1683 – Mr. Jones (2019)

timespace coordinates: The film loosely tells the story of Gareth Jones, a journalist from Wales, who in 1933 travels to the Soviet Union and uncovers the truth about the Holodomor, the man-made famine in Ukraine in which millions died.

Mr Jones (Polish: Obywatel Jones; Ukrainian: Ціна правди) is a 2019 biographical thriller film directed by Agnieszka Holland. (wiki)

Gareth Jones’ great-nephew Colley told the Sunday Times: “In the film, they have got him up a tree eating bark, eating human flesh, tripping over dead bodies. He didn’t witness any dead bodies or any cannibalism, let alone take part in any. They’ve made Gareth a victim of the famine, rather than a witness.” (read more: walesonline)

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1678 – The Accountant of Auschwitz (2018 documentary)

The Accountant of Auschwitz is a Canadian documentary film, produced by Ricki Gurwitz and Ric Esther Bienstock and directed by Matthew Shoychet. The film centres on lawyer Thomas Walther‘s prosecution in the 2010s of former Schutzstaffel agent Oskar Gröning, focusing in part on the ethical debate around whether there’s any useful purpose to be served in prosecuting an elderly man for crimes he committed 60 years earlier. (wiki)

Gröning decided to make his activities at Auschwitz public after learning about Holocaust denial. He openly criticised those who denied the events that he had witnessed and the ideology to which he had subscribed. Gröning was notable as a German willing to make public statements about his experience as an SS soldier, which were self-incriminating and which exposed his life to public scrutiny.

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1677 – The Reader (2008)

timespace coordinates: Berlin, 1995 >> Neustadt West Germany, 1958

The Reader is a 2008 romantic drama film directed by Stephen Daldry and written by David Hare, based on the 1995 German (partly autobiographical) novel of the same name by Bernhard Schlink. It stars Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, and David Kross. It was the last film for producers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, both of whom died prior to its release.

The film tells the story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who, as a 15-year-old in 1958, has an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz. She disappears only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp.  (wiki)

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1675 – The Time of Money by Lisa Adkins (2018 book)

Speculation is often associated with financial practices, but The Time of Money makes the case that it not be restricted to the financial sphere. It argues that the expansion of finance has created a distinctive social world, one that demands a speculative stance toward life in general.

Replacing a logic of extraction, speculation changes our relationship to time and organizes our social worlds to maximize the productive capacities of populations around flows of money for finance capital.

Speculative practices have become a matter of survival, and defining features of our age are hardwired to their operations—stagnant wages, indebtedness, the centrality of women’s earnings to the household, workfarism, and more. Examining five features of our contemporary economy, Lisa Adkins reveals the operations of this speculative rationality. Moving beyond claims that indebtedness is intrinsic to contemporary life and vague declarations that the social world has become financialized, Adkins delivers a precise examination of the relation between finance and society, one that is rich in empirical and analytical detail.

Read Excerpt: Money on the move (Chapter 1)

1674 – Good Enough: The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Society by Daniel S Milo (2019 book)

In this spirited and irreverent critique of Darwin’s long hold over our imagination, a distinguished philosopher of science makes the case that, in culture as well as nature, not only the fittest survive: the world is full of the “good enough” that persist too.

Why is the genome of a salamander forty times larger than that of a human? Why does the avocado tree produce a million flowers and only a hundred fruits? Why, in short, is there so much waste in nature? In this lively and wide-ranging meditation on the curious accidents and unexpected detours on the path of life, Daniel Milo argues that we ask these questions because we’ve embraced a faulty conception of how evolution–and human society–really works.

Good Enough offers a vigorous critique of the quasi-monopoly that Darwin’s concept of natural selection has on our idea of the natural world. Darwinism excels in accounting for the evolution of traits, but it does not explain their excess in size and number. Many traits far exceed the optimal configuration to do the job, and yet the maintenance of this extra baggage does not prevent species from thriving for millions of years. Milo aims to give the messy side of nature its due–to stand up for the wasteful and inefficient organisms that nevertheless survive and multiply.

But he does not stop at the border between evolutionary theory and its social consequences. He argues provocatively that the theory of evolution through natural selection has acquired the trappings of an ethical system. Optimization, competitiveness, and innovation have become the watchwords of Western societies, yet their role in human lives–as in the rest of nature–is dangerously overrated. Imperfection is not just good enough: it may at times be essential to survival. 

Read Excerpt: Natural Selection Can’t Explain This Bugs Bizzare Horn

1667 – Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

timespace coordinates: 2286 > 1986 San Francisco

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is a 1986 American science fiction film directed by Leonard Nimoy and based on the television series Star Trek. It is the fourth feature installment in the Star Trek film series, and is a sequel to Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984); it completes the story arc begun in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) and continued in The Search for Spock.

Intent on returning home to Earth to face trial for their actions in the previous film, the former crew of the USS Enterprise finds the planet in grave danger from an alien probe attempting to contact now-extinct humpback whales. The crew travel to Earth’s past to find whales who can answer the probe’s call. (wiki)

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1642 – Snowpiercer (TV Series 2020-)

timespace coordinates: 2021, seven years after the world becomes a frozen wasteland, the remnants of humanity inhabit a perpetually moving train consisting of 1001 carriages that circles the globe 2.7 revolutions per year (133 days to complete a revolution). Built by billionaire Wilford, the train is rigidly separated by class, with passengers caught up in a revolutionary struggle against the strictly imposed social hierarchy and unbalanced allocation of limited resources.

Snowpiercer is an American post-apocalyptic dystopian thriller television drama series that premiered on TNT on May 17, 2020. It is based on both the 2013 South Korean–Czech film of the same name, directed by Bong Joon-ho, and the 1982 French graphic novel Le Transperceneige, from which the film was adapted, by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand, and Jean-Marc Rochette.

A reboot of the film’s continuity, the series questions class warfare, social injustice, and the politics of survival. Daveed Diggs and Jennifer Connelly star alongside Mickey Sumner, Annalise Basso, Sasha Frolova, Alison Wright, Benjamin Haigh, Roberto Urbina, Katie McGuinness, Susan Park, Lena Hall, Sheila Vand, Sam Otto, Iddo Goldberg, and Jaylin Fletcher. (wiki)

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