culture Archives

Friday

February 20, 2026

Love Story’s counterfeit Kennedys

Last June, Jack Schlossberg, the Kennedy nepo baby currently running for the open seat in New York’s 12th Congressional District, called out the television mini-series, Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette. Executive producer Ryan Murphy was, Schlossberg declared, exploiting this couple’s courtship, marriage and death, and “profiting off of it in a grotesque way.” On a key point, Jack can rest easy. Love Story, now airing on FX/Hulu, treats his uncle John F. Kennedy Jr. reverently. Elizabeth Beller, Bessette’s biographer, praises the show for “honoring the legacy of everyone involved.” If JFK Jr. had a single physical flaw – I am grasping at straws here – it was a head

Wednesday

February 18, 2026

Katherine Dee

Nancy Guthrie and the gamification of crime

Nancy Guthrie had been missing for less than 48 hours when the game began. Not the investigation, which was already under way, with FBI agents crawling the Catalina Foothills and more than 30,000 tips flooding in from the public, but the thing building around her disappearance, the thing that one could generously call “journalism” in both its legacy and citizen varieties. By the time Ashleigh Banfield named a suspect in the case on her podcast, by the time Megyn Kelly had structured coverage around episode titles such as “Nest Camera Questions, Savannah Stalker Possibilities and Bitcoin Rumblings,” by the time dozens of true-crime influencers had weighed in, the kidnapping of

Friday

February 13, 2026

Gavin Mortimer

Americans are erasing European culture

Did Mariah Carey mime or not when she headlined the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan? That was the main takeaway from last Friday’s jamboree. Organizers have since suggested that the US singer did indeed lip-sync to Domenico Modugno’s “Nel Blu, dipinto di Blu” and the song that followed, her very own, “Nothing is Impossible.” “The technical, logistical and organizational complexities of an Olympic ceremony are not comparable to a live performance by a single artist,” said a spokesperson for the organizing committee. Was there also a linguistical complexity in the decision? Perhaps Carey didn’t feel confident singing live in Italian in front of 75,000 spectators in the San Siro Stadium, plus the 9.2 million Italians watching the ceremony on television. Nevertheless, Maria Laura Iascone of the organizing committee called Carey’s performance “exceptional,” adding that

Tuesday

February 3, 2026

Alexander Larman

No, Jacob Elordi isn’t a ‘whitewashed’ Heathcliff

For those of us who associate Wuthering Heights either with high-school English classes or Kate Bush caterwauling over the moors while exhibiting some remarkable interpretive dance moves, the news that the new Emerald Fennell-directed film of what she calls “my favorite book in the world” has become the subject of a race-based controversy may come as a shock. Yet the latest interpretation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel, which is being released, appropriately, on Valentine’s Day, has already been met with contempt and derision by many before anyone even sees it. Margot Robbie – fresh from taking the world by storm as Barbie – plays Cathy Earnshaw, the novel’s lovelorn and

Saturday

January 31, 2026

J. Scott Turner

How mediocrity took over the Grammys

Is music getting worse? Rick Beato is a musician, producer and critic with more than five million YouTube subscribers. His answer would be: yes, pretty much. In a recent video, he compares the 2026 Grammy Song of the Year nominees to those of 1984. There are a few bright sparks among the slate of new songs, but Beato regards most of them as derivative, unoriginal and unlikely to be remembered past the end of the awards show. In contrast, 42 years on, all the 1984 nominees – Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” and Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” among them – are firmly embedded in