ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY:The Odyssey Translator Emily Wilson Slams Christoper Nolan’s ‘Abysmal’ Screenplay: ‘I Would Be Ashamed to Have Written Any Part of This Script.’

Christopher Nolan cited Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of “The Odyssey” as an influence on his own interpretation of Homer’s epic poem while on the press tour for his latest blockbuster. Wilson is not returning the favor. In a negative review of Nolan’s “The Odyssey” for the London Review of Books (via The Guardian), Wilson criticized Nolan’s adaptation for lacking “psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth.” The author, who is also a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, added that Nolan’s “The Odyssey” has “nothing convincing to say.”

“I had hoped that Nolan’s affinity with these Homeric themes might push him to new creative heights, and enable him to conjure more believable characters. But ‘The Odyssey’ features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality … the film’s vision is too confused, its characters too underdeveloped, to deliver what it half-promises in terms of big ideas – although it is very good at conveying big bangs and big giants,” Wilson’s scathing review reads.

She adds: “Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbors. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”

Exit questions:

It’s pretty funny to me that before The Odyssey came out, there were a bunch of people saying, “Nolan used the super woke Emily Wilson translation so you know it’s going to be woke trash!” and now you can play a really tough game of, “Was this said by Emily Wilson or Matt Walsh?”

— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) July 27, 2026

UGH: Drug-Resistant Bacteria May Be Jumping Between Pets And Humans, Scientists Warn.

I DON’T TRUST ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS: One Common Sweetener May Increase Stroke Risk by Damaging The Brain’s Protective Barrier.

THOSE THINGS HAVE MOSTLY BEEN OVERSOLD, I THINK, BUT OKAY: THC-CBD Treatment Dramatically Reduces Agitation in Dementia Trial.

FLASHBACK: Jane Austen’s Fight Club.

THINK OF IT AS EVOLUTION IN ACTION: The Benadryl Challenge Isn’t Going Away — Here’s How Public Health Officials Are Trying To Stop This Deadly Viral Trend.

GOOD: Trump Asks Supreme Court to Allow Order Restricting Mail Voting: The Trump administration asks justices to intervene after an appeals court blocked key parts of a mail-in voting executive order.

OUT: MUSCLE CAR. IN: MUSCLE TRUCK: 2026 Roush Nitemare First Test: The 705-HP Ford F-150 That Drives Like a Muscle Car.

COLOR ME DUBIOUS: Is Alpha School for real? “Alpha School claims that students can master academics in two AI-powered hours a day, equaling the achievement at elite schools, writes Robert Pondiscio. He wants it to be the ‘educational breakthrough’ we need. But he wonders: Is Alpha School for real?”

ICYMI: GENERATION IRON RICE BOWL: China’s Best and Brightest Bet on Beijing, Not Business.

BE SAFE: Prepared Hero Emergency Fire Blanket. #CommissionEarned

“COMMON SENSE GUN CONTROL” MEANS HITTING YOUR TARGET: Sorry, Gun-Grabbers, We’ve All Seen Where Those ‘Common Sense’ Proposals Lead.

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: The Woman Who Wasn’t There. “Lots of women evidently like looking at middle-aged Instagram/TikTok/YouTube ‘influencers’ who have managed to stay young and trim. One influencer’s secret? Not existing.”

What really stood out is how Instagram chooses to deal with the problem of AI-generated influencers: “Every time their algorithm suggested some ‘popular influencer’ for my feed I merely blocked them. After a few weeks Instagram killed my account because it said I was ‘violating site rules’ or something.”

WHO’D’A THUNK IT? Bombshell Documents Point to China Blackmail Efforts Targeting Biden Family.

SCOTT PINSKER: The Great MAGA Reversal on Ukraine: How Helping Zelensky Became ‘America First.’

GET ENOUGH MAGNESIUM: BIOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough Supplement with 500mg. #CommissionEarned

“YOU CHOSE … POORLY”: FIRED: Nurse Who Called Jews “Hooknose Hymies”, Said They Pray To “Satanic Star”.

