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I don't really love going to the movies. Most of the time it feels like sitting in a slightly upgraded economy seat, except the person in front has a bucket of popcorn. But a Nolan film in IMAX is the exception, and with Spain in the middle of a heatwave, three hours in a cold dark room was less a cultural decision than a survival one.

Turns out the whole team had the same week. Everyone's come back with something — a shot, a sound design choice, a bit of trivia about how they built the thing without CGI. That's what pushed this week's piece: we're going deep on The Odyssey, and on how one person's vision made it through a $250 million production intact when almost nobody else's does.

Not everyone's enjoying it. There's been a steady run of complaints about the casting and how woke the whole thing supposedly is, from people talking about it like it's a historical record. It's a poem that was sung out loud for generations before anyone wrote it down, and it changed every time it was told. There's a witch who turns men into pigs. So enjoy it for what it is…entertainment.

I have it top three Nolan films. I can't put it above The Dark Knight. That would be a betrayal of Heath Ledger, and I'm not doing that to the man.

In today’s issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

My grandpa used to tell me the Odyssey over cards when I was a kid, long before I understood any of it. He never set foot in a school and knew more than most people who did. Sitting in an IMAX theatre last weekend, watching Christopher Nolan's version of the same story, I found myself thinking less about the film than about the fact that it arrived in the shape one person intended.

That almost never happens at this size. A $250 million production usually means a hundred people with the standing to ask for one small change, and the vision doesn't get killed so much as worn down by agreement. Nolan went the other way, writing and directing it himself, keeping a small team he's worked with for years, building a 60-foot practical Cyclops in a Greek cave while every other studio was putting AI efficiency in the strategy deck. It has done $640 million in two weeks without a dollar of that cost-cutting.

The obvious objection is that he could do all this because he's Nolan, and that's fair enough, though it's also the whole point. He built the reputation and then built the system that protected it. Craft works as a magnifier here rather than a rescue: it amplifies whatever's already true about how tightly you're holding the wheel.

👉 Read the full piece

I have never been able to walk past a record shop without going in, and once I'm through the door my feet take me to the same bin before the rest of me has agreed to anything. Latin Music. Música Latina. Once, at a stall with no roof, just Latino, handwritten on masking tape. Flamenco filed next to reggaeton, a Cuban bolero from 1954 beside a Colombian trap record, tango sharing a divider with bachata. Ten years of doing this in Lisbon, New York, Barcelona, Sydney, and only this week did I notice that upstairs in every one of those shops there was a section called Rock, and nobody had ever felt the need to specify which continent.

I noticed because BTS declined to enter the Grammys' new Best Asian Pop Music Performance category, six weeks after the Recording Academy announced it and after the Korean fandom had already taken it apart. The Academy's case is not a stupid one: more categories mean more artists in the room, and the building is already full of doors like this. The problem is in the small print, where a song entered in one performance category cannot be entered in another, which means the door that opens is also the door that closes behind you.

A category built around region or language reads two ways at once, and neither reading is dishonest. If you have never been seen at all, it looks like recognition. If you were already close to the centre, it looks like a ceiling with a nice light fitting. Anyone who has ever built a separate line for an audience they wanted to reach has made this call, usually without noticing it was one.

👉 Read the full breakdown

Healthy food has a habit of turning up apologetically. Muted colours, a paragraph about gut flora, the general air of something prescribed. iLiyo opens with "so delicious you'll forget it's good for you" and lets the nutrition arrive later, as something you notice rather than something you're told.

It can afford that because of what's in the tub. Grass-fed Greek milk, Greek cream, strained three times through cloth until it's thick enough not to need a thickener. Three ingredients, fifteen grams of protein. It needs the confidence too, because one of the shelves it's launching onto is in China, where the biggest sellers trading on the Greek name are ambient cartons sterilised for room temperature, which kills the live cultures on the way in.

The category's instinct in that situation is to list what's been left out, and that instinct quietly works against you, because reading "no thickeners" means picturing thickeners first. We moved all of it next door into the comparison column and printed the three things that are in there instead.

👉 Read the full piece

A family sits in an ordinary house giving a testimonial about their orthopedic shoes, and the fact that society has collapsed outside barely comes up. One of the sons is a zombie. The shoes were taken off corpses. None of this is the headline in their world, because the real news is pain-free feet.

That's the joke in KURU's new spot with Little Big Engine, and it holds up better than a one-line gimmick has any right to. Orthopedic footwear has spent years reading as the category you enter once you've stopped caring how you look, and the brief was to shift that. The answer wasn't to argue with the perception at all — it was to be funnier than it.

The whole thing was shot in a house and its garden with minimal makeup and no effects, which in a year of enormous AI productions is worth noticing. Ordinary people underreacting to an extraordinary situation only works if the production stays ordinary too. A slicker version kills the joke.

👉 Watch the campaign