Shabbat
Reading List

Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): As an adult, I’ve unfortunately developed a short and ever-decreasing attention span—I blame it on technology destroying all my best neural pathways—and one of the side effects of this is that sitting through a movie is hard for me, especially in a theater where I can’t take a pause. One of the side effects of that is that I rarely see movies twice, which is why it’s so unusual that I saw Sentimental Value twice within a week at the end of 2025 (and would be happy to watch it with you a third time, if anyone is looking for a companion).

When I think about the works I’ve recommended over the past year in the Shabbat Reading List, it occurs to me that most of them have something in common: They’re complicated stories where no one is wholly good or wholly bad, where people do terrible things and repair is messy. It’s not that I think there aren’t morally simple questions in our current moment—in fact, there are many (genocide is wrong, kidnapping people because they don’t have paperwork that gives them permission to remain in their home is wrong, etc). But there are also complex ones, and our culture’s inability to distinguish between the two often leaves me depressed. What revives me is art that captures how capacious and contradictory human beings actually are.

Sentimental Value tells the story of a Norwegian family that, in its contours, is perhaps not so unusual. The parents are divorced; the father (Stellan Skarsgård), a well-known filmmaker, is disconnected and self-involved. The sisters are emotionally close, but constitutionally opposite—the younger, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), leads a stable life as an academic with a husband and son, and the older, Nora (Renate Reinsve), is a free-spirited actor with intimacy issues. The surprise main character at the center of the story is the family house itself, which the film anthropomorphizes into a being with wants and desires, feelings and memory. The house is sad when it’s empty, happy when it’s filled with noise; it stands quiet, constant witness to suicide, divorce, loneliness, and all the far subtler joys and traumas that define the lives unfolding within its walls.

When the arc of a story leads us toward warmth for a person we started out despising, it can feel like a cheap trick. Redemption narratives bankroll Hollywood, and most of them are vapid, unearned, and unmemorable—junk food in movie form. Importantly, Sentimental Value is not a redemption story. No one has really transformed by the end of the film, at least in terms of their inner core. What has transformed, though, is what we understand about each character, and what they understand about each other. Watching them see each other for the first time—as the house has seen them all along—is beautiful.

In one of the film’s early scenes, Nora leaves her sister’s house in the middle of a visit without explanation, seeming suddenly and mystifyingly sad. After Agnes closes the door behind her, she returns to the couch and tells her husband that she’s worried about her sister. It is hard not to be moved by this mundane moment of tenderness, rendered so quietly and out of view. It is even more moving when finally, far later in the movie, Nora finally sees it too.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): I couldn’t quite make out the white-lettered slogan on playwright/performer Anne Gridley’s black t-shirt from my back-row seat at Watch Me Walk. But early on, she made a point of telling us what it said: “No, I am not an inspiration.” The line is just one of the hilarious retorts with which Gridley schools the audience—presumably able-bodied and clueless—as she describes her late-onset hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP), a neurological disorder that affects her mobility, requiring her to use aids to walk. (In press photos, Gridley’s shirt reads, “Not All Who Stumble are Sauced,” and on the night a friend saw the play, “Look out, it’s contagious!”)

The show is didactic, yes, but in such a disarming, sometimes self-ironizing, and often whimsical way that one wants to lean forward and earn straight A’s. Part of its humor comes from the seeming contradiction between Gridley’s sweet, girlish appearance—slight build, short kilt, dark tights, Doc Martens-like boots, an open zipper hoodie over that t-shirt—and her badass acerbity. If a random stranger, she tells us, demands to know, “What happened to you?” she replies, “My parents were anti-vaxxers.” In response to “God bless you”: “God did this to me.”

In fact, DNA did it to her. Gridley’s mother and grandmother had HSP. While we hear about an abundance of heartache in Gridley’s upbringing, Watch Me Walk veers away from becoming a traditional autobiographical one-woman show. There’s no wallowing here, nor any redemption narrative. The play is more interested in disorder—neurological, socio-political (“viva Luigi,” Gridley declares after describing her insurance company’s refusal to cover vital aids), and even theatrical. While this is Gridley’s first work as a playwright, she comes with a storied background as an actor in the wildly experimental troupe Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and the show’s director, Eric Ting, is part of the leadership of the fiercely adventuresome Soho Rep. Little surprise that Watch Me Walk mixes together, among other things, satirical songs, a pair of chiseled male backup singers, medical exegesis, a man in a duck suit, and a big number with Gridley dressed as a magenta, many-tentacled, degenerating upper motor neuron.

