The Cut 🔪Issue 24

It is a week when Phil Collins’ ex-wife barricaded herself in his mansion with armed guards at the door, a woodworking show featured a face-tatted Nazi sympathiser, and one-time Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani was caught with his hands down his kecks in the presence of an actress in the new Borat movie. Frankly, we can’t compete with that. Come, hide under the covers with us and enjoy some writing that won’t make you feel like the abyss is staring into you.

Now is the time. Here is the place. This is The Cut.

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Pubs in the time of The Situation have never been more under threat. The government seems to be targeting the humble hostelry with an aggressive, almost puritanical zeal—despite evidence that pubs are not a vector of viral spread. The irony is that the British pub scene was born out of the aftermath of an earlier pandemic—the Black Death…

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-the-oldest-pub

The arts have also taken a battering of late, with the government ‘encouraging’ creative types to retrain if they can’t make a living in The Situation. An online campaign along those lines was met with richly-deserved derision. Writer John Bull takes the character of Fatima, the star of the most laughed-at poster, and considers what her career in ‘cyber’ could actually look like…

https://medium.com/@garius/the-ballerina-9620f2d4854f

It’s not all bad news in the arts world. Film sets have slowly reopened and furloughed productions are grinding back to life. After all, we need something to watch besides the news, right? But filming under Covid restrictions has its own set of challenges. Actress Niamh Walsh tells us more…

https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/niamh-walsh-filming-during-pandemic

Thanksgiving is looming on the horizon. For many culinarily-challenged Americans faced with a giant turkey, the holiday means a call to the experts at the Butterball Turkey Line. It’s been a part of the culture for decades. This year, with the focus ever more on home comforts, the Turkey Line has become more important than ever…

http://read.medium.com/ZePws1N

We loved this reading of the Alien movies, reframing them as commentary on class—especially the tension existing between the working and management class. Weyland-Yutani have always been villainous, but seeing one of the great fictional corporations as oppressors is a fascinating new way to look at the movies. Time to dig out that box set again, we feel…

https://neotextcorp.com/culture/game-over-man-the-alien-franchise-as-working-class-horror/

2020 has been the year of huge anniversaries. For us Ninth Art fans, none is more important than the 40th birthday of one of the greatest comic books of all times—Maus. Mixing history, memoir and meta-commentary, it’s hilarious and horrifying in equal measure. Sam Leith talks to the creator of Maus, Art Spiegelman, to find out how Maus still comments powerfully on the world and the animals in it…

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/17/graphic-artist-art-spiegelman-on-maus-politics-and-drawing-badly

If you think there’s no way into a sense of wonder anymore, consider this. We’ve just remotely piloted a probe the size of a truck millions of miles through space to rendezvous with a tiny asteroid, landing for just long enough to grab a trowel full of rock samples—an event the deputy mission scientist described as “kissing the surface with a short touch-and-go measured in just seconds.” The OSIRIS-REx flight is a mind-boggling achievement. A dance, a touch, a kiss, done and dusted in moments.

https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-10-20/nasas-osiris-rex-touches-asteroid-to-grab-sampe

And finally. We are huge fans of Sohla El-Waylly, the still calm centre of the Bon Appetit kitchen. When she left, revealing the disparity in pay and conditions between her and her white colleagues, Bon Appetit crumbled in her wake. Now she’s found a home with Andrew Rea in the Babish Culinary Universe. Vulture talks to Sohla as she takes on new challenges—like cooking mac and cheese only using eighteenth-century tools…

https://www.vulture.com/article/sohla-el-waylly-profile.html

There’s a new Bruce Springsteen album out. What more do we need to say? Your Exit Music is the lead track from Letter To You, which reunites The Boss with the E Street Band in a barnstorming collection of new songs recorded in a hectic five day session. They’re back just when we needed them the most.

See you in seven.