What Kathleen Kennedy claims to have accomplished at Lucasfilm is a generational transfer of the Star Wars brand to the so-called “modern audience” that supposedly demands stories in which the man gets the dog, or else a gay love affair, or else killed, while the girlboss does everything, taking no moral responsibility for anything, deserving what she receives simply because she was born awesome. Audiences have had enough of it

Does anyone here remember that beautiful little periodical, The Happy Reader? Penguin published it for a while. Well, the man who ran it, Seb Emina, has a Substack called Read Me and in a recent edition he ‘invented some words that are a bit like “vegetarian”, but for the increasingly urgent activity of setting limits on what we consume online’. It’s a delightful read. My favourite is ALGNOSTIC: Avoids anything that’s been pre-curated by an algorithm, especially feed-based social media. Often likes to browse in the old way, by actively checking newspaper home pages or the blogs of favourite florists. May also eschew stuff like Google search results and the Netflix homepage, depending on severity of creed.