Sri Lankan poet-turned-author Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 novel “The English Patient” is a lyrical, highly detailed exploration of love across the decades and how its sacred qualities overcome time and geography. Written in a fragmented, poetic style by Ondaatje, the novel tells the story of a World War II nurse named Hana (Juliette Binoche in the movie) caring for a severely burned man (played by Ralph Fiennes in the adaptation) suffering from amnesia. With the help of a thief named Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe) who has lost his thumbs, and a Sikh bomb expert (Naveen Andrews), the trio learn about the burned man, dubbed “the English patient,” and his past, which includes an affair with the beautiful and wealthy Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas).

Because of Ondaatje’s specific writing style, director Anthony Minghella found the task of adapting the novel daunting: “Its gifts, in a way, are very elusive and are very much connected with the beauty of language, which is probably the thing that the film is least good at conveying.” Ondaatje worked on the script with Minghella, sharing the belief that most people seeing the movie never read the book in the first place. The book’s events happen over several years, and rather than focus on complex themes of national identity and the fluid connections between time and history, it made more sense for the movie to situate the love story between the English patient and Katharine as the primary narrative, with a parallel romance between nurse Hana and bomb expert Kip.

The film (which turns 30 this year) parcels out the mystery of the English patient’s identity over a near three-hour run time, whereas the book has no chronological structure and alternates between the past and the present, telling the patient’s story backward. The reader is an outside observer and learns about things in a realistic manner. No one can predict when a life-changing moment will happen in their lives and the same goes for Hana, the patient, and everyone else. Information is given to them and it takes several chapters for the reader, and the character, to understand the significance of that information.

Ondaatje, a Sri Lankan man living in Canada, makes multi­culturalism and the history of exoticizing the desert key themes in “The English Patient.” This is evident in the depiction of Kip, a Sikh man finding his way in the English world of colonialism. In the book, Kip loves the English and the West — so much so that he sings their songs and wears their clothes. The movie touches on these themes here and there, but in the book Kip is, at times, more important than the English patient himself.

Unlike the movie, where Kip meets Hana as he tries to defuse a minefield on the road she’s traveling, the novel shows him accidentally stumble upon her playing the piano at the villa where she’s been holed up since the novel’s first page. As the two grow closer, he tells her about his family and how he was expected to become a doctor but instead decided to enter the army and, through the mentorship of Lord Suffolk (a real-life person), became a bomb expert.

Several chapters are devoted to Kip’s stories of defusing bombs and saving English lives, all aided by Lord Suffolk’s encouragement. As Kip says, Lord Suffolk is the first person to treat him like a fellow Englishman and not a foreigner. However, when the atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima—illustrating how much time passes in the book compared to the movie— Kip becomes so wild with rage that he plans to shoot the patient, believing the unnamed man represents every evil the English and the West have committed against Asia. Kip feels that if Japan were a white country, those in charge would not have been so hasty to drop the bomb. The patient welcomes death, but Kip can’t pull the trigger. With the explosion of the atomic bomb, Kip’s belief system is literally shattered, leaving him to find a new path in life that, sadly, doesn’t include Hana.

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Kip is such a large part of the narrative that the novel even ends on his character. The movie ends with Hana and Kip parting because his job takes him to other areas of the country. They agree to meet again, but Kip completely discards his Western life. Years pass and Kip becomes the doctor his family wanted him to be. He is married and has two children. He says he received letters from Hana for a year, but never responded to them.

This bittersweet ending is paralleled alongside the story of the patient and Katharine. The love affair between the English patient, revealed as Hungarian cartographer László Almásy, and Katharine Clifton is told on-screen similarly to how it presents on the page, albeit in chronological order and as the overarching story. The pair meet and engage in a powerfully charged romance despite Katharine being married. Almásy and Katharine have a highly sexual affair with moments of extreme toxicity, trying to repel each other because of their awareness that outside forces are pulling them apart. Katharine takes her frustration out on Almásy in the novel by not only hitting him (also seen on screen), but throwing plates and stabbing him with forks. When people notice his plentiful bruises, Almásy makes up excuses, leading them to think he’s a klutz.

The couple’s affair is eventually discovered by Katharine’s jealous husband, Geoffrey (Colin Firth), who has been spying on her. Geoffrey, accompanied by his wife in a biplane, travels to Cairo in order to kill his competition and commit a murder/ suicide by crashing the airplane into the desert sand where Almásy, preparing to leave, is waiting. The crash kills Geoffrey and leaves Katharine severely wounded. Almásy shelters Katharine in a cave and goes off to get help, eventually evading arrest and stealing an airplane to rescue her.

Geoffrey is British Intelligence in the book and works as an aerial photographer. Because the intelligence agency knows of Almásy’s affair with Katharine, they assume Geoffrey’s death is suspicious and imprison Almásy as he tries to get help. His story then jumps ahead three months as he returns to the cave and finds Katharine dead. The movie shows this discovery as a tender moment, with only a few days passing and Almásy lying next to Katharine’s recently deceased body, stroking her hair. The book is more macabre, with Almásy making love to Katharine’s body, a final blending of life and death, love and sex, body and mind.

“The English Patient” was nominated for twelve Academy Awards and won nine, including Best Picture. The movie’s sweeping visuals and romantic love story evoked a sentiment similar to 1940s war romances. It was highly praised upon release, though contemporary audiences today place the moment in the “when Oscar gets it wrong” category due to a perceived lack of staying power and quality compared to fellow nominee “Fargo” (1996). Regardless, Minghella’s film is an utterly beautiful and roman­tic story, a daunting feat considering how equally beautiful, though different, its source material is.

Excerpted from “But Have You Read the Book? Romance Edition: 40 Love Stories That Inspired Our Favorite Films” by Kristen Lopez. Copyright © 2026. Available from Running Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The post The colonial reckoning “The English Patient” adaptation couldn’t capture appeared first on Salon.com.

English writer and director Anthony Minghella has died at age 54, according to various news reports. It’s a sad and early departure for one of the best-loved figures in the British film industry. Minghella was chairman of the British Film Institute, where he had vowed to stem the outflow of British talent to the United States. He won the 1997 best-director Oscar for “The English Patient,” an international hit that launched a new wave of high-gloss, star-studded literary adaptations. His other films as a director included “Truly Madly Deeply” in 1990, “The Talented Mr. Ripley” in 1999 and “Cold Mountain” in 2003. Minghella apparently underwent surgery for a growth in his neck last week at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He had seemed to be recovering normally, but suffered a fatal hemorrhage early on Tuesday morning.

Minghella had recently completed a 90-minute pilot episode of “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency,” a planned television series based on Alexander McCall Smith’s best-selling novels about a Botswanan female detective. The program is scheduled to premiere this weekend on BBC One in Britain, and has been acquired for U.S. broadcast by HBO. He was reportedly close to beginning production on his next film, “The Ninth Life of Louis Drax,” which he had adapted from Liz Jensen’s novel and was planning to shoot in California. It’s too early to know whether that film will be scrapped, or possibly made with another director.

I’ll set aside my own mixed assessment of Minghella’s work and observe that he had an unerring eye for projects that combined big-screen cinematic spectacle, a literary pedigree and wide appeal among upscale audiences. He saw himself first and foremost as a storyteller, and had few artistic pretensions. Unlike so many people in his trade, Minghella was universally well liked on both sides of the Atlantic. Former British prime minister Tony Blair, who worked with Minghella on a 1995 campaign video and became his friend, told the BBC: “Anthony Minghella was a wonderful human being, creative and brilliant, but still humble, gentle and a joy to be with. Whatever I did with him, personally or professionally, left me with complete admiration for him, as a character and as an artist of the highest caliber.”

The son of Italian immigrants who owned an ice cream factory, Minghella was born on the Isle of Wight in 1954. His brother Dominic and sister Edana both work as writers for British television. He is survived by his wife, the choreographer Carolyn Choa, and two children, one of them the actor Max Minghella, who appeared in “Syriana” and “Art School Confidential” and is now a student at Columbia University in New York.

The post Anthony Minghella, 1954-2008 appeared first on Salon.com.

Early in his extraordinary new documentary, “Remake,” seasoned filmmaker Ross McElwee reminisces with his young son, Adrian, about their travels together, presenting McElwee’s films at various festivals around the world. “What’s your favorite place that we’ve been to, Adrian?” McElwee asks his son in the archival footage. Adrian recalls a snafu from the Munich Film Festival, but can’t quite remember the details. McElwee explains that the numbers on his film reels were mislabeled, causing extended confusion as they tried to put the footage back in the correct, chronological order. Still a child, Adrian looks off into the distance, biting his gelato spoon while registering the information.

