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Top Ten for May 17, 2022

Ascension doc on the deranged hustling in the hyperreal of modern China; filled with bizarre and hilarious images

Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia plays on the intellectual ferment of pre-Revolutionary Russia. Why is it so hard to see any Stoppard production that's not Rosencrantz?

Soviet Storm, a 2011 Russian documentary on WW2 depicting the immense struggle in the East; less friendly to Stalin than you might think, but also less nuanced than you might hope

Dylan tries to figure out what key Not Dark Yet is in – he gets a lot of stick for screwing around with his arrangements but it's not just perversity or boredom prompting that, the song is always being discovered (which in typical Dylan style Dylan himself says can’t be done)

Pinning down the source of the Wow Signal – the star being offered is 1800 light-years away, which would mean the transmission occurred in 177 CE

Fantastic documentary on Claude Shannon: The Bit Player – the doc makes the case for him as a modern Newton and the comparison seems apt

Battlefield – PBS series with long, detailed episodes on WW2 battles and campaigns

Tooze on the reasons for inflation – not what you think it is, and unfortunately this information will do nothing to prevent inflation from being politically weaponized over the next few years

Wonderful, detailed musical genre exegeses with historical context from Road Jack

Top Ten inspired by Greil Marcus’ long-running columns

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