John Cox

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inews.co.uk

The 14 best dystopian novels of all time

A rundown roster of essential dystopian fiction, framed by The Handmaid's Tale and its sequel The Testaments as touchstones, tracing the genre from Zamyatin's We and Kafka's The Trial through Cold War-era and postmodern entries to recent works like Station Eleven, Submission and Little Eyes. Each brief entry sketches the premise and argues for why the book endures or unsettles, whether through Ballard's collapsing tower block, McCarthy's scorched-earth father-son journey, or Alderman's gender-power reversal. Worth keeping as a ready-made syllabus of the genre's key preoccupations — totalitarianism, technology, ecological collapse, and patriarchy — spanning a century of imagined catastrophe.

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www.slashfilm.com

5 Forgotten '70s Western Movies That Still Hold Up Today

A roundup of five overlooked 1970s Westerns worth revisiting: Charlton Heston facing a vengeful outlaw in "The Last Hard Men," Robert Aldrich's bleak Vietnam-allegory "Ulzana's Raid," Charles Bronson's train-set whodunit "Breakheart Pass," Franco Nero's spaghetti-Western revenge tale "Keoma," and Lee Van Cleef's underseen "The Grand Duel." The piece argues that the genre's '70s output grew more cynical and violent than classic Hollywood oaters, deliberately puncturing frontier myths rather than romanticizing them, and that these particular titles got lost in the shadow of New Hollywood landmarks like "Jaws" and "The Godfather" despite still holding up. Worth keeping as a quick watchlist of underrated genre gems with a shared skeptical streak toward the "Old West as noble adventure" narrative.

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www.kawasaki.com

collider.com

10 Sci-Fi Books That Are Better Than 'Dune'

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www.cbr.com

6 Classic Movies Everyone Forgot Are Actually Perfect

This piece identifies six classic films that have faded from modern audiences' collective memory despite their quality: The Iron Giant, From Russia With Love, Frantic, Capricorn One, Sorcerer, and Once Upon a Time in the West. For each film, the article briefly describes the plot and explains the specific circumstances—box office failure, overshadowing by contemporaries, or shifting genre popularity—that caused it to be overlooked or forgotten. The underlying argument is that contemporary moviegoers should seek out these forgotten masterpieces as a corrective to nostalgia for older cinema and as alternatives to endlessly debating the same canonical favorites.

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www.gamesradar.com

The 32 greatest sci-fi movies

This is a ranked list of 32 essential science fiction films spanning from 1927's *Metropolis* to 2022's *Nope*, selected for their influence, innovation, and enduring impact on cinema. The selections range from celebrated classics like Kubrick's *2001: A Space Odyssey* and Scott's *Alien* to more recent entries like Villeneuve's *Dune*, with entries representing diverse subgenres including cyberpunk, time travel, AI thrillers, and alien invasion narratives. The list emphasizes both Hollywood blockbusters and international works, recognizing key films that shaped sci-fi's visual language and thematic concerns across nearly a century of filmmaking.

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collider.com

10 Movies From 1966 That Are Now Considered Classics

This is a Collider ranking of the ten best films from 1966, a year the piece frames as a hinge point between fading Old Hollywood and the more experimental, globally adventurous cinema that followed. It runs through titles like Django, Tokyo Drifter, Cul-de-Sac, Fahrenheit 451, The Battle of Algiers, Andrei Rublev, Blow-Up, A Man for All Seasons, and Persona, before crowning The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as the year's most influential film. Worth keeping as a quick reference list of underrated and canonical 1966 releases with brief context on why each still matters.

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ew.com

coolmaterial.com

10 Bourbon Cocktails You Need to Try

A rundown of ten classic and modern bourbon cocktails worth having in your repertoire, arguing that bourbon deserves a place in mixed drinks despite purist objections to using it beyond neat pours. It runs through recipes and quick histories for staples like the Old Fashioned, Manhattan, Mint Julep, and Boulevardier alongside lesser-known options like the New York Sour, Scofflaw, Gold Rush, and a bacon-garnished shot called the Mitch Morgan, pitching both winter sippers and summer-friendly highballs. Worth keeping as a practical reference card for mixing bourbon drinks at home rather than a deep dive into any single cocktail.

