Weekly reader: Stories from across Paste Media

Making it a little easier to find good writing on the internet.

By Danette Chavez | August 22, 2025 | 2:30pm

Clockwise from left: Liam Gallagher (Photo by Jordan Mansfield/Comic Relief/Getty Images); (Photo: iStockhphoto); (Images: Nintendo/Team Cherry); Coal plant (Photo by Joseph Prakash/Unsplash)

Aux Features Weekly Reader

Weekly reader: Stories from across Paste Media

Welcome to Paste Media’s new weekly reader, a roving roundup wherein we gather stories from across the five sites that make up our indie media company—The A.V. Club, Paste Magazine, Jezebel, Splinter, and now Endless Mode—that capture the range of our coverage. After all, if you have a blog network with thoughtful reporting and criticism on pop culture, politics, and gaming, why not use it? And with Google now actively working against discovering good writing on the internet, we figured we’d make it a little easier on curious readers. So, every week, a different site will host this feature, which will be made up of stories that deserve another look (or a first one). Read on for Gamescom dispatches, a feature on coal plants (they’re back), and more.

From Endless Mode

Every year hundreds of thousands of video game fans and professionals descend on Cologne, Germany, in late August. No, they’re not there to pay tribute to the legendary band Can, who called Cologne home, but to attend Gamescom—the biggest games show in the world, at least by attendance. Our new games and immersive entertainment site, Endless Mode, is on site, with Associate Editor Elijah Gonzalez playing some of the biggest games coming out over the next several months. In the first of his daily dispatches Elijah goes hands-on with Hollow Knight: Silksong, the sequel to an independent hit that has improbably become the most anticipated game this side of GTA 6. He also shares his thoughts on Nintendo’s big 2025 release Metroid Prime 4, and the next chapter in Capcom’s always popular Resident Evil saga. Whether you’re interested in video games, board games, tabletop RPGs, pinball, interactive art, immersive experiences, or even anime, Endless Mode has you covered.

From Jezebel

‘Women, Seated’ Shows How Precarity, Wealth, and ‘Having It All’ Are Not Just American Problems by Morgan Leigh Davies

“While translated works make up only around 3% of published books in the United States, some authors of works in translation, like Elena Ferrante, have achieved immense popularity and acclaim in English. In recent years, East Asian authors have begun to break the stranglehold that European writers have previously exerted over translated literature, particularly Japanese and South Korean women writers—like Han Kang, who last year became the first South Korean winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Mieko Kawakami and Sayaka Murata.

Strikingly, however, Chinese authors have mostly been absent from this cultural conversation. Riverhead’s initiative seeks to change that, and is bringing more works of Chinese fiction to U.S. audiences, with a focus on contemporary storytelling. Zhang’s novel is thematically similar to other novels by Asian women authors that have found success in the U.S. market: Women, Seated is a sharp examination of gender and class in the society in which it takes place.”

From Paste Magazine

In Their Second Act, Oasis Returns as Everything They Once Promised to Be by Lacy Baugher Milas

“An Oasis reunion was always going to bring critics out of the woodwork: music snobs who consider themselves too good for the band’s stadium anthems; performative haters who snottily assume just because something is popular that also automatically means it’s bad; closet classicists that get weirdly judgy about the lads’ working class Manchester roots; casual celebrity gawkers hoping for a chance to watch another all-too-famous Gallagher brothers crash out once again. But it’s never mattered less. The band has grown up now, and so have we, settled into a middle age that seems to have, if nothing else, brought some important home truths into clarity.”

From Splinter

A Retreat to the 19th Century, One 90-Day Coal Plant Extension at a Time by Dave Levitan

“It is worth repeating that outside of the Trump administration, essentially no one wants this. The company that owns the plant was well prepared for life after its closure; the grid operators are doing just fine and the lights would stay on without it; and as we recounted back in May, each 90-day extension of this single plant will mean something like 112 extra asthma attacks, four heart attacks, a few extra ER visits and hospital admissions, and 10 or 11 dead people that don’t need to be.”

From The A.V. Club

Together Again: Nobody gives Delroy Lindo more than Spike Lee by Jesse Hassenger

“Delroy Lindo first appeared in a Lee movie that was, to that point, arguably Lee’s most conventional. But Lee’s stately, less incendiary Malcolm X (which many didn’t expect in 1992) is nonetheless both rigorous and entertaining, a 200-minute epic built from one of Denzel Washington’s most accomplished performances. Lindo plays West Indian Archie, a Harlem gangster and master of numbers rackets who guides Malcolm as a young man. Lee directs some early sequences of Malcolm X like a musical, and Lindo enters the picture as it briefly morphs into a gangster movie. On paper, the part isn’t especially complicated: Archie is a mentor to this brash young guy, until they have what seems like an entirely avoidable falling-out over Malcolm insisting he hit a major winning number, while Archie believes he’s lying. It’s Lindo’s firm yet restrained authority on either side of this schism that makes this bit of the movie play so well. Another director might well have elided much of this material to shave the movie down under the three-hour mark; Lee’s attention to the Lindo character signals the actor’s importance, and Lindo doesn’t squander his moment.”