Here’s how you can continue to help people in Gaza.

By Dan Sheehan

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January 17, 2025, 1:16pm

With news coming in earlier today that Israel’s security cabinet has, after some delay, ratified the Gaza ceasefire agreement, it looks as if the carnage that has enveloped the strip for over fifteen months will, on Sunday, finally come to an end.

For surviving Palestinians in the brutalized enclave, all of whom have had to endure a level of trauma most of us would be unable to fathom, the cessation of hostilities is only the first step on a long and painful road back to something resembling normalcy.

Over the past 467 days, tens of thousands of Palestinians have died violent deaths (almost 18,000 of them children) at the hands of the Israeli military. More than 100,000 have been wounded (with an estimated 22,500 suffering “life-altering” injuries). Almost all of the region’s 2.2 million people have been displaced, in most cases multiple times, and are suffering from “acute food insecurity.” The region’s infrastructure—medical, educational, cultural, recreational, agricultural, religious—has been decimated. 92 percent of all homes have been damaged or destroyed.

In short: the grieving, traumatized survivors of the Gazan genocide have been left with nothing, and they’ll need our help, for many months and years to come, in order to rebuild their lives. We, the citizens of countries whose leaders sponsored and defended this nightmare, owe them that much at least.

Here are some ways you can help right now:

Mutual Aid Organizations

Gaza Funds is a project that connects people to verified crowdfunding campaigns for individuals and families in Gaza. Consider adopting a fundraiser and sharing it among your friends and colleagues.

The Sameer Project is a grassroots aid organization, led by four Palestinians in the diaspora, working to supply emergency shelter and aid to displaced families in Gaza.

Workshops for Gaza is a group of autonomous writers, artists, and educators organizing donation-based workshops and classes to raise money for Palestinians in Gaza.

Larger Aid Organizations

Medical Aid for Palestinians is on the ground in Gaza where they are working to stock hospitals with essential drugs, disposables, and other healthcare supplies.

Palestine Children’s Relief Fund is the primary humanitarian organization in Palestine. They deliver crucial, life-saving medical and humanitarian aid on the ground.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society is a humanitarian organization that provides emergency services in the West Bank and Gaza. Dozens of its staff members have been killed by Israeli military attacks over the past 15 months.

The World Food Program has been distributing fresh bread, canned food and ready-to-eat food to those who sought refuge in United Nations Relief and Works Agency shelters in Gaza.

Doctors Without Borders is providing support to hospitals and health facilities in Gaza.

UNRWA is providing medical support, trauma relief, and food assistance on the ground in Gaza.

The Middle East Children’s Alliance works to protect the rights and improve the lives of children in the Middle East through aid, empowerment, and education. Their team are providing emergency assistance to displaced families in Gaza.

Heal Palestine helps Palestinian children with severe injuries and amputations evacuate Gaza to get lifesaving treatment.

Project Hope is providing support to operate a primary health clinic in Deir Al Balah and to build a medical team in Rafah in response to the ongoing humanitarian emergency.

On the immortality of David Lynch.

By Brittany Allen

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January 17, 2025, 1:05pm

High-school is Twin Peaks. All the cool girls are Audrey for Halloween, eerily twisting in pencil skirts. Unless they’re the Log Lady. Every cup of coffee is “damn good.”

College is Blue Velvet country. At every party, some bro will parrot Dennis Hopper when the keg runs dry. (“Heineken? F*ck that sh*t. Pabst. Blue. Ribbon!”) Before any of that we get the OG Paul Atreides, soiling his space suit as Frank Herbert intended. And though the maestro disowned this edit, your mother still jokes you have “Mentat eyebrows” certain mornings.

David Lynch, the inimitable auteur, has died at 78. Known for psychosexual, dreamy masterpieces like Mulholland Drive, he was a peerless weirdo. A precise bard of the American uncanny, as fun to interpret as he was to be unsettled by. Praising his canon, peers and former colleagues have called him wizard, friend, and “imagination voyager.”

In a moving Instagram tribute, Lynch’s longtime collaborator Kyle MacLachlan said “he was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get to.”

Today I’m struck by the length of the director’s shadow. For as long as I’ve know of it, Lynch’s work has felt immortal. Those images and characters (fire) walk with you from room to room and dream to dream. They existed long before you moved to the suburbs. They’re hiding in the closet still, determined to outlive you.

