With permission from CapitolHillCitizen.com

A friend posed a question — why so much focus on Israel when there are so many pressing crises around the world, like the Sudan, largely forgotten?

A worthy question, as dire straits expand from deadly political conflicts and authoritarian, corrupt governments to include climate impacts and crop failures.

Attention should be paid.

While US policies and actions have played undeniable roles in some disasters, like Libya and Somalia, Israel’s long occupation and brutal subjugation of Palestinians stands apart.

Here’s why.

No other country enjoys but a fraction of US patronage that Israel does. Yet it repays America by undermining our government and political processes. Could any other country get away with its lobbyists announcing a hundred million dollars and more to defeat critics in Congress — even offering $20 million to primary one and seeking, with alarming success, to nullify Americans’ 1st Amendment freedoms?

The latter is done with compliant federal and state legislators seeking to twist language and devise laws as draconian as they can get away with.

Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) got that rolling. In 2017 he tried to pass fines up to a million dollars and prison sentences up to twenty years for advocating Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). Attempting to crush Americans exercising their First Amendment, at the behest of a foreign power, is a stark betrayal. Censure? Expulsion? Senator Chuck Schumer made Cardin chair of Foreign Relations when Senator Bob Menendez, his Israeli lobby largess second only to Biden’s, flamed out.

On July 24th Cardin sat behind Bibi during his address to a joint session of Congress, joining bought and paid for know-nothings who rose and genuflected with each lie. Good God, what kind of moral cretins have we elected?

In lockstep are billionaire bullies, Grand Inquisitors incarnate, threatening to wreck educations and careers of students with strong moral beacons many of them American Jews because their views differ from the Israeli government’s narratives. Privileged people with the influence extreme wealth conveys seeking to hamstring young people starting out. Sociopaths or psychopaths, these bullies? A wavy line.

One marvels as Biden Administration spokespersons freely shred their reputations, speaking out of both sides of their mouths. Likely auditioning for the bullies, or those who service them, credibility need not apply.

It is heartening to march in protest, to see American Jews of all ages getting along famously with Palestinians and protestors of all backgrounds. Do political chumps calling them anti-semitic realize how comical they appear?

Much of the world sees America’s claimed ideals in bizarre refraction, twisted to undermine international law and to continue carte blanche support of a violent eight-decade-long land theft underpinned by supremacist, racist beliefs. Now the world sees us as complicit, not just in slow motion ethnic cleansing, but an undeniable genocide in high gear.

A quick but-for test. Could Israel do this but for the US? The whole world knows that answer.

The British medical journal The Lancet recently estimated the real Palestinian death toll, considering those mashed under rubble and indirect deaths from destruction of medical facilities and public infrastructure, might exceed 186,000, or 8 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population of 2.3 million.

How does one count when two million have been displaced, their homes destroyed, with weaponry including US bombs each packing a ton of powerful explosives? Past conflicts, The Lancet‘s study noted, have had indirect deaths ranging from three to fifteen times the number of direct deaths, so the real toll could skyrocket.

UN-backed experts recently estimated over a half-million Palestinians face imminent starvation. Ethnic cleansing is well-underway in the West Bank, from violent settlers backed by IDF and Israeli police, and children again among the targets.

The Fourth Estate is supposed to push back on such mayhem. But one example after another shows much of the mainstream compromised, finding ways to avoid reporting the full horror. Here again, the big money figures in, easily manipulating increasingly skittish journalists as journalism job prospects diminish.

The IDF confirmed there was a “death before capture” Hannibal Directive on October 7. Hear much of that, or of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners, almost all without trial, kept in dire conditions, including torture, before the October 7th attack? Or that Netanyahu earlier addressed the UN while showing a map of greater Israel absent Palestinian Territories? Was Hamas, always cultivated and indirectly supported by Israel to avoid negotiating a two-state solution, baited as Israel sought an excuse to drive out Palestinians?

While the US supplies the vast majority of Israel’s weapons, Israel has itself become a major arms purveyor, its infernal creations demonstrated on unarmed civilians in Gaza.

Israel has also become a major force moving parts of the world into a surveillance state, selling technology to authoritarians around the world seeking to spy on dissidents, political opponents and journalists. One client was Saudi Arabia, using Israeli tech to spy on associates of Saudi critic and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, before dismembering him. It’s not for nothing Israel cozies up to far right governments. They have common aims.

