Entertainment
Review: James Joyce, like Kim Kardashian, understood a sex scandal could be good for business
Book Review
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W. David Marx’s doomscroll through 21st century pop culture, “Blank Space,” is largely a catalog of cringe.
Kardashians keep barging in, joined by Paris Hilton, Milo Yiannopoulos, MAGA-hatted trolls, latter-day Hitler enthusiast Kanye West and more. The collection of Z-listers in the book runs so deep that there’s no room for even some of the most infamous Kevin Federline-level hacks to fit into its pages. In Marx’s reckoning, we’ve lived with 25 years of mediocrity, with no end in sight. Couture is now fast fashion. Art is IP, AI, the MCU and NFTs. Patronage has become grift.
“Where society once encouraged and provided an abundance of cultural invention, there is now a blank space,” Marx writes. Yes, he’s side-eyeing Taylor Swift, or at least her savvy-bordering-on-cynical approach to fandom. The title of the book, after all, is a nod to one of her hits. This might seem like get-off-my-lawn grousing from a critic who misses the good old days. But Marx’s critique isn’t rooted in pop culture preferences so much as concern with the ruthless ways that capitalism and the internet have manipulated the way we consume, discuss and make use of the arts. Algorithms engineered for sameness and profit have effectively sidelined provocation. Revanchist conservatism, he suggests, has rushed to fill the vacuum.
Weren’t we doing OK not so long ago? The Obama era might have been a high point of inclusivity on the surface, but the past decade has demonstrated just how thin that cultural veneer was. As Marx writes, in a brutal deadpan: “Trump won the election. Not even Lena Dunham’s pro Hillary rap video as MC Pantsuit for Funny or Die could convince America to elect its first female president.” MAGA, Marx argues, wasn’t simply a product of Donald Trump’s cult of personality; it was the culmination of years of ever-intensifying hotspots for macho preening like Vice magazine (cofounded by Gavin McInnes, who’d later found the Proud Boys) and manosphere podcasters like Joe Rogan. Trump — regressive, abusive, reactionary — wasn’t special, just electable.
“Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century” by W. David Marx
(Viking)
Marx’s background is in fashion journalism, and “Blank Space” can feel unduly cantilevered toward that world, detailing the history of hip lines like A Bathing Ape and luxury brands’ uncomfortable embrace of streetwear. But fashion writing is good training to make the point that the cultural flattening, across all disciplines, is rooted in matters of class and money. A certain degree of exclusivity matters when it comes to culture, especially for high-end brands, and it starts with street-level changes. But the street, now, is built on ideas of instant fame — “selling out,” once a pejorative, is now an ambition.
That shift, combined with the algorithm’s demand for attention, has made culture more beige and craven. Memes, #fyp, and Hawk Tuah Girl are our common currency now. Artists from Beyonce on down are dragged “into unambiguous business roles, and pushing fans to spend their money, not just on media, but across a wide range of premium, mediocre commodities,” Marx writes. “In this new paradigm, the ‘culture industry’ could no longer sustain itself on culture alone. Personal fame was a loss leader to sell stuff.”
There’s plenty of room to disagree with all this: You and I can reel off any number of novels, art films and TV shows that demonstrate the kind of boundary-pushing Marx says he seeks. (It makes a certain sense that highbrow books and movies would get short shrift in “Blank Space,” being relatively niche pursuits, but his relative neglect of prestige TV feels like a curious lapse.) Still, for every “Children of Men” there are a dozen “Minions” knockoffs, for every “To Pimp a Butterfly” a tidal wave of brain rot. The early-aughts “poptimism” that judged the judgey for demonstrating judgment opened the door to an everything-is pretty-OK lack of discernment.
Whether that’s what put us on a slippery slope to Kanye West peddling T-shirts with swastikas on them is open to debate. But there’s no question that artists are fighting uphill like never before. “How did advocating for timeless artistry at the expense of shallow commercial reality become an ‘elitist’ position?” Marx asks toward the end, pressing creators and consumers alike to sidestep poptimism’s guilt-tripping and operate outside the boundaries of the algorithm.
