PicoBlog

Hi friends, This is our last installment of this volume of Notes From Three Pines. We’re kicking around some ideas for 2023 — so you’ll likely hear from us again in the New Year. For our final post, we asked our contributors to suggest books they think Louise Penny fans will enjoy. Please offer your own recommendations in the comments. As a special treat, commenters will be entered to win a copy of one of Amy Tector’s mysteries!

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real. — Anyone else been watching Shogun, on FX? It seemed like “the show everyone was talking about” for at least a hot minute there.

One of the year’s very best movies – I’m confident I’ll still be saying that in December – opens in limited release today before going wider next week. Also in theaters: A blockbuster let-down that’s going to make pots of money anyway. The good one first: I first saw “Past Lives” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐) at Sundance in January and wrote about it then; I’m re-running the bulk of the review below because I felt it captured the quiet rapture with which Celine Song’s debut feature was greeted by a normally hardhearted Park City press crowd.

Here’s something interesting: Two of the most unique and strangely satisfying movies of the year to date have both involved a beloved actress of a certain age in a hotel room with a hot co-star talking about love and sex and the whole damn thing. The first was – is – “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” with Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack; it’s available exclusively on Hulu and is a fine old thoughtful and randy time.

NOTE: This post is the second part of an ongoing essay about religious themes in Warrior Nun. You can read the previous part below: Thank you. *** As Episode 3 of Warrior Nun begins, so too does the show’s more splintered narrative. Like many TV series in the modern age, the show features one core character as its protagonist, but often focuses on fleshed-out storylines for its other characters as well.

Since it’s impossible to talk about Dreamcatcher without talking about the shit-weasel, we may as well start with it. An adaptation of Stephen King’s 2001 novel of the same name, Dreamcatcher heavily foreshadows its most memorable foe via a rumbling tummy and swelling belly before revealing it in its awful fullness around the 45-minute mark. After making their annual retreat to a remote cabin, four childhood friends take in an unexpected guest in the form of Rick (Eric Keenleyside), a hunter who isn’t feeling too well.

Does anyone remember Muslimgauze? It was the creative outlet of Bryn Jones, a man from England who was basically a human assembly line, extruding close to 100 albums’ worth of material over the course of roughly 15 years. (The first Muslimgauze material appeared in 1983, and he died in January 1999 of pneumonia, caused by a fungal infection in his bloodstream, which sounds like the kind of thing a noise musician would use as a track title.

We know from the Gospels that Jesus’ ministry provoked mostly widespread opposition from religious leaders, both the Sadducees and the Pharisees. But the Bible also shows specific examples of religious leaders who earnestly sought to understand Jesus and eventually became followers of Christ. Of these, Nicodemus is perhaps the most prominent. Nicodemus was a Pharisee but held a seat on the Sanhedrin, the prestigious, 70-member ruling body dominated by Sadducees. We first meet him in the pages of John’s gospel as he seeks out a secret meeting with Jesus at night and probes the itinerant teacher with a series of questions.

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces. When Paul Steiger and I first talked, in the late Spring of 2007, about what would become ProPublica, he recommended that I look closely at a recent paper just out from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. It was written by Chuck Lewis, the founder of the pioneering Center for Public Integrity (CPI), and was entitled, “The Growing Importance of Nonprofit Journalism.