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Jan 13, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Alexander Larman |Byron’s Women |Philip Clark |Aaron Gwyn
The Robbie Williams biopic Better Man opened in American theaters last weekend and, as every single box office commentator predicted, it flopped, and flopped hard. A gross of just over $1 million in its opening three days — less than the Golden Globe-winning The Brutalist, which is only showing on sixty-eight screens nationwide — is utterly disastrous, all the more so because this wasn’t a $10 million indie, or even a $40 million Rocketman, but a movie that it cost $110 million to make.
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Nov 23, 2024 | 
bloodmeridian.substack.com | Aaron Gwyn
“But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!”—Matthew 6:23In 2005, arts critic Richard B. Woodward travelled to Santa Fe to profile Cormac McCarthy for Vanity Fair.
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
newsletter.oalannoble.com | O. Alan Noble |Aaron Gwyn
Yesterday I woke up expecting life to be normal and my favorite author not to be legitimately guilty of statutory rape of a 17 year old when he was in his “early” forties. I also didn’t expect to read this story in a sprawling, romanticized, purple-prose narrative in Vanity Fair. Life is full of stupid and horrid surprises. So here we are, again, with the reality that a literary giant is a moral degenerate.
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Aug 11, 2024 | 
open.substack.com | Aaron Gwyn
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Mar 3, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Jawad Iqbal |Damian Reilly |Aaron Gwyn |Theodore Dalrymple
The record low turnout for parliamentary elections in Iran, which took place on Friday, is another blow to the regime’s attempts to pretend that all is well in the country. Early reports suggest a turnout of just under 41 percent nationwide. Iranians in their millions have rejected the regime by choosing to stay at home rather than vote.
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Mar 3, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Damian Reilly |Aaron Gwyn |Theodore Dalrymple |Laurie Graham
For an astonishing length of time the attitude of soccer authorities to the prospect of widespread doping at the sport’s highest levels seemed best summed up in a 2017 tweet by the often spectacularly dim-seeming former pro and Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker. “Doping is not really an issue in football. Doping doesn’t help players play better.
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Mar 3, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Aaron Gwyn |Theodore Dalrymple |Laurie Graham |Tom Hodgkinson
At a moment when words like “jihad” and “genocide” fall perpetually from the lips of pundits, professional activists, and policy makers, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two seems a rather subversive spice to sprinkle into our combustible culture. While both parts of Dune comprise a complex film that defies simplistic one-to-one allegory, at times Villeneuve’s richly imagined epic places a finger on the familiar, the historical, just as it points its others toward a fiction set amongst the stars.
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Oct 25, 2023 | 
thespectator.com | Charles Lipson |Phoebe Hennell |Aaron Gwyn |Clinton Heylin
When a long-silent former president finally speaks out, the public listens. So do foreign leaders, especially when the former president is closely tied to the current one. That’s why Barack Obama’s comments on the war in Gaza attracted attention. Anyone who remembers President Obama’s foreign policy knew what to expect: criticism of Israel and a delicate dance around Iran’s malign behavior. In fact, he did not mention Iran at all. He totally ignored their role.
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Oct 24, 2023 | 
thespectator.com | Aaron Gwyn |Aidan Hartley |Leyla Sanai |Alexander Larman
In the summers my grandmother would drive us south of town to where the black oaks thinned out and the world opened into pasture land and sky: prairie grass as far as you could see. Here, on their tribal land, the Seminole People would hold an annual powwow. Folks congregated to visit and eat frybread tacos, and I would skateboard with my Muskogee friends, Mike and Bobby Harjo on the cement basketball court, or along sections of sidewalk outside the aluminum-sided lodge.
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Oct 20, 2023 | 
thespectator.com | Aaron Gwyn |Olivia Potts |Justin Marozzi |Paola Romero
He stands five-foot-seven in his stocking feet — five-nine in boots — but with Clarence White’s Telecaster slung around his neck and a thick head of gray hair roostered up, he looks ten feet tall. John Marty Stuart has plucked the strings of every major figure in country music. Growing up in Philadelphia, Mississippi, his heroes were bluegrass legend Lester Flatt and American prophet Johnny Cash.