Chiefly, the play makes the demand of its title. Gridley requires us to do the thing typically considered inappropriate, but essential to the bodily fact of theater: to stare at her for nearly two hours. We do watch her walk, back and forth again and again and again near the top of the show, across the long, white, narrow stage floor. In a sort of disability-rights inversion of the Brechtian estrangement effect, Gridley makes what is too often considered strange, familiar. And from there, she launches a witty—and scorching—critique.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In 1988, the historian Arno J. Meyer published his controversial take on the Holocaust, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? In it, Meyer placed anti-Communism at the center of the Judeocide, for it was when the war against the Soviets went bad that the Final Solution really took wing. We now have Jochen Helleck’s World Enemy No. 1, which, though it only mentions Meyer and his work (dismissively) in a footnote, makes a strong and important case that the history of the Holocaust has been only a partial one—that for political reasons that should have nothing to do with serious study, the primacy of the Nazi war on Communists and Communism has been elided. As Helleck writes, “The fact that the Nazis rose to power and generated enormous backing across Germany and throughout Europe on the strength of their stridently anti-Communist politics and their ability to fuse Communists and Jews into a single monstrous threat is lost” in the dominant narrative.

For all too obvious reasons, hatred of Communism and Marxism is often treated as a secondary factor in the rise of the Nazis. Left out is the milieu in which the Nazi Party was born and grew, in the rise of violent Freikorps groups that combatted the various Communist-led failed revolutions in post-World War I Germany. During the Nazi rise to power, the street fights across Germany were between Nazis and Communists, with killings committed on both sides.

The Nazis’ foundational hatred of Marxism and the Communist Party earned it, as Hellbeck makes clear, the support of large segments of the Western world, and of course of huge swathes of the German population. When the campaign against the Jews picked up in Germany after the Nazi rise to power, the government would occasionally downplay or deny it, whereas the murderous attitude toward Communism was a constant. There are debates about what the Pope did or didn’t do to help the Jews; what is known for certain is that he had no problem with Hitler’s (and Mussolini’s) war on the Communists and the Soviet Union. Hellbeck explains a large part of the reason the anti-Communist was has been occulted: “Imagine a US government having to explain to millions of Americans and visitors from all over the world that the Soviet Communist order was Nazi Germany’s defining target and that the Holocaust was the culmination of a policy that persecuted Communists as subhumans.”

Hellbeck’s task is not to downplay antisemitism; rather it is to show that the Nazi hatreds of Jews and Communists were intertwined. Bolshevism was hated as a “Jewish” ideology; Jews were hated as the alleged bearers of Bolshevism. Jews were killed as bearers of the Communist bacillus. Jews and Communists were singled out by the Nazis during the period of the war on Soviet soil. Hellbeck’s work in no way diminishes the horrors of the Holocaust. His descriptions of the mass murders of Jews in the death camps are unflinching in their brutality. It is instead a rectification of a lacuna in the remembrance of the event.

Alex Kane (senior reporter): I have long thought of the scholar and author Tareq Baconi as one of the sharpest minds on Palestine. His book Hamas Contained is the best book on the Islamist organization that I have read, and Baconi is a frequent source of mine whenever I write on Gaza and Hamas. But, like many of the people I call up to help me understand contemporary politics, I knew very little about his personal life.That changed in November, when Baconi published his astonishing memoir, Fire in Every Direction.

Baconi’s new book is a stunning, intimate, and beautiful coming-of-age tale, in which his awakening as a queer boy and then man in the Middle East unfolds against the backdrop of war and dispossession. Structured around a series of letters he receives from his childhood love, Baconi gives his readers a bracing look at what it meant to grow up gay in Amman. The book transported me to moments in his life in ways that I am grateful for—it allowed me, to the extent possible, to understand his upbringing and the forces that shaped his life. I loved the intimate moments detailing conversations with his parents, his awkward middle and high school days, and his departure from the Middle East for college. He never allows the political to disappear, weaving in the Nakba, the Second Intifada, and the US invasion of Iraq without any of it seeming incidental to his personal story, subtly making it clear just how much the politics of the region have shaped his life without the book splitting into irreconcilable genres.

The book also stands as a rejoinder to hackneyed and propagandistic descriptions of queer life in the Arab world that aim to depict it as a homophobic backwater. While Baconi’s book never shies away from discussing the repression of queerness in the region, his frank discussion of the issue allows us to see queer Palestinians for the humans they are, with all their hopes, fears, and loves, instead of as props in a battle to depict Arab and Palestinian society as barbaric outposts that need dominating.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Twenty-some-odd years ago, I don’t remember the season, my friends and I ended up in the narrow backroom of an Italian restaurant in the East Village, where a three-person band stood in a little clearing at the front, carved out from the jumble of wooden tables and chairs. Zack Djanikian (known for his work with Graham Nash) on sax, Solomon Dorsey (Brandi Carlile, Amos Lee) on upright bass, and, standing at the mic with a guitar, Krystle Warren—slender, hair shorn close to the head, with a deep, sonorous voice that in some moments had the rich, romantic quality of the cry of a freight train. To watch her sing was to understand what it meant for the body to be an instrument; she sang with all of it; she played it.