The more extreme those in the US Congress are, the more Israel seeks them out. AIPAC backed scores of Republican Congressmen and candidates who opposed certifying the 2020 Presidential Election. Yet that lobby isn’t required to register as a foreign agent. Why no foreign influence alarms from agencies tasked with government integrity?

As a guest of Israel in 1999, I broke bread with Moshe Katsav, Netanyahu’s outgoing Minister of Tourism. Katsav told me Palestinians are their “N-words,” sneering at the actual word. He later became President of Israel. One top Israeli official after another has expressed supremacist viewpoints, using terms like cancers and cockroaches, denigrating Palestinians, making them “the other,” as relentless as propaganda penned by Goebbels.

Any persons of color in Congress-looking at you Hakeem Jeffries, one of the largest recipients of Israeli lobby largess-taking money while ignoring galloping racism aren’t worth their salt.

If this entire essay were an abbreviated list, it would only scratch the surface. No matter how damped down the full picture is in the mainstream media, no matter how many Palestinian journalists Israel slaughters to stop those bearing witness to atrocities, no matter how many UN employees and their family members are murdered-over 366-the depravities escape Israel’s grasp.

Israel does its damnedest to pull America into the abyss as its protector, one with nothing to lose by staying the hellish course. But the US has everything to lose as it earns pariah status in the eyes of much of the world.

America’s “brand” is in tatters.

In a 1973 meeting Biden described as “one of the most consequential” of his life, Prime Minister Golda Meir told him the “Palestinian nation” did not exist any more than the “Palestinian people.” Moreover, she could not “forgive the Palestinians for forcing (Israelis) to kill their children.”

Did that give Biden pause, Meir’s telegraphing what was to come, what was already served up? A smorgasbord of horrid indignities. Violent land grabs by lunatics waving real estate deeds from God. Restricting calorie counts so children lived but did not flourish to their potential. Periodic lethal “mowing the lawn” to terrorize civilians. Snipers greeting non-violent protests in Gaza with competitions to blow apart knees, crippling even children and medical personnel rushing to attend them.

Does it give Biden pause now, when Israel’s long-held intentions are laid bare? Children no longer just on minimized calories but starved to death by design? Destruction of water supplies and cultivation of conditions of disease, even the polio specter rising?

Does he consider the karma payback for forcing upon his countrymen complicity with child murderers? With child torturers? What torture is greater than forced starvation and infliction of disease?

Perhaps denying antibiotics and anesthesia to orphaned children having shrapnel removed from shattered eyes, having limbs amputated? Shaken brains from repeated shock waves of massive bombs?

All the while arresting, torturing, and murdering the brave surgeons and medical personnel struggling to alleviate children’s suffering. We know not just from doctors but from IDF soldiers that small children are also targets. As noted, the damnable acts would exceed this space.

Golda gave Biden a glance at the systematic dehumanization of Palestinians early on.

One cannot help but wonder if cognitive dissonance between good Catholic Joe and his alter-ego, a self-proclaimed proud Zionist, hastened the disconnects in his mind. Even after Biden helped waltz the country into the disastrous invasion of Iraq, could he have imagined he’d finish his long public career acquiring the moniker Genocide Joe? That would crumble many of even the most carefully constructed self-images. Take note, Kamala Harris.

And what of damage to Americans’ self-images, as the horror seeps through the blood-brain barrier?

Nothing would delight Netanyahu more than Trump’s return, beholden again to Adelson cash.

No other country has enjoyed anywhere near the US patronage that Israel has. Yet it repays America by undermining our government and political processes. Could any other country get away with announcing a hundred million dollars and more to defeat critics in Congress and seeking, with alarming success, to nullify Americans’ 1st Amendment freedoms?”

In his intriguing book SpyFail, James Bamford, long our foremost investigative journalist on intelligence agencies, and a writer for The Nation, credibly revealed that a foreign power conducted espionage to benefit the 2016 Trump campaign. And that the foreign power was Israel. One would expect a thunderclap across Washington. Instead, crickets. Perhaps it roughed up too many pet media and political narratives. Even Hillary kept mum. That’s a fright.

When the International Criminal Court indictments, which included Hamas leaders as well as Netanyahu and Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, came down, the press releases from a number of members of Congress, both parties, decried the “equivalence” of it and condemned the ICC. Politicians from Adam Schiff to Tim Scott used almost identical phrasing and talking points. AIPAC’s puppet strings are everywhere, as visible as those on the satirical puppets of the 2004 film Team America: World Police.

