Matt Johnson

Dec 7, 2024 | quillette.com | Claire Lehmann |Lawrence Cahoone |Charlotte Allen |Matt Johnson

Two days after Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis, I was sitting at my desk in the Sydney Central Business District. Zoe, my colleague, stood up from her desk with a worried look. Holding her phone, she told me that the New South Wales Board of Deputies had received a police warning: the safety of Jews in the city could not be guaranteed. The message she had just received was encouraging them to leave.

Dec 5, 2024 | quillette.com | Lawrence Cahoone |Charlotte Allen |Matt Johnson |Brian Stewart

Introduction: My guest this week is Anna Gat. Anna is a Hungarian émigré who is now happily based in New York. A former poet, screenwriter, and playwright, in 2016 Anna founded Interintellect: a platform that allows people to create discussion forums, talks followed by Q&A sessions, and more informal meetups, both online and in person. Interintellect now hosts one or two salons every day and subscribers to the platform number in the tens of thousands.

Dec 5, 2024 | quillette.com | Charlotte Allen |Matt Johnson |Brian Stewart |Lawrence Cahoone

Some commentators fear that the West is in decline or dying or committing suicide. Others look forward to this development. Still others claim there never has been a “West” to worry about. Each may be right about a different appendage of the elephant. The unipolar moment—the “end of history” in 1989 when the Cold War concluded and the West with its allies seemed triumphant—led to new globalisation, economic gains in the developing world, and an expansion of liberal democracy.

Dec 4, 2024 | quillette.com | Charlotte Allen |Matt Johnson |Brian Stewart |Joel Kotkin

On the surface, Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow is simple enough that even a toddler can enjoy it. The plot and stakes are lessons in ruthless efficiency. A lonesome cat—named Flow in promotional material—has to survive on a small boat when a flood surges across the Earth. As the film progresses, the boat’s “crew” comes to include a capybara, a lemur, a secretary bird, and a golden retriever.

Dec 4, 2024 | quillette.com | Charlotte Allen |Matt Johnson |Brian Stewart |Joel Kotkin

While watching Gladiator II, I was mesmerised by... no, not Paul Mescal’s legs. Although did anyone besides me notice that his protagonist, Lucius, wears his Roman tunics about 24 inches shorter than his fictional father, Maximus (Russell Crowe), did in the original Gladiator (2000)? Maximus went for just above the knees, in a style that seemed to be based on actual portrait-statues of Roman luminaries such as Julius Caesar and the emperor Trajan.