And as Patryk Chlastawa put it in a 2010 essay for The Point, the indelibility of, say, this scene is as much about theme as mood. “Lynch’s work confronts its audience with their own sense of helplessness and victimization,” he wrote. Which analysis helps explain how Lynch’s work, which is so often alarming or grotesque, managed to smack us teenagers sideways.

As in high school, nobody in a Lynch film ever knows exactly where, why, or who they’re supposed to be.

*

In one of many nice remembrances this morning, John Semley of The New Republic recalled one of Lynch’s last screen appearances: a mega-meta cameo in Steven Spielberg’s self-mythologizing 2022 biopic, The Fabelmans. In a penultimate scene, Lynch chomps scenery—I mean, a cigar—behind an eye patch, cosplaying another great American director: John Ford.

As Semley has it, here is “a master of American cinema playing a master of American cinema, in a film by another master of American cinema, about the genesis of his own cinematic mastery. A seemingly random, throwaway role, it typified Lynch’s approach to art and creativity… eccentric and unexpected.” It’s true that one could hardly imagine an apter career cap. Exit, pursued by a legacy.

And on observing the explosion of a(n unmanned) SpaceX Starship shuttle yesterday, one brilliant BlueSky scout theorized that this could be the auteur’s true last will and testament. An uncanny and violent shock, “shot down from heaven.” Something to make you laugh. To freak you out. To wake you up.

Image via

Vampires, pranks and podcasts: here are some ideas to reboot 2025’s public domain books.

By James Folta

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January 16, 2025, 4:21pm

The new year means new calendars you’ll stop using in a month, new resolutions you’ll break in a week, and new public domain works you can remix and ruin all year long. And in 2025, a lot of classics are escaping the shackles of copyright — Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has a great list and a thorough explainer on the law, if you want to dig a little deeper.

Some of these dusty 1929 books are just crying out for an exciting reboot for today’s fickle audiences. Here are a few ideas — and Hollywood? I’m waiting by the phone.

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway’s first best-seller has all the big Ernie tropes: spare style, courageous and conflicted men, and beautiful and tragic and tragically beautiful women. The novel follows an ambulance driver working on the Italian Front in WWI, as he grapples with war, God, and his love affair with a British nurse. Pretty standard stuff, I think we can do better.

Any of the women in this book would be excellent characters for an Ahab’s Wife or Wide Sargasso Sea treatment, or could serve as the emotional center of a quiet, introspective novel where the nurse, Catherine, survives the war and her American lover, to live at the foot of the Swiss Alps with her child.

But this could also go in a louder, more marketable direction: Catherine, sick of following around this perpetually wounded Hemingway stand-in, ditches him. Years later, she sees the same masculine tendencies exploding around her in Fascist Italy, and starts an antifascist group to resist Mussolini and his goons. I’m imagining a lot of cool biplane and train chase sequences taking visual cues from the Italian Futurists.

Magick in Theory and Practice by Aleister Crowley

I would love to see an American Vandal style parody show satirizing cult documentaries, set in Crowley’s Thelema scene. Crowley’s self-seriousness makes for excellent comedy — the spelling “magick” alone is very funny.

RIP Aleister, wish you had lived long enough to experience Hot Topic.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

A lot of great horror has been made by upturning the conventions of predominantly white, Southern stories and physically manifesting America’s worst sins in terrifying ways. Faulkner is perfect for this treatment — and you could definitely throw some vampires in there on top of the Compson’s financial and social collapse.

But I think what’s interesting to me about doing a horror Sound and the Fury is its form: the book’s stream-of-consciousness style would make for a great spooky audio project. Getting inside someone’s head through a manic monologue while they’re running around trying avoid getting blood-drained by some Southern Nosferatu? I’m listening.

Plus I know Hollywood will be into the franchise potential of a Yoknapatawpha County Cinematic Universe.

Popeye by E. C. Segar

An exact remake of HBO’s Girls, but Adam Driver’s character is Popeye played by Adam Driver.

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Red Harvest is one of my favorite of Hammett’s book, and I think it’s ripe for a reimagining. My understanding is that the book was inspired by real life IWW miners strikes and reprisals, and I would love to see the radical labor plot-lines put a little more front and center; Red Harvest’s main gumshoe, cynical and completely off-the-leash, is due for some comeuppance. Or maybe he renounces the Pinkertons after discovering a sense of solidarity and class awareness.

