Weekly Reader: Stories From Across Paste Media

On casting Channing Tatum as his lead:

“I met with him in Prospect Park, and we had a five-or-six-hour walk, and I didn’t pitch him the story, but I learned from that walk how important his daughter was to him, and how he was in a custody situation with his daughter. I could feel that pain, and I could feel the love. I was like, “Wow, that’s very Jeff-like, too.”

Channing could tap into that. And then he had a physicality, in the way he moved. Not every actor can move the way Channing moves. So many actors now are dialogue delivery machines, because of the “golden age of TV,” but Channing can move. I knew so much of this story had to be told physically. It’s like Castaway in how he engages with it. I rewrote the script for the next nine months in his voice. The last time I saw the movie, I was blown away. He was born for the screen.”

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From Jezebel

How Horror Movies and Women’s Rights Have Been ‘in Lockstep’ Since the 1970s by Scarlett Harris

There’s an often repeated argument that horror has undergone an “elevation” in recent years, with sophisticated films such as Get Out, Hereditary, and The Babadook examining social and political issues through a spooky lens. But film critics will tell you that horror has always been political, and that’s the focus of Eleanor Johnson’s new book, Scream With Me: Horror Films & the Rise of American Feminism, 1968–1980.

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From Paste

Cover Story | It’s a Tweedy Affair by Matt Mitchell

It helps that Twilight Override is the best record Jeff Tweedy’s made in twenty years—solo, Wilco, or otherwise. Its length is in elite company, indexed into history next to other 30-song releases, like The Beatles and Sandinista!, But its abundance isn’t brand-new in Jeff’s catalogue: Wilco put out Cruel Country, a 21-song project recorded while the band was making Cousin; before that, he and his sons made the double LP Sukierae. Some of the best efforts of Jeff’s solo career occur when he’s got ideas coming out the wazoo. This time, it’s personifying inanimate objects, like an ashtray on “Caught Up In the Past,” or going into spoken-word mode on “Parking Lot” which was a fresh, intimidating idea embraced (with trepidation) by Jeff for the first time in a musical context. “I definitely have a tougher time listening to my speaking voice than my singing voice. It’s such a weird thing, but I’m making peace with that. [Recording that] was really unsettling, but also seemed very effective for those words. Singing those words would have made that song not work.”

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From EndlessMode

Whether 8-Bit, 16-Bit, or Battle Royale, It’s Always Super Mario Bros. by Marc Normandin

Super Mario Bros. is 40 years old in North America on Oct. 18. You are guaranteed to read articles about how important Super Mario Bros. was to the NES, to Nintendo, and to the video game industry at large as that significant anniversary approaches. If you’re of a certain age, you’re already very aware of all of that without even reading any of those articles. There is another angle worth pursuing when it comes to Super Mario Bros., however, and it’s about the core design and its timelessness. It was a mindblowing game in 1985 but it remains a joy to play in the present, too. Part of that is just because Super Mario Bros. is undeniably great, the kind of game that can be enjoyed by both less inexperienced players and also speedrunners dedicated to shaving fractions of a second off of world records. Another thing it has going for it, however, is that Nintendo has seen fit to update it, again and again, without ever having it be anything besides Super Mario Bros.

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From Splinter

How American Academia Supports Israel’s Genocide in Gaza by Roqayah Chamseddine

Our modern universities, which are entirely saturated with capital, have chosen the side of order over justice. While the people of Gaza faced down societal collapse and now struggle in the aftermath of a tenuous ceasefire, many institutions maintained alliances with systems of warfare, thereby accelerating violence and fueling the direct and indirect killing of Palestinians. In a damning report from The Anti-War Initiative, many elite universities were revealed to have been operating as conduits of genocide, underwriting the technologies of bloodshed with the very research they have long claimed is “neutral.” A striking case is Cornell University, whose complicity was unmasked, revealing that between 2023 and 2024 alone, some $180 million flowed from the U.S. and Israeli military and defense contractors into Cornell’s research programs and departments. According to the Everything is Political report, Cornell’s partnerships include arms manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Israeli institutions like Technion (The Israeli Institute of Technology), confirming that these alliances aren’t just peripheral, but deeply established.