward.) In conclusion: it's a long tale, but so worth it.


Out of the Dark Valley (324646 words) by irhinoceri
Chapters: 53/53
Fandom: Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rise of Empire Era - All Media Types, Star Wars - All Media Types
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker, Mara Jade/Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa & Luke Skywalker
Characters: Anakin Skywalker | Darth Vader, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Padmé Amidala, Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, Ahsoka Tano, Mara Jade, Original Female Character(s), Han Solo, Sheev Palpatine | Darth Sidious, Barriss Offee, Yoda (Star Wars)
Additional Tags: Skywalker Family Feels, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Padmé lives!, minor ahsoka tano/barriss offee, Canon-Typical Violence, Time Travel Fix-It, Time Travel Fuck-It-Up-Again, Family Drama/Angst, Dysfunctional Family, Ensemble Cast
Summary:

15 years after the events of RotS, Darth Vader discovers a way to time travel backwards through the Force, to the moment in his past he most regrets. This creates an alternate timeline where he has the opportunity to change his and Padmé's tragic fate. But reliving the past and making a new future will prove to be no easy task, and the sins of the father will have lasting effects on the next generation. (AU from Mustafar onward. Ensemble PoV featuring Anakin, Padmé, Obi-Wan, Luke, Leia, and Mara Jade. Skywalker family focus with mild Anidala and LukeMara elements. Background Barrissoka. Rated T for violence and dark themes.)

Browsing through Curt Siodmak's memoirs again, I was reminded again of how so many things are a matter of perspective. Siodmak - scriptwriter of many a sci fi and horror movie in the 40s, started out writing (both scripts and novels) in the last years of the Weimar Republic, i.e.those very years which in the English speaking world's imagination are firmly coded as sexually liberated (or decadent, depending on who is doing the telling, but at any rate, if Brits and Americans refer to Weimar era Germany, you can bet they envision sex and drugs somewhere). Meanwhile, young Curt Siodmak, making it to the US in 1937 after wisely getting out of Germany post Goebbels' speech to the film worldi in March of 1933, and a few years in France and Britain, comes to just the opposite conclusion - he thought it - i.e. the US of A - was the country of sexual liberation, so unlike sexually repressed Germany (and he means Weimar era Germany, not the Third Reich) and even more repressed Britain. Now this might have something to do with just where Curt S. scored, but even so, I was amused.

Being a genre man through and through, he has a nice hang-up free attitude towards the fact he'll probably best known for The Wolf Man (and inventing a lot of modern day pop culture werewolf folklore, complete with doggerel), but he can be snobbish in other regards; David O. Selznick is never mentioned, for example, without the adjectives "ill-educated". And the descriptions of the first visits to post war Germany in the 50s are (deservedly) scathing, because of course he runs into denialists and "did something happen?" attitudes all around. One of these encounters includes the most effective verbal slap I've ever read administered, when he runs into Gustav Ucicky, whom he knew from ye olde UFA days, and who had then gone on to become one of the Third Reich's leading film directors. Seeing Siodmak again, he asks: "Mensch, Kurt, wo biste gewesen?" "Hey, Curt, long time no see" would be the closest English equivalent for what is the kind of informal greeting you give when you haven't seen each other in a good while but have parted on good terms - the literaral translation, however, is "where have you been?" To which Siodmak replies: "Not in your ovens", and leaves.

(A few decades later Siodmak got and accepted the Bundesverdienstkreuz; in the memoirs he said that three decades of Germany confronting its past (since said memoirs were written in the early 1990s, I'm assuming he means the time between the mid 60s and the present, which is a fair assessment) seemed supportworthy.)

I can't imagine what he'd say to the situation on both sides of the Atlantic right now. Or wait, I can. *cringes* (He died in 2000, at 98 years of age, in his sleep, which.) On that note:


Something New In the West : in which two writers from Die Zeit ponder not just German-US but general Europe-US relationships in the age of not just the Orange Menace:

Today Atlanticists have to deal with the paradox that the attack on the foundations of the liberal international world order founded by America comes from the White House. In the West Wing sits a nationalist and confessed enemy of multilateral politics, one who sympathizes with authoritarian leaders and undermines the EU by supporting Brexit.

The fact that the constants and principles of German foreign policy -- European integration, multilateralism, engagement in the name of human rights and the rule of law, rule-based globalization -- are questioned by the American government constitutes an enormous intellectual and strategic challenge. In the future, Europe now, out of necessity, has to do this by itself without the aid of the U.S., or perhaps even against the U.S. government.

And lastly, on to something to be fannish about.

Black Sails:


Fabulous essay about Black Sails by one Natasha Simonova, University of Oxford, posted by the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies. Spoilers for all four seasons.

Doctor Who:

Casting news: ( Cut just in case it's considered spoilery. )

Harper Lee: when you're a dead writer of note, your letters will be published sooner or later. These sound as if they contain some gems, including this reaction to Obama's inauguration:

In one letter, dated 20 January 2009 – the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration – Lee wrote to Itzkoff: “On this Inauguration Day I count my blessings … I’m also thinking of another friend, Greg Peck, who was a good friend of LBJ. Greg said to him: ‘Do you suppose we will live to see a black president?’ LBJ said: ‘No, but I wish her well.’”

Well, what do you know: LBJ, female black president predictor? Am trying not to be depressed at the thought of what Harper Lee and Gregory Peck would say to the current occupant of the White House. Otoh, Lyndon Johnson (at full power, unhindered by depression) - let loose on the Orange Menace could have been quite something, because Johnson could out vulgar anyone any time, was excellent at destroying people in his way and above all could whip the Senate into shape. Also, muccamukk, Gregory Peck fan extraordinaire, did you know he was buddies with LBJ?

Meanwhile, in depressing reality:

Leaked White House Memo detailes more war on women's health

Because general war on women isn't enough, it seems the Orange One has picked a fight with a soldier's widow and a Congresswoman both last week. You know, I don't get (much of) the US re: soldiers. In no other country I can think of is there such a cult like reverence for "our boys" in everyone's (independent of party) rethoric and such a lack of care for veterans with ill health (unless, of course, they're politically useful generals) and families of dead soldiers in reality. Anyway, good article on the subject of the widow in question: Myeshia Johnson stands up to Donald Trump.

Lastly, the Mary Sue has an article looking back on The Stepford Wives. (The film based on Ira Levin's novel.) I think what gives it - and the trope it coined - its enduring power is that the disturbing answer it provides do the "what do men really want from women"? question is today still all too plausible. No, of course not all men. Etc. But enough.