"A Crew of Crows Fly the Skull and Bones, They Fly the Colours of Their Home" Edition
Hello,
Welcome to THE Harry and Meghan ZONE, where you’ll find news about Harry and Meghan, commentary on Harry and Megan, news about commentary on Harry and Meghan, and commentary on news about Harry and Meghan, not to mention news about commentary on news about commentary on commentary about news about Harry and Meghan.
Obligatory shilling. I wrote a short piece for UnHerd about comedy and politics.
For my paying Substack subscribers, I wrote about two different yet similar columnists: Joseph Sobran and Alexander Cockburn.
Kieślowski. The great Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski died 25 years ago. In the West he was most famous for his magisterial Three Colours trilogy but perhaps his greatest achievement was Dekalog, a television series set in a gruelling tower block in communist Poland. Kieślowski could not help being artistic. I suspect A Short Film About Killing was conceived of as being straightforward anti-death penalty propaganda yet it is still visually and thematically fascinating.
Suburban sociopathy. In a post I wrote about deepfakes for paying subscribers two weeks ago, I wrote that ordinary people have less to fear than public figures because so many fewer people are invested in their manipulation and humiliation. Well, a fifty-year old Pennsylvanian woman has been arrested for creating deepfakes of her daughter's cheerleading rivals in an attempt to get them kicked off the squad. Never underestimate how designing and vindictive ordinary people can be I suppose.
A childhood debt repaid. Here is a funny, lovely article by James Bloodworth in The Fence about shielding his grandmother during the pandemic:
My gran must grapple with a new bodily affliction on an almost weekly basis: a shooting pain here or a mysterious throbbing elsewhere. These form a regular topic of telephone conversation with a dwindling circle of friends. Ailments are reeled off and described with relish; comparisons are made; notes are taken. Industrious grandsons are then sent to the shops to locate and procure the newly crowd-sourced remedies.
I really enjoyed this piece.
A private partnership. We’re having a mushy week here at THE ZONE because I also really enjoyed this article by Nick Cornwell, the son of John Le Carré and apparently a formidable novelist in his own right, about his parents' tireless and trusting collaboration.
As they both became ill in their later years, it only revealed the extent of the mutual support and mutual dependency. They might struggle, as everyone does after 80, to remember things in casual conversation, but in work each could rely on the other to make the connection, to pick up the slack when a brilliant but ageing mind suddenly stuttered.
It's enough to make a man's heart defrost.
H&M. In all seriousness, I said everything I have to say about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex last year.
Saving John Silver. This story of debt, decline and scandal in the guts of Hollywood is riotously entertaining in a way than no actual film I have caught in years has been.
Lost in translation. Laura Marris writes about translating The Plague - one of my favourite books - during the pandemic.
Hall monitors. Glenn Greenwald addresses the nascent campaign against Substack:
Every platform that enables any questioning of their pieties or any irreverent critiques of mainstream journalism — social media sites, YouTube, Patreon, Joe Rogan’s Spotify program — has already been systematically targeted by corporate journalists with censorship demands, often successfully.
I'm sure these guys really imagine that Greenwald, Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan are encouraging far-right radicalisation or whatever but I think professional jealousy plays a role as well. How dare people succeed on their own terms?
Fearful and humourless. Emma Webb writes, in The Critic, in righteous opposition to the expansion of “hate speech” laws:
If this law is passed, there will be less free speech in Scotland than anywhere else in Europe. It will become a fearful and humourless nation without trust or free thought. If such a society takes the wrong path, no one will able to tell the Emperor Sturgeon she has no clothes.
Newcomers. Ross Douthat has joined Substack! As has Michael Tracey! As has Niall Gooch! Who hasn’t at this point? There's my grandad, I suppose.
Have a lovely week,
Ben