Institutional memory in Washington, both of Congress and of media, apparently undergoes periodic lobotomies.

In 2002, Netanyahu gave testimony to a Congressional committee that if we didn’t invade Iraq, Saddam Hussein would supply nukes to terrorists around the world. Bibi also predicted an invasion would bring a flowering of democracy throughout the region, including in Iran.

Anyone thinking the invasion of Iraq was a grand idea should look up studies by the Watson Institute at Brown University. They can only shock and awe, and dismay. Four or five million dead from direct and indirect impacts, by any measure a rambling holocaust. Not over. We’re saddled with a federal price tag of, according to the Watson Institute, over $8 trillion for post 9/11 wars, which continues to limit our national priorities.

How many in Congress who clamored for Bibi’s wisdom and counsel are aware of a speech he gave in 2008 to Bar Ilan University? As reported by the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, Bibi said, “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.” According to the newspaper account, Netanyahu then said that these events “swung American public opinion in our favor.”

His speech continued a theme when Bibi, then the former Prime Minister, was asked right after the 9/11 attack what it meant for US-Israeli relations. As reported in The New York Times, Bibi’s first reply was “It’s very good.” A pal, his concern for his American benefactors always paramount.

Washington has become a company town. Our military/industrial complex—Eisenhower had originally added congressional—is our company. Those profiting, greased by America’s uniquely styled legalized bribery via campaign finance, were certainly capable of engineering the worst foreign policy disaster since Vietnam, without Bibi’s assistance.

But in another but-for, it’s arguable it might not have happened without Bibi and his American cronies in high positions in the George W. Bush Defense Department, particularly Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith.

I recently spoke with Dennis Fritz, a retired Air Force command chief master sergeant and author of a remarkable book fresh off the press, Deadly Betrayal, The Truth About Why the United States Invaded Iraq.

Short and to the point, with Pentagon redactions visible as intriguing puzzles, it’s one of those books one wishes would be assigned reading for Congress. Fritz wrote it for two reasons. First, that military men and women who paid a high price, often a terrible price, for participating in the invasion, and their families, could understand how the tragedy came about, devoid of the lies they were told at the time. And two, to sound an alarm that the same interests that pushed that invasion now want the US to go to war with Iran.

Fritz says that Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith were all both neo-cons and Zionists. A double whammy. They were already planning on going to war before 9/11. Fritz’s past work included reviewing and declassifying relevant documents in the Pentagon, ironically in part for a book by Feith, who is described as the architect of the rationale for going to war, including talking points and making the case to convince George Bush. Fritz believes the primary interest of this trio was always first and foremost Israel’s agenda. In Fritz’s view that was prioritized over the best interests of the US. Fritz says these three were part of a long-range plan to take down Iraq, Syria and Iran, ultimately forcing Palestinians to settle solely on Israel’s terms.

Though more Americans died in Vietnam, medical intervention improved considerably by the Forever Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Consequently, of the over 100,000 who were maimed, many who otherwise would have died survived with terrible and lasting wounds that require ongoing care and staggering expense.

Fritz believes all of that sadness, and the horrific collateral damage to those in other countries, might have been avoided but for the zealots driving the war. Those are among the reasons Israel deserves so much more attention now, with urgency. For most, Forever Wars don’t work out that well. In the shorter term, are Americans really on board with genocide? Can an apartheid foreign power really purchase our government so cheaply?

Here’s a recent interview by author: https://www.laprogressive.com/foreign-policy/riyad-mansour.

With permission from Capitol Hill Citizen, CapitolHillCitizen.com

The opinions expressed here are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of TravelingBoy.com or LA Progressive.

The post Why Israel? appeared first on Traveling Archive.

The country holding captive  the birthplace of the religion I grew up with, Christianity, of the ethics that shaped me, has withered beyond redemption. It seems hell-bent on withering spirituality throughout the world.

In 1999, I was a guest of Israel, there to write on adventure travel. While traveling at night on camels across the Negev desert to a Bedouin-staffed luxury camp for tourists, news comes of Ehud Barak’s defeat of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud party. The guides, members of Bedouin tribes long displaced and discriminated against, were ecstatic. They chattered away on cell phones, hopeful for reforms that might improve their lives. That was not to be.

