“We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security,” President Donald Trump said on Jan. 5, “and Denmark is not going to be able to do it.” This was the icebreaker for a negotiation over Greenland’s reserves of “critical minerals,” especially rare earth elements. The outcome may lead to a gold rush as American companies […]

Art historian Nicolas Ballet’s Shock Factory is a book seemingly at odds with its subject, industrial music, at every possible level. This 500-plus-page tome is the very model of professional scholarship. It is the work of years of research, with interviews going as far back as 2014. It weaves in citations across the disciplines: music […]

Midway through The Beast in Me, Netflix’s entertainingly flawed saga of murder and longform journalism, comes a moment guaranteed to make the editors in the audience smile. Nile Jarvis, a menacing real estate developer played by Matthew Rhys, has recently snuck into the home of Aggie Wiggs (Claire Danes), the author writing his profile. Coming […]

The new Gus Van Sant film, Dead Man’s Wire, is the latest entry in what might be called the “crazy people doing crazy things on live TV” genre. This places the movie within the tradition of Dog Day Afternoon or Network, whose lead characters are explicitly or implicitly mad as hell and behave accordingly on TV. […]