We were only supposed to stay for a few songs—I remember I was having a party that night, and was expecting guests not long after. And indeed, I reluctantly left early, though later than I should have, so as not to keep anyone waiting. But I lost two of my friends to that room: drummer Michael Riddleberger (Bleachers, Maya Hawke) and engineer and producer Ben Kane (D’Angelo, Emily King). They were fixed in place. Soon, they too would join the band, and make some of the most achingly poetic, exquisitely arranged records as Krystle Warren and the Faculty.

But to experience Krystle Warren’s music you have to see her live, which I did a hundred times in the early aughts, back before Bowery Poetry Club had tablecloths (or tables) and was full of freaks. One feels her musical intelligence at work, sampling from other songs in the crescendos or breakdowns of her own, riffing, dialing up the intensity, making the room electric with the feeling that one is witnessing a moment that will never happen quite the same way again.

For the first time in seven years, Krystle Warren, who now lives in France with her partner, is coming back to New York for a show on February 7th at Public Records, with the now rarely-assembled Faculty, in a shuffled lineup and with a handful of Grammys between them from other projects. I highly recommend you check it out.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): My discovery of the work of the Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck was an accidental one. I was visiting the room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art containing the only painting on display by the great Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi, when I saw on the wall opposite it a simply stunning painting by Schjerfbeck, whom I’d never heard of. The painting, “The Lace Shawl” (1920), is an almost otherworldly work.The woman wearing the shawl has a strange, greenish, elongated face, with boldly red lips. She looks dolefully to our right, her outsized eyes staring numbly across the green background into the void. It’s a work I would return to on every subsequent visit to the museum, wondering who the artist was and what the rest of her work was like.

The Met has satisfied my curiosity with the exhibition Seeing Silence, the first Schjerfbeck show in the US since 1940. It is a feat, a rare opportunity to experience the work of an ignored genius. It is also a chance to see and almost feel how the painter freed herself of the strictures of academic style and found her way to an extremely personal form of modernism, while living on the outskirts of European art.

Such progress in a painter isn’t rare, but in Schjerfbeck’s case it occurs in a curious way. Already, at around the time she was painting patriotic scenes from Finnish history in the purest conformist style, she was also producing strange canvases like “Drying Sheets,” in which all forms of storytelling are absent. All that’s left are the almost abstract shapes of sheets on grass. It’s a work about color and form, a hint of much that was to come.

The influence of Hammershoi in leaving behind narrative work is obvious, and it is a useful one, as it freed her of the anecdotal. An empty room, a mother holding her baby, her face turned from the viewer—all of it of enormous beauty both in itself and as signposts of the artist’s future.

Not that the anecdotal disappears; rather, it becomes more subtle. Schjerfbeck often painted her elderly mother, seated and reading or performing domestic tasks. In a simple, pared down 1902 work, her mother is seated in a room with a simple blue wall, reading in her rocking chair, her back turned to the painter, uninterested in her artistic endeavors.

The catalog for the show is a beautiful one, filled with enlightening essays, but however good the reproductions, they are unable to show us a key element in many of Schjerfbeck’s paintings: the way she layered the paint and worked with the canvas. The texture of the works, the lightness of the brush strokes, the abrading of the paint, even—as in the beautiful “Fragment” from 1904—the areas of the canvas left untouched, are an integral part of her vision.

The show ends with a series of self-portraits from the artist’s final years. The horrors of aging and of impending death are the true subjects of these works. The artist’s face, mouth tightly puckered, is painted with a limited palette or monochromatically. She stares at us, her eyes wide open. The immediate thought when viewing these works is of their resemblance to the character screaming on the bridge in Munch’s painting, and there’s certainly that. But her ears seem to be pointed, as if she were Nosferatu. The end of life is a vampire, sucking out what little juice is left in us.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): “It is a fact,” the philosopher Martin Buber writes, that “several” Hasidic masters “attempted by means of theurgic or magic activities” to “make of Napoleon that ‘Gog of the Land of Magog’ mentioned by Ezekiel,” and thus hasten the arrival of the Messiah. Having idly opened Buber’s foreword to his novel, For the Sake of Heaven (1945), I do not know whether I was more surprised to learn this “fact” or that Buber had fictionalized this apocalyptic endeavor. Hooked by Buber’s explicit analogy between the story’s subject and World War II, in which he detected “false Messianism on both [!] sides,” I bought the book.

I recommend it, albeit with certain caveats. For instance, Buber is aware that there ought to be female characters, and that the Zaddikim may have occasionally mistreated their wives, but he cannot get beyond a few, fumbling passages about marital relations. More broadly, For the Sake of Heaven, originally published under the (much preferable, very metal) title Gog and Magog, is largely composed of associated, chronologically ordered anecdotes, like those collected in Buber’s famous Tales of the Hasidim (1933). (In fact, many of the anecdotes are simply taken from that anthology.) This is an odd way to write a book—one hesitates to call it a novel, and indeed, Buber’s term is “chronicle.” The reader is constantly pivoting between the larger plot, such as it is, and the local spiritual insights of one rebbe or another.

