If eight people could build two bombs with $700 worth of material and destabilise the global oil market, “What does that say about the tactics currently being employed in the climate movement?” Quoted in an interview with Vulture, this is the premise of Daniel Goldhaber’s environmentalist thriller How To Blow Up a Pipeline.
Barbie, Mattel and Greta Gerwig’s multi-million-dollar confection of nostalgia and hot pink, is a blockbuster hit and a bona fide cultural phenomenon. The film has taken in more than a billion dollars at the box office and inspired scores of breathless articles, everywhere from the mainstream press to the far left, extolling it as an artistic and political masterpiece.
“The [Voice] referendum is about whether we retreat into ourselves or have the courage to advance forward”, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared in a keynote speech at the Garma Festival in north-east Arnhem Land on 4 August.
“Culture cannot be destroyed by violence”, read the banner held by representatives of the Toho Labor Union on 19 August 1948 as they faced down more than 2,000 police and five American Sherman tanks, “everything but the battleships”, according to actress and unionist Akagi Ranko. Behind the barricades, hastily constructed from set pieces of films in progress, stood a thousand striking workers from every department of the Toho studio in Tokyo.
“There’s a lot of ways to lose your house,” US actor Ron Perlman threatened in a video posted to Instagram earlier this month. “Some of it is just figuring out who the fuck said that and where he fucking lives.” Perlman is referring to an anonymous movie studio executive who commented that the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers—the American film industry bosses’ association—plan on stonewalling negotiations with striking writers and actors until they “bleed out” and start to lose their homes.
Three large academic publishers—Elsevier, Wiley and American Chemical Society—brought a case against the pirate website Sci-Hub and its founder, 34-year-old computer scientist Alexandra Elbakyan, in 2020. They argued that the website, which hacks academic journals so users can access thousands of scientific articles for free, infringed on their copyright and should be blocked.