What would that look like? It may help to set the time machine to a century ago. In “A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls,” critic Adam Morgan considers the case of Margaret C. Anderson, who founded the literary magazine the Little Review in 1914. Though its circulation was as minuscule as its name suggests, it wielded outsize influence on Modernist writing. Recruiting firebrand poet Ezra Pound as her European talent scout, Anderson began publishing works by T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein and others, most famously serializing James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” a decision that made her a target of censors and conservatives.
“A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature” by Adam Morgan
(Atria/One Signal Publishers)
The woman at the center of what Morgan calls “America’s first modern culture war” was a poor fit for her times. Headstrong, queer and disinterested in Victorian pieties, she escaped her smothering Indianapolis family and headed to Chicago, where she hustled work as a bookseller and book reviewer. But her approval of then-risque fare like Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” got her tut-tutted by editors. “What they wanted of me was moral rather than literary judgments,” she said.
She struck out on her own, launching the Little Review with her lover, Jane Heap. Anderson was enchanted by outsiders — not just avant-garde writers but radicals like Emma Goldman. She fired back at haters in the letters section. When money was tight, she relocated to a tent north of Chicago to keep the magazine afloat. And when moral scolds seized on excerpts of “Ulysses” — citing the Comstock Act’s ban on sending “obscene” material via U.S. mail — she protested. Copies of the magazine were seized and burned, and her lawyer’s argument that Joyce’s language was too complex to serve as pornography fell on deaf ears.
Even that lawyer, John Quinn, knew the effort was likely futile: “You’re damned fools trying to get away with publishing ‘Ulysses’ in this puritan-ridden country,” he wrote to Anderson and Heap. (The two were sentenced to pay a fine of $50 each, around $900 today.) Through the sepia filter of today, it can be easy to romanticize this tale — a lesbian champion of the arts making the world safe for Modernism. But one valuable thing Morgan’s history does is scrub the sheen off of Anderson’s accomplishment. Anderson had to play a long game, with no guarantee of success. She was forever pleading with patrons for support from month to month. She had to cloak her sexuality, make frustrating compromises in what she published, and absorb attacks and mockery from masses that treated her like a curiosity piece.
Yet it wasn’t wasted effort: Her advocacy for “Ulysses” paved the way for its eventual U.S. publication, with the controversy helping its cause. (James Joyce, like Kim Kardashian, understood a sex scandal could be good for business.) In her later years she lived largely as she pleased, collecting lovers and becoming a follower of weirdo mystic G.I. Gurdjieff. Anderson didn’t have an algorithm to battle, but she did have a censorious moral atmosphere to navigate around, and her story is an object lesson in the one virtue the algorithm has little tolerance for — patience. If we want more works like “Ulysses” in our world (and far less cringe), the financial and critical path is no easier now than it was then. But it will demand a stubbornness from creators and dedication from consumers that the current moment is designed to strip from us.
Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”
The sixth outing in the director’s chair for filmmaker Kirk Jones, I Swear dramatizes the real-life story of touretter John Davidson (played by Robert Aramayo). Tourette’s Syndrome, for those unfamiliar with the condition, is a nervous system disorder that causes various tics, the most prolific being erratic and explicit language. However, as I Swear expertly showcases, the syndrome is far more than ill-timed outbursts of curse words. Davidson’s story is one of societal frustration, finding your people (both with and without the condition), and using your voice to help others rise. The subject and subject matter are handled with absolute care and understanding under Kirk’s measured vision and Robert Aramayo’s BAFTA-winning performance.
The film kicks off with the greatest exclamation to democracy ever uttered (*%#! the Queen!), as a nervous John Davidson prepares himself before entering an awards ceremony hosted by Britain’s royal family. Right away, the film tells us what it is: a triumph over adversity that blends humor and human drama with education. It’s an important setup, as the film flashes back to Davidson’s 1980s youth, where we see his time as a star soccer recruit flatline as his condition takes hold. Davidson’s life spirals from there. Some aspects, like school bullying and accidental run-ins with authority figures, are expected but important to empathizing with young Davidson’s (young version, played with heart by Scott Ellis Watson) new everyday life. The more tragic, a complete meltdown of his family system, is unsettling if quick. His father (Steven Cree) is never given enough screen time to explore his alcohol coping tendencies. However, his mother Heather’s descent into easy fixes and blaming is crushing and convincing. Harry Potter series actress Shirley Henderson (Moaning Myrtle) gives a layered performance as Heather. Someone who loves her son, but also feels cursed by him as the entire family exits the picture. It’s bitter, she’s tired, and fills each conversation with ‘only medication and your mother can save you’ energy.
