One day I ask Robert Eggers, who directed Pattinson in last year’s The Lighthouse-in which Pattinson plays a man driven to insanity and avian homicide by isolation and loneliness-why he cast Pattinson in his movie. ‘Well,’ Eggers says, from his own solitude in Belfast, ’that paranoid quality about Rob that you kind of feel in his everyday life, I think, is why Josh and Benny wanted him in Good Time and why I thought that he made a lot of sense in The Lighthouse. Although he’s good enough that he can transform. But I think that paranoid quality is something that is special for him.’

— Robert Pattinson in Isolation, Zach Baron in GQ

I can, for example, guarantee that this blog is faster than any Gatsby blog (and much love to the Gatsby team) because there is nothing that a React static site can do that will make it faster than a non-React static site.

— Second-guessing the modern web, Marc Wright

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf.

— The real Lord of the Flies, Rutner Bregman in The Guardian

On the pathology:

What it does when it gets down to the lungs is similar in some respects to what respiratory viruses do, although much remains unknown. Like SARS-CoV and influenza, it infects and destroys the alveoli, the tiny sacs in the lungs that shuttle oxygen into the bloodstream. As the cellular barrier dividing these sacs from blood vessels break down, liquid from the vessels leaks in, blocking oxygen from getting to the blood. Other cells, including white blood cells, plug up the airway further. A robust immune response will clear all this out in some patients, but overreaction of the immune system can make the tissue damage worse. If the inflammation and tissue damage are too severe, the lungs never recover and the person dies or is left with scarred lungs, says Xiao. “From a pathological point of view, we don’t see a lot of uniqueness here.”

On the epidemiology:

“By far the most likely scenario is that the virus will continue to spread and infect most of the world population in a relatively short period of time,” says Stöhr, meaning one to two years. “Afterwards, the virus will continue to spread in the human population, likely forever.” Like the four generally mild human coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2 would then circulate constantly and cause mainly mild upper respiratory tract infections, says Stöhr. For that reason, he adds, vaccines won’t be necessary.

— Profile of a killer: the complex biology powering the coronavirus pandemic, David Cyranoski in Nature

My therapist used to tell me that PTSD is only a mental illness in times of peace. Our bodies and brains are consistently attuned to war, so we look paranoid or hypervigilant in peacetime. But in times of crisis, PTSD is an incredible survival mechanism that our genius bodies created to help us adapt.

— My PTSD can be a weight. But in this pandemic, it feels like a superpower., Stephanie Foo in Vox

I’m not proud about how any of the rest of this went down. I broke one of my own cardinal rules and snooped through the Boyfriend’s email. I learned that Kimberly had already forwarded my original email to him with a note that read, ‘I’m sorry, I had to tell her.’ My mind rebelled past the idea of the Boyfriend cheating on me, and kept returning to this Negroni Season business. I wasn’t even sure if I knew what a Negroni was — how could it have a whole season? I sat in my boss’s office, who was a real grown-up, who wore blue blazers and aftershave, and told him everything. Did he know anything about a Negroni Season? He looked down his glasses at me. “Only a total boozehound whore would even dream up such a thing as Negroni Season,” he said.

— Negroni Season, Everlyn Everlane in The Awl

Through much of the 20th century, oil derricks towered over homes, schools, golf courses, and even orange groves across the Los Angeles Basin, once among the nation’s top-oil producing regions. Beginning in 1892, when Edward L. Doheny and his associates opened the region’s first free-flowing well, each new strike would quickly attract a cluster of the wooden structures, which supported the drills that bored deep into the Southland’s sedimentary strata.

— When Oil Derricks Ruled the L.A. Landscape, Nathan Masters in Lost L.A.

“I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed,” Buck admits while cycling through facts and figures about casualty rates in the event of a Russian tactical strike. This line—and many others in Kubrick’s masterpiece—have been invoked in recent weeks in the context of a very different sort of international catastrophe and its dubiously motivated overseers; this currency speaks to the timelessness of Dr. Strangelove’s vision even as everything in it is rigorously specific to the mid-’60s: the wryly sacrilegious use of Vera Lynn’s World War II standard “We’ll Meet Again,” a song dedicated to British soldiers leaving their loved ones, to soundtrack a mushroom cloud; the Playboy magazines strewn in the cockpit of the B-52 bomber; the political power vacuum in which the lack of a Kennedy-esque stalwart prefigures mutually assured destruction. But if Kennedy is Dr. Strangelove’s structuring absence, Scott’s jowly, Southern-fried shtick as General Turgidson manifests a weirdly prescient riff on LBJ, who’d shortly be advocating his own callous calculus during the onset and development of the Vietnam War.

— ‘Cool Hand Luke,’ ‘Strangelove,’ and the Distrust of LBJ-Era Filmmaking, Adam Nayman in The Ringer

‘I love the idea of the Tom Sawyer adventure,’ Mooney said. ‘The problem is it’s not 1883. You can’t do that anymore. You have to follow the rules.’

— This boat don’t float, Lora Pabst in Star Tribune

Next week, we’ll start the action proper by taking a look at Th�oden’s trip to Helm’s Deep and the additional film action-sequence of a cavalry-on-cavalry engagement (a surprisingly rare thing to see in film, despite how many times the cavalry rides to the rescue).

— Collections: The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part I: Bargaining for Goods at Helm’s Gate A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry by Brit Devereaux