And hey, toss some vampires and wolfmans in there too — people love that stuff.

Encyclopædia Britannica (14th edition)

The 14th edition had a murder’s row of contributors, which makes me think that an anthology show inspired by the entry writers and their subjects could make for an interesting series, or a wide-ranging novel like Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease To Understand The World.

But that’s not going to work for the TikTok set, so what about a prank show optimized for bite-sized social media clips: Every week, Encycl-Oh No-pedia Brat-annica takes an entry from the 14th edition as inspiration for a wacky prank. For the “Interferometer” episode, someone giving a presentation at work gets a bunch of laser pointers shined on them. For the “Diving, Deep Sea” episode, a family is tricked into thinking that they’re seeing real mermaids, but on closer inspection, they’re just D-List celebrities with fins. And it goes without saying that the “Harmonic Analysis” prank writes itself.

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

A subtle rumination on a woman’s role and limitations in a society that seeks to stifle them? Sorry, but that’s just not getting butts in seats. We gotta jazz this up.

How about Law & Order: Room Of One’s Own Unit, a procedural about a female detective who is able to solve crimes by entering into a special room where she becomes clairvoyant. Her hard-nosed boss just doesn’t understand her, leading to a will-they-won’t-they situation, and maybe in later seasons it could be revealed that he’s a vampire.

The original German version of Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

This book is just crying out to be rebooted as an advice podcast.

Anne Sexton

Sexton’s work will enter the public domain in countries with copyright of “life plus 50 years” this year, meaning her powerful and complex work can be made even more powerful and complex:

So it has come to this –
insomnia at 3:15 A.M.,
the clock tolling its engine

like a frog following
a sundial yet having an electric
seizure at the quarter hour.

It’s also when
the vampires come out,
yeepers creepers!

Which of Tom Hanks’ beloved typewriters are you?

By Brittany Allen

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January 15, 2025, 12:50pm

A special collection landed in the Hamptons this week, care of Tom Hanks—the world’s one true pleasure to have in class.

As real ones know, Mr. Hanks has long nursed a fetish for typewriters. He spotlit the technology in his debut story collection, Uncommon Type. And recently appeared in a documentary “valentine” called California Typewriter, alongside fellow clackity-clackheads Sam Shepard, David McCullough, and John Mayer. (Yes, you read that last one right.)

I like to think Tom’s collection was inspired by this scene from You’ve Got Mail, in which his cast-mate Greg Kinnear made a kind of love to the Olympia Report Deluxe Electric. But theories proliferate. Anyway, who knows why obsessions bloom? Leo DiCaprio has his Star Wars toys. Tom’s got his typies. The point is, we layfolk finally get to see them up close.

As The Guardian reports, some thirty primo models from Hanks’ 300+ collection of obsolescent word processors are now on display at The Church in Sag Harbor. Humbly named “Some of Tom’s Typewriters,” the exhibit was curated by Simon Doonan, the former Barney’s creative director. It runs through March 10th and is of a piece with recent Church programming that purports to explore “material culture.”

For those of us who can’t come see the magic machines in person, I’ve assembled a wee sneak preview. To paraphrase Doonan, a typewriter museum is kind of like a box of chocolates. In that the one you select says at least as much about you as Tom Hanks.

The Hermes 3000

If this portable calls your name, you’re prone to moderation. You’re the sane friend. Probably a Libra. You like a well-paced thriller, a reasonable bedtime, and solving puzzles in a group. Oh, yeah—this little baby befits an Apollo 13 lass. Tom’s got the 1966 model, with chic mint keys and a grey body.

The Olivetti Valentine

Like this disruptive number from Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, you’re known for a “bright, rebellious” aspect. You’re effectively the mayor of your social group, and refuse to take lumps lying down. But you’ve got a sense of humor. And when your pride’s not going before the fall, you can be playful. Kind of like Sheriff Woody.

The Robotron

You’re direct, efficient, and to-the-point. This Cold War import from the Eastern Bloc (technical name: VEB Kombinat Robotron) suits your head for business. It’s not personal, it’s business. Whether squeezing a band for a second single or destroying a small business on the Upper West Side, you show no sentiment and brook no compromises. No time for frills or foreplay. You’ve got dollars and deals to make.

