Worthy Read: A Portrait of Steven Spielberg, In The Year 2026

Worthy Read is an ongoing series here at the blog where I link out to a piece I think is worth your valuable time. Wesley Morris / The New York Times: But a kind of cultural malnourishment has set in. While you once needed a pair of hands to count the major studios, we’re on the verge of barely needing one. And the best, most lucrative ideas entail microwaved nostalgia that we all know by its legal nickname: I.P. The takeovers and reheating, the obscure metrics that ensure we never quite know exactly how popular anything is, it’s dispiriting: Pac-Man eating ghosts, algorithms keeping secrets.When movies play in only a handful of theaters to qualify for awards, and increasingly millions of us watch them on our phones, “that is not my definition of a motion-picture experience,” Spielberg told me. For that, he said, you need “an audience to be the accelerant of that experience, to be the contagion of making the experience even more profound for the individual in that crowded theater — or…