• “One Hundred Years of Betrayal.“
Santiago Ospina Celis’s essay is partly a review of the new Netflix series based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. And it’s partly a reflection on the possibility and responsibility of adaptation and on the limits of legacy and on Marquez’s complicated views on all of that. It starts with this great quote from the author himself: “I have seen many great films based on very bad novels, but I have never seen a great film based on a great novel.”
• Also from New Lines, Diane de Vignemont, “Gisele Pelicot: Finding Sisterhood at France’s Mass Rape Trial.”
If you don’t already know about this trial and what happened to Gisele Pelicot, then I almost don’t want to tell you. It’s a horrific, unimaginable story and while it’s good for you to know that horrors happen in this world, maybe you don’t need to read all the details. In the abstract, I suppose, I will say that knowing is better than not knowing, but I also can’t imagine anyone being glad or grateful that they know more about this awful story.
Those awful details are present in de Vignemont’s piece, but it’s not mainly about that. It’s about the courage and dignity of Gisele Pelicot and what that means to countless other women. As the subhed for this piece puts it: “An Avignon courthouse has become a site of pilgrimage for French women seeking catharsis and community.”
• “If there’s anything that truly separates human beings from animals, it’s not alcohol.”
• Charles Kuffner linked to this 2023 story ages ago and I stumbled across that link again recently, re-read the story, and fell in love all over again with Las Amazonas de Yaxunah, the indigenous, barefoot, bad-ass Mexican softball team.
• “There Are Many Programs Trying to Reduce Recidivism. This One Works.” Adam Hochschild spends time with the facilitators and participants of a California program for inmates that seems to be changing lives. His story is, in part, about a program and about recidivism rates and such, but mostly its just a bunch of people — human stories and humans telling their stories, so it’s sad and tragic and beautiful and occasionally hopeful.
• “How a Tale of Demonic Possession Predicted the Decline of an Early Medieval Empire.“
So imagine you’re a Frankish courtier 1,000+ years ago, watching Charlemagne’s grandchildren fighting each other and tearing the kingdom apart. You maybe have some constructive criticism, but offering such criticism to emperors or would-be emperors isn’t usually a safe thing to do.
So how do you speak up on behalf of the country and its people? You attribute your criticisms to “Wiggo.” That’s the name of the alleged demon in this story who — while being exorcised — gives a sermon worthy of Isaiah or Amos. You know things have gotten bad when the demons possessing your peasant children start to sound morally indignant at the state of the kingdom.
• Will Tavlin, “Casual Viewing: Why Netflix looks like that.”
The point here is not Netflix Movies Are Bad, but rather This Is Why Netflix Movies Are Bad. That’s a more interesting subject, particularly since — as Tavlin’s piece explains — dunking on Netflix movies doesn’t really matter since Netflix itself doesn’t care whether those movies are good or bad, whether you liked them or didn’t, or whether anyone ever watches them or doesn’t.
“Netflix grew its business by targeting companies that Americans hated, and the only company that Americans hated more than Blockbuster was their local cable provider,” Tavlin writes. And the rest of the piece is, basically, an explanation of how and why streamers are turning into a combination of Blockbuster and your local cable provider, embodying everything you used to hate about both of those things.
• “TikTok’s Prince of Poverty.” This piece by Johanna F. Still and Kevin Maurer is from last January, but it came back around after earning a spot in The Assembly’s best-of-the-year round-up. Meet slum-lord party boy Thomas Cruz:
“If y’all wanna fuck the middle class and the poor at the same time, lemme hear a ‘hell yeah’ in the comments,” Cruz implored a live TikTok audience of roughly 1,000 on the Sunday before Thanksgiving.
“Hell yeahs” poured into the chat.
“Look at all these people that want to exploit the poor and the middle class. Hell yeah!” he said, cackling from the balcony of his waterfront Miami mansion. “I really do enjoy exploiting the poor … They congregate in very certain spots in these United States.”
Cruz’s brash rhetoric and villainous persona have helped him win over disciples who hand him a steady stream of new revenue.
Wiggo would’ve been morally disgusted with that guy too.
• Also from that Assembly list, from last May, “What Is Really Going On With Charlotte the Stingray?“
“The behavior of the aquarium staff also became increasingly bizarre,” Emily Cataneo writes. Just savor that sentence for a moment and then tell me you don’t want to read more.