Hump day recommendations, April 9, 2025

Watch: “Rumours.”This darkly comedic 2024 movie is a pitch-perfect critique of elite politics, featuring zombies, a giant brain mysteriously sitting in a forest, and Cate Blanchett. – Justin Kosslyn, publisher of GZERO Media

Read: “Chip War.” Chris Miller’s 2022 nonfiction book on semiconductors more closely resembles an epic novel – the economic historian charts the rise of a component that now undergirds the global economy. Amid the US’s burgeoning trade war with the globe, it’s an apt moment to breeze through this eloquent tale. – Zac

Read: “An Officer and a Spy.” This gripping and meticulously researched historical novel by Robert Harris (of “Conclave” fame) recounts the Dreyfus affair, a scandal that shook French society to its core at the end of the 19th century when a Jewish French Army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was wrongly convicted of treason and banished to Devil's Island, a barren rock off the coast of South America. The affair exposed deep veins of institutional corruption in the French military, as well as a virulent strain of French antisemitism. The protagonist, a persnickety intelligence officer named Georges Picquart, first helps lock up Dreyfus before reluctantly, but determinedly, uncovering his innocence, risking his own life in the process. There are 19th-century stakeouts in which hearing tubes go down chimney flues, torn-up telegrams that painstakingly get taped back together, and a fearlessly pudgy Emile Zolá. And with two world wars just around the corner, the stakes become much higher than the fate of just one man. – Alex Gibson, senior producer of GZERO World

Read: “When the Going Was Good.” In his new memoir, Graydon Carter, who helmed one of the glossiest of the glossy magazines, Vanity Fair, opens up about his storied career and the many trials and tribulations he faced along the way. It’s the tale of a kid from Canada who somehow became the toast of Manhattan, and eventually Hollywood, as the famous VF Oscar Party blossomed under his care. Remember when the character Carrie Bradshaw confessed on “Sex and The City” that she used to skip meals to afford the new copy of Vogue? I can relate, but it was Vanity Fair, in the Graydon years, that provided my sustenance.

– Tony Maciulis, chief content officer of GZERO Media