paper trail

Sight and Sound’s greatest films of all time; Hanif Abdurraqib on Osa Atoe’s Black punk zines

Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Janus Films

Sight and Sound’s decennial ranking of the greatest films of all time has been updated from a new poll of 1,639 film critics, curators, academics, archivists, and programmers. The last time the rankings were published, in 2012, Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) topped the list. This year, that spot was usurped by Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). 

Maria Dimitrova interviews Elif Batuman, the author most recently of Either/Or, for the Paris Review’s online edition. They discuss Batuman’s crisis of faith in the novel at the beginning of the Trump administration, writing diaries and emails, and how being with a woman has expanded Batuman’s ideas about narrative. “Adrienne Rich writes about interrogating how all these things became so closely identified—creating new people and narrative and personal fulfillment and physical pleasure. Why should all of those be the same thing? They don’t have to be. I found that really eye-opening.”

In this week’s 4Columns, Hanif Abdurraqib writes about Osa Atoe’s Shotgun Seamstress zines, which celebrated Black punk, and which have now been collected and published in one volume by Soft Skull Press. One of the zine’s gifts, Abdurraqib writes, was “the simplicity of saying I exist, so I know that somewhere, you exist, there’s another reality.” 

More than one thousand members of the New York Times Guild have pledged to walk out if management does not “agree to a complete and fair contract” by December 8. The union has been bargaining with the paper for almost two years over fair wages, health care, pensions, and standards about remote work and performance reviews. 

The Intercept reports on how Elon Musk appears to be suspending the Twitter accounts of antifascist organizers and journalists based on the recommendations of far-right voices like the writer Andy Ngo.