Then the footage burns out, replaced by shots of Adrian across his youth, preserved in celluloid amber: raking leaves on an autumn afternoon, waving a sparkler around in the summertime, looking at himself in the mirror as a baby. McElwee’s voice, more mature and stoic than before, fades in. “The story I thought I was telling with my filmmaking, the stories of lives lived over decades, is now disjointed, confused — the reels are all out of order,” he says. “First there is a father, and he has a son: me. But then it starts all over. I am now father, and I have a son: you. But something goes awry. Something goes off-script. And then, suddenly, you’re gone.”

“Remake” is McElwee’s first film in 15 years, appearing like a jewel out of a mountain of life’s rubble. His extended absence from filmmaking was necessitated by Adrian’s death in 2016 and the monumental torrent of confusion and emotional displacement that followed. McElwee’s last documentary, 2011’s “Photographic Memory,” saw Adrian as a young adult, trying to come into his own and figure out his place in life amid a shifting social landscape riddled with digital black holes. 

In that film, McElwee set out to reconcile his somewhat fractured relationship with Adrian, who’d become distant and disillusioned compared to his spritely, curious youth, by traveling back to France, where he worked as a photographer’s assistant in his early 20s. In retracing his steps, McElwee sought to understand Adrian better, to comprehend the grasp digital media had on his son in contrast to his own fascination with the analog film camera he frequently used to capture his family, both for his own memories and for his documentaries. In “Remake,” McElwee laments the hope that making “Photographic Memory” gave him, an aspiration that he was depicting his son on the cusp of finding his way through the dark. “The film might’ve been shot as a documentary,” McElwee says, “but now it’s fiction.”

“Remake” may be the story and study of a tragedy. But McElwee’s nonlinear construction and brusque, confessional narration slowly transform the film into something much deeper, a poignant work of art that instantly yet subtly aligns itself with the great stories of our time. His mission is unassuming. This is a film McElwee feels compelled to make, as if it were something living inside of him that had to be excised by any means necessary. 

Like all grieving, it is complicated and disordered, and beautifully so. McElwee stitches together the past and present to find new meaning in their seams, a jagged line that runs through time and points toward the future. To call his latest film a contemporary masterwork would be true, but there’s also no quantifying the magic McElwee conjures here, no comparing it to anything else. “Remake” is a truly singular piece of art, a self-reflexive rumination on life and the result of all its passions. It is memory embodied.

Sometime in the 2010s, McElwee received a call from director and producer Steve Carr, who wanted to explore remaking his breakthrough documentary, 1986’s “Sherman’s March,” into a narrative film. “Sherman’s March” loosely explored McElwee’s hapless search for love during a trip to his native South, where he planned on making a film about a Civil War campaign through the area. Along the way, the movie became less about American history and more about McElwee’s family and his experiences with religion and relationships. 

Carr, the director of fun-for-the-whole-family crowdpleasers like “Daddy Day Care” and “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” didn’t exactly seem like the best candidate to take on something as intricate as “Sherman’s March.” But at the time, a teenage Adrian, hoping to break into the more commercial side of the film business, was vexed by his father’s reluctance to pursue Hollywood money-makers. So, in hopes that a remake might bring the two of them together in some way, McElwee signed the rights to “Sherman’s March” over to Carr, with a condition: McElwee would be granted access to produce a making-of documentary about the new film. McElwee set up his camera to film himself the day he signed the contract. He preferred an easygoing static tripod shot — a point Adrian contested, as is shown in the film. After some back and forth, McElwee relented, letting Adrian try his slow zooms and dynamic shots. The final product in “Remake” is a combination of the two styles, with the loving squabble between a father and his son left in the middle. 

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“Remake” is often startingly honest in this way. McElwee refuses to scrub the truth from his personal histories, choosing instead to confront his own regrets head-on. His regret lingers alongside his grief, allowing the viewer to understand his complex feelings of remorse. Occasionally, McElwee will verbalize his paternal contrition. But most of the time, his choices in archival footage do the talking, asking silent questions. Was he too hard on his son? Did he push him in the wrong direction by trying to reorient his path? Did the fun of the film festival circuit eventually become a blinding limelight, through which Adrian couldn’t see past as he got older? None of these questions have answers. Still, McElwee seeks meaning that may be embedded somewhere in the film grain, revisiting the footage he compiled during the documentary for a remake that never came to fruition, and measuring its tenor against his finished films.

In the process, McElwee creates a patchwork tapestry, comprised of vignettes across time. This one heartwarming, that one agonizing. Together, they form a rich yet incomplete portrait of an existence cut short, which McElwee hopes to broaden by weaving in meaning from before and after Adrian’s life, all captured by McElwee’s omnipresent camera. 

But even that begins to feel disingenuous. There’s an elephant in the room in every scene, and its lens follows the subject everywhere. “Remake” stars McElwee, his son and the camera — that one simple tool that connects Adrian and his father through space and time, life and death. What forged McElwee’s passion and helped him establish his life’s work now reveals its dual nature as the wedge that kept him and Adrian apart. For McElwee, the revelation presents a new crisis. Was he so concerned with capturing his son’s malaise as Adrian became an adult that he missed details he might’ve seen if one eye weren’t looking through the viewfinder? Set against the backdrop of our modern culture, where we’re filming everything but listening to no one, McElwee finds himself trapped in irony’s clutches. In his desire to portray Adrian’s immersion in parasocial worlds filled with shadowy, destructive figures, McElwee’s own perspective was equally one-sided. 

Of course, this is a film about life, and nothing in life is ever so simple. Alongside his regret, McElwee wears compassion for himself and even more for his son, bravely journeying into Adrian’s own archives, including footage from a film Adrian was making about his addiction and recovery. McElwee finds images both startling and serene; videos that fill in gaps he couldn’t on his own. He lovingly omits most graphic footage, but commits to approaching his and Adrian’s shared story from a different viewpoint — a remake.

Throughout the film, alongside the contemplation on the sacrifices he’s made for his work, McElwee repeatedly revisits the importance of filmmaking from different angles: as a tool for preservation, for storytelling, for survival. A film, especially a documentary film, can often tell the story of our lives more succinctly than we ever could. It can also distort that same story into something untruthful. It’s both fact and fiction, and the meaning changes depending on your vantage point.

This idea got me thinking about a class I took in college about ethnographic filmmaking, after an extended break from school following some of my own issues that took me off-track and made my life listless. Searching for direction, I found guidance in professor and documentary filmmaker Carolyn Strachan, whose average RateMyProfessor score hovered somewhere around 2.1. She was a stickler for analysis, whose intensive assignments were the bane of many classmates. But her thorough coursework and off-the-beaten-path syllabus of films opened my eyes to countless new ideas and perspectives. Her class reignited my passion for both writing and film, and pushed me back toward a version of myself that I recognized. 

It took some time to realize how fundamental this course was. But when I understood the connection last year, I tried to get in touch with Professor Strachan to thank her, only to find out that, in 2022, she died after a long battle with cancer. It was a personal matter that never came up in class, but almost certainly influenced her passion for her work and her teaching. Immediately, I thought of how many of my peers complained that her assignments were too difficult, and her film choices were too unconventional to analyze easily, even for college-level writers. She wanted too much from us, they thought. Now I see that she simply wanted us to work a little harder to see how truly beautiful and varied life can be. 

I was upset that I’d never be able to thank her, to laud her for pushing students out of their comfort zones by showing them documentaries that were not easily palatable. There was nowhere to put my grief. So, I’m putting some of it here. As McElwee’s film reminded me, there’s no easy way of making sense of life. But art is our foremost way of working through it, of trying to understand who we are, who we become and how. There’s no better way to honor someone than through art, even if it’s imperfect, even if it can’t reflect their substantial impact, no matter how brief.

Shortly after he and Adrian reminisce about the mishap in Munich, McElwee continues his narration. “So, yes, you’re gone,” he says. “But you’re not gone, not entirely. Because I still have all these moments with you I captured on film.”

The post “Remake” will shift your perspective on grief appeared first on Salon.com.

Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair was widely mocked as a great American flop: overpriced, uncomfortable and, above all, dull.

Well, bad news for fans of fun: Trump’s billionaire buddies, Larry and David Ellison, are about to bring MAGA-ified misery to the rest of entertainment with their proposed merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, which will likely make movie theaters, cable TV and other entertainment products a lot more MAGA — and a lot more boring. 

Larry and David Ellison are the father-and-son duo behind Paramount’s attempted purchase of Warner Bros., a move that would consolidate most of Hollywood into a few hands and dramatically reduce free market competition in the entertainment industry. The two often present, especially in court documents, as simple businessmen just trying to make money. But in reality, Larry Ellison was called a “shadow president” by a Trump adviser speaking to Wired last year. The Ellisons aren’t just in this for money. They are in it for power — and their vision of remaking the country and even world in their MAGA-centric image.