Shortly after that excitement, I’m in a luncheon in Jerusalem. I’m sitting next to Netanyahu’s outgoing Minister of Tourism, Moshe Katsav. No backwater, this cabinet post. For a time, Barak served simultaneously as both Prime Minister and Minister of Tourism. The post is not just central to bring in income but for propaganda, which is ladled thick on visiting journalists.

I asked Katsav why, instead of arguing with Jordan about which side of the river Christ was baptized on, the countries didn’t join together in joint tourism projects, enlarging the tourism pie.

Even better, I added, why not include the Palestinians? Give them skin in the game and a stake in stability?

Katsav stared at me like I’d just emerged from a twenty year coma.

“The Palestinians, (pause), they are our N-words!”

Katsav didn’t say “N-words”. He said the word. Drawn out, emphasized. No KKK Imperial Wizard could outdo his sneer.

Katsav assumed I’d grasp terms a white American would understand. No concern of insulting African-Americans any more than Palestinians. Or of offending me, someone there on their dime. Scales dropped from my eyes. The supremest racism underpinning Israeli society and policy winked at me.

An outlier? Katsav was later elected President.

At least he didn’t give the common scripted response, “It’s complicated”. It isn’t. It’s never been more complicated than people, even the non-god fearing, waving real estate deeds from God to steal what they coveted of what little Palestinians had left.

Another Minister of Tourism, Rehavam Ze’evi, appointed in 2001 by Ariel Sharon, remained a pal of Netanyahu. He described Palestinians working in Israel as a cancer that should be gotten rid of as if they were lice. He wanted to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank by making life miserable for them. He envisioned Jordan as part of a Greater Israel.

A proponent of Israel’s strategy of assassinating “potential” terrorists, even calling for the death of Arafat, he later met that fate.

Current Likud Minister of Tourism Haim Katz has long pushed for Israeli colonization in the Gaza Strip and developing tourism in the occupied West Bank, via illegal settlers, measures preventing a Palestinian state. During a prior government post Katz obtained parliamentary immunity on charges of corruption.

Nice crowd, beckoning travelers to the Holy Land.

Spirituality that hasn’t withered runs deep in groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, with whom I had the pleasure of marching on Capitol Hill. Damned impressive, they hold up under despicable insults to their character and identity. As are Code Pink and anyone else who’ve let me string along demonstrating for a ceasefire. Revealing how deeply the fix is in, Nancy Pelosi called for FBI investigations to see if those calling for a ceasefire are doing Putin’s bidding. Honest, Nancy, Putin hasn’t called.

Israel has manipulated America, founded on the separation of church and state and on free expression, into creating a doom loop for our democracy. We do carte blanche funding of an apartheid foreign power which then purchases and threatens both our legislative and executive branches, Federal and state. Would it go over if any other foreign country’s minions publicly announced they’d spend a hundred million dollars to defeat a handful of US Representatives who opposed ethnic cleansing? If they offered bribes of 20 million dollars to people to primary those they want removed?

What about if their US legislative minions pushed to throw our First Amendment rights under the bus by threatening fines of a million dollars and prison sentences of twenty years if one advocates BDS – boycott, divestment and sanctions – for Israel’s violations of international law? That’s what “liberal” Maryland US Senator Ben Cardin tried to pull off in 2017. Chuck Schumer made Cardin head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after Senator Bob Menendez – Senator Mendacity – another Israeli favorite, crossed too many gold lines. Lately we have the spectacle of legislatures across the country twisting our language so that criticizing Israel and Zionist genocide is equated with anti-semitism. The irony of course is that there is no greater cause of anti-semitism throughout the world than Israel’s actions. No justification for anti-semitism, but impacts are there. As it is now for Americans before the shocked eyes of the world.

Legal pushback didn’t happen when people boycotted apartheid South Africa. The editorial page cry for our First Amendment rights would have been deafening if it were tried. Not loud now. That should terrify us.

The NY Times recently told reporters to mostly shutter the terms “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “occupied territory,” “Palestine” and “refugee camps.”

Orwell looks wiser every day.

