Culture

A war has taken over media coverage. No, not one of actual consequence. This war, however, is imminently affecting your national pastime and your wallet. This is a civil war within media. The combatants are the Walt Disney Company with it’s channels – including ABC and ESPN, plus the SEC and ACC networks – and Google, YouTube TV’s parent company. The two entities failed to meet a carrier agreement, and all Disney channels are blacked out on YouTube TV. That means that much of the nation will not have access to most of the weekend’s football content, as has been the case since the showdown a couple weeks ago.

Everyone can name JFK and his (probable) assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, or Abraham Lincoln and everyone’s least favorite actor, John Wilkes Booth. But what of James A.  Garfield, America’s short-lived (in both senses) 20th President, and his murderer, Charles Guiteau? Both men have disappeared into obscurity, at least until Candice Millard’s award-winning 2011 true-crime history Destiny of the Republic, which skillfully unpicked the sheer strangeness of the backstory behind Garfield’s protracted death and Guiteau’s conviction and execution for the crime. Garfield won election in the 1880 presidential election almost by accident.

Bryan Garner has performed a remarkable act of cultural recovery with his vigorously written new book, The Etcher: The Life and Art of Oskar Stoessel, a long-forgotten Austrian artist who had total mastery of his form and deep understanding of the human face. Stoessel (1879-1964) attained success in the US in the 1940s after fleeing from the Nazis in 1938 with the help of US Minister to Austria, George Messersmith, who introduced him to elite American circles. Stoessel went on to etch portraits of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, among many others, and exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC. He found his greatest supporters and subjects in the Supreme Court – he sketched all the sitting justices in 1941 and more in subsequent years.

Big-name, all-star team-ups used to be the preserve of Hollywood blockbusters – perhaps reaching its peak in 2005 with Mr. and Mrs. Smith, when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie met, fell in love and sold a billion copies of the National Enquirer in the process. But in our new era of superhero-driven slop, where it barely matters which actor is in what picture, such things have largely fallen into abeyance. Still, even in our jaded times, there remains an undeniable thrill from seeing Katniss Everdeen and Edward Cullen together on screen at last, as they are in Die My Love.

As Britain's royal family attempts to maintain a "business as usual" approach in the aftermath of the biggest scandal to have engulfed the institution in decades, the pair responsible for its last existential embarrassment have been notably silent. You might have expected, as Andrew was showily stripped of all his titles, some sanctimonious comment on the Sussex Instagram account, some hashtag-laden exhortation always to stand with the victims of abuse. But no. Those of us who were wondering why this has not happened now have an answer, of sorts. Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, has returned to her old profession: acting. In truth, it is unclear as to whether Meghan’s appearance in the forthcoming picture Close Personal Friends will be the greatest test of her thespian abilities.

The death earlier this year of Brian Wilson, aged 82, was marked by the usual tributes to a man who was not only a pioneer of popular music, but also a sadly troubled genius whose early years of wild success were quickly overtaken by decades of drug addiction and mental health problems. A recurring theme in the obituaries was what might have happened in the aftermath of the Beach Boys’ masterpiece, 1966’s Pet Sounds, if Wilson, by then the band’s producer and lead songwriter, had not descended almost immediately into narcotic-induced torpor. It has commonly been suggested that Paul McCartney – who revered Wilson – was also jealous of the achievement of Pet Sounds, which arguably overshadowed the Beatles’ Revolver, and that Sgt.

It may be coincidence or clever record company marketing, but the two current reigning queens of the British pop music scene, Lily Allen and Florence Welch, have released their two latest records within a week of one another. Allen, who has admittedly been more involved in acting and selling pictures of her feet on OnlyFans of late, brought out the excoriating and autobiographical West End Girl, which is said to explore the compromises and difficulties of her short-lived marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour. And, not to be outdone, Welch and her band Florence and the Machine have come back with her first album since 2022’s excellent Dance Fever; it promises another smorgasbord of operatic vocals, soaring choruses and BIG tunes. Does it work?

If you want to see Guillermo del Toro’s no-expense-spared adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein this Halloween, you’ll have to hope that you’re living in a major city with an arthouse cinema. That is because, as part of the Faustian deal that Netflix strikes with the filmmakers whom it gives blank checks to realize their dream projects, the pictures that they make get only the most token of cinematic releases before they are sent onto the streaming service, there to become part of the algorithm for all eternity.

Ever so often, a film project – especially one that never ended up happening – emerges into the public domain to a mixture of disbelief and disappointment. So it has proved with Steven Soderbergh’s Star Wars film, tentatively entitled The Hunt for Ben Solo. The picture was to have been a sequel to the little-loved The Rise of Skywalker and focused on Adam Driver’s character Kylo Ren, aka Ben Solo, the son of Han Solo and Princess Leia who finds himself torn between the noble impulses of the Force and the more dastardly influence of the Dark Side. Given that Soderbergh is nobody’s idea of a conventional blockbuster director, the results would, at the very least, have been interesting.

It’s Christmas Eve in a small German town. In a cozy wood-paneled living room, a brother and sister named Helmy and Lexa are decorating the tree, half chatting and half squabbling, the way siblings do. As they light candles, Lexa’s fiancé, Moritz, pounds on the door, demanding jauntily to be let him. He’s as excited as a small child to see the festivities – and to kiss his bride to be. So opens the off-Broadway production of Crooked Cross.  It's a joyous scene, full of promise. Quickly, though, things begin to go south. Moritz Weissman, a surgeon, is accomplished, smart, and well-liked. But while he was raised Catholic, his name, taken from his professor father, is Jewish.