Whether they succeed in the long run remains to be seen, but in the process, they are going to make your movie-going and likely TV-viewing experiences more tiresome. Above all, MAGA is bad at culture, too strapped to their narrow interests and bigotries to understand what makes entertainment actually entertaining.

Last week, the attorneys general of a dozen states, along with the Writers Guild of America West and East, filed suit to stop the merger, which has unsurprisingly been approved by Trump’s corrupt Justice Department. (Full disclosure: I’m a member of WGAE.) Labor and economic concerns fuel these lawsuits, but the consumer experience is front and center. On Monday afternoon, the merger was frozen by a federal judge’s temporary restraining order. 

“The unlawful merger of these two entertainment behemoths would lead to higher prices, lower quality, and less content for film and television, harming movie theaters, basic cable distributors, and ultimately, audiences on every sofa and movie theater seat in the U.S.,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a press conference on Wednesday.

On the podcast “The Town with Matthew Belloni,” he argued that the quality of movie theaters themselves will decline even more if the merger goes through. “You won’t have comfortable seating,” Bonta said. “You won’t have the same quality and variety at concession stands.”

Under the Ellisons, the future of the movies stands to echo the Great American State Fair, where consumers had the pleasure of paying $25 for an overcooked drumstick while they stood in an empty plaza on the National Mall in Washington waiting for the elderly Lee Greenwood to sing “God Bless the USA” for the billionth time.

Experts I talked to explained that such decline is the economic result of consolidation, which reduces competition and therefore removes incentives for movie studios to take creative risks. Miranda Banks, a professor at Loyola Marymount University who has conducted extensive research on media mergers, contrasted this low-competition era with the 1970s, when Hollywood was full of “creative workers” and “a lot of independent companies,” which created “an open market of bidding for good quality programming.” Now companies avoid originality in favor of “churning out more films within franchises,” which is cheaper and easier than developing original products with independent creators. 

But it is also about power and political ideology, explained James Schamus, a screenwriter who once ran Focus Features and is now a Columbia University professor. He argued that the Ellisons are building a “techno fascist project” that is far more interested in waging “war on democracy” than old school Hollywood concerns like selling movie tickets. “Short-term profit is happily sacrificed to long-term domination,” Schamus said.

Chief among these goals is mass surveillance of the population through many means, which includes making sure people can’t watch a movie or TV show without having to hand all their data over to Oracle, the another Larry Ellison-owned company. The elder Ellison isn’t exactly coy about his dystopian scheme: At an Oracle financial analyst meeting in 2024, he promised his company would pave the path to mass social control.

“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” he said. Unsurprisingly, both Larry and David Ellison are big fans of artificial intelligence, seeing it as a way to streamline their surveillance operations, and for what David Ellison euphemistically calls “cost efficiencies and synergies.” 

That’s just code for “firing thousands, if not tens of thousands, of creative people,” Schamus said, and replacing good work with dreck “made for the cheapest price” for the “lowest common denominator.” 

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Anyone who spends time on X or Truth Social knows that, while most Americans loathe empty A.I. slop, there is one audience that eats it up: MAGA folks. Trump himself loves it. He constantly posts A.I. videos that are as tedious as they are uncanny, and his cultural tastes are mirrored by the bulk of right-wing audiences, who artistic discernment is too clouded by bitterness and ideological obsession to engage with the more human emotions that make movies, TV and music engaging to other people. The MAGA capture of Hollywood behemoths like Paramount and Warner Bros. threatens to gut the ability of smart, creative people to make good things, and replace it with mind-numbing rubbish.

“Once upon a time, in Hollywood,” Banks said, movie studios were run by people whose “goal was to get people into the theater.” They were “not good guys or kind guys,” she explained, but ultimately, they saw their job as “making money to make more movies.” However cynical — and largely straight, white and male — some old-school operators were, they helped to build a Hollywood that was centered around giving the people what they wanted. This seems like paradise compared to what the Ellisons and their kind envision.

“For these guys,” Banks said, the goal “is extraction,” and “what they’re extracting is not just our money, but our data.” For years, movie ticket sales have been declining, because of this shift from seeing the consumer not as a customer to please, but a mark to suck dry. In some ways, the Ellisons don’t care that much if you ever go back to the movies.

“They all think they should be the techno-fascist philosopher king at the end of the day,” Schamus said, referring not just to the Ellisons, but also to similar megalomaniacal MAGA billionaires like tech investors Peter Thiel and Elon Musk (who recently lost his trillionaire status). At a certain point, these men have amassed so much money that it’s meaningless. The next hill to conquer is social control.

Making media more MAGA will make it dumber, but that’s by design. Truly creative and inspiring art undermines that goal, because it provokes responses like empathy and critical thinking in audiences — which gets in the way of authoritarian domination.

UPDATE: This article has been updating to reflect a federal judge’s temporary restraining order against the merger on July 20.

The post The MAGA-fication of Hollywood is going to be so boring appeared first on Salon.com.

Throughout all three hours of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” — the acclaimed writer-director’s take on the ancient Greek epic attributed to Homer — I repeatedly returned to one question.

This isn’t entirely atypical. In the past, Nolan’s films have pushed me to ponder ideas both enormous and infinitesimal; much of his work ricochets across this spectrum at a dizzying rate, which is part of why his movies, though always grand in scale, feel different from your typical blockbuster fare. Unlike many of his contemporaries working in the big-budget space, Nolan has no affection for the slow build. His films are designed to be all-consuming experiences, opening in media res, grabbing the viewer by the ankle and dragging them into action already in progress. This technique also makes them difficult to refute based on feeling alone. When you’re swept up into the story immediately and held there for 180 minutes, it’s harder to pinpoint exactly where the film ends and your own impression of it begins. With its exhaustive narrative breadth and action set pieces that only a budget of a cool $250 million could afford, the fact that “The Odyssey” exists at all is intended to feel like a miracle. But that’s precisely why I couldn’t seem to shake that one nagging question: What’s the point of all this?

I mean, I know the point. The point is to dazzle. The point is to convey cinema’s great power. The point is to remind us that there is no filmmaker working today other than Christopher Nolan who can make a movie of this size.

But do any of those things warrant “The Odyssey”? Nolan, fresh off the success of “Oppenheimer” — a historical biopic about the father of the atomic bomb that became a runaway hit, generating nearly a billion dollars and seven Oscar wins — had a blank check waiting on his doorstep upon returning home from Oscar night. He could conceivably do whatever he liked, go in whichever direction he pleased. And yet, Nolan returned to Homer’s poem, the structural basis of almost all storytelling throughout human record, which, if you break it down more acutely, includes Nolan’s filmography.

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Nolan has called the lack of mainstream adaptations of the work a “curious gap in Hollywood history.” But I’d argue the lack of “Odyssey” films partially stems from the fact that the text speaks for itself. Pursuing an adaptation of this caliber feels like a losing battle, something a filmmaker does just to prove that they can. Without any noteworthy changes that give the source material unexpected new meaning — significance you could only get in a movie theater, and not from the story or any of its scholarly interpretations — that air of self-importance quickly turns to a sour funk. In an ironic twist, Nolan’s own ambition in adapting “The Odyssey” looks something like Odysseus’. Fresh from his latest victory, Nolan reaches for the stars and grazes the Gods. His determination may be admirable, but the sheer, futile arrogance of such a display backfires in equally spectacular fashion.

None of this is to say that there isn’t merit in a filmmaker, particularly one of Nolan’s stature, wanting to explore their artistic desires. But that’s also why “The Odyssey” is such a keen disappointment. Someone like Nolan — who has passed just about every bar there is to pass, raised that bar, and then passed it again — probing his ambition within the context of a work as substantial as “The Odyssey” should prove to be compelling in its own right. To use a recent example operating on a similar blockbuster scale, Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” did this particularly well, assessing humanity and movies together against the backdrop of Spielberg’s favorite themes. One could enjoy “Disclosure Day” as a solitary experience, or measure it against Spielberg’s body of work to explore an even deeper meaning.

Sure, one might argue that in “The Odyssey,” Nolan is studying his own hubris, accepting the innate faults that come with bringing Homer to the big screen. But I don’t think Nolan understands that’s what’s happening here, and that’s because his “Odyssey” doesn’t have anything new to say about the original text or his beliefs as a filmmaker. If anything, “The Odyssey” only waters down every artistic statement Nolan has already posed.

Like Homer’s poem, Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is told nonlinearly, scattered between the perspectives of Odysseus (Matt Damon), his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and their son, Telemachus (Tom Holland). Ten years after the fall of Troy, Odysseus still hasn’t returned home to Ithaca, and his kingdom has been overtaken by suitors crudely courting his wife’s hand. As their impatience grows, the window for Odysseus to reclaim his kingdom and restore a crumbling world to Zeus’ law — essentially open-hearted hospitality and treating others as you’d be treated — is closing. As Telemachus travels to seek news of his father’s whereabouts, or if he’s even alive, Odysseus recounts his story to the island nymph, Calypso (Charlize Theron): The bloody Trojan War, a cyclops, a sea witch, dalliances with the dead, sirens, and a crew of impatient men.

