Slate Arts & Culture Spoken Edition

One might call Melodrama—Lorde’s critically acclaimed, Grammy-nominated sophomore album—high art. The album is not just an aural splendor but a visual one too, with a moody, blue-lit painting of Lordeby Brooklyn-based artist Sam McKinniss on the cover. One fan, it seems, definitely does.

After a miserable day like Wednesday, we could all use a news story—just one!—that isn’t part of the torrent of garbage that’s been raining down for the last year. So here’s that story: Aardman Animations, the beloved studio behind Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, has a new movie coming out. It’s called Early Man, it’s directed by Nick Park, and here’s its trailer.

There hasn’t been a better feel good story in a long time than Project Veritas’ hilariously inept attempt to trick the Washington Post into publishing a false story about Roy Moore, even if, as Slate’s Osita Nwanevu argues, conservative buffoon James O’Keefe won’t face any real consequences. I mean, have you ever seen anything more satisfying than watching Veritas operative Jamie T.

Pixar has always been known for making children’s movies adults can love too, occasionally to the point of giving their youngest viewers more than they are ready to handle. The tear-jerking opening montage of Up is the classic example—a four-minute lesson in the cruelty of time and mortality that is way beyond the emotional reach of many children—but let’s not forget the resigned embrace of death in Toy Story 3’s furnace scene, Mr. and Mrs.

Thanksgiving! Is there any other word that so perfectly embodies the spirit of Thanksgiving? If there is, we should change the holiday’s name to whatever that word is, probably. But whatever name it goes by, Thanksgiving can only mean one thing: Playing 12 hours of turkey sound effects at increasingly high volume until your family goes home and leaves you in peace.

Law & Order recently experimented with true crime, but the franchise hasn’t given up on their usual practice of taking real news stories and turning them into fictionalized, police procedural entertainment. If anything, it’s almost surprising that it took this long for Law & Order: SVU to announce that an episode addressing the Harvey Weinstein scandal is headed to a TV near you in 2018.

In 2013, L.V. Anderson wrote this sharp, controversial takedown of a culinary Thanksgiving tradition: Apple pie. Just in time for this year's festivities, we've reprinted the story below. It’s practically a law that in late November, every publication must offer a Thanksgiving guide. This year, I would like to draw your attention to two exceptional ones (other than Slate’s).

Lil Peep, who earlier this year was dubbed the “future of emo rap” by Pitchfork, died on Wednesday at the age of 21. Through his woozy, melancholic songs like “White Wine,” “Girls,” and “Drugz,” he drew from ’00s emo influences like Limp Bizkit and Panic! At the Disco as well as rapper Gucci Mane, while garnering millions of fans on social media and Soundcloud.

Disney released the first official trailer for Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time on Sunday night—that last one was just a teaser—and this time around they’re focusing on the thing we want most from trailers: exposition, and lots of it! The first minute or so of the teaser is built around an explanation of fifth-dimensional travel involving an ant and a piece of yarn.

Given that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy won a combined 17 Oscars and, when you throw in the three Hobbit movies, grossed nearly $6 billion worldwide, you would think that the entertainment industry might be inclined to leave it way-more-than-well-enough alone.