On Saturday, Andrew Cuomo announced that movie theaters outside New York City could reopen at 25% capacity. Theater owners are obviously happy with the decision, but is it enough to save them? Earlier this month, Regal Cinemas suspended operations in the United States and the UK. The company has not said when it will reopen these. Independent movie theaters, on the other hand, are considering all the options: “The challenges brought on by the pandemic have highlighted the ongoing commitment of the Coolidge’s community and forced the staff to master new skills, according to Tallman. From continuing to offer a mix of in-person and virtual movies and film seminars online to possibly adding a drive-in next year, several adaptations made by the theater will carry on post-pandemic. Bramante has kicked around several versions of the future of West Newton Cinema. One idea is shifting to a nonprofit model that looks a lot like how the Coolidge was about to disappear in the late 1980s when a rally of support (and a group hug) turned it around.” You can now rent an AMC theater for a private showing for up to 20 people for just $99.

Some theater owners believe that there will be pent-up demand for the theater experience once the pandemic ends, but will there be? In The New York Times, A. O. Scott asks: “What if the pandemic, rather than representing a temporary disruption in audience habits and industry revenues, turns out to be an extinction-level event for moviegoing? What if, now that we’ve grown accustomed to watching movies in our living rooms or on our laptops, we lose our appetite for the experience of trundling down carpeted hallways, trailing stray popcorn kernels and cradling giant cups of Coke Zero, to jostle for an aisle seat and hope all that soda doesn’t mean we’ll have to run to the bathroom during the big action sequence?”

In other news: A huge feline geoglyph has been discovered in Peru: “The dun sands of southern Peru, etched centuries ago with geoglyphs of a hummingbird, a monkey, an orca – and a figure some would dearly love to believe is an astronaut – have now revealed the form of an enormous cat lounging across a desert hillside.” (HT: Richard Starr)

Bruce Wagner will publish his latest novel online for free after his publisher balked at the work’s “problematic language”: “Wagner had the feeling, common to many contemporary writers, that his editor was under the thumb of the publisher’s ‘sensitivity readers.’ I have writer friends who have been subject to three such quibblers: an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. representative, a P.O.C. representative, and a B.S. (Body Sensitivity) representative. Among the words Counterpoint Press found problematic, there was one in particular whose prohibition has to be, even in our Emily Post–Goebbels age, a woke Waterloo. Reader, can you guess what this word was? ‘Fat.’ One of Wagner’s characters calls herself ‘fat.’”

The day Max Jacob died: “Jacob rose early in the brutal cold to help the vicar, the Abbé Hatton, serve Mass in the chapel in the Hospice; then he returned to his room, lit his fire, and wrote his daily meditation. When he rejoined his friends, he was in a jolly mood, trilling a verse. After lunch, the doctor drove them to Sully—still half in ruins from German bombs—where the Béalus would catch the bus to Montargis. They planned a visit for the following Sunday. ‘Au revoir, les enfants!’ called Max, waving at them as the bus pulled out. On Tuesday, Jacob dined with his friends, Dr. Georges Durand and his wife, in the village; he left early to attend a parish meeting. The next day was Ash Wednesday: Jacob received the mark of death on his forehead that morning at the rite in the crypt of the basilica. On Thursday, February 24, he rose at dawn to write his meditation and to help the Abbé Hatton serve Mass. He was back in his room, writing letters, when a gray car from Orléans drove up and three Germans in trench coats got out. They rang the bell, climbed the stairs to his room, and arrested him.”

Amelia Tait writes about the bizarre hobby of buying and reading strangers’ diaries: “Joanna Borns, 35, is a writer from New York with 10,000 YouTube subscribers. Borns first started the YouTube trend for reading strangers’ diaries three years ago – since then, she’s purchased five diaries, which cost between £20 and £40 each. ‘It’s interesting to see how you’re similar to a totally random stranger,’ Borns says. ‘The voyeurism of peeking inside somebody’s private thoughts appeals to people. On YouTube, people love a story, they love a narrative, even a mundane diary can turn into a little drama.’”

Numbers don’t speak for themselves—ever: “Do you thrill to the word ‘statistics’? Do you trust headlines telling you that having a Waitrose nearby adds £36,000 to the value of your house? Or that bacon, ham and sausages carry the same cancer risk as cigarettes? No, nor do I. That is why we need a book like this that explains how such implausible nonsense arises in the first place. Written by a master of the subject, it gives a historical overview of statistics and its handmaid probability, one of its first lessons being to decry the false notion that the numbers speak for themselves. They do not. Interpretation is vital, and so is the way they are derived.”

I have a chapter in this book on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. So, too, does Gary Saul Morson, Ralph Wood, and Peter Leithart, among many others. Why not pick it up?

Photos: Texas