From there, the viewer and Davidson find refuge in a host of characters. Maxine Peake plays Dottie, the mother of a childhood friend and a retired mental health nurse. Screen vet Peter Mullan plays maintenance man Tommy Trotter. Together, they help Davidson build a life and an understanding of himself that carries the film forward into its second half. After that, the film is primarily a 3-actor show as director Kirk fills the screen with these tour-de-force performances. Peake and Mullan are great vessels to get the film’s main message across: patience, love, and a shared responsibility between the diagnosed and those who understand their struggle can help change the path for people quickly left behind by a normative world. Together, they are the soul of the movie, with the filmmakers clearly hoping the audience will follow their lead after they exit the theater (in my case, the beautiful Oriental Theater for the Milwaukee Film Festival). Both performances are perfectly warm and reflective and shouldn’t be left out in discussions of I Swear.
I say this because the movie is anchored by The Rings of Power actor Robert Aramayo, who leaves Elrond’s elf ears behind to bring an acute naturalism to his performance of main character John Davidson. Aramayo’s physicality and timing of the fitful Tourettes Syndrome never feel out of place or overplayed. In fact, the movie as a whole does an amazing job of never veering into sentimentality. While many moviegoers left with tissues dabbing their eyes, the filmmaking never felt like it was forcing that reaction out of audiences. It straddles the line between feel-good and reality with every story beat and lands squarely on the side of letting the real inform our feelings. Anyone with an ounce of empathy will grasp the film’s message and hopefully take it with them into life.
I Swear continues at the Milwaukee Film Festival on Tuesday, April 21st, and releases nationwide April 24th, 2026, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
Several private equity firms and Hollywood power players, including United Talent Agency and longtime agent Patrick Whitesell, have expressed interest in buying parts of Casey Wasserman’s music and sports management firm after it abruptly went up for sale.
Wasserman became ensnared in controversy earlier this year after his salacious decades-old emails to Ghislaine Maxwell, an accomplice of child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, were released as part of the U.S. Justice Department’s trove of Epstein files.
The agency auction is in the early stages, according to three people close to the process but not authorized to comment.
Earlier this week, several interested parties submitted proposals to meet a preliminary deadline in the auction, two of the sources said.
The company, which changed its name to the Team last month, is expected to be valued at around $3 billion.
Providence Equity Partners holds the majority stake. The private equity firm has discussed selling the entire company or carving off Wasserman’s minority interest. Providence also has considered selling the bulk of the firm and staying on as a minority investor, one of the sources said. Another scenario could involve separating, then selling the individual business units that make up the Team.
Wasserman and Providence’s company boasts an enviable roster of music artists, including Kendrick Lamar, Coldplay and Ed Sheeran. Its sports marketing practice is viewed as particularly lucrative and has potential to grow in value as big dollars flow into sports that draw large crowds.
Wasserman, who declined to comment, has a veto right over any sale of the company that he has spent a quarter of a century building.
UTA, which also declined to comment, is among the most aggressive suitors, the sources said. The Team’s sports marketing and music representation divisions would dramatically boost the Beverly Hills agency’s profile and client roster.
Whitesell, former executive chairman of Endeavor, separately has been motivated to make investments in sports, media and entertainment since last year when he left the talent agency that he and Ari Emanuel built. Whitesell launched a new firm with seed money from private equity firm Silver Lake, and last spring he started WIN Sports Group to represent professional football players.
Whitesell wasn’t immediately available for comment.
European investment firm Permira also has expressed interest, according to a knowledgeable source. Permira declined to comment.
The New York Times first reported that Permira, UTA and Whitesell had expressed interest.
The sales process is expected to stretch into summer, the knowledgeable people said. The auction could become complicated particularly if Providence decides to unwind the business.
For example, UTA could not buy the entire company because of the Brillstein television unit. The agency is bound by an agreement with the Writers Guild of America that prevents it from owning television production.
Investment bank Moelis & Company is managing the sale. A representative of the firm declined comment.
Wasserman also is the chairman of LA28, the nonprofit group that will be staging the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in two years.
Following revelations of Wasserman’s 2003 emails with Maxwell, several musicians and athletes — led by pop artist Chappell Roan and soccer star Abby Wambach — said that, to stay true to their values, they would leave the agency then known as Wasserman.
