What to Watch… 

The Children’s Train, is an Italian film on Netflix, and it’s excellent.  This 2024 feature film is about an 11-year-old boy, Amerigo in 1946 Naples, Italy.  Based on a true story, the PCI (Communist Party) arranged for children in the desperately poor south of Italy to travel by train (“treni della felicità”—trains of happiness) to Italy’s more prosperous northern cities to be housed with party members’ families for a year or longer.  Thousands of children had the opportunity to eat good food, and live in better surroundings with caring and politically-committed families.  Amerigo finds himself in Modena (not far from Bologna), billeted with a single woman partisan from WWII. She is patient, educated and very much a role model; she becomes his mother.  Don’t miss it. Here’s the trailer.

Liked The Good Wife? then you’ll like The Split

You could watch The Split – three seasons’ worth on Kanopy.  A bit of a potboiler but this series, made in London in 2018, is good.  A family of two lovely English sisters and their mother are lawyers and principals of the family’s 100-plus year old law firm.  They are wealthy, high end divorce lawyers.  But (of course) the family is collapsing: the third sister, who works as a nanny, is getting married to a South Asian man.  The eldest sister’s marriage to a barrister is in trouble, and the middle sister’s life is tainted by alcohol and one-night stands.  The mother is nasty, only to be nice, if you know what I mean.  But all the women clack along in high heeled shoes, wear tight (if conservative) clothes and love to hate partying with members of their family.  Have a look at the trailer.

On Britbox, I watched three episodes of Outrageous, a longer series about the six talented and independent-minded Mitford sisters.  This is a pleasant inter-war British costume drama, much too “nice” and friendly than the sisters were themselves. Several sisters became well-known writers, one sister was a fascist, another a fellow traveller with the Communist Party, and one a horsewoman on the family estate.  I’ve read Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death (1963), and she is not nice, or kind but rather sarcastic, observant and full of humour. Her book is a  “take-down” of the profit-rich funeral industry in America.  Still this dramatic series (trailer is here) is certainly inoffensive.  But I have to agree with one commenter on the Youtube site,

“Mitfords were so fascinating you’d think no one could mess up a series about them, yet somehow these guys seem to have managed it. Awful.”

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UK’s Top Export must be police procedurals

On Britbox  there is a police series (UK’s top national export!) worth watching, Karen Pirie.  Pirie is a 30-year-old detective sergeant in a Scottish police force, clearly good at her job and fearless. But for that she is watched too closely by senior male officers. They send her on what they consider a fool’s errand –to solve what had been a hopeless cold case.  Trailer is here. 

Do watch Club Zero, a 2024 feature film about a high school for the wealthy that focuses on discipline, and disordered eating.  This is well-written, funny, nasty and a rich portrayal of privilege and poverty of spirit in the US.  It’s on Kanopy: the trailer is here.  

Code of Silence is brilliant – another British cop series but this one features a deaf barmaid who is keen to solve crimes, but of course whom the cops undervalue and ridicule.  Here’s the trailer – it’s on Britbox

For a dazzling and edifying travel vignette, watch Tucci in Italy, on Youtube. Here’s the trailer. Tucci is a well-known actor on stage and screen, and Italian-American.  With more than a smattering of Italian, he travels to different regions of Italy to see how signature dishes are made, and explore a slower, and more delicious lifestyle.   

I watched one episode free on Youtube.  You can subscribe to Tucci’s food-travel series on the National Geographic channel.  Tucci’s Italy will take your mind off Gaza– for 44 minutes.

With a Heavy Heart…I urge you:

Don’t stop talking about Gaza

This short tiktok show what happened at a reception desk at the People’s History Museum  in Manchester, UK when a woman employee dared to wear a keffiyeh as a scarf.

Watch it here. Interestingly, the museum is also the national museum of democracy, “telling the story of its development in Britain: past, present, and future.”  It calls on the visiting public to:

“Explore the radical stories of people coming together to champion ideas worth fighting for, and be empowered by the past to make a change for the future. We are all together in the fight for a fairer world.” — from the Welcome message on the People’s History Museum’s site

I guess the man who complained at the museum never got the memo.  It reminds me of the time I was hounded for wearing a keffiyeh to my online exercise program –in my own living room — read all about it here!

…more than 82 kidnappings (for ransom) every day in Mexico, and more than 100,000 people have gone missing—likely through abductions– in the last decade…

“A Mom Who Fought a Cartel” on Al Jazeera True Crime Reports

What to Read…

Suspicion, a 2015 thriller by Joseph Finder, started out okay.  Danny, a writer and father of a young teen doesn’t have the money to pay for another term at his daughter Abby’s expensive private school.  He vacillates between telling the girl the truth and hoping for a miracle.  A miracle comes in the form of the wealthy father of Abby’s best friend who generously offers to loan Danny $50,000 to cover the tuition and a bit more.  Danny’s happy;  Abby’s happy to stay in the school.  But days, later the DEA (the US Drug Enforcement Administration) visits Danny to tell him the loan for $50K is drug money and his benefactor is involved with a very unsavoury Mexican cartel.  The plot thickens, the blackmail begins, the pace is fast, the writing is good – but the ending is a bit deflating.   True escape.