Better to support tourism to nations not cowed, that call out Israel’s war crimes and my own country’s tragic hypocrisy. The forced complicity of the parade of depravities we’ve seen is unforgettable and unforgivable. Yes, nothing justifies attacks on innocent civilians, even by the occupied against occupier, even in return for attacks continuously done on Palestinians, including in the West Bank. Should never have happened, even if past non-violent demonstrations were greeted by snipers. Just a line one can’t cross and maintain one’s moral high ground. But most Palestinians, including men, had nothing to do with it. The horrors of collective punishment, including on children, women and other innocents, did not begin after Oct. 7th, despite the illusions of PR machinery. It began with the systematic, long-haul dehumanization and annihilation of a culture and people. I can easily do without the country behind that, as well as its apologists and enablers. I guess that’s something of a personal boycott.

The post Israel’s Doom Loop for Our Democracy appeared first on Traveling Archive.

1. NYFF61 Festival Report
   
   The 61st New York Film Festival recently closed up shop, which means that it was once again time for Film Comment’s Festival Report, with our annual live overview of the NYFF that was. Devika and Clint convened an all-star team of critics: Molly Haskell, Adam Nayman, and Kelli Weston, for a spirited wrap-up analysis of the highlights and lowlights from the NYFF61 lineup. In front of a lively audience, the panel discussed and debated Todd Haynes’s May December, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, and many other noteworthy selections.
   
    
   
   
   
   
2. Are the Palestinians Wrong about Everything? (An Average Israeli Perspective)
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. Online calculator can gauge stress level of air travel
   FlightsFinder has introduced an online Airport Stress Calculator to help travelers avoid hassles while flying or prepare for potentially difficult situations. Users can enter their departure time, airline and airport and the tool will analyze how busy the airport is likely to be, the chances of having a flight delay and airlines’ specific baggage restrictions.
   
   
   
   
4. Best Directorial Film Trilogies
   
   
   
   
5. Upcoming Book-to-Screen Adaptations
      
   • The Other Black Girl
     by Zakiya Dalila Harris
     Zakiya Dalila Harris’ 2021 mystery-thriller follows twentysomething publishing assistant Nella Rogers, who is tired of being the only Black employee in the office. So she’s delighted when Harlem native Hazel joins the team as another woman of color. But things get quickly and severely weird when a series of unsettling events turns Nella’s world upside down. The new Hulu series adaptation premiered in September, and the creative team cites some varied inspirations, from Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing to Jordan Peele’s instant-classic 2017 horror film Get Out.
     
   • The Changeling
     by Victor LaValle
     Victor LaValle is one of the most innovative writers working in speculative fiction these days. (For immediate proof, check out his 2016 quick-read novella The Ballad of Black Tom.) LaValle’s 2017 novel The Changeling follows an antiquarian book dealer who travels through eldritch realms to save his family. LaValle’s book is a slow-motion collision of dark fantasy, gritty realism, and parental anxiety. The Apple TV+ adaptation, starring LaKeith Stanfield, premiered its first three episodes on September 8, with eight total planned for release through the fall season.
     
   • Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
     by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
     Check the reader reviews and you’ll find that people have a deep and genuine affection for this 2021 coming-of-age YA novel. The story introduces two Mexican American teens living in 1980s Texas and explores themes of family, queerness, and ethnic identity. The big-screen adaptation, in theaters now, features up-and-coming actors Max Pelayo and Reese Gonzales as Aristotle and Dante, respectively. Also on board: Eva Langoria, as Dante’s artistic mom, and Lin-Manuel Miranda behind the scenes as producer.
     
   • Black Cake
     by Charmaine Wilkerson
     A Goodreads Choice Award nominee for both Best Historical Fiction and Best Debut, author Charmaine Wilkerson’s 2022 novel concerns two siblings, a strange bequeathment, and a famous Caribbean recipe with a loooooong history. Black Cake shuttles back and forth in time, as the siblings learn about their family’s astonishing past and how stories are passed down through generations. (Sometimes via cake recipe!) The TV series adaptation, from Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films, is set to debut on Hulu November 1.
     
   • Killers of the Flower Moon
     by David Grann
     Investigative journalist David Grann made all the best-of lists in 2017 with this book about a terrible and largely forgotten chapter in American history. In the 1920s, dozens and perhaps hundreds of Osage Native Americans were murdered in a vicious dispute over oil rights in Oklahoma. Probably the most high-profile adaptation of the year, director Martin Scorsese’s long-awaited film will debut in U.S. theaters on October 20, with an Apple TV+ release later in the year. The cast includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Blackfeet Nation actress Lily Gladstone.
     
