Dylan Farrow, now 28, writes an open letter about her alleged sexual abuse by Woody Allen at age 7. This might have been at least partly a response to Allen biographer Robert B. Weide's piece at The Daily Beast titled "The Woody Allen Allegations: Not So Fast," which is itself a response to Allen's ex-girlfriend Mia Farrow and their biological son Ronan going on Twitter earlier in January to say that the Golden Globes had no business honoring Allen for anything, given the horrendous stories about him. At The New Inquiry, Aaron Bady cautions: "“he said, she said” doesn’t resolve to 'let’s start by assume she’s lying,' except in a rape culture, and if you are presuming his innocence by presuming her mendacity, you are rape cultured. It works both ways, or should: if one of them has to be lying for the other to be telling the truth, then presuming the innocence of one produces a presumption of the other’s guilt. And Woody Allen cannot be presumed to be innocent of molesting a child unless she is presumed to be lying to us." Meanwhile, Allen
"No, it's also that I can't bear all the kind of rubbish that goes on on those big films. I just can't stand sitting around for hours in a great big luxury trailer, waiting, bored out of my head. I used to do. A lot of tapestry. Yes, I had a lot of cushions around."
“'It feels like home,' Mr. Abrams said with the requisite reserve and slight social unease that one expects from a dedicated archivist. He preferred to steer the conversation toward the floor-to-ceiling shelves and cabinets, and the wondrous things they contain as repositories of material that has emanated from courtrooms in Manhattan since the 1600s. Where else might you find the tattered indictment of Mae West, connected to her scandalous 1928 Broadway show, 'Pleasure Man'? Or an original 1909 letter from Typhoid Mary asking, in desperate cursive, to be set free from quarantine on North Brother Island in the East River?"
"[W]e have a Constitutional right to shut up, as well as to speak. A right to indifference as well as to opinion.
To say 'I deserve to be heard!' today is a vexed proposition. Right and left, tech corporations beg you to say your piece for the sake of content-generation, free publicity, hype, and ad sales. America’s speech is so free, it pays—just not you. Even when we don’t opine, just clicking around, we’re like cilia on the tracheal lining of some gross beast, and our small work of enthusiasm, liking or passing along or reiterating or linking, is like the wriggle of a hair, pushing the story down the throat of the culture, filling its lungs so that it may breathe."
Trailer for 1985's "Cabra Marcado Para Morrer," by Eduardo Coutinho. The great Brazilian documentarian was stabbed to death by his mentally ill son this weekend, putting a tragic end to a long and influential career. RogerEbert.com contributor Pablo Villaca remembers the man and his work in his essay "Broken Screens."