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Shout out to our new sponsor Nord VPN. Click on their link and get your EXCLUSIVE Deal. Get a Huge Discount off your NordVPN Plan + 4 additional months for free! If you don’t like it, cancel it within 30 days. This is one of the most important pieces of media ever made on cricket. It is also aimed at 4-year-olds. If you don’t have kids around that age, you may have no idea what this is, or why it matters.

My Columbo odyssey continues - I'm now on the sixth season, made in 1976.  Season five was a very bumpy ride - and the show was nearly cancelled - but season six starts with the most exquisitely delightful Columbo episode yet. I didn't know that William Shatner appeared in Columbo. Google tells me he appeared in not one but two episodes, the second in 1994, which I haven't seen (though the clips look terrifying), and which anyway isn't included in the Amazon Prime Video Columbo collection I'm currently bingeing on (which only covers the canonical 1970s Columbo - not the Columbo reboot from 1989 on).

Am I the only one who missed the memo that Barbie is a Jewish feminist icon? Yes, that tall, long-legged, blonde, blue-eyed, straight-haired, high-arch-footed doll is a symbol of empowerment. And a Jewish one, at that. Hey Alma on Instagram: “can’t argue with that logic (via @/mareeekuh, rg @kvellercom) tap the link in bio for a deep dive from @jtanews! image description: a tweet that reads, “Barbie was created by a Jewish woman.

I’ve just returned from a three-week trip on the other side of the world, after spending Christmas with family in Australia and New Zealand. As we lugged our suitcases from London to San Francisco to Sydney to Wellington (and then back again), my thoughts turned to luggage – and how much it’s changed since I was a kid. I can remember packing my parents’ brown Samsonite hard cases when we went to visit my grandparents.

Like the rest of New Things Under the Sun, this article will be updated as the state of the academic literature evolves; you can read the latest version here. Audio versions of this and other posts: Substack, Apple, Spotify, Google, Amazon, Stitcher. We all know the proverb “Necessity is the mother of invention.” This proverb is overly simplistic, but it gets at something true. One place you can see this really clearly is in global crises, which vividly illustrate the linkage between need and innovation, without the need for any fancy statistical techniques.

Happy Friday, Friends! How is it August 18th already? This is the last week of my husband’s summer vacation, and he’ll be heading back to teaching come Monday. I’ll then start doing hybrid homeschooling with Toby and Becket the first week of September. That same week, we’ll pick back up on our weekly newsletters and begin our study of Pope Benedict’s third and final encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. For many, many reasons, I accomplished just a fraction of the things I hoped to accomplish this summer, and I have a pit in my stomach about the fall to come.

Hi, welcome back to Mixed Messages! This week I’m speaking to designer Nadine Merabi, who is of mixed Lebanese and English heritage. Nadine is known for her glamorous designs, never shy of a sequin, with A-list fans including AJ Odudu and Tina Knowles. You’ll also have spied her iconic feather-cuffed pyjamas on Instagram accounts far and wide. I loved speaking to Nadine about how her heritage has influenced her love of jewel tones and sparkles – read her story below.

This week, a rare film archive uploaded a long-forgotten 1995 Disney Channel documentary, James Dean: A Portrait, a hagiographic biography of Dean produced by Gary Legon from a script by Legon and Dean biographer David Dalton, narrated by Rip Torn. The documentary, which aired on the fortieth anniversary of Dean’s death, is no great shakes—it’s almost uncomfortably worshipful, with some rather striking omissions and fabrications to suit the heroic narrative Legon wanted to create.

Welcome! It’s a new Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s what we’re doing: Now, here we go! When Akira appeared in 1988, it changed things for anime. It was an international hit — in theaters, and especially on video. The artist behind it, Katsuhiro Otomo, had never made an animated feature before. He was suddenly a major director. Even so, Akira came from somewhere. Otomo started it as a manga series, which had already made him famous.