Not a single entry for Pride & Prejudice this week. Pathetic. A marker of how much I’ve been enjoying it, I suppose. More on that when I’m done, and I hope to finish it by the end of the week so that I can take a fresh book with me when I get on a plane next Saturday.

Every opportunity to read instead went to news outlets and blogs/newsletters, of which I’m only listing here the ones I digested in full. Headline skimming and quick reads of stories’ first few paragraphs for the necessary details don’t count.

The unifying theme of most of the articles/essays is that it’s bad out there. We’re heading into the final week of the Biden presidency, Twitter’s so fully compromised that Musk’s moved on to other battles, and Meta’s decided to eschew even the most basic nods toward diversity, equity, and moderation in a craven capitulation to the incoming administration. Getting good, reliable information, civil discourse, and less bigotry from social media will only get harder, it seems.

Because of this, I’ve seen many also bemoaning the looming TikTok ban, but if I’m being honest, I’ll welcome it if it actually happens. Contrary to what I hear from a fair number others on the app, it seems to me just as lousy a news source and just as much a cesspool of meaningful dialogue/engagement as any other algorithmic space, and I’ve been thinking it might be time to get off it anyway. I deleted both it and Instagram from my phone this week, and I’ve got a longer post in me about going to war with algorithms in general.

Passive intake from the spigot of the “for you” feeds is out; active intake based on personal curation/selection is in. And in that spirit, I booked a ticket days in advance and woke myself up earlier than usual on Saturday for the express purpose of making it to a 10:45 a.m. screening of The Brutalist at the Music Box Theater.

I’m desperate for someone to discuss the film with. It immediately became one of my faves of all of last year. Up there with I Saw the TV Glow. A big, sprawling, dense, meticulous swing, and made for only $10 million! I hope people turn out for it. I want Hollywood to see that such projects can sell. I want more filmmakers to get the chance to tell smaller-budget stories that can still be grand.

Also hoping people don’t sleep on The Order, which came out near the end of 2024 to almost zero notice, which is criminal. Jude Law is great as a washed FBI agent investigating a white-supremacist terrorist group. The whole time he’s moving around with a curious gait, a tensed posture, and a permanent squint from the smoke coming off the cigarette always dangling from his mouth. It’s a kind of world-weary part I’ve never seen him play before.

Anyway, we’ll see what the next week has in store. Time to go see check back in with Miss Bennet and Mr. Darcy.

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Sunday

• Yellowstone, 1x04
  
• The Order

Monday

• Tell the Bees, “The Year Losers Won”
  
• How Things Work, “It’s Not Looking Great”
  
• Citation Needed, “Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia”
• The Big Picture, “‘Love Lies Bleeding’ and the 21st Century Noir Movie Canon”
  
• Abigail
  
• My Old Ass
  
• Persona

Tuesday

• Kinds of Kindness
  
• Blitz
  
• Platformer, “Meta surrenders to the right on speech”
  
• 404 Media, “Facebook Deletes Internal Employee Criticism of New Board Member Dana White”

Wednesday

• 404 Media, “Facebook Censors Stories About Facebook Censorship”
  
• Matt Pearce, “Fires and the facts”
  
• After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News
  
• Abbott Elementary, 4x09
  
• The Big Picture, “Top Five World War II Movies, and ‘Blitz’”

Thursday

• Block Club Chicago, “One Alderwoman’s Crusade To Ban Legal Weed Dispensaries In Her Southwest Side Ward”
  
• Brats
  
• What We Do in the Shadows, 6x08

Friday

• Platformer, “Meta just killed its diversity, equity and inclusion program”
  
• Programmable Mutter, “We’re getting the social media crisis wrong”

Saturday

• The Brutalist
  
• The New Yorker, “‘The Brutalist’ ’s Epic Inversion of the American Dream‘”
  
• The Big Picture, “The Triumph of ‘The Brutalist,’ With Adrien Brody and Brady Corbet”