In a way, this formal tension expresses the book’s thematic question: can the saint enter into history? Buber saw the “sacred anecdote” as encoding “the oneness of inner and outer experience” in which the spiritual master sheds a flash of sudden, spontaneous light perfectly suited to the occasion. But what does such pure illumination have to do with larger social problems, with history that plays out over time, and with intractable political forces? Two camps of Hasidim debate, and battle over, this question. Those of Lublin employ “practical Cabala” (that is, magic) to aid Napoleon, who they concede to be a villain, to accomplish their messianic aims; the quietists of Pshysha, meanwhile, reject this instrumental use of evil means. The Pshysha faction faces an additional paradox: precisely the passivity they council prevents their leader, the so-called “Holy Yehudi,” from defying his teacher, the Seer of Lublin, and establishing his own court. Both Hasidic sociology and world history thus raise thorny practical problems for the spiritual master.

While Buber frames the book in terms of World War II, I wonder if he was also thinking of the Zionist project. Napoleon’s allure in the novel involves his campaign in the Middle East; rumors circulate that he seeks the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land. Moreover, Buber reports that he finally finished the novel after dreaming of “a demon with bat’s wings and the features of a judaizing Goebbels.” My friend Sam Brody (conveniently, a Buber scholar) suggested that this monster of Jewish fascism might represent the Revisionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Sam also speculated that the Seer’s enthusiasm might reflect mainstream Zionists’ joy at the Balfour Declaration, since Buber’s heterodox, binationalist group, Brit Shalom, was wary of sponsorship by the British Empire and hoped instead to ally with Palestinians. Pshysha’s position, with which Buber explicitly sides, also anticipates Hasidic anti-Zionist arguments, especially the insistence that collective repentance must strictly precede redemption, a claim which one finds in, for instance, the writings of the Satmar Rebbe.

Buber would certainly have repudiated any association with Haredi anti-Zionism. And yet, For the Sake of Heaven rejects the Seer’s messianic dealings with the devil, preferring the Yehudi’s pacifism. And its oddly diffuse, occasionally almost unreadable form thus acquires a historical plangency, the series of tenuously connected anecdotes levying a spiritual protest against a smoothly plotted, self-assured Zionist narrative of a Jewish return to history through the coherent agency of a nation-state.

Sean Pergola (operations coordinator):Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice is beautifully shot, raucously funny, and nail-bitingly suspenseful, but what ultimately sets it apart is how precisely it captures the calamity that is artificial intelligence––especially impressive given that AI only enters the film explicitly in its denouement.

Up until then, the plot is a well-crafted, if somewhat familiar, satire of global capitalism: Man-su, a mid-level manager at a paper manufacturing plant (played by Lee Byung-hun of Squid Game fame), has a perfect house and a perfect family, until an American company buys out the paper plant he works at and unceremoniously fires him. After 13 months of limited employment in manual labor jobs––despite his decades of experience and his “Pulp Man of the Year” award, there aren’t enough paper manufacturing jobs to go around––his wife declares that they must sell their house and move to an apartment. Emasculated and desperate, Man-su instead decides to take matters into his own hands by murdering his job competition.

Each killing is preceded by a moment of hesitation, as Man-su grapples with his conscience and recognizes himself in his victims: in their marital disputes, in their desperation to support their children, in their refusal to abandon the only work they know. Each time, however, he overcomes this sentimentality by repeating the same mantra used to justify his own firing: “No other choice.” His hesitation becomes progressively easier to overcome as he grows accustomed to murder––the first one is Chaplinesque in its absurdity and physical comedy, while the last is so efficient and brutal it belongs in Park’s Old Boy.

Finally, Man-su is offered a new job, and we come to the film’s pivot: his interviewers tell him that the manufacturing company will be trying out a new AI-run manufacturing system, and Man-su will be the only one in the factory, only there to make sure the AI is running properly. They ask whether he has any concerns. Man-su––who previously promised his own workers that he would categorically refuse to have them replaced by automation––laughs at the very idea of having any moral scruples.

In the film’s closing, we see Man-su driving to work, the only passenger car on a highway clogged with massive semi-trucks. We then see him walking through a factory emptied of people, populated only by enormous, whirring, inhuman machines. While he luxuriates in this hard-won isolation, the audience is forced to ask: how could this miserable fate have been worth it? The lights go out. As the credits roll, the camera cuts to a scene of automated machinery decimating a forest.

Ari Aster’s Eddington is the only other film I’m aware of that has featured the societal effects of AI this prominently. Whereas Aster depicts AI as a conniving force at work behind the backs of the characters, Park instead shows Man-su as a gleeful participant in enabling the AI regime, so long as it facilitates his family’s middle-class existence. Unlike with Aster, AI does not represent some new evil; it’s simply the logical endpoint of capitalistic atomization, toward which society trudges inexorably, and which appears to us as if it were our fate.