Wasserman apologized to his staff for “past personal mistakes” and said he would sell the agency.
He had limited dealings with Epstein, flying on the financier’s jet along with former President Clinton for a September 2002 humanitarian trip through Africa.
Wasserman, a prolific Clinton fundraiser whose legendary grandfather, Hollywood titan Lew Wasserman, helped the Democrat win the 1992 presidential election, was joined on Epstein’s jet by his then-wife, Laura, actor Kevin Spacey, Epstein, Maxwell — who was convicted of sexual abuse in 2021 — and others, including security agents.
The LA28 board’s executive committee unanimously voted to keep Wasserman as chairman, citing his “strong leadership” of the Games.
Pizza Movie (2026) Director: Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, Star: Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone
Somehow, I got through an hour of this movie. I was seconds away from turning off in the first fifteen minutes because of the juvenile humor. Pizza Movie is too silly, repetitive, and the characters are annoying. Stranger Things Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone star as college friends, Jack and Montgomery. College angles are rarely seen in films right now, and that’s the one saving grace of the film. Similar to high school, people are also trying to fit in. The story and visuals were too corny. You can only watch someone’s head exploding for so long without letting yours.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026) Director: Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, Stars: Chris Pratt, Charlie Day, Anya Taylor-Joy
I never saw the first Super Mario Brothers Movie when it was out, but I heard it got positive reviews. My brother always loved playing Super Mario video games as a kid, and I’d watch him. I tagged along with my friends to see Super Mario Galaxy Movie, and it’s a cute and fun film. I like it when movies explore the video game world. The animation creates unique worlds and characters. The characters are split into their own storylines, and for me, I felt like it worked. It adds more action, especially for kids who are seeing the films.
Emily in Paris Season 5 (2025) Creator: Darren Star, Stars: Lily Collins and Ashley Park
After a bright spot in season 4, I thought season 5 of Emily in Paris would continue its growth in the story and its protagonist, but no, it’s all drained out in the usual Emily (Lily Collins) mishaps. Ashley Park (Mindy) has become too good for this show. Emily and Mindy waste several opportunities because of their love lives. The whole relationship angle is ruining it. I don’t understand why Alfie (Lucien Laviscount) is still in the show. I thought writers learned their lesson, but by the last episode, they’re continuing to bring the past into an apparent season 6.
Sarah’s Oil (2025) Director: Cyrus Nowrasteh, Stars: Naya Desir-Johnson and Zachary Levi
There’s always history lurking right beneath our noses. Sarah’s Oil (2025) tells the true story of Sarah Rector, an Oklahoma-born African American girl who became the first black female millionaire in the U.S. Naya Desir-Johnson is fierce and driven as Sarah. Zachary Levi is also along for the ride as Bert, a man who helps Sarah. Kate (Bridget Regan) was another favorite character as an intelligent woman. Cyrus Nowrasteh was drawn to the subject for its story and its themes. Nowrasteh’s direction is compelling as he unearths a hidden story from history. The film is streaming on Amazon Prime.
Jack Goes Boating (2014) Director and Star: Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Ryan
Jack Goes Boating (2014) didn’t quite work for me, largely because of its slow pace and uneven storytelling. The film stars the late Seymour Hoffman as Jack, who also directed the film. This was Hoffman’s first and only time in the directing chair. Amy Ryan also stars in the film, giving a solid performance. This was also based on a play that Hoffman starred in. Jack wants to participate in a swim championship. That’s hardly what the film is about, tracking other characters’ stories. While the film aims for quiet intimacy, it ultimately drags, making it an underwhelming viewing experience.
You Kill Me (2016), Director: John Dahl, Stars: Ben Kingsley, Tea Leoni, Luke Wilson
Meet You Kill Me (2016), yet another film that I found in the museum of underrated gems. The concept revolves around Frank (Ben Kingsley), a hitman, who is sent to an A.A. meeting to get his mind focused again. A different story happens, where Frank falls in love with Laurel (Tea Leoni). Leoni is one of my favorite actresses. It also stars the funny Luke Wilson. I liked the trio’s dynamics. You Kill Me is a mental health movie. It’s okay to make changes if you’re not happy. I recommended that you keep an eye out for this movie.
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