Nolan makes only a handful of changes to the translations of the original text. Instead of Gods like Poseidon and Zeus playing an integral role in the story, they are left as unseen forces that motivate the characters’ actions. (Every 40 minutes or so, Zendaya appears to Odysseus as the goddess Athena to spout some ethereal wisdom before disappearing, but Athena plays more like a postwar trauma manifestation than an actual character.) Characters speak with a more casual, modern dialect. And, perhaps most memorably significant, the Trojan Horse is discovered half-submerged on the beach, and not outside Troy’s gates on wheels. Nolan uses this adjustment to build out the film’s emotional throughline: an extended rumination on the evils of war and the repugnance of men. And while it’s a smart and novel twist on a colloquial metaphor that has almost come to precede Homer’s poem, Nolan’s Trojan Horse doesn’t inspire any reflections on war that weren’t addressed more directly and cleverly in “Oppenheimer.”

Every question “The Odyssey” poses has been asked dozens of times before by Nolan himself, and in far more interesting ways. Here, Nolan once again returns to his pet themes of playing God, human mistreatment, the passage of time, and bearing witness to the world’s slow, painful destruction. All of these things are surveyed with more thought and care in many of his other works, especially “Oppenheimer,” but also in “Interstellar,” “Tenet,” and even translated into the hyper-accessible superhero fare of his “Batman” films.

Many great filmmakers are immersed in the same ideas, returning to them in one way or another with each film. But to do that with something like “The Odyssey” is unnecessary, even haughty. Nolan attempts to assert the text’s relevancy in our contemporary age, but that’s not something any scholar or even the average reader would contest. This is Homer, after all, famously the foundation of all great work. What’s perplexing is that Nolan’s said as much himself. So why try to tackle “The Odyssey” at all, if not only to — as Nolan also acknowledged — be one of the only loyal feature-length film adaptations in history, and have his name forever cemented in the same conversation as Homer’s?

In the second act (that is, the second hour of the film’s three), Nolan gets close to revealing why. Tied to the mast of his ship as he and his crew pass the singing sirens, adorned on the jagged rocks at sea, Odysseus screams out with pain and desire. After the ship has made safe passage and the sirens’ voices have drifted into the air, Odysseus’ second-in-command, Eurylochus (Himesh Patel), asks him what he heard. Odysseus tells Eurylochus that their song contains everything he’s ever known and everything he never wanted to admit to himself. And, in a line of dialogue that will stick with me — one that shot straight to my heart faster than any of Nolan’s oft-repeated contemplations on war or morality — Odysseus says, “Their song told me that what you want the most is what you already had.”

There’s no better summary of Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” Here, a filmmaker who managed to reach the peak of Olympus makes the prideful, ill-fated decision to hoist a ladder toward the stars, trying to get even higher, past where even the Gods can see. He knows there is no foundation to hold him, nothing to prop his steps against, but he tries anyway. And truthfully, there’s dignity in that curiosity, in wanting to know if greatness is all there is, or if there is something more that exists beyond what we can perceive. But both history and myth have proven that there’s no measuring up to the Gods.

The post Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is pointless appeared first on Salon.com.

When news of Sam Neill’s death at the age of 78 broke earlier this week, much of the public sentiment for the late New Zealand actor revolved around his humor and charm. Neill was a consummate character actor, hard-working and driven by a love for his craft, with a filmography spanning decades and roles that touched countless lives. And as such, Neill was a fount of fascinating stories and notable quotables — products of keeping his eyes open to all of the world’s strange beauty.

The New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan reminisced on an interview with Neill from 2022, promoting his return to the “Jurassic” franchise alongside former costars Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, in which Neill spun a truly incredible anecdote about his son farting in front of Princess Diana. On X, a user posted a magazine clipping in which Neill revealed how he’d commit a murder. (At the time, he was making the rounds for the BBC miniseries adaptation of “And Then There Were None.”) “I’d use a steamroller,” Neill confessed. “There’s a couple of people I’d put under a steamroller, but I won’t say who they are; otherwise, when they see a steamroller coming their way, they’ll be on full alert. And steamrollers don’t go very fast.”

Beyond making us laugh, Neill’s wit was one of those special traits that enhanced all the other aspects that made him so lovable as both an actor and a person. His real-life geniality provides a stark contrast to some of his most famous roles as monstrous men committing equally hideous deeds. His best work tunneled into life’s darkest spaces to excavate ideas about our fears and obsessions, often reflected through dazzling practical effects that matched the naturalism of his greatest feature: a singularly expressive, malleable face. The mixture of satisfaction, excitement and sheer bewilderment that Neill wore in the first dinosaur scene in “Jurassic Park” was so effective that it made viewers feel like they, too, were witnessing something beyond imagination. To convey so much using nothing but the  God-given tools in your arsenal is the mark of a truly great actor.

Though “Jurassic Park” may be Neill’s most loved work, it’s far from his most impressive. To quantify a career like Neill’s is impossible, but “Jurassic Park” points to a trend that spanned his filmography, even defined it. Throughout his career, Neill pitted himself against creatures both real and imagined — or, even more often, somewhere in-between — to reveal humanity’s foibles in the face of the freakish and fantastic. Neill’s penchant for the weird and abstract allowed him to use his unique features and distinct, gravelly voice to create characters who were as devilishly memorable as the beasts they went up against. Few performers could make your blood run cold one minute and have you laughing the next. And Neill relished that ability, returning time and again to characters whose unpredictability mirrored life’s, creating an oeuvre that is both grotesque and supremely human.

It’s telling that Neill’s first major film role outside of a few sleepy Australian movies was as a grown-up version of “The Omen” antichrist Damien Thorne in 1981’s “The Final Conflict.” With his slick black hair and steely gaze, he was practically born for the part. But those features were on far more chilling display — and for a significantly better film — in Andrzej Żuławski’s “Possession,” which debuted the same year, making for a pair of roles that supply a sturdy outline for Neill’s career. In Żuławski’s famously imposing psychological horror film, Neill stars alongside Isabelle Adjani as Mark, a young man whose life and marriage are falling apart at the seams after his wife, Anna (Adjani), has an affair and begins to exhibit strange behavior. As the first person the viewer sees in the film, Neill has the responsibility of setting the tone — a nearly inconceivable task for a movie that twists itself into a knot before consuming and regurgitating itself 10 more times. But Neill is up to the task, creating an atmosphere of sheer bleakness with little more than a look that is, somehow, both vacant and teeming with emotion.

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Though many critics and historians have tried, it’s impossible to get to the true root of a work as oblique as “Possession.” There are 100 feasible readings of Żuławski’s film, and just when those all seem to make sense, you could conjure up a 101st. What’s certain is that watching Adjani give herself over to Anna — and the gurgling, tentacled creature that may or may not be a figment of her fractured reality — is one of the most terror-inducing experiences you could have with a movie. But it’s important to note that “Possession” is a two-hander; Adjani’s performance needs Neill’s to sing, or perhaps, screech. He rises and falls at the same pace as his companion in this nightmare, laying the groundwork on which Adjani can create something so enormous. Neill’s performance is as flailing and furious as hers, and together, they turn “Possession” into a radical piece of filmmaking that has deservedly earned its cult following and late reverence. It’s really no wonder that Neill would go on to play characters who echoed Mark’s descent into madness, splitting off into equally extraordinary works of spine-tingling creature feature dread.

While some might cry sacrilege at comparing a filmmaker like Żuławski to Paul W.S. Anderson, the man behind such cinematic triumphs as the “Resident Evil” film franchise and “Alien vs. Predator,” both directors knew exactly how to push Neill to his most frightening limits. Like “Possession,” Anderson’s 1997 space horror, “Event Horizon,” took its time becoming a cult classic. Though the film was initially a critical and box office flop, it contains some of the most captivating sequences of outer-space terror you’ll find in any film, largely thanks to Neill’s petrifying turn as Dr. William Weir, a spaceship designer driven mad by mysterious visions. Weir and a small crew are sent on a recovery mission after the lost spaceship, the Event Horizon, suddenly reappears in orbit around Neptune, issuing a distress signal. When they arrive, they discover an inexplicable massacre has occurred, potentially the result of the ship’s ability, engineered by Weir, to fold space-time and travel great distances in a flash.

“Event Horizon” demonstrates a major theme in Neill’s most gruesome creature feature performances: the slow, onscreen transition from good to evil. Though Neill had more than a lifetime’s experience playing characters who were solely benevolent or entirely wicked, he was remarkably adept at navigating the journey back and forth between these two polarities. Even when they were written simply, his characters were never one-note. Neill seemed to savor the chance to go deeper, to look more closely at our innate capacity for acts both moral and depraved. Often, it’s trauma that changes us, that pushes us past the confines of what we know to be righteous and toward something cruel and unusual — a picture of ourselves that looks unfamiliar.