True, despite his mantra and the film’s title, there were always other choices for Man-su; true, there is also the choice for us in the real world to stop the mindless proliferation of AI at the expense of human welfare. But in our dog-eat-dog reality, who among us would forgo the logic of capitalism that sustains our lives of bourgeois comfort?

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Queen Kelly is the greatest film that ever wasn’t. Directed by Erich von Stroheim and starring Gloria Swanson, it’s best known to millions as the film from Swanson’s glorious past that is screened by her character, delusional has-been actress Norma Desmond, in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. The cruelty of that scene, in fact of the casting and the entire film, is made more extreme by the fact that Queen Kelly was the film that ended the directorial career of Stroheim, who plays Desmond’s ex-husband.

The new restoration of the film by Kino International has been in the works for 40 years, and provides us with as complete a version of the unfinished masterpiece as we’ll ever have. Stroheim was the great immoralist of the silent cinema, and in an oeuvre full of the cynical and sex-drenched, Queen Kelly is the capstone.

The existing footage, assembled according to Stroheim’s script and with new intertitles drawn for the screenplay, gives us all the more reason to regret Queen Kelly’s demise. Here we have Stroheim at his most extravagant, with crowd scenes so massive they almost take your breath away. The frank sexuality of the film, which would have become more obvious had it been completed, surpasses even Stroheim’s previous works: this is, after all, a film about a former convent girl, Sally Kelly, who meets a handsome prince who falls in love with her when her panties fall off at the moment of their meeting, and who becomes a madame of a brothel in Tanganyika in East Africa, where her regal manner earns her the title Queen Kelly.

The shoot was shut down by producer Joseph Kennedy, Gloria Swanson’s lover, shortly after the Kelly character’s arrival in Tanganyika, where she meets the “employees” and a Dutchman named Jan, played by Tully Marshall—as revolting a character as ever lit up a screen, his awfulness accentuated by the high-contrast lighting on his face and his incessant slobbering. Kelly is immediately betrothed to him, weds him, and swears never to sleep with him. Here the film ends.

Legend has it that the film’s two backers, Swanson and Joseph Kennedy, pulled the plug due to cost overruns, but this seems not to have been the case. Swanson in later years would claim she ended the film—at least Stroheim’s role in it—because a switcheroo had been pulled on her: she thought that the establishment in Africa would be a bar, and it was only during the shoot she learned she was about to become a madame. In fact, in every version of the script the business is a brothel.

The truth, found in her archives, was that after a number of disputes with Stroheim, the break came as a result of the introduction of Kelly’s husband Jan. As Swanson wrote in her memoirs, “Mr. Stroheim began instructing Mr. Marshall in his usual painstaking fashion, how to drool tobacco juice onto my hand while he was putting on the wedding ring. It was early morning, I had just eaten breakfast, and my stomach turned. I became nauseated and furious at the same time.” This was the last straw. Swanson called Kennedy, told her “the director is a madman,” and Stroheim was fired. What remains is still worthy of admiration, the slender remains of a masterpiece.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): For a not insubstantial number of women watching Heated Rivalry—a smutty new Canadian romance about a nearly decade-long affair between closeted pro hockey players Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov—the show has become an all-out obsession bordering on psychosis. When they are not rewatching one of its six episodes, they are replaying them in their mind, or endlessly consuming related content about the show and its stars, previous unknowns Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie (of course, the algorithm gladly obliges). These women speak of the trouble they’re having leaving the HR world behind; they report sleepless nights, a loss of interest in their work or home lives, and conversations that always end up back on their boys.

I am one of these women. I am very sick and this is a cry for help.

There is so much supplemental content to consume about the show. (My personal favorites are the episode recaps on Empty Netters—by all accounts a normal hockey bro podcast hosted by two very straight ex-pro players until Shane and Ilya came along and broke their brains. The comments on YouTube are all gay men talking about how watching the Netters discuss the show with so much genuine excitement, tenderness, curiosity, and, yes, horniness, is healing them.) And yet I’ve read nothing that is even attempting to answer the most important question: Why the fuck is this happening to us? I’ve heard about all the weird shit the CIA got up to with MKUltra; could this be Canada’s answer? Some subliminal hypnosis-type shit? WHAT IS THE ENDGAME HERE?

Romance writers are having a field day online arguing that the mainstream is just getting acquainted with the intoxicating contours of their genre, which aims to light up the pleasure centers, not to disappoint. After all, the show was adapted from Game Changers, a gay hockey smut series by Rachel Reid. The show—and the authentic, embodied chemistry between its leads—elevates the committedly lowbrow aesthetic of slash, a genre in which mostly women write erotic romances between famous male duos, real and fictional. (The slash comes from the ur example, Kirk/Spock, but imagine Harry/Draco, or Lennon/McCartney. HR takes its inspiration from the real-life feud between hockey stars Alexander Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby.) In my very basic armchair analysis, it seems the female attraction to slash, and to “boy love” in general, may be a way of imagining sex and love without the steep and often violent power imbalances inherent in heterosexual relationships. In other words, the fantasy is equality. Indeed, though Shane and Ilya do sometimes hurt one another, they are also peers (ahem, rivals)—rich and famous phenoms on the international stage. No women were harmed in the making of this soft core. To account for the loss of the erotics of power, the love is forbidden, hence its setting in male pro sports, one of the only provinces left in North America where queerness remains entirely unspoken.