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coolmaterial.com

50 Books Every Man Should Read Before He’s 50

A sprawling 50-book reading list pitched as a personal-development curriculum for men, mixing school-canon classics (The Odyssey, Catcher in the Rye, Crime and Punishment) with genre picks, graphic novels, and contemporary literary fiction (Between the World and Me, Infinite Jest, A Visit from the Goon Squad). Each entry gets a punchy one-paragraph pitch on why it matters or what lesson it teaches, framed around the gimmick of finishing all 50 before turning 50. Worth keeping as a ready-made, annotated to-read list rather than a single argument.

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collider.com

Jimmy Stewart Gave Us His Most Menacing Performance in This Western

This piece examines how "Winchester '73" marked a turning point for James Stewart, trading his wholesome pre-war persona for a morally ambiguous, violence-capable gunslinger under Anthony Mann's harsher directorial style. It traces the plot's gimmick of following a coveted rifle through various owners' hands as a device for Mann to interrogate frontier brutality, culminating in the revelation that Stewart's Lin and villain Dutch are estranged brothers, which turns a standard revenge plot into something closer to fratricidal tragedy. The write-up frames the film as the hinge between Stewart's earlier idealism and his subsequent darker collaborations with Hitchcock, making the case for why this particular western is a career-defining anomaly worth revisiting.

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collider.com

30 Best Robert Redford Movies, Ranked

A wide-ranging ranking of Robert Redford's acting and directing career, running from decent-but-forgettable studio fare like "Our Souls at Night" and "The Last Castle" up through more substantial work like "The Horse Whisperer" and "Brubaker." It's essentially a career retrospective published around his death in September 2025, mixing critical assessment with trivia about co-stars and collaborators (Fonda, Pitt, Gandolfini, a young Scarlett Johansson) across six decades of films. Worth keeping as a guided tour through the deep cuts of his filmography rather than just the obvious classics.

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SPIN

The 300 Best Albums of the Past 30 Years (1985-2014) | SPIN

SPIN's milestone 30th-anniversary ranking of the 300 best albums from the past three decades draws on input from over a dozen contributors to identify works deemed masterpieces, enduring pleasures, and new favorites, though the list enforces the constraint that no single artist can appear more than three times. The editors included studio albums, EPs, live records, and select compilations, with each entry accompanied by a brief critical summary explaining why the album merits its position rather than relying on plot descriptions or historical context alone.

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The Marginalian

kottke.org

A "new" Leonardo painting

A Leonardo da Vinci painting lost for centuries has been authenticated by scholars at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after a collector named Simon acquired it at auction and brought it in for examination. The work had been heavily damaged by centuries of poor restoration attempts, including overpaint and artificial resin coatings that obscured Leonardo's original delicate brushwork underneath. Once conservators carefully removed these layers of damage, the painting's authenticity became clear to all the experts involved.

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eddieonfilm.blogspot.com

Edward Copeland on Film...and more: Comic Training, Sir!

Plays from YouTube. Nothing is loaded from Google until you press play.

This retrospective essay celebrates *Stripes* as a quintessential early-1980s comedy that channels the anarchistic spirit of SNL-era comedies through Bill Murray's deadpan performance and his chemistry with Harold Ramis as two directionless men who enlist in the Army to get their lives together. The piece traces the film's development from its origins as a Cheech and Chong concept, analyzes the brilliance of Murray's comedic choices and subtle physical humor, and credits director Ivan Reitman with casting Warren Oates as the perfect authoritarian foil and allowing improvisation on set to enhance the comedy. While acknowledging the weak final act set in an Eastern Bloc country, the author argues that the film's strong first two-thirds, witty dialogue, and ensemble cast make it one of Murray's finest comedies, though its premise feels dated in contemporary times when military service lacks the whimsical appeal it had during the Cold War.

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Readability

The Greatest — www.nytimes.com — Readability

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Damn Interesting

Damn Interesting » Blog Archive » The Phantom Time Hypothesis

German scholars have proposed that roughly 297 years were fictitiously inserted into our calendar during the early Middle Ages—meaning it's actually 1708, not 2005—based on inconsistencies like the Gregorian calendar's correction being smaller than it should be and mysterious gaps in historical construction records. While the proponents point to evidence of medieval document forgeries and historical discontinuities, their conclusions rest on circumstantial evidence at best, and their proposed motives for such a vast conspiracy (like Otto III wanting his reign to include the year 1000) strain credulity. The hypothesis, though intellectually intriguing for raising legitimate questions about historical dating, ultimately reflects an unscientific leap from ambiguous data to an extraordinary claim.

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