Dr. Weir, trying to do good for the world while still grappling with his wife’s suicide, reaches that threshold with unnerving speed (and even a bit of camp). But in “Event Horizon,” Neill avoids hokeyness in what could otherwise be an extremely hokey film, finding the emotional center in a character whose inner demons become real-life manifestations of Hell. It’s rare that an audience will sympathize with a character who is almost too nightmarish to bear, but Neill’s ability to consistently humanize the inhuman is precisely the kind of quality that we go to the movies for.

Of course, we also go for stories that are larger than life, that traverse beyond this realm into a place that only movies can go. One may argue that “Jurassic Park” is Neill’s perfect example of such a power. But my personal favorite will always be John Carpenter’s “In the Mouth of Madness,” a film that, by its title alone, is so fitting for Neill’s career that it’s almost comical. If you watch any film of Neill’s to pay tribute to a life well-lived and a career well-balanced, let it be this one: a hauntingly prescient, brilliant work of horror that perfectly encapsulates Neill’s most notable characters.

In the film, Neill stars as insurance investigator John Trent, who has been hired by the book publisher Arcane to track down their missing horror author, Sutter Kane, whose next book is hotly anticipated by the adoring, obsessed public. John’s work leads him to Hobb’s End, the fictional town in all of Kane’s novels come to life, where a series of strange occurrences that seem to lead back to Kane are happening more and more frequently. But John believes all of it to be an elaborate publicity stunt concocted by Arcane — or, at least, that’s what he tells himself.

Riffing on the public’s fanatical response to Stephen King’s work with a culty, Lovecraftian spin, Carpenter and screenwriter Michael De Luca craft a fascinating tale of how idol worship alters our collective consciousness, in which Neill is an essential component. As an ordinary man thrust into a world of monsters and maniacs, Neill is inherently playing with ideas about art and celebrity that reflect his own career. “In the Mouth of Madness” ponders just how powerful media — and our relationship to it — can be, and Neill gives an electrifying turn as a man caught up in a myth made real.

Neill said that, in filming “Possession,” he “only just escaped with his sanity barely intact.” And with “In the Mouth of Madness,” he once again evaluates the price of making great art, but this time from a safer distance. One could easily read the film as a meta examination of Neill’s work, of the kinds of characters he was drawn to, the ones that no audience member could soon forget. These men were striking figures, as intimidating as they were irresistible. They were characters who made us remember why we look to certain actors for specific things, and how important it can be to pay attention to the feelings they conjure within us. For Neill, it was the passion for complex, wily characters, and how those types of people reacted in situations that were equally complicated. His performances reminded us how easy it is for a person to lose their senses when they come face-to-face with something spectacular and indescribable. And what is life if not spectacular and indescribable? Through Neill’s work, we could explore our fears about what we can’t always understand. He wore the terror for us, making life’s big mysteries seem just a little less daunting — even if they, like Neill, will always be unpredictable.

The post Sam Neill, king of the creature feature appeared first on Salon.com.

After the first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s new film adaptation of The Odyssey dropped, a wave of conversation followed, part amused, part outraged: Why were all the actors, even the British ones, doing American accents? And why did the dialogue sound so contemporary?

“My dad is coming home,” declares Tom Holland as Odysseus’s son Telemachus, with tight-mouthed American vowels despite Holland’s natural English accent. 

“You’re pining for a daddy you didn’t even know,” returns Robert Pattinson, another British actor hitting hard American r’s.

“Let’s gooooooo!” yells Matt Damon’s Odysseus as he leads his men to battle, Boston o’s in their full splendor. 

“Dude,” the Hollywood Reporter wrote. “Everybody sounds like they’re from Ohio.” The comments section below the trailer is filled with jokes about seeing Odysseus waiting outside Starbucks. 

It makes sense that audiences were so surprised at Nolan’s choice. We’re used to seeing actors in period pieces and fantasy epics speak with British accents, a trope sometimes called “The Queen’s Latin.” But there’s no logical reason that characters who, in-universe, are speaking ancient Greek should sound to us like they’re talking in mannered BBC English, says Erik Singer, the dialect coach who helped Austin Butler nail his Elvis accent. The Odyssey is nearly 3,000 years old, and on that scale, contemporary American English is just as close to Homer’s language as the elevated old-timey English diction we often see in period films. 

“Accents do not in fact inherently mean anything,” Singer says, “but we really think that they do.” 

To understand why the accents in The Odyssey sound so strange to so many people, you first have to understand why British accents became the default for any period piece. The answer has a surprising amount to do with what American audiences think power sounds like. 

“Why is the empire British when we’re in outer space and there is no Britain?”

As the Hollywood epic emerged starting in the 1930s and evolved in the 1950s, Singer says, studios developed a convention of coding the past in different accents. In films like Spartacus and Ben-Hur, the villainous elites were mostly played by British theater actors in Received Pronunciation English, whereas the heroic peasant protagonists were played by Americans with American accents.

“I do think that it is not an accident that…there still was a British Empire in the ’30s and ’40s,” Singer tells Vox. “There’s something [there] that makes sense…the popular conception of the Roman Empire bestriding the world, like the British Empire.”

“British accents have been closely associated with imperialism for a very long time for obvious reasons,” says Mike Walsh, a dialect coach who worked with Brian Geraghty for 1923: A Yellowstone Origin Story. “When you’re dealing with some sort of war effort that takes place in something that feels like fantasy, most often the characters become British.”

Over time, this practice calcified into a convention. In fantasy worlds based on medieval Britain, like Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, the American and Australian actors speak in British accents. They also speak in British accents in period films that are supposed to take place in France (Ever After, Les Miserables), Russia (Anna Karenina), and the ancient past (Gladiator, 300). In The Borgias, the Italians have British accents, but the French have French accents. 

Even in Star Wars, the Empire uses the Queen’s English, while the scrappy resistance army has American accents. “Why is the empire always the British one when we’re in outer space and there is no Britain?” Walsh asks. “Britain has become associated with this high-fantasy war conqueror image.”

Avoiding “British period movie accent”

When Hollywood avoids a British accent in a period or fantasy film, it’s usually for a specific reason. Often, it has to do with which characters the audience is supposed to perceive as powerful, and which ones they are supposed to relate to. 

In the 1984 film Amadeus, director Miloš Forman had Tom Hulce use his usual American accent to play Mozart. Forman “wanted the Mozarts to feel like out-of-place Americans in Vienna,” Hulce explained in 2023. F. Murray Abraham also kept his American accent to play Salieri, but the Viennese characters around them were primarily played by Brits in their natural accents.

In 2005, Sofia Coppola directed the cast of Marie Antoinette to use their natural accents. “We weren’t going to do the movie in 18th-century French, so it didn’t make sense to have them do British period movie accent,” she said at the time, adding that she was influenced by the way the natural accents in Amadeus made the characters feel “like real people.” As in the old Hollywood epics, Coppola cast British theater actors as the old guard of Versailles and young Americans as Marie Antoinette and her friends, so that Kirsten Dunst’s California drawl became another anachronism, bringing Marie Antoinette’s youth and modernity to life.

In the 2017 film The Death of Stalin, each character in 1950s Russia has a different accent. Director Armando Iannucci told most of the cast to speak as they normally would, so that Steve Buscemi’s Khrushchev keeps Buscemi’s Brooklyn intonations, while Adrian McLoughlin’s Stalin is Cockney. (The exception is Jason Isaacs, who tweaks his Liverpool accent into something more Yorkshire). Iannucci told Metro in 2017 that he considered having the cast perform in Russian accents, but ended up feeling it would detract from the comedy. “I thought it would just kill the pace and spontaneity of it,” he said. “I wanted a range of English accents, to indicate the geographic spread of this Empire.”

Nolan’s Odyssey, however, does not appear to be aiming for the shocking anachronism of Marie Antoinette, the fish-out-of-water humor of Amadeus, or the black comedy of The Death of Stalin. Whatever Nolan’s doing with his accent work, it’s something else entirely.

“Language that has emotional not intellectual meaning to people” 

Nolan has said he was inspired by Emily Wilson’s portrait of Odysseus in her radically stripped down 2017 translation. While most English translations of The Odyssey use heightened, highly poetic language, Wilson’s is severe in its simplicity. She rejects any flowery invocations of “the muse” at the beginning of her translation, rendering the first line starkly as “Tell me about a complicated man.”