About half-way through the one-woman show Unstuck, the American comic Olivia Levine admits that it’s “hip” to talk about one’s obsessive-compulsive disorder.   She’s right. In Unstuck – which tracks Levine’s at times paralyzing battle with the illness – Levine is following a well-trod path, seen on many a movie and television show. The OCD character can’t stop counting or washing their hands or looking over their shoulder. Often their symptoms are played for laughs or sympathy or to showcase their weird but essentially charming quirkiness. Rarely is the more menacing side of OCD shown.  Levine is here, then, to disrupt the stereotypes and, with humor and likability, discuss the symptoms that are less often depicted in media.

If you’re a big Bruce Springsteen fan, then this weekend’s new release, Deliver Me from Nowhere, will be one of the year’s most eagerly awaited releases. But more-casual fans of the Boss – and I include myself in this category, despite a great admiration for a vast amount of the Springsteen recorded canon – may find the film, which focuses on the recording of his notoriously sparse Nebraska album in the early Eighties, a strange mixture of hard-going and unedifying.

What if the country responsible for almost 3,000 deaths on September 11, 2001, was not Afghanistan, and certainly not Iraq, but Saudi Arabia? Did the US invade the wrong country? A lawsuit in Manhattan makes this case. The legal action, by 9/11 survivors and victims’ families, has unearthed new evidence that puts the blame for the attacks squarely on the -Saudis. The families believe the government of Saudi Arabia plotted the attack from the start – and afterwards, the US government let them get away with it. The CIA kept information from the FBI, Carlson says, because ‘the CIA was grooming the hijackers as sources’ At the same time, a new Tucker Carlson documentary, The 9/11 Files, makes a different accusation against Saudi Arabia.

Sabrina Carpenter, who will for the first time this week be hosting NBC’s Saturday Night Live, continues to be a cause of controversy. Over the summer, the five-foot, honey-voiced singer revealed the cover for her newly released album, Man’s Best Friend. It shows her wearing a black minidress on her hands and knees, while a faceless man holds a handful of her hair. The image immediately stirred outrage online. Those who usually find themselves on the side of unfettered female sexual liberation called the cover regressive, degrading, and submissive toward the male gaze. Some fans defended the image, arguing that Carpenter was clearly satirizing incompetent and controlling men as well as her portrayal by the media as a “sex obsessed” pop star.

If you watched The Paper and, like most of its viewers, remained unimpressed by its comparatively limp updating of The Office – and I’m still haunted by the sheer awfulness of Sabrina Impacciatore’s performance in it – then you’ll be delighted to hear that Tim Robinson’s new show, The Chair Company, which is made by HBO, is the dark workplace comedy that the world needs right now. While it’s too early to say whether it’s a true classic along the lines of The Office, or a less impressive but still enjoyable achievement, it represents another success for Robinson, who is inexorably turning himself into one of the most interesting comedians and writers in the industry.

This weekend, Tron: Ares releases across US cinemas, and is expected to make a decent, rather than record-setting, amount of money in its opening weekend. It is a curious film franchise in that neither of the two films that precede it are especially beloved, but both have iconic soundtracks composed, respectively, by electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos and French electro duo Daft Punk. (The honors this time around fall to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, aka Nine Inch Nails.) Yet whatever the strengths and weaknesses of Tron: Ares – and the early reviews have not been kind – there is one aspect that can only make audiences groan in anticipation, and that is the casting of its star, Jared Leto.

If you count among the Anglophiles emerging from Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale misty-eyed, you might be interested to hear that London's cultural calendar is having a maximalist moment. Harking back to eras of pomp, excess and pouffy outfits, two exhibitions showcase icons who made extravagance an art form: David Bowie and Marie Antoinette. In South Kensington, the Victoria and Albert Museum is hosting Marie Antoinette Style, dedicated to the most fashionable teen queen in history. Across town, the David Bowie Centre in the brand-new V&A East Storehouse space (bigger than 30 basketball courts) reveals over 90,000 items from the singer’s archive.

Over the past couple of weeks, two expensive, auteur-driven films with big stars have been released at the American box office, both conscious throwbacks to the kind of Seventies cinema that isn’t supposed to be made any longer. In the case of Paul Thomas Anderson, his Leo DiCaprio-starring Thomas Pynchon fantasia One Battle After Another seems to have been a success by the skin of its (yellowed) teeth: it has already made over $100 million worldwide, helped by excellent reviews and strong word of mouth. But in the case of another A-lister, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, the critical and commercial reception of The Smashing Machine has been rather more muted, suggesting that audiences know what they want from Johnson, and it sure as hell isn’t arthouse fare.

The Metropolitan Opera has been in the hole for years and for most of that time company leadership has pleaded ignorance as to why. Just this February, general director Peter Gelb lamented audiences’ lack of interest in the Met’s slate of contemporary operas. “It’s impossible to predict hits,” said the man paid $1.4 million a year to, well, predict hits. In its 2025-26 season slate, the Met finally seems to be wising up – but it faces an uphill climb. For the better part of a decade, the company has been financially unprofitable, artistically boring and actively hostile to its audience. ‘It’s impossible to predict hits,’said the man paid $1.