But whatever, no need to overthink things. It’s hot, it’s romantic, it’s beautifully shot. Though I can’t say it’s particularly deep (certainly not as deep as Normal People, its hetero counterpoint in more ways than one), there are some scenes, especially in the latter half of the series, that are so well-written, well-acted, and well-choreographed that I was literally screaming at the screen. One commenter on a post asking for an explanation for their Heated Rivalry psychosis, touting their therapeutic credentials, said the answer is simple: joy. I’m still not sure that Canada isn’t building an army of middle-aged women supersoldiers. But fuck it, everything is so dark. Treat yourself and watch the gay hockey show.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): In 1980, International Harvester closed the Wisconsin Steel Works in South Chicago. Not content to lay off thousands of workers, the company also employed a complex legal scheme to renege on its pension obligations—signed off on by a corrupt company union connected to the Chicago Democratic machine.

The company did not reckon, however, on the steel workers themselves, who organized, under the name “Save Our Jobs,” what their lawyer called a “spiritual union” and fought a 17-year campaign of protests, pickets, and lawsuits to claw back their pensions. They were led by Frank Lumpkin, a Black Communist steelworker who was already 64 years old in 1980.

His wife, Beatrice Lumpkin, who is still alive (and currently, keinehora, 107 years young), wrote a biography of her husband, “Always Bring a Crowd!” The Story of Frank Lumpkin, Steelworker (1999), focusing on the battle with International Harvester. The book, like its protagonist’s life, bridges between the Old Left and the desperate 1980s battles against deindustrialization. Lumpkin moved North from Florida during the Great Migration, and he participated in the wave of post-World War II strikes and in Communist efforts at racial integration in the late 1940s, more than a decade before the Civil Rights Movement. The political repression of McCarthyism crushed the Left organizationally, but could not repress the spirit of class struggle. When the moment arrived, Lumpkin seized it to organize a multiracial, militant group. Save Our Jobs shaped Chicago and even national politics, contributing to Harold Washington’s 1983 mayoral victory over the Democratic machine, and anticipating Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, the last progressive presidential campaign until Bernie Sanders in 2016. And though the plant never reopened, Save Our Jobs wrung substantial settlements from International Harvester and its shady corporate partner—exemplifying the simple idea that when workers fight, we win.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Some years ago, the wildly eccentric artist Alex Melamid, formerly half of the marvelous team of Komar and Melamid, devised something called the Art Healing Ministry. Working out of a small gallery in Soho, patients would bring him their problems, psychological and physical, for which he’d prescribe works of art, usually housed at the Frick Collection, the sight of which would cure their malady. I’m certain that Alex—whose work at the time I helped propagate by having him as designated artist-in-residence at Queens Hospital Center, where I then worked—would prescribe the current exhibition, “Renoir Drawings”, on display at the Morgan Library until February 8th, 2026, for almost anything that ails you. “Joyful” might be a cliché in describing Renoir’s work, but if it is, it’s only because it so aptly applies to his oeuvre, including the works on display here.

Joyful and alive. When I visited the show, the woman standing next to me before Renoir’s drawing of a salon, its walls, and the people and furniture in it enthused over how alive everything was, how the walls and the chair were as vibrant as the people. This is true everywhere in the exhibition.

The curators have assembled the preliminary stages of several of the larger and more impressive drawings. The most thorough tracks a painting through all of Renoir’s preparatory work. There are many sketches for Three Bathers, a large work depicting the pink, fresh-skinned young women who dominate Renoir’s art. They are first drawn separately, with Renoir experimenting with the right poses, the right gestures, and the right way to draw their feet. One drawing in particular, of a model who appears in several of the works, a young woman with bangs, shows her nude body turned away from the viewer so only her back is seen. In the sketch, done on paper on canvas, Renoir has worked the skin color to the point of perfection. The enormous work involved, we must remember, was for a sketch, something that Renoir never would have expected to be displayed. The final image is one of sheer youthful joy bursting from the large frame.

Grim times require respite. Alex Melamid was entirely right: In any given dreadful situation, there exist works of art that can rescue you. The hour or two you spend at the Morgan with Renoir’s drawing will be time well and fruitfully spent.