“The notion that the Homeric epic must be rendered in grand, ornate, rhetorically elevated English has been with us since the time of Alexander Pope,” Wilson writes in her introduction to The Odyssey, referring to Pope’s grandiloquent 1725 translation. “It is past time, I believe, to reject this assumption.” Her argument is that the original Greek is “not difficult or ostentatious,” and she wants to honor the fact that “stylistic pomposity is entirely un-Homeric.”

Following suit, Nolan told the Los Angeles Times that he wanted “an earthy narrative” for his Odyssey, and that he prioritized “language that has emotional not intellectual meaning to people.” 

“He’s attempting to go closer to that idea of what would have been colloquial for the time,” Walsh says. “Though it is a heightened story told in song, that doesn’t mean that it was told with a filter or a distance applied to it, or that it was only meant to apply to smart people.”

What seems to be jarring to people, though, is that while Nolan’s characters might sound relatable, they are still powerful classical figures: kings and queens and gods and goddesses. 

We’re used to thinking that power sounds like the British Empire. Nolan’s Odyssey shows that might not hold true anymore.

“If it’s changing…it could well be because for folks, maybe Americans younger than 40, those associations between [Received Pronunciation] and Empire aren’t really there anymore strongly,” Singer says. “Or even between RP and high falutin’ fanciness or something aren’t there as much anymore.”

The British Empire is passing out of living memory now, and the American empire is here. In Nolan’s Odyssey, if not for the rest of Hollywood, power sounds like a guy from Boston, loitering outside a Starbucks.

In 2023, the Indian director Honey Trehan was on the verge of a breakthrough. His film Punjab ’95, which told the story of a human rights activist murdered for investigating mass killings of Sikhs in the state of Punjab, had been given a prominent slot at the Toronto International Film Festival. Trehan was convinced the film would be big; its star, Sikh Bollywood A-lister Diljit Dosangh, believed in the project so much that he didn’t even ask for a salary. 

But the premiere never happened. According to Trehan, his producer got a threatening call from someone affiliated with the Indian government, saying that if the film screened in Toronto, it would never appear at home. Trehan and his producer agreed, but the approval never came. India’s ratings agency, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), demanded 127 cuts — including cutting the word “Punjab” from a film about the state. If implemented, they would have left the film (in Trehan’s words) as little more than a “trailer.”

After years of court cases and failed wrangling, Trehan and his producer gave up on a theatrical release. They signed an agreement with Zee5, an Indian streaming service, to premiere the film exclusively on their platform in July under the new name Satluj.

But just two days after the film’s release on July 3, Zee5 removed Satluj for Indian viewers at the request of the government, which claimed the film threatened public order and national security. This weekend, it was removed from Zee5’s international service as well, meaning the film was no longer legally accessible anywhere on the planet.

When we spoke on Monday, Trehan was still unsure why the government had gone to such great lengths to suppress his film. He claims to have heard nothing beyond vague public claims about the film threatening public safety and Indian sovereignty. But it’s clear that the events had rocked his faith in his country.

“When all these kinds of things happen,” he says, “you are bound to ask this question to yourself: Are we still living in a democracy?”

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Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014, the Indian film industry — which has a cultural footprint that rivals Hollywood and even surpasses it in some regions — has undergone a transformation. Once seen as a bastion of Indian multiculturalism and secularism, the kind of business where Muslims and even Pakistanis could be stars, the Indian film industry has increasingly been remade in its right-wing government’s image. Films that celebrate Hindus and demonize Muslims make up an ever-growing share of industry output; films that take up politically difficult topics, like Satluj, are becoming scarcer.

This is by design. As part of its broader assault on democratic freedoms, the Modi government has taken a series of very visible steps to reward ideologically simpatico filmmakers — and punish dissidents. The industry has gotten the message, and shifted its output accordingly. Those filmmakers willing to speak publicly, like Trehan, describe a widespread climate of self-censorship, painting a portrait of an industry that has chosen compliance over courage.

“There are so many things I want to make and I get told, ‘No one will touch it,’” the Indian director Shruti Ganguly tells me. “Actors who speak out against the government — they don’t get work.”

Understanding how this happened matters to Indians — but not only them. The Trump administration has, in several ways, laid the groundwork for a similar attack on cinematic free speech. While the American version is vastly less developed than what’s happening in India, the subordination of Bollywood has exposed the general means through which a powerful and seemingly liberal entertainment industry can be brought to heel by a determined government.

In today’s America, “you can see an [early stage] of what happened to allow institutions to be captured and politicized” in India, says Sadanand Dhume, an expert on Indian politics at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.

The fall of Bollywood

Censorship in Indian film is hardly new. The CBFC, created in 1951, is empowered not just to rate movies but to block their release outright if it finds a film contrary to any of the sweeping categories in Section 5B of the Cinematograph Act: the sovereignty of India, the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign countries, public order, decency, or morality.

It is a power that certainly had been abused prior to Modi’s premiership. Aman Bhargava, a data scientist based in Bangalore, recently examined data on over 8,000 Indian films censored by the CBFC between its founding and the end of the 20th century. His investigation found extremely high levels of censorship in the board’s first three decades, focusing primarily on depictions of sex and violence. But political censorship was hardly unheard of. During the Emergency, a two-year period from 1975 to 1977 where Prime Minister Indira Gandhi assumed essentially dictatorial powers, censors literally burned the prints of a film satirizing her leadership.   

“There are so many filmmakers whose film is stuck. But they are not ready to speak out of fear.”

Honey Trehan, director

By the 1990s, instances of CBFC censorship had declined dramatically. Modi has not only revived it, but significantly expanded its scope — creating a new censorial regime even worse than what came before. “The past was problematic. The present is worse,” Dhume says.

This judgment is backed by extensive evidence, published in both the Indian and American press, demonstrating the government’s increasingly tight grip over Hindi-language filmmaking.

The most obvious mechanism has been politicization of the CBFC. The current chair — a poet named Prasoon Joshi — is a vocal ally of the prime minister; in a phone call, the Indian film critic Sucharita Tyagi described him as a government “stooge.” Trehan, similarly, says the body is working “hand-in-glove” with Modi’s Ministry of Information “to control the narrative” on politically sensitive topics.

Over time, the Modi government has moved to remove checks on its allies’ power. In 2021, it eliminated a decades-old special appellate board that allowed filmmakers to contest CBFC rulings — forcing them instead to go through regular litigation for relief. But India’s justice system is slow and expensive, often an unrealistic option for movies that need to make their budgets back in a timely fashion. Trehan’s Satluj shows how difficult it is to fight the censor, and why so few in Bollywood are willing to do it.

“Over the past decade, the CBFC has become less a certifying body and more an arm of state-sponsored and sentiment-driven censorship,” journalist Saurav Das wrote last year in Frontline, an English-language Indian magazine published by The Hindu newspaper. “With every decision, every inexplicable demand for cuts, and every instance of folded resistance in the face of fringe protests, the Board has revealed what it truly is: a morality police in disguise.”

Nor is the CBFC Modi’s only weapon. “The tax authority,” Dhume says, “is basically completely politicized in India” — and can be wielded against filmmakers and studios who step out of line. So can the police: Five years ago, Indian police arrested the son of Muslim megastar Shah Rukh Khan on drug charges. The move was widely interpreted as retaliation for Khan’s outspokenness on violence against Muslims. Khan’s son was detained for three weeks and released on bail; prosecutors dropped the charges seven months after his arrest, ultimately admitting he never had possessed drugs in the first place.

Modi’s BJP party also has something no prior Indian government possessed: a fervent online cadre that directs waves of threats and harassment at dissident directors, actors, and even film critics. In January 2021, a Muslim supporting actor in an Amazon-hosted streaming show called Tandav — a soapy political drama that took shots at life under the BJP — became deluged by online hate. Angry Modi fans repeatedly reported him to the police for alleged insults to Hinduism; Amazon eventually cut one of his scenes to try and appease the mob.

But the Modi government hasn’t been satisfied with only punishing critical filmmakers. It has also provided ample incentives to studios who wish to make ideological propaganda.

This began with 2022’s The Kashmir Files, a movie about very real killings of Hindus in the contested territory of Jammu and Kashmir that exaggerated the scope and severity of the situation to demonize Muslims. Widely panned by critics as dishonest shlock, the film received a huge promotional push from the ruling party. Modi personally endorsed it, and at least eight BJP-governed states gave it a special exemption from entertainment taxes to lower ticket prices. BJP states also gave government employees time off from work to go see the film, and even hosted screenings. As a result, it was one of the best-performing movies of the year.

The success of The Kashmir Files showed that there was a real audience for aggressively nationalist films — as makes sense in a country that has elected Modi to the premiership three times, and where he currently enjoys a roughly 70 percent approval rating. As such, it has spawned more sophisticated imitators.

