Today's reads span the distance between creative ambition and institutional failure. A new book argues that Spielberg, Lucas, and Coppola owed their greatest work not to solo genius but to the honest, combative friendships between them. Across the hemisphere, the label "narcoterrorism" has become a blank check for military-grade violence, from Brazilian favelas to the Caribbean Sea.

In Illinois, Governor JB Pritzker's resistance to Trump draws on a family history of fleeing authoritarian persecution and a refusal to stand by while others capitulate. And in northwest Georgia, decades of carpet manufacturing left entire communities swimming in forever chemicals while the industry and its regulators looked the other way.

Happy reading!

Brett

Paul Fischer's new book The Last Kings of Hollywood examines the creative triangle of Coppola, Spielberg, and Lucas, arguing their greatest asset wasn't individual genius but productive friendship. Fischer braids together the famously chaotic productions of Apocalypse Now, Jaws, and Star Wars to show how the three directors critiqued each other's work, fought over projects, shared profit points, and pushed one another toward bolder filmmaking. Brian De Palma's blunt feedback on an early Star Wars cut led directly to the iconic opening text crawl. Lucas and Coppola clashed over who would direct Apocalypse Now, a dispute that likely produced a superior film. The book's freshest revelation involves Lucas's contract for The Empire Strikes Back, which secured him up to 77.5 percent of profits in perpetuity. Fischer frames the era as a counterargument to today's franchise-driven Hollywood, where directors cycle through IP like hired hands. The "Three Amigos" of Mexican cinema and the Anderson-Tarantino dynamic prove that competitive artistic friendship still elevates the craft.

Read here, free for LBR Readers.

The concept of "narcoterrorism" has traveled a long political road from George W. Bush's post-9/11 drug policy speeches to the deadliest police operation in Brazilian history. Evandro Cruz Silva traces how the term, coined in the 1980s to describe the overlap of drug cartels and political insurgency, became a flexible geopolitical tool for justifying military intervention and domestic repression across Latin America. The U.S. seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026 laid the strategy bare: narcoterrorism charges were dropped the moment Maduro reached a New York courtroom, their purpose already served. In Brazil, the far right has embraced the label to reframe urban policing as national defense. Rio de Janeiro's October 2025 Operation Containment killed 117 civilians, and officials openly celebrated it. Legislative proposals now seek to classify drug traffickers under anti-terrorism law, opening the door to U.S. involvement via international treaty obligations. The pattern is consistent across the hemisphere: a convenient accusation that bypasses legal rigor to enable extraordinary state violence.

Read here.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker's confrontational stance toward the Trump administration has roots deeper than partisan politics. His great-grandfather Nicholas Pritzker fled tsarist pogroms in Kyiv and wrote a family memoir, Three Score After Ten, that instilled in future generations an obligation to protect the vulnerable. That inheritance shaped JB's trajectory from a grief-marked childhood (he lost his father at 7, his mother to suicide at 17) through a failed 1998 congressional bid, two decades of philanthropy, and eventually the governorship. When Trump launched Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, sending masked federal agents into Latino neighborhoods, Pritzker fought the National Guard deployment in court, signed new protections for immigrant communities, and told residents to document everything. His defiance carries a specific framework borrowed from the Illinois Holocaust Museum he helped build: people respond to authoritarianism as collaborators, bystanders, or upstanders. While elite institutions folded under federal pressure, Pritzker leveraged his position to resist, warning that each capitulation accelerates democratic decline. His family story, he argues, leaves him no other choice.

Read here.

For decades, carpet manufacturers in Dalton, Georgia blanketed the world in stain-resistant flooring while saturating their own backyard with PFAS, the synthetic "forever chemicals" that resist breakdown in both carpets and human blood. An investigation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Associated Press, and PBS Frontline reveals how Shaw Industries and Mohawk Industries continued using PFAS products long after chemical suppliers 3M and DuPont privately disclosed the compounds were accumulating in human blood. Internal records show carpet executives learned of the risks as early as 1999, yet kept buying millions of pounds of fluorochemicals. The local public utility, Dalton Utilities, collaborated with the industry to block EPA testing and was convicted of falsifying wastewater reports. University of Georgia researchers found PFAS levels in the Conasauga River among the highest ever recorded worldwide. An Emory University blood study found three-quarters of tested residents had levels warranting medical screening. One Calhoun woman's blood showed PFAS concentrations hundreds of times above the national average. The Trump EPA has moved to delay enforcement of Biden-era drinking water protections, leaving communities with contaminated wells and few options beyond litigation.

Read here.

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The Guardian: Melania review – Trump film is a gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest by Xan Brooks

“Dispiriting, deadly and unrevealing – there is a decent documentary to be made about the former model from Slovenia, but this one is unredeemable.”