Mari Cohen (Senior Editor, Politics): A month ago, I finally canceled my Spotify subscription. For a few years, I’d already felt unsettled about supporting a company known for its paltry payments to artists and shady schemes to pad the platform with mass-produced content under the name of “ghost artists.” When Spotify’s CEO made a major investment in an AI military tech company and then the platform began running ICE ads earlier this year, I realized it was time to cancel the family plan I maintained, write them a sternly worded explanation, and move over to Apple Music. I’m not under much illusion that Apple is a particularly ethical company to support either, but at moments when a just consumer boycott is cohering, despairing over how every alternative is compromised can become an excuse to do nothing. So I feel good about making the choice to move to a slightly better option—one that I actually used to use until peer pressure pushed me over to Spotify seven years ago. (Doesn’t hurt that I was able to transfer all my playlists, too.) It’s taking a bit of time to re-familiarize myself with the Apple Music interface, but I can’t say I particularly miss Spotify’s uncanny AI-generated personalized playlist titles or its repetitive recommendations. So with that preamble out of the way, I’m happy to present my annual playlist of my favorite songs released during the year, courtesy of Apple Music.

This year, my favorite album was largely overlooked by major year-end lists. I couldn’t stop listening to the impeccable melodies and emotional vocals on Bloodless by indie singer-songwriter Samia. The more widely recognized Bleeds by Wednesday made for my close second: Frontwoman Karly Hartzman knows how to transform intricate evocations of Southern life into catchy hooks—and she’s not afraid to scream them when necessary. Meanwhile, if Lorde’s limp 2021 offering Solar Power was a disappointment, I found this year’s Virgin to be a return to form, an album that can light up headphones or a dance floor, with a thematic depth still rare in the megapop world. (If you get a chance to see the Ultrasound tour, don’t hesitate—Lorde’s spare, artsy tour production drew me all the way in from the highest spot in the balcony.)

Don’t worry, I also liked a few albums by men, including Southern rock king Jason Isbell’s Foxes in the Snow, which I’ve already extolled in this newsletter, as well as the blues-inflected rock and political poetry on Greg Freeman’s Burnover. The playlist also heavily features selections from Spanish pop star Rosalía’s operatic tour-de-force Lux, as well as the whispery but energetic stylings of her countrywomen AMORE (Top Hits, Ballads, Etc...); the miraculous reunion of Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield with twin sister Allison on Snocaps, bringing back the grungier rock sound of my favorite Waxahatchee record Out of the Storm with the help of MJ Lenderman on guitar; the audacious and addicting power pop tunes on Blondshell’s If You Asked for a Picture; the many permutations (two different versions with two different track lists, plus a b-sides release) of fka twigs’s experimental dance pop record Eusexua (“Girl Feels Good” might be my top song of the year); a welcome return of the interesting version of Justin Bieber on laid-back, groovy SWAG (no, I will not speak about SWAG II here); the throbbing beats and soaring vocals on Sudan Archives’s The BPM; and this year’s rich solo projects from both The National’s Matt Berninger and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy. Shoutout also to Bad Bunny, Ethel Cain, Oklou, Alex G, and The Beths. (Neither of the latter two matched the heights of their respective 2022 albums, but I enjoyed this year’s offerings nonetheless.)

If you’re waiting for me to mention Geese and Cameron Winter, I’ll say I have genuine respect for what the kid is doing—enough to drop a chunk from both albums onto the playlist, though if I had to choose, I think I prefer the full band—but I have a hard cap on for how long I can truly enjoy listening to his warble. I don’t really get the Addison Rae thing more generally but “Diet Pepsi” is a banger. In the Taylor Swift department, I only wanted to drop a few songs from major disappointment The Life of a Showgirl on this playlist—most happily ”Ruin the Friendship,” the only track that maintains the tight, picturesque storytelling that originally had me blasting her music while cleaning my room in middle school—but I would like to present the “Taylor Swift Song of the Year award” to Lady Gaga for “How Bad Do U Want Me,” which uses a remarkably Swiftlike melodic pattern to great effect. As my friends and I used to say about Swift’s “Cruel Summer,” “How Bad Do U Want Me” has those chemicals they put in Doritos to get you to keep eating them. At least someone is putting them to good use!

This rec also serves as my farewell before I head off on my sabbatical at the start of next year. I’ll see you all in May 2026!

Daniel May (publisher): The Voice of Hind Rajab is hard to “recommend.” It’s difficult to think of another movie that I found as physically painful to sit through; I ended up watching most of it with my jacket pulled halfway over my head, as if the padding might shield me from its blows. I left feeling drained and dizzy, but knowing that I had seen a very, very special film.

The entirety of the movie is set in the Ramallah offices of the Red Crescent, the organization that provides emergency health services in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, and the close quarters evoke a claustrophobia more familiar to the stage than cinema. When I initially heard the conceit—the audio from Hind, a six-year-old girl trapped in a car in Gaza, is the actual recording, while actors portray the aid workers that received the call—I thought it sounded formally inventive but practically awkward. I was wrong. The effect is intensely intimate, forcing the viewer to sit with the workers of the Red Crescent for 89 torturously long minutes.