In 2025, a film called Dhurandhar — a slick action movie about an Indian sleeper agent killing his way through mafia and terror networks in Pakistan — dominated the box office, becoming the third-highest grossing Hindi film of all time. Dhurandhar 2: The Revenge premiered this year, and is more nakedly propagandistic: Variety’s reviewer wrote that it “practically features Modi as a supporting character through endless news snippets.” It has already surpassed the box office total of its predecessor. 

The end result is a kind of profit-minded self-censorship. Increasingly, Indian film studios shy away from financing movies with controversial themes and shovel money at jingoistic fare like Dhurandhar. An 11-month investigation by the Indian publication Article 14 concluded that this has effectively transformed the most prominent sector of the Indian film industry.

“Barring a minuscule minority, Hindi filmdom has collectively capitulated before the BJP government, thus handing a virtual cakewalk to the right-wing in India’s most high-profile film industry,” Article 14’s Anna M M Vetticad writes.

To be clear: It’s not that critical voices in the film industry have been silenced entirely. Independent-minded films still get made — like 2023’s Jawan and Pathaan, Shah Rukh Khan-led action films that The Atlantic described as “littered with subversive commentary on India under Modi.” The environment is markedly freer outside Hindi-language cinema; the Malayam and Tamil film industries have been more resistant to government pressure. 

But the Hindi industry is the biggest and most influential: The term “Bollywood” itself generally refers only to Hindi studios. And it’s clear that the balance is off there — leading the government’s anti-Muslim narrative to dominate in one of India’s most important cultural spheres.

“There are so many filmmakers whose film is stuck,” Trehan says. “But they are not ready to speak out of fear.”

The future of Hollywood?

What Modi has done to Indian film carries clear lessons for other backsliding democracies — most notably, the United States.

The first lesson is that free expression in major industries depends, in large part, on preserving nonpartisan leadership and norms in powerful government agencies.

India’s CBFC, tax agencies, and law enforcement have long had problems, including abusive political interventions. But Modi has made these problems considerably worse, to the point where it is less a change in degree than in kind. Today, key agencies have become staffed by political cronies who act like extensions of ruling parties. This capture of nominally nonpartisan institutions is what enabled him to bring so much political pressure on studios, producers, and actors. 

The second lesson is that big cultural industries — whatever their professed political values — are first and foremost profit-seeking entities. Bollywood has a reputation as a more culturally progressive space, even casting Pakistani actors in prominent roles during the early Modi years.  But when it became clear that the balance of financial power favored the government, that critical films might never see the light of day and propagandistic ones would make bank, Indian film studios shifted accordingly. 

“Movie-making is an expensive business, so you understand where they’re coming from.” Dhume says. One film critic, granted anonymity by Indian journalist Kaashif Hajee, was even blunter: “The only God is the box office.”

We have seen both of these mechanisms at work in the second Trump administration.

President Donald Trump has famously demolished the independence of agencies like the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission, and even tried to weaponize them against its enemies in the entertainment industry — most notably when it tried to force Jimmy Kimmel off the air earlier this year.

That effort failed. But there are also many examples of American conglomerates seeming to bow to government pressure, like CBS’s decision to cancel Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s show while its parent company awaited FCC approval for its merger.

There’s even a handful of examples of studios pushing out films nakedly bidding for the president’s favor, like Amazon’s Melania documentary. While that film was a box office dud — it made just $16.7 million on a $75 million budget — it was widely seen as an effort to win favor with the administration on other regulatory matters. Ted Hope, one of the founders of Amazon’s studio arm, called the film “an outright bribe” in an interview with the New York Times.

Overall, however, these cases remain exceptional. There is no evidence that the American entertainment industry is shifting toward MAGA propaganda in any mass way; Trump critical-fare (like the Star Wars series Andor or the superhero satire The Boys) remains vastly more popular with critics and audiences.

This owes partly to structural dissimilarities between the United States and India. The American ratings board has long been far weaker than the CBFC, and the First Amendment is far stronger than India’s constitutional speech protections. We are less than two years into Trump’s second term; Modi has been in power continuously since 2014. It would be very surprising to do in a year and a half what Modi accomplished over a decade.

The lesson of India’s film industry is not, then, that Trump is on the verge of conquering Hollywood. Rather, it’s that he has identified the right mechanisms for pressuring the entertainment industry: using politicized agencies to both raise the costs of free speech and create incentives for companies to toe a state-friendly line.

That these lines of attack are at present underdeveloped in the United States does not mean they could not, eventually, become something more serious. Any effort to future-proof American democracy, to safeguard its foundations from further assault, requires serious study of how these tactics worked in places like India and identifying means of blocking them.

“The situation with a film like Satluj…is a warning call — not just for Indians, but other countries around the world when it comes to how governments are going to control the creative business,” Ganguly says.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is about to surf the wine-dark sea into theaters everywhere, and between its star-studded cast and ecstatic early reviews, it’s likely to be a blockbuster. Readers are taking note. According to Circana Bookscan, unit sales across all editions of The Odyssey are up 76 percent year-to-date. This 2,800-year-old poem has never been hotter.

So if you’ve never read The Odyssey — or you skimmed it in the 10th grade and haven’t thought about it since — is this the time for you to get in on the hot Odyssey summer?

There’s a strong argument to be made that the answer is yes, because The Odyssey is an absolute blast to read. It’s funny, gripping, and sexy, an epic adventure with a human heart. If you’re willing to deal with the fundamental strangeness that comes with reading a text so old, you’ll come away from The Odyssey with a new understanding of how and why the West tells its stories. 

How The Odyssey invented the asshole trickster hero

The genius of The Odyssey is that it’s both a family story and an adventure. Clever Odysseus is trying to make his way back to his wife and kid after 10 years at war, but at every turn, he’s beset by angry gods, jealous nymphs, or world-shaking storms. What we see of Odysseus’s home life is tender and sweet, and the voyage is thrilling, but Odysseus is the real secret weapon here.

Odysseus is one of those guys who’s super smart but, unfortunately, knows it, so as soon as he’s talked his way out of one jam, he can’t help but talk himself right into another. He defeats a Cyclops by using the admittedly very funny gambit of giving his name as No Man, so that the Cyclops’s pained shrieks of “No Man is killing me!” fail to summon any of his fellow one-eyed monsters to his aid. But, then, Odysseus is arrogant enough to yell his real name at the fiend he just maimed so he can get proper credit for his feat — and is shocked that doing so comes back to haunt him. It’s hard not to root for Odysseus to get home, but you also have to admit that he bears a lot of responsibility for his own problems.

That storytelling tool — someone clever and charming enough to get out of every sticky situation but hubristic enough to keep making it worse for themselves, too — is so satisfying to read that it birthed an archetype. You see Odysseus in Ferris Bueller, in Bugs Bunny, in Don Draper, in Marty Mauser. Trickster heroes who infuriate allies and antagonists alike all owe a debt to Odysseus, who showed the West what a powerful narrative engine such figures are.

Just as powerful is Odysseus’s quest to find his way home, which is so human and relatable that it’s become the basis for many of our go-to adventure stories. Dorothy wants to get back to Kansas, Robinson Crusoe wants to get back to England, and even E.T. wants to phone home. Who hasn’t felt at one time or another like though they’re stranded in a big scary world and longed to find a way back to the safety and comfort of their family? The Odyssey is the earliest story we have that put that feeling into words and blew it up larger than life. 

That’s the thing about The Odyssey: It’s been around so long and is so influential that it’s the source for a lot of story structures. Reading it will help you understand the obvious culprits like Ulysses and O Brother Where Art Thou, sure — but it will also unlock a lot of old favorites that you wouldn’t have thought could connect so neatly to the ancients and make you experience them in new ways. If you care about storytelling, that’s an experience worth having.

Reasons to skip The Odyssey

If you decide to read The Odyssey, and you aren’t used to dealing with ancient texts, you have to go in knowing that it’s going to be a weird experience. This is an oral poem, first composed in a dead language, likely developed by a lot of different people over generations, that’s now been translated into modern written English. It’s structured around repetitions, like the famously recurring phrases “wine-dark sea” and “rosy-fingered dawn,” to help bards deliver the poem from memory. It can be confusing and even boring to navigate if you’re not prepared.

The Odyssey is also a story from an ancient culture with its own moral system. Greek heroes love a little unprovoked murder and theft, and Odysseus is always bragging about the cities he’s conquered and all the treasure he stole from them. Almost all the characters, even the ones we are supposed to admire, behave in misogynistic and deplorable ways. That can be jarring.

If any of these oddities are a deal breaker for you, it’s fine to leave The Odyssey alone. But if you’re willing to put in the work to look past them, The Odyssey will reward you for it. As alien as its source culture is to us, the story it tells is so gripping, and funny, and human that we keep raiding it, Odysseus-like, looking for new tropes.

How to pick an Odyssey translation

There are a lot of different English translations of The Odyssey on the market, and the experience of reading each one is different — and will affect your perception of the text and the core story. Here are the four I would recommend for four highly specific circumstances.