SAD, BUT TRUE:

From the Russia! Russia! Russia! conspiracy, through Covid, through the 2020 election fraud and the suppression of Hunter Biden's laptop, through Joe Biden's cognitive decline, they've learned that simply ignoring massive scandals works. https://t.co/bgHgNrMiDx

— Northern Barbarian (@xnoesbueno) July 27, 2026

And here’s the meaty part of what Northern Barbarian replied to:

But the fact that the people who worshiped him in the first place are not going to take in any of this information nor get angry or upset.

Their worship of Fauci, and all the lies, he told about:
-masks,
-the infection fatality rate of the virus,
-the vaccines stopping transmission, stopping contraction,
-the toxic side effects that are off the chart,
-the excess deaths caused by the vaccine,
-the damage to children’s hearts, kidneys, neurological disorders from the vaccine,
-the lies about NOT inventing the virus in the first place

Will still be ignored by the people who most ardently enforced the Fauci Covid narrative because to admit to themselves, all these lies, would mean that they were monsters acting in an evil way and poisoning themselves and their own children, and they just can’t live with that.

Yes.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: U. Florida ‘early childhood education’ professor scrubs ‘anti-racist’ readings after inquiry.

A University of Florida professor scrubbed optional readings on “anti-racist” and “anti-bias” education from her syllabus after receiving inquiries from The College Fix.

In this class, “students develop and/or implement instructional strategies consistent with their personal philosophies of early childhood education,” according to the course description.

The original version of the “Early Childhood Curriculum” syllabus, available in early July, offered students two different writing options.

Option A would require students to read articles such as “Creating anti-racist early childhood spaces” and “An Inclusive, Anti-Bias Framework for Teaching and Learning about Race with Young Children. Young Exceptional Children.”

The latter reading states that because picture books feature white characters, “a trip to the public library may implicitly communicate to young children that ‘whiteness’ is superior.”

To be fair, even the Smithsonian says that the “written tradition” is part of icky “white culture.”

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

"In hindsight, that might have been a mistake." https://t.co/j1fPXH7i7o pic.twitter.com/3ELD0biXhb

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) July 27, 2026

SPACE: A Spacecraft Skimmed 2,800 Miles From Mars, And Captured This Breathtaking, Trippy Timelapse.

TWO FAUCIS IN ONE, PART DEUX:

Photo 1: A man who claimed Covid had a mortality rate of a flu in his diary.

Photo 2: A man who claimed Covid had a mortality rate 10X of a flu under oath in front of Congress. pic.twitter.com/xKs8oDt8YB

— C3 (@C_3C_3) July 27, 2026

DSA’S SOLEMN VOW: We Win an Election, You Lose a Country. “The Democratic Socialists of America mean to end the United States — and if you don’t believe me, take a look at what DSA Co-Chair Megan Romer had to say about it this weekend.”

UNWANTED IMMIGRANTS ARE A GLOBAL PHENOMENON: African snails overrun cardamom fields in India’s Kerala, spreading through Bison VALLEY.

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: The money train: Colorado’s Front Range rail a looming debacle.

Early this week, Colorado’s Front Range Passenger Rail District released its Plan for Colorado Connector – CoCo, the name it has given to a proposed passenger train between Fort Collins and Denver.

The plan calls for spending $332 million in phase 1 (three trains a day each way), $1.7 billion for phase 2 (extending trains to Pueblo), and $2.7 billion for phase 3 (increasing frequencies to up to 10 daily roundtrips).

My first thought is that, as someone who actually went to planning school for a year or so before becoming disillusioned by the profession, I resent it when government agencies call documents like this “plans.” A real plan considers a wide range of alternatives, carefully evaluates the benefits and costs of each alternative, and then, as a part of implementation, sets up targets and a monitoring process so that it can change or cancel the plan if it fails.

This document contains none of that. Instead, it simply proposes to spend a lot of money, after which it would spend a lot more money, and then spend even more money. No alternatives are considered and there is no suggestion that if the first step in the project fails in some way they will modify or abandon later steps.

In short, this is not a plan; it is a sales brochure designed to convince legislators and the public to pay for expensive train service that few people will use.

Democrats couldn’t figure out how justify California-style high-speed rail in Colorado, so we’ll get the smaller scale “CoCo” grift machine, instead.