September 9, 2026

AMERICA’S TEAM’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

THESE ARE HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS — WE JUST LIVE IN THEM:

Don’t forget to get your gestating parent something nice for Gestating Parent Day.

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

IT’S A BEAUTIFUL SHIP. PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE LOOMING ICEBERG: Alexandra Pechman Came of Age in Early Aughts New York — Her First Feature Magazine Tackles the Time with a Light Touch.

When lockdown hit in March 2020, journalist-turned-filmmaker Alexandra Pechman couldn’t help but get a little nostalgic for the good old days. Who didn’t?

“We couldn’t really look forward, so a lot of people were looking back. We were all inside and everyone was feeling so nostalgic and reading old journals and diaries and talking to people from the past,” Pechman told IndieWire in her first long-form interview for her first feature film, “Magazine.” “I was also looking back at what my career had been, and I kept going back to that kind of cusp-y time at the beginning of my career in magazines. It was the last gasp of the Old World, and so it was that feeling of this complicated nostalgia of, ‘Oh, I really miss that time, but also that time was not great for me or people like me, and why do I miss that?’”

The world of “Magazine” was pulled from Pechman’s own early career in journalism, notably pre-#MeToo. As a young writer in the late aughts, she published stories in Vogue, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, and was a staffer at The Paris Review, Aperture, and W magazine. By 2019, Pechman had sold her first script and joined the WGA. And she was trying to get comfy with the idea that, as her filmmaking career was on the rise, she was going to have to say goodbye to journalism.

Her big farewell: a delightfully winsome, extremely smart first feature, captures the specifics of the time (it’s set in 2011) while hinting at what very much needs to change in the years to come. The film stars Lily McInerny as starry-eyed poet Nora, who alights on a summer internship at the lauded lit mag Platen, where she meets fellow interns, played by Lukita Maxwell, Ruby Cruz, and Daniel Zolghadri, plus an alluring older editor, played by Joshuah Melnick.

As John Podhoretz tweets:

In 2011, when I reviewed The September Issue, a cringe-inducing documentary starring Anna Wintour and the staffers of Vogue, I wrote:

It’s a fascinating time capsule of a film, sort of the Titanic or Last Days of Pompeii of the New York magazine industry. And beyond the world of Vogue depicted in the movie itself, of a supremely competent insular liberal Masters of the Universe worldview just before the lights went out on the world’s economy, and elites got what they wanted in the years that followed — good and hard, as Mencken would say. President Obama likes to say that Americans have been pretty soft in recent years; he need only watch this film to see how right he was about his core constituency. When Occupy Wall Street complains of “The One Percent” and their enormous wealth, well, come and see the plutocratic excess inherent in the system.

Still though, forget ‘80s nostalgia. I can understand early 2010s nostalgia among coddled leftists when compared with the autophagy they’re faced with today: “You Better Get Ready for … War”: Socialists Call for “War in the Streets” and the End of Capitalism. “‘The Democrats cannot be reasoned with. They must be destroyed.’ There is little subtlety in the message, [University of California Santa Barbara History Professor Butch Ware] has explained: ‘You cannot call yourself a revolutionary and not be talking about training with weapons.’”

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHINA AND SOUTHEAST ASIA, THE CASE FOR BOMBING:

Posted at 1:32 pm by Stephen Green

HOW MILES DAVIS AND JOHN COLTRANE CHANGED JAZZ FOREVER:

Both musicians were products of the 1940s bebop age. Davis joined Charlie Parker’s group in 1944, long before he had the technique, by his own admission, to keep pace with Parker’s breakneck improvisations. Coltrane hailed from a generation of saxophonists – including Sonny Rollins, Lee Konitz and Paul Desmond – who picked up the pieces after Parker had roared through jazz like a tornado, smashing the existing landscape, before dying, aged just 34, in 1955. The rhythmic and melodic complexity of Parker’s work threw down the gauntlet. Matching his intensity and perfecting the techniques of his music was not enough. Parker upped the ante constantly, never settling for the songs he’d already worked out how to play.

Davis and Coltrane had been aware of each other during the early 1950s, but properly entered each other’s orbits in 1955, when Coltrane auditioned for a quintet Davis was organizing. Davis had quit Parker’s group just before Christmas 1948, finding himself increasingly unwilling to deal with the saxophonist’s self-destructive addictions. In that spirit of renewal, Davis’s antidote to four years of improvising around Parker’s high-tempo melodic obstacle courses was to start a nine-piece ensemble in collaboration with arranger Gil Evans and baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, which favored instead airy and spacious arrangements, heavily influenced by the perfumed delicacy of the French composers Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy. If Parker’s music had been “hot,” this group leaned toward the “cool” – and the records they made would be subsequently anthologized as Birth of the Cool.