If you like your classics accessible and self-aware

Emily Wilson’s 2017 edition, which generated a ton of buzz when it came out, is the first English translation of The Odyssey written by a woman. Her language is plain, terse, and unadorned — at times winkingly ironic, at times severe, always refreshingly direct and to the point. What’s most impressive is her ability to make plain the misogyny of the characters without asking the reader to be a misogynist along with them. “Earlier translators are not as uncomfortable with the text as I am,” she told Vox in 2017, “and I like that I’m uncomfortable.”

Read the first line: “Tell me about a complicated man.”

If you like your poetry lyrical and sensual

Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 translation has some of the most ravishing language of all the Odyssey translations. Every translator has to choose what to prioritize and what to discard. Fitzgerald prioritizes the beauty of his own words, and he doesn’t care too much about being faithful to the ancient Greek. He’s also not fond of footnotes and extra material to tell you about historical details you might miss. If you want your Odyssey translation to read like a poem that stands completely on its own, Fitzgerald is your best bet.

Read the first line: “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, that wanderer, harried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy.” 

If you’d like your translation to be as accurate as possible

Richmond Lattimore’s 1965 translation is a favorite among academics, because Lattimore tried to stay as close as possible to the original Greek. While Fitzgerald and Wilson write in English-friendly blank verse (unrhymed lines of five-beat iambic pentameter), Lattimore uses a six-beat line that echoes Homeric rhythms. Given a choice between making a sentence sound beautiful in English and capturing the nuances of the original Greek, he opts for faithfulness every time. 

Read the first line: “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s secret citadel.” 

If you’d rather listen to the audiobook

The best audiobook edition of The Odyssey is the one Ian McKellan narrates using Robert Fagles’s 1996 translation. Fagles tries to walk the line between Lattimore’s accuracy and Fitzgerald’s poetry, and he manages nicely. But the best way to experience his version of the story is to have McKellan’s rich, rolling voice read it out for you and bring this poem back into the oral tradition.

Read the first line: “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.” (Or, just listen.)

Whichever translation you choose, it will immerse you in Odysseus’s strange, ancient, but very human world. It will show you some of the source code for Western storytelling. And it will give you a chance to experience a wise-ass beat up a one-eyed monster and, then, ruin his own life by bragging about it. What more could a person ask for from one book?

Update, July 15, 10:45 am ET: This piece was originally published on July 10 and has been updated with information about The Odyssey’s book sales.

Today's links

• Vicky Osterweil's "The Extended Universe": How Disney killed the movies and took over the world.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Zappa v censorship; Chemistry set with no chemicals; Short cons; Mitsubishi's Dieselgate; "Bellwether."
• Upcoming appearances: Berlin, NYC, Barcelona, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Vicky Osterweil's "The Extended Universe" (permalink)

Vicky Osterweil's The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World makes the kind of long, polemical, startling and illuminating argument that defines great cultural criticism; it's the sort of book that encapsulates the reasons I read criticism in the first place:

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2525-the-extended-universe

My first brush with this kind of criticism came more than two decades ago, when I read John Kessel's now-classic "Creating the Innocent Killer," a critique of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, a book I had read and enjoyed enough to re-read several times:

https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-website/creating-the-innocent-killer

Kessel's argument is that Card used Ender's Game to smuggle in some very ugly ideas, wrapped in a story that was compelling, even exhilarating. In Ender's Game, we meet Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, a small, physically weak boy possessed of a prodigious intellect and a great deal of sensitivity and empathy. Ender is tormented by an escalating series of aggressors, whom he retaliates against with overwhelming force, first to the point of lethality and then all the way to literal genocide. And here's where Card makes his move: Ender's sensitivity and empathy and intellect tell him that he must respond this way, because he can tell that his aggressors will not back off from their intention to harm him; and because Ender is so small and weak, he has to use whatever tactic his brilliant mind can devise, and if that tactic results in the death penalty for mere bullying, well, that's the bully's fault, not Ender's. Indeed, in dying at Ender's hands, these bullies re-victimize Ender, because Ender is a gentle, smart, wise, weak person, and these inescapable murders that he is goaded into committing are a stain on his soul that he can never wash away.

Before reading "Creating the Innocent Killer," I confess I didn't really understand what criticism was for. Like many people, I conflated "criticism" with "reviews," thinking of critical works as a species of inconveniently difficult-to-digest essays that might help me figure out which books to read and which movies to see.

Kessel's magnificent essay changed all that, and not in spite of the fact that Kessel had pointed out some very important problems with a book that I loved, but because of that fact. In helping me understand the ugliness hidden within something whose beauty and virtues I saw very clearly, Kessel taught me more about myself – about where my aesthetics and my values overlapped, and where they diverged. It was literally life-changing.

Like Kessel, Osterweil's 'Extended Universe' deals with media that I have a great deal of affection for – the products of the Walt Disney Company. Though I'm primarily interested in theme parks – I love a big, ambitious built environment of any description and Disney pursues these with a seriousness that few others can touch – the Disney films (and the films of the studios Disney purchased, like Marvel and Lucasfilm) are obviously intimately bound up in those theme park designs.

Osterweil has her own ambivalent affection for these movies. Like so many of us, she's been raised on them, and they've shaped how she sees the world and its stories. But – like me – Osterweil is deeply suspicious of capitalism, American imperialism, and the notion of "intellectual property," and she uses reviews of a dozen Disney films to make the case that Walt Disney and the studio he founded with his brother are standards-bearers for these odious forces, and not just in the overt ways that might immediately spring to mind, but also in subtle ways that can be teased out of a close reading of the films.

In so doing, Osterweil also makes a sharp and well-argued case that intellectual property, colonialism and racial oppression are all facets of the same drive, the drive of people who fancy themselves born to rule to dominate others, which requires that those others also be dehumanized and their work denigrated. When Walt Disney insisted that his be the only name associated with "his" movies, he was playing out the same logic that underpinned his virulent opposition to labor unions and his participation in American imperialism in Latin America.

As with Kessel, Osterweil's argument is full of surprises and illuminations that are especially vivid for those of us who have great affection for these works. As her chapter on Black Panther shows, this contradiction need not go unresolved. There is plenty of scope for fans to seize the reins of the narrative (and as her chapter on the reactionary backlash to the later Star Wars movies shows, it's not just the forces of progress and anti-racism who can pull off this move).

Like the very best criticism, Osterweil's book is more than a way to deepen your understanding of the material she dissects – it's a way to deepen your understanding of the world that produced it, and to deepen your understanding of yourself.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• BRIEF OF PENN & TELLER AS AMICI CURIAE IN SUPPORT OF PETITIONER https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/25/25-6774/400679/20260312113948009_25-6774%20Penn%20and%20Teller%20Amicus%20Brief.pdf

• Zack Polanski calls for Trump to be 'kicked out' of his Scottish golf courses https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8954xe8yjpo

• Uncovering Global Telecom Exploitation by Covert Surveillance Actors https://citizenlab.ca/research/uncovering-global-telecom-exploitation-by-covert-surveillance-actors/

• What's Missing in the 'Agentic' Story https://www.mnot.net/blog/2026/04/24/agents_as_collective_bargains

• Licensed to Loot https://static1.squarespace.com/static/65c9daef199ea70aa66592fe/t/69e7b2f2949631007bb3d969/1776792306864/Licenced+to+loot+AI+Data+Centre+Report.pdf

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Frank Zappa’s anti-censorship letter https://www.flickr.com/photos/mudshark/117551768/in/set-72057594090059726/

#15yrsago Chemistry kit with no chemicals https://web.archive.org/web/20110427212354/http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/04/chemistry-set-boasts-no-chemicals.html

#15yrsago Russian corruption: crooked officials steal multi-billion-dollar company, $230M tax refund, then murder campaigning lawyer https://web.archive.org/web/20110426045152/http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/20/russia_s_crime_of_the_century?

#15yrsago Golden-age short-change cons https://web.archive.org/web/20110429014539/https://blog.modernmechanix.com/2011/04/26/tricks-of-short-change-artists/

#10yrsago Campaigners search Londoners’ phones to help them understand the Snoopers Charter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szN7DlmMLYg

#10yrsago Mitsubishi’s dieselgate: cheating since 1991 https://web.archive.org/web/20160427145038/https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/mitsubishi-cheated-fuel-economy-tests-since-1991/#ftag=CAD590a51e

#10yrsago Bellwether: Connie Willis’s classic, hilarious novel about the science of trendiness https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/26/bellwether-connie-williss-classic-hilarious-novel-about-the-science-of-trendiness/

#5yrsago The Big U https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/26/moolah-boolah/#poison-ivies

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyebuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
  https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/

• Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
  https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor

• When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8

• Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

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Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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