   • Lessons in Chemistry
     by Bonnie Garmus
     Another incoming AppleTV+ adaptation-premiering October 13-Lessons in Chemistry is based on author Bonnie Garmus’ warmly received debut novel from last year. The setup: Brilliant chemist Elizabeth Zott finds herself hosting America’s most popular cooking show, where she challenges 1960s notions of what a woman can do in her professional life. A genuine hit with both readers and critics, the book earned the attention of Hollywood A-lister Brie Larson (Captain Marvel!), who is fittingly both lead performer and executive producer. You really can have it all!
     
   • All the Light We Cannot See
     by Anthony Doerr
     Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Anthony Doerr’s World War II novel follows the parallel stories of a blind French girl and a reluctant German soldier whose lives come together in occupied France circa 1940. Netflix’s four-part limited series is set to drop on November 2, with all episodes available upon debut. This is prestige-picture territory for Netflix, and the production has attracted some top-shelf talent including Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti, a legally blind actress who won the role after a global casting process.
     
   • The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
     by Suzanne Collins
     Both spin-off and prequel, this 2020 dystopian sci-fi novel from Suzanne Collins marks her return to the colossal pop culture phenomenon that is the Hunger Games series. Set 64 years before the events of the first book, the novel provides an origin story for ultimate boss villain Coriolanus Snow. Is he the good guy in the new book? Is he the bad guy? The answer is yes. The movie adaptation, starring Tom Blyth as young man Snow, hits theaters November 17. Rachel Zegler plays Snow’s protégée, Lucy Gray Baird.
     
     
     
     
   • Leave the World Behind
     by Rumaan Alam
     Author Rumaan Alam’s popular 2020 novel fits squarely with a long and noble tradition in the psychological thriller genre: the Vacation Gone Wrong. Two families end up at the same luxurious Long Island rental property when word comes that a mysterious blackout has struck New York City. Then things get really weird. The star-studded film adaptation-featuring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, Myha’la Herrold, and Kevin Bacon-is slated to premiere December 8 on Netflix, with a limited theatrical release likely as well.
     
   • Eileen
     by OttessaMoshfegh
     The first full novel from author Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen was a surprise sensation in 2015, winning the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for debut fiction. Genre designations are terminally blurred with this one, and that’s part of the book’s strange, dark appeal. The story-one fateful week in the life of two women in 1960s Boston-is a kind of literary thriller, inspired by Shirley Jackson, Vladimir Nabokov, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Anne Hathaway and New Zealand actress Thomasin McKenzie headline the movie adaptation, coming to theaters December 1.
     
   • Foe
     by Iain Reid
     Canadian author Iain Reid specializes in the shadowy areas between cerebral horror, haunting sci-fi, and psychological thriller. In his sophomore novel, Foe, a near-future marriage is tested when the husband is replaced by his biomechanical double. While technically science fiction, the story is much more interested in the people involved than in the technology. The film adaptation, starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal, will debut in theaters on October 6, with a later streaming debut on Amazon Prime.
     
     
     
     
6. The T-Boy Society of Film & Music’s Top Five North-American-English Language Travel Novels
   
   
   
   
7. Florida lawmaker who penned “Don’t Say Gay” law sentenced to prison
   Joseph Harding, a former Florida lawmaker who penned the state’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” law has been sentenced to prison for wire fraud, money laundering and making false statements in connection with obtaining $150,000 in COVID-19 relief loans.
   
   
   1. What Really is Halloween
   • Halloween or Hallowe’en (less commonly known as Allhalloween, All Hallows’ Eve, or All Saints’ Eve) is a celebration observed in many countries on October 31, the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Saints’ Day. It begins the observance of Allhallowtide, the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful departed.
     
     One theory holds that many Halloween traditions were influenced by Celtic harvest festivals, particularly the Gaelic festival Samhain, which are believed to have pagan roots. Some go further and suggest that Samhain may have been Christianized as All Hallow’s Day, along with its eve, by the early Church.Other academics believe Halloween began solely as a Christian holiday, being the vigil of All Hallow’s Day. Celebrated in Ireland and Scotland for centuries, Irish and Scottish immigrants took many Halloween customs to North America in the 19th century, and then through American influence various Halloween customs spread to other countries by the late 20th and early 21st century.
     
     
     
     
     
8. T-Boy Society of Film and Music’s Favorite Food Destination Cities
   
   
   
   
9. ‘Every single day I am ready to be killed’: The KGB defector who writes about Putin
   
   
   
   

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