Coltrane passed his audition and Davis’s new quintet aimed to fuse hot and cool. The titles of the four albums they recorded in 1956, Cookin’, Workin’, Relaxin’ and Steamin’, tell you something of the emotional palette the group encompassed, from “When I Fall In Love,” an early taste of the cut-glass fineness of Davis’s approach to playing a ballad, to their stampeding reboot of Sonny Rollins’s “Airegin.” With its emotional range and the space Davis was prepared to give his musicians to develop their improvisations, his quintet surpassed even Parker’s work. But in 1957, Davis let his saxophonist go. Coltrane had cultivated a debilitating drug dependency – and having recently shaken his own habit, going cold turkey, Davis recognized the dangers and knew Coltrane had to get himself clean. The Davis/Coltrane mythology properly began when the quintet reunited a year later. Classic album followed classic album, each fresh installment apparently compelling the music to follow a radical new direction. Milestones, from 1958, used hectic compositions to kick-start muscular, finger-popping improvisations. By comparison, Kind of Blue, recorded a year later, was strikingly sparse and introverted.

Speaking of which, from me in 2019: The 60th Anniversary of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis’ Masterpiece.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

WAIT, WHAT? Lethal Injections: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. “You know she has a charmed life when she can leisurely reanimate each morning with a fresh cup of coffee and access to all paywalled media sites. Such is my morning routine because, yes, I have a pretty lovely life; however, the idyllic process was interrupted today when I simultaneously inhaled and spat the aforementioned coffee when I read that the State of Georgia purchased its lethal injection cocktail from a pharmaceutical supplier based out of a West London driving school.”

Posted at 1:15 pm by Stephen Green

CONSEQUENCES: U.S. Destroys Five More IRGC Tankers After Iran Targets Navy Warship.

U.S. forces destroyed five Iranian crude oil tankers Tuesday after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeted a U.S. Navy warship with ballistic missiles twice over the past two days, according to U.S. Central Command.

CENTCOM said the warship successfully evaded both attacks and continued its patrol. No American personnel were injured.

In response, U.S. forces struck the Kaviz, Charminar, Horizon 1 and Riesco in the Gulf of Oman, along with the Deryanear Iran’s Kharg Island. CENTCOM said crews were ordered to abandon the vessels before they were struck and rendered inoperable.

The strikes bring to eight the number of Iranian tankers attacked by U.S. forces since Sept. 5.

Do those seem like rookie numbers?

Posted at 12:44 pm by Stephen Green

WELL, THE SELECTION PRESSURE IS PRETTY INTENSE:

Posted at 12:42 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE ORIGINAL STAR WARS IS COMING TO IMAX 70MM THEATERS IN 2027:

70mm IMAX film is very special and requires purpose-built projectors and huge screens. The 15-perforation 70mm film is in a tall 1.43:1 aspect ratio, very different from the more standard cinematic 21:9 aspect ratio of many movies.

It will be interesting to see how Disney handles Star Wars: A New Hope in 70mm, since the original theatrical release was shot on 35mm film with anamorphic lenses to achieve a wide aspect ratio of 2.35:1. That’s very far from 1.43:1.

Presumably, the original 35mm film will go through IMAX’s proprietary Digital Media Remastering (DMR) process, a sophisticated form of upscaling and image processing that ensures movies filmed on non-IMAX formats still look great on the big screen.

That sounds like a lot of digital processing to upscale a 35mm film to the 70mm Imax format. If there’s a 70mm Imax theater near you, certainly go for it. But I suspect the original 1977 Star Wars will still look awfully impressive in a digital Imax theater, and they’re far more ubiquitous. As the above linked article notes, there are about 400 Imax theaters in the US and Canada, but “Relatively few theaters worldwide can project IMAX 70mm film prints. Per DFIrentals, there are only about 41 of them, which is less than 3% of all IMAX-certified theaters. Roughly 30 of these 70mm theaters are in the United States.”

 

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS IS A GREAT IDEA:

From the linked article: “Between the two bills, Rep. Davidson’s bill is the more detailed and the more aggressive. Its private cause of action – its ‘sword’ – includes damages language and would, if enacted, have greater deterrent effect than a declaration-only bill. Much of what Rulli’s bill implies is, in Davidson’s proposal, made express.”

Having nearly outlawed innovation, the EU now squeezes American tech firms for all they can, while trying to muzzle Americans’ free speech.

Time to put the squeeze on Brussels until they stop.

Posted at 12:25 pm by Stephen Green

SHE GOT THE MOON IN HER EYES:

For 50+ years society has rewarded women for being kooky, and sheltered them from the consequences. That has had consequences for society.

UPDATE:

Flashback:

Posted at 12:13 pm by Glenn Reynolds