Faith Hahn

Barry Lyndon is a story which does not depend upon surprise. What is important is not what is going to happen, but how it will happen. I think Thackeray trades off the advantage of surprise to gain a greater sense of inevitability and a better integration of what might otherwise seem melodramatic or contrived. In the scene you refer to where Barry... See more

Many people were outraged by what they regarded as his non-parliamentary use of medieval laws to raise money. The most notorious was ship money. This turned an old law, where coastal counties provided ships to the Crown, into a money tax levied on all the counties, including those inland.

Her discovery may have been crucial to creating the atomic bomb, but she wanted nothing to do with it nor wanted to be depicted in films about it. And I believe Meitner’s refusal to participate in the weaponization of her work on moral grounds makes her more worthy of commemoration than Oppenheimer. She chose humanity over notoriety.

The study estimates that the music industry has lost over £10 million in revenue to AI-generated content, but this is likely just the tip of the iceberg. Consider that one North Carolina musician, with a relatively small-scale operation, was allegedly able to generate hundreds of thousands of fake tracks, rack up billions of plays, and syphon off... See more

We also discuss, among other things: decapitated ostriches, fatal rose petals, and Mary’s robust reappraisal of Marcus Aurelius’s ‘sub-Stoic’ maundering.

Goldman Sachs’ latest Music In The Air report is forecasting that the “superfan” market could be worth $4.3bn globally next year. The subtext here is that this needs to become a priority focus for the music business as recorded music revenues actually fell short of Goldman Sachs’ expectations in 2024, causing it to downgrade its forecasts for this... See more

In this mirror one can see the terrifying nature of force, of this ancient human drive to turn others into things, which will never disappear, no matter how many smart professors comfortably say otherwise over coffee tables. Simone Weil knew we desperately need a clear mirror to deal with the horror of force in its most ghastly expression, which is... See more

14. All those nasty, rebellious songs that defy authorities are now owned by hedge funds.

The project would attempt to invent an anti-gravity system from the ground up instead of reverse engineering it. This project began in 1955 with the establishment of the Research Institute for Advanced Studies (RIAS) at the Glenn L. Martin Company, which later became Martin-Marietta and ultimately merged with Lockheed in 1995 to form the modern... See more