PicoBlog

Hi, I’m back! I had a busy start to the new year, which made me put off returning to this newsletter for a bit. But it’s been a whirlwind week for media and culture news. The Oscar nominations came out, and we had the beyond-inane Barbie snub discourse. Jon Stewart is returning to The Daily Show (part-time), Vince McMahon is leaving the WWE (again), the White House is paying attention to Taylor Swift deepfakes, a whole bunch of talented journalists (including some friends and acquaintances) got laid off, and on and on. Amid the swirling madness, one north star has steadied me: my intense dislike for Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan’s Maestro, a styrofoam block of a film that's ornamented with all sorts of ribbons and sequins and other fancy-seeming fripperies, none of which can hide the film’s fundamental artificiality. Maestro had pretty much nothing to say about Leonard Bernstein’s music career or the crucial historical context in which his mass-appeal celebrity was possible (which is why there’s now a biopic about him in the first place). It’s driven by screwball patter that emphasizes how much noise there is in this film without meaning, and its central “romance” (between a queer man and his beard-ish wife) felt, viewing it in the moment, full of omissions that significantly hindered the script’s character developments. This piece from my colleague Richard Brody, titled “In Maestro, Bradley Cooper Leaves Out All the Good Stuff,” goes deeper into why Cooper’s directorial follow-up is such an unsatisfying, if not downright irritating, experience.

True Detective: Night Country Finds the Heart of Darkness. I really enjoyed the fourth season! I didn’t even realize until seeing her again in a lead role how much I missed seeing Jodie Foster on screen. For this review, I went back and revisited most of the previous seasons, and the current iteration really is the show’s strongest. There’s little else to recommend among the January TV premieres, though. I was let down by the dramas Expats, Griselda, and Criminal Record, though there might be some promise left in Death and Other Details, of which I’m currently three episodes in.

One of Klimt’s ‘most beautiful’ portraits rediscovered after almost 100 years. This was such wonderful news, although it’s depressing that instead of going to a museum, the painting is headed to an auction house.

Filterworld says algorithms are destroying your sense of taste. My friend Rachelle Hampton wrote an elegant and incisive review of Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld, which deplores our algorithm-driven culture.

The AI Election + Bitcoin’s Wall Street Debut + TikTok’s Doodad Era. I’ve begun looking forward to new episodes of Casey Newton and Kevin Roose’s tech-commentary podcast, Hard Fork, from the New York Times. This was an especially strong installment, especially when discussing TikTok’s recent prioritization of online shopping. IIRC (it’s been a couple of weeks since listening), their summary of the pivot is: “Finally, a social media treats its users with the contempt they deserve.”

A Visual Guide to Jacob Elordi’s Sprawling Designer Bag Collection. They’re real, and they’re spectacular.

More than 26K rape-related pregnancies estimated after Texas outlawed abortions, new study finds. Sorry to end on a bummer!

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