The film has a narrative structure so simple that, were it not based on well-documented events, would seem contrived. Omar, the weary and dogged aid worker who receives Hind’s call, is responsible for keeping her on the phone while his colleague and supervisor Mahdi arranges for an ambulance to retrieve her. While the ambulance in Gaza is only a 12-minute drive from Hind, Mahdi will not authorize the pickup until he has clearance from the Israeli Ministry of Defense that the ambulance will not be fired on. As the hours go by and Hind becomes more scared, desperate, and despairing, Omar unravels. He grows increasingly impatient with Mahdi for not simply directing the ambulance to go to Hind, furious at his deference to the Israelis. His increasing rage makes him a poor source of support for Hind, and his colleagues Rana and Nisreen step in to try and offer words of calm to the girl.

Initially, our sympathy is with Omar, who sees Mahdi as overly obsequious to the same army killing his people. “You’re the reason we’re occupied!” he screams at Mahdi. But when Mahdi points to the wall of photos of the many ambulance drivers already killed in Gaza, telling Omar that if he loses another he is going to quit the job, we see the grief behind his stubbornness.

The hours go on. Omar loses himself, collects himself, loses himself again; Nisreen and Rana talk to Hind about daycare, her favorite colors, anything at all. As they assure her that help is on the way, her voice grows thin in weakness, exhaustion, and fear. It slowly becomes clear to Hind that she is alone and dying, and as much as Rana and Nisreen try to tell her the ambulance will be there soon, in time the six-year-old stops believing them.

You know how the story ends. After almost four hours, the ambulance was finally granted clearance, and several yards in front of Hind’s car it was shelled by a tank. Both of its drivers were instantly killed, and12 days later Hind was found dead in her family’s car.

If all this sounds crushing to watch, it is. But what flattened me was not primarily the awful killing of Hind, whose story is well known and whose voice has already been heard by millions. Nor was it the portrayal of the mundane mechanics of genocide; the bureaucrats that refuse to offer the ambulance authorization are never shown, the tank that kills the drivers and attacks Hind’s car is heard but not seen. The film is not ultimately about the victims or the perpetrators of this genocide, but about its witnesses. In the hands of director Kaouther Ben Hania, the offices of the Red Crescent in Ramallah are a crucible in which the agony of those witnesses can be revealed in ferocious intensity. Her relentless focus is on four that happen to have more power to help than most but, in the end, have far, far less power than they need.

In the reflections she offered after the screening I saw, Ben Hania noted that narrative film is above all an emotional medium, and in bringing us so close to those aid workers, the movie demands that the viewer sit with the agonizing feeling of their powerlessness. As specific as the story is, the experience calls up in acute form a feeling that I have often found myself trying to keep muted these last two years, just to get through the days. The film is about the dedication and efforts of Omar and Rana and Nisreen and Mahdi, but like them we’ve all had some power to stop all this killing—and ultimately, not nearly enough. Ben Hania asks that we see the toll it took on them, and face the toll it takes on us.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The US war crimes in My Lai, encompassing the slaughter of hundreds of Vietnamese villagers, were first revealed by journalist Seymour M. Hersh. Hersh also played an essential role in uncovering the Watergate scandal, working in parallel to Woodward and Bernstein. Hersh laid bare the many crimes of Henry Kissinger, and, much later, the monstrous acts of torture at Abu Ghraib.

In their new film Cover-Up, screening in theaters for a week and then streaming on Netflix, Laura Poitras and Mark Oberhaus take us through Hersh’s work in all these cases in detail. The amazing work he’s done, the skill and luck that have made him a redoubtable figure in the world of muckraking journalism, are presented with great clarity. Hersh has never hesitated to go after the US government, and particularly the military, when they throw off the shackles of law and decency. He has contributed to the firing of malefactors within the government, like the head of the CIA’s counterespionage division, James Jesus Angleton. His astounding work on My Lai revealed the vileness and callousness of military justice—which released the leader of the slaughter, Lt. William Calley, from his life sentence after just three months—as well as the moral degradation of a swath of the American public, which viewed Calley as a hero and a martyr.

But Hersh has also been guilty of sloppiness, as in the case of a fake Marilyn Monroe-JFK correspondence which, in his hunger for a scandal, fooled him entirely, seriously wounding his credibility. There have been other incidents of sloppiness that get scant attention in the film. But Cover-Up doesn’t shy away from showing Hersh to be what any regular reader of his work would assume to be the case—an egomaniacal, temperamental, nasty piece of work. The egocentrism that bursts forth on every page of his writing also appears in every scene of this film.

Though his difficult youth as the child of Jewish immigrant in Chicago is dealt with well, the rest of his personal life is a blank. His wife and children must have chosen not to appear, and he speaks little about them. He is petulant, prickly, and curt with the filmmakers. We learn that it took 20 years for Hersh to agree to do this film with Poitras. There are moments when she must have regretted his consent.

Cover-Up, precisely because of these unpleasant moments, feels like an accurate portrait of Hersh and not a hagiographic suckup. It’s not a muckraking film on a muckraker, but it is an honest film, portraying its subject warts and all.