The Petite

This English Petite Toy Typewriter is fun to look at, but not technically functional. Sort of like your canine sidekick when it comes to police work. Why is the universe constantly playing tricks on you like this? You’re just a good cop, trying to live right!

The Blickensderfer Featherweight

The MacGyver’d aesthetic of this OG portable appeals to you, because you had to do a fair share of DIY on the island. You respect effort, patience, and a timely rescue. But you’re resourceful when you have to be. A maverick by circumstance, if not by choice.

There are plenty of other models on display. Standard Underwoods for the sleepless. Remingtons for the soldier with a savior complex. Peruse the catalogue for more marvels you can count on.

(And remember to say, thanks, Hanks.)

Images via, via

It sure looks like Meta stole a lot of books to build its AI.

By James Folta

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January 14, 2025, 1:12pm

It’s a grim week for Meta. The company formerly known as Facebook, and before that Facemash, “designed to evaluate the attractiveness of female Harvard students,” now encompasses Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, and Meta, the failed vision for a remote workplace, fun-zone, and Zucker-verse where legs are always just around the corner.

CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that slurs are okay on their platforms, added a pro-Trump UFC boss to their board, and made appearances in the aggrieved weirdo media world to make some convoluted case that we need more masculine energy in business, more resentment overall, and more fealty to Don Trump. Zuckerberg has also recently switched up his personal style so that he now looks like he’s perpetually in a sitcom flashback where an older actor is unconvincingly costumed to look like their younger self.

And in the Northern District of California, Wired reports, recently unredacted court documents reveal that Meta used a database of pirated books to train its AI systems. These documents were unsealed as part of a copyright lawsuit, one of the earliest of many similar cases, called Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms. The plaintiffs in this case are a number of writers and performers, including Richard Kadrey, Christopher Golden, Junot Diaz, Laura Lippman, Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and—jump scare!—Mike Huckabee.

The new documents quote Meta employees frankly admitting to using stolen stuff from a notorious piracy site:

…an internal quote from a Meta employee, included in the documents, in which they speculated, “If there is media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated, such as LibGen, this may undermine our negotiating position with regulators on these issues.”…

…These newly unredacted documents reveal exchanges between Meta employees unearthed in the discovery process, like a Meta engineer telling a colleague that they hesitated to access LibGen data because “torrenting from a [meta-owned] corporate laptop doesn’t feel right 😃”. They also allege that internal discussions about using LibGen data were escalated to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (referred to as “MZ” in the memo handed over during discovery) and that Meta’s AI team was “approved to use” the pirated material.

Meta has claimed that they used publicly available material that was legally accessible under fair use doctrine, but that doesn’t pass the smell test to me: just because something is public on the internet, doesn’t make it legal.

The plaintiffs are arguing that they should be allowed to expand their case to incorporate these new findings:

“Meta, through a corporate representative who testified on November 20, 2024, has now admitted under oath to uploading (aka ‘seeding’) pirated files containing Plaintiffs’ works on ‘torrent’ sites,” the motion alleges. (Seeding is when torrented files are then shared with other peers after they have finished downloading.)

“This torrenting activity turned Meta itself into a distributor of the very same pirated copyrighted material that it was also downloading for use in its commercially available AI models.”

Legally, Meta and their lawyers may find a way to finagle the law and get around this. But in plain terms, it doesn’t seem defensible for a major company with tons of lawyers, money, and talent to knowingly use stolen work to build something that they then turn around and sell.

I’m not naive enough to think that this lawsuit, or any of the many others currently winding their way through the courts, will end in this kind of software leaving the market—in America, you can’t unring a bell that’s been valued in the billions. But I do hope that the writers and artists whose work was stolen are compensated.

In spite of all this, tech-optimists continue to push AI in more places, and people in power continue to trumpet it as the future of everything. In the case of publishing, for example, the excellent xoxopublishinggg Instagram account has been posting anonymous responses about publishing workers’ experiences with AI in the workplace—it seems like a lot of publishers are at least curious about these tools in ways that don’t bode well for an AI-less future.

If you’re considering using AI, or are feeling pressure at work to do so, you can add “built on piracy” to the list of concerns about this tech, alongside its environmental impact, its human toll on underpaid and marginalized workers, and the simple fact that it is incapable of making anything good.