Saturday Links
Fraser Nelson leaves “The Spectator,” going for a drink in Vienna, the economics of religious films, a life of Marie Curie, and more.
Good morning! Fraser Nelson has stepped down as editor of The Spectator. (The magazine was bought last month by Paul Marshall.) Nelson writes about his 15 years in the editor’s chair in the latest issue of the magazine:
When The Spectator succumbs to tribalist temptation, it is most at risk. We were the only weekly to back Brexit (as it wasn’t then called) in the 1975 referendum. At the time, the magazine never shut up about that and it fell into the snare of trying to give ‘thought leadership to the right’. Alexander Chancellor saved the magazine by almost entirely reconstructing it. My first act as editor was to have lunch with him and ask him how he did it. He told me that he saw it as a restoration, not a reinvention, and pointed me to the original Spectator of 1711.
I immersed myself in the Addison and Steele project, to try to understand why reprints of these essays were read in every educated home for generations, doing so much to shape English language and culture. Chancellor’s advice was to make sure the DNA of the 1711 Spectator was applied to everything new we engaged in, and that everyone who joined The Spectator understood what the magazine is and isn’t about.
Curating this culture is the editor’s job. Charles Moore worked under Chancellor and puts much of his success down to making the office ‘an extraordinarily happy atmosphere in which to work and – so – a paper that people enjoyed writing for’; the result was that ‘people enjoyed reading it’. It would have been fatal to move us to a soulless office block. Having a Spectator home – whether in Gower Street, Doughty Street or Old Queen Street – has been fundamental to our success.
As has our possession of a large wine fridge. While some newspapers put a zero-alcohol policy in place, we put a notice on our fridge asking staff to make sure that two bottles of Pol Roger were chilling at all times. My office has a well-stocked whisky cabinet and I judged our general success by the speed with which that whisky mysteriously evaporated. An article about us in the New York Times had a quote that summed things up well: ‘It’s a very serious professional operation pretending to be a bunch of champagne dilettantes.’
Michael Gove has replaced Nelson, who will stay on as associate editor.
Nick Burns goes for a drink in Vienna:
We pushed past the people smoking outside into a small, cozy little old-school-looking place with worn and scarred tables and wooden chairs, and in another room, velvet-upholstered corner booths and a jukebox which turned out to have all of maybe 20 songs on it (a typical European selection, some Euro ballads, some well-chosen tracks from Springsteen and Dylan and Cash, and some real head-scratchers, including Dylan’s “Wigwam”).
We sat in one of the dark velvet corner booths and ordered a couple of beers from the Wirten, a late-middle-aged Austrian woman with shortcropped blonde hair and crow’s feet we immediately took a liking to, and asked the Austrians at the table next to us what they were drinking. They had a small plate with two glasses of warm amber-red liquid, just a finger’s worth, and sugar cubes and coffee beans. It’s called Koks, they said. This apparently means cocaine in German slang. You chew the beans, drink the rum and eat the sugar cube.
Daniel Parris writes about the economics of religious films: “Faith-driven movies are often belittled by critics and online ratings, a product of poor production value (stemming from low budgets), a bias against their subject matter, and, well, the fact that some are quite bad . . . It's not just secularly-minded audiences who disparage these films—the reality is far more nuanced (as is typical of most things). Many Christians are contemptuous of works produced by Affirm Films and Pure Flix, denouncing their oversimplification of religious conviction and predictable plot structuring . . . And yet, despite quality concerns, these movies are consistently profitable, regularly grossing 1.5x their budget (Hollywood's back-of-the-envelope breakeven point). Economically speaking, religion-driven films are most similar to horror movies—wildly profitable despite below-average acclaim. Horror and faith-based films stand out as significant outliers when we chart the percentage of profitable projects against average online rating.”
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