Anatomy of a Cover-Up: The Truth about the RCMP and the Nova Scotia Massacres by Paul Palango is his recent second book about the Portapique murders. I reviewed his first book 22 Murders here.  Both books are well worth reading.  Anatomy too looks behind what we read in the Mass Casualty Report, and shows the shallowness  of the investigation and the extent of a police coverup in the aftermath of the 22 Portapique murders in April 2020. Palango lists a number of inconsistencies he found in his investigations compared with the authorities’ version of events.

1. The murderer, Gabriel Wortman, knew each of the victims.  Though from the start, the police maintained some of killings were chance encounters. It turns out none were random.
2. There may have been a 23^rd murder victim in the area at the time, but police can’t say for certain if it was connected to the massacre of the 22.
3. It seems clear that at least one victim, Corrie Ellison, was killed in error by the RCMP.
4. Several important witnesses were never called by the Inquiry.  These include Leon Joudrey (now deceased). It was he who opened his door to Lisa Banfield at 6 the morning after the first night of murders and fires.  She wore no shoes, no socks, had on a halter top and yoga pants—yet she claimed she had hid all night in the woods in temperatures that dipped to zero.  He couldn’t see any scratches, dirt on her clothes or evidence she had a sweater.  He hardly knew her and was unsure why she would have come to his house.  He urged her to call 911.  

The book is full of information and background that the Inquiry refused to hear.  For instance how many readers know there was no cross-examination of any of the witnesses allowed by the Inquiry? To find out exactly what happened, there has to be a chance to ask a witness questions which are sometimes not nice or polite.  This Inquiry managed to never ased the right questions of the right people.

Podcasts to listen to…

Al Jazeera True Crime Reports podast, “A Mom Who Fought a Cartel” is fascinating– if a bit sensational. However, this episode tells a shocking story of a mother in Mexico, Miriam, whose 20-year-old daughter Karen was kidnapped from her car in San Fernando, a drug-addled town 100 km south of the US border.  From the outset, we find out in the podcast that there are more than 82 kidnappings (for ransom) every day in Mexico, and more than 100,000 people have gone missing—likely through criminal gang-related abductions — in the last decade. The police were of little to no help, so Miriam vowed she would find her daughter’s killer and see him jailed.  In a chance meeting, a retiree on a bus handed Miriam a slip of paper with a phone number.  If she was ever in danger, she should call it.  She did call the number and so began her search.  Flying by the seat of her pants, Miriam posed as a barmaid, a cleaner, even a government census-taker to locate the gang and the culprit.  This is a well done thriller, listen here.

Listen to this short story “The Comedian” by Ottessa Moshfeghi  in a recent New Yorker magazine.  It’s brilliant – you can read it but listening to the story is magical.  You’ll love it.   

To Gaza with Love…

From Amazon to the Gaza Flotilla: the journey of an activist.  This 20 min. podcast features an excellent interview with Chris Smalls, founder and leader of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) the first to successfully organise workers at an Amazon warehouse in the US in 2022.  (The first unionized Amazon warehouse in Canada was certified as recently as 2025!)).  Smalls was one of the activists on the recent boat to Gaza, the Handala, which was illegally intercepted by the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) a couple of weeks ago.  Not only did the IDF confiscate the phones, laptops and anything belonging to the 40+ activists aboard —everyone (but Smalls) were released when they got to the Israeli port of Ashod.  Smalls was the only Black person aboard the Handala.  He was violently attacked, choked, kicked by seven soldiers. Three put their knees on his back, and the others pulled his head back by his neck jewellery.  The IDF also yelled racial slurs at him and flung him in prison for five days.  Another example of “the most moral army in the world,” eh?  Listen to the interview here.

Above: Chris Smalls, centre right, president of the Amazon Labor Union, takes part in a march in solidarity with Palestinians demanding a cease-fire in Gaza, 8 June 2024, in London. And (left) people gather around the Freedom Flotilla ship ‘Handala’ loaded with medical supplies, baby formula and medicine. This was ahead of the boat’s departure for Gaza, at a port in Siracusa, Sicily, southern Italy, on 13 July 2025 [ credit: Giovanni Isolino/AFP]

Central Intelligence (series II)  is a scripted episode (like a radio play)  produced by UK’s Limelight podcasts.  It is the story of the CIA and some of its dirty tricks from post-World War II to today through the 40 year career of a fictitious agent,  Eloise Page (played by Kim Cattrall),  who started with “the Company” in 1947.  explanations of a specialist agent .  There are ten episodes, each about 30 minutes.  Much of this history we know – but hearing the actors, and the situations such as the CIA role in the Suez Canal contretemps and the Cuban Missile crisis.  Worth listening to here, produced by BBC-4.   

Canadian True Crime has a post-mortem, Surviving the Hockey Canada trial, about the verdict in the infamous hockey trial of the five Juniors’ players.  The work by Kristi Lee, creator and host of Canadian True Crime, is always good, honest and informative.  In this first part, she interviews two women who “know what it means to survive not only the  sexual assault– but the trial itself.” Here’s part one of the two part series.

Ars Gratia Artis (Art for the sake of Art)

Is Costco a cult for those who love $1.50 hotdogs? Here’s three minutes– watch to find out!

Image at the top: Part of the Gaza flotilla, the Handala, in the port city of Siracusa, Sicily. Before setting off for Gaza, the ship was loaded with medical supplies, food, diapers, infant formula and medicine intended for the people of Gaza in mid-July 2025. [credit: Getty/file photo]