T Lo’s Weekend Pop Culture Reading List

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Darlings, here are all the articles and essays that made our week more interesting. Spend the weekend getting zeitgeisty, T Lo-style!

As executive producer I had a voice in who would write it because, obviously, that’s the most important thing when you’re dealing with a complex narrative like this. It’s a very challenging project for a writer. They’ve got to get it historically accurate and at the same time develop the characters to make sure the audience understands who’s who and what’s what and what’s happening.

Helen Mirren on Catherine the Great, Powerful Women, and Her Favorite Roles to Play By Jenna Adrian Diaz at Vogue

Don’t think of those totes and saddle bags as just pretty accessories. They could also be an investment portfolio.

You Too Can Play the Handbag Stock Market By Vanessa Friedman at The New York Times

Museums in the Netherlands are ditching historical terms and names, and updating their collections as they grapple with the legacy of slavery and colonialism.

A Dutch Golden Age? That’s Only Half the Story By Nina Siegal at The New York Times

Please book a flight home and prepare to spend the next several days rummaging around your parents’ basement, because all that random stuff you owned in the ’90s? Yeah, it’s about make you rich. Beanie Babies, Pokémon cards, and even old video game cartridges are worth hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars these days. In other words: nostalgia, but make it rich.

50 Things from the ’90s That Could Make You a Lot of Money Now By Mehera Bonner at Marie Claire

I take a lot of guidance from the vision of our founders, and our founders fought very hard for our democracy, for our country, for our Constitution. In the dark days of revolution, Thomas Paine said, “The times have found us.” We believe that the times have found us to keep the republic from all enemies, foreign and domestic. And that would be those who say things like, “Article II says I can do whatever I want.” That’s not a republic, that’s a monarchy. That’s not what we have.

Two Days in the Life of Nancy Pelosi, Political Grandmaster By Abigail Tracy at Vanity Fair

Quinn Tivey, one of the screen icon’s grandsons, is previewing several lots from the “Property From the Lifestyle of Elizabeth Taylor” sale this week aboard the Queen Mary 2 in New York, while discussing his legendary grandmother.

More Than 1,000 Items Owned by Elizabeth Taylor to Hit the Auction Block By Laurie Brookins at The Hollywood Reporter

Then Francis Ford Coppola chimed in, ratcheting up the rhetoric by calling Marvel movies “despicable.” Then somebody asked Ken Loach about them — because why the hell not? — and, in what surely came as a huge shock to everybody, the director of such anti-capitalist masterpieces as Riff-Raff and Land and Freedom deemed the candy-colored movies about Übermenschen repeatedly saving the galaxy, produced by one of the planet’s biggest corporations, “a market exercise.” Fernando Meirelles, he of City of God and The Two Popes, was next, with Wim Wenders and Wong Kar-wai presumably to follow. Pedro Almodóvar was characteristically ahead of this current debate when he told us earlier this year that he thought superheroes were “neutered.” (Though he may yet chime in again; he’s doing press for a new release, after all, and the hustle is the hustle.) Hell, Jodie Foster beat them all to the punch when she said, two years ago, that “going to the movies has become like a theme park,” and compared empty-calorie blockbusters to something akin to “fracking — you get the best return right now but you wreck the earth.”

Okay, Fine, Let’s Talk About Marvel By Bilge Ebiri at Vulture

The result is an institution that exists in a liminal space, attempting to be both specific to but greater than a singular racial experience, both historical and savvy to the present moment. For years, many fought for such an institution, the beauty and relevance of which is undeniable, where I witnessed, among the clamor of schoolchildren, a woman with skinny dreadlocks quietly weeping in front of an exhibition of a slave cabin—unceremoniously blotting her nose and eyes as she continued on through the space. In some sense, the museum, by design, by the limits of its perspective, will always be a failure. In another, in the spaces where the black visitors lingered, looking at their ancestry, and where white visitors passed respectfully, silently, noting their own position in the history—a shared history that implicates all of us in this America—the museum was and will continue to be a success. This duplicity is, as the museum called it, part of the American paradox: a museum that represents both stagnancy and change, advancement and retrogression, black America and the rest.

The Smithsonian’s Black-History Museum Will Always Be a Failure and a Success By Maya Phillips at the New Yorker

The sisters remain close with their daughters. Vivian balances motherhood with roles on Grey’s Anatomy and Station 19. Condola, who holds the record for youngest actor with four Tony nominations, co-stars on the hit series Billions. The entire clan gathers as often as possible around their matriarch and inspiration, Vivian Ayers Allen, a Pulitzer Prize–nominated poet and real life “hidden figure” who worked at the Johnson Space Center as a mathematician in the 1960s.

How Sisters Debbie Allen and Phylicia Rashad Built on Their Family’s Artistic Dynasty by Susan Fales-Hill at Town & Country

Now, Fox classics are going into the vault as well, for reasons the company won’t publicly explain or justify. And Disney’s vaultification of Fox titles is bad news for movie theaters that depend on repertory screenings to shore up their increasingly shaky bottom lines. The decision to broaden Disney’s artificial scarcity tactic to include thousands of movies released by a onetime rival is a wounding blow to a swath of theatrical venues that used to be able to show them, and where film buffs were able to see them with an audience.

Disney Is Quietly Placing Classic Fox Movies Into Its Vault, and That’s Worrying by Matt Zoller Seitz at Vulture

By the end of the night, 35 city blocks had been burned to the ground. Black Wall Street had been erased. There are photos of the dead bodies of African American residents lying in the streets. Some had been shot to death.

The historical account is that at least 300 black people were killed.

“There’s really no way to knowing exactly how many people died. We know that there was several thousand unaccounted for,” said Brown, citing survivor accounts and population tallies. Many simply fled the city.

The Tulsa race massacre in the ‘Watchmen’ premiere was real. Here’s what happened in the horrific event by Sarah Sidner at CNN

[Photo Credit: Hal Shinnie/HBO]

• T Lo’s Weekend Homework