A new Dylan is needed to inspire protest against Trumpism, writes Toby Wood . Plus letters from Patrick Owen, Cris Yelland, John Blake, Ian Cunningham, Richard Barnard, John Beer, Jane Barrett, Charles Jeffrey, Helen Keating, Rae Street, Pete Lavender and Tom Stubbs

On Monday, my wife and I went to our local cinema to watch A Complete Unknown, not only to see Timothée Chalamet’s stunning re-creation of a young Bob Dylan but also to avoid the wall-to-wall televised coverage of Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony. Set in the early 1960s, the film reminded us of how Dylan ignited and spoke for the interests of young people, starting out with simple folk songs of hope and aspiration, swiftly followed by angry snarls of rage exacerbated by the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

With Trump once again ensconced in the White House, promising/threatening a multitude of actions, now is surely the time for a new Dylan to appear – hopefully someone who can galvanise and electrify a new generation and then inspire and support a viable new Democrat leader who can first provide opposition to any Trump excesses and then fight to ensure that his like never succeeds again ( Trump sworn in as 47th president as US braces for a new era of disruption and division, 20 January ).
Toby Wood
Peterborough

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Hudson was the last remaining member of the folk-rock group, releasing 10 studio albums with them and touring with Dylan in his newfound electric period

Garth Hudson, the last remaining founder member of the Band, has died aged 87.

The multi-instrumentalist, who played keyboards and saxophone for the bestselling 1960s folk-rockers as well as Bob Dylan, died peacefully in his sleep at the Woodstock nursing home he lived in, the executor of his estate confirmed to the Toronto Star.

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The actor’s husband has announced ‘with a heavy heart’ that she will step back from public duties

Actor Pauline Quirke, best known for starring in BBC sitcom Birds of a Feather, has dementia, her husband has announced. In a statement, Steve Sheen confirmed that she was diagnosed a number of years ago and she will no longer be doing any public-facing work.

“It is with a heavy heart that I announce my wife Pauline’s decision to step back from all professional and commercial duties due to her diagnosis of Dementia in 2021,” said Sheen.

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Are the guitars right? Is Joan Baez sidelined? Who is this Sylvie Russo? And why is it an American shouting ‘Judas’? A Dylan tribute singer, two biographers, a superfan and more weigh in

Richard Williams, biographer

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Daredevil is among my favorite stories in the Netflix Defenders universe—along with Jessica Jones— in large part because Wilson Fisk (aka Kingpin, played to perfection by Vincent D'Onofrio), was such an incredibly complex and even occasionally sympathetic villain in the first and second seasons. I'm far from alone in this assessment, which explains why it was such a blow to fans when Netflix canceled the critically acclaimed Daredevil (and the rest of its Defenders series) in 2018, despite the showrunners' plans for a fourth season.

Charlie Cox's titular vigilante hero has since made a couple of cameos in other Marvel projects, most notably as a one-night stand for Tatiana Maslany's She-Hulk in 2022. That kept hope alive that Daredevil might be revived and/or re-imagined. The hope has paid off because Marvel Studios just released a trailer for the new nine-episode series Daredevil: Born Again . And the studio has already confirmed a second season as part of the MCU's Phase Five .

D'Onofrio's Fisk (who also appeared in the limited series Echo and Hawkeye ) is back, of course. Per the official premise: "Murdock, a blind lawyer with heightened abilities, is fighting for justice through his bustling law firm, while former mob boss Wilson Fisk pursues his own political endeavors in New York. When their past identities begin to emerge, both men find themselves on an inevitable collision course."

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The Internet has become the most prevalent communications technology the world has ever seen. Though there are more fixed and mobile telephone connections, even they use Internet technology in their core. For all the many uses the Internet allows for today, its origins lie in the cold war and the need for a defence communications network that could survive a nuclear strike. But that defence communications network quickly became used for general communications and within only a few years of the first transmission, traffic on the predecessor to today’s Internet was already 75% email.

In the beginning

Arpanet was the vital precursor of today’s Internet, commissioned by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) in 1969. In his interesting account of why Arpanet came about , Stephen Lukasic, Director of Darpa from 1970-75, wrote that if its true nature and impact had been realised it would never have been permitted under the US government structure of the time. The concept for a decentralised communications technology that would survive a nuclear attack would have placed it outside Darpa’s remit (as defence communications specifically were assigned to a different agency), so the focus changed to how to connect computers together so that major applications could be run on the most appropriate system available.

This was in the era of time-sharing computers . Today’s familiar world of the ubiquitous “personal computer” on each desk was decades away. Computers of this time were generally very large, filling entire rooms, and comparatively rare. Users working at connected terminals would submit jobs to the computer which would allocate processing time for the job when available. The idea went that if these computers were networked together, an available remote computer could process a job even when the computers closer to the users were full. The resulting network was called Arpanet and the first packets of data traversed the network in September 1969.

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The second season of Silo , Apple TV's dystopian sc-fi drama, is off to a powerful start with yesterday's premiere. Based on the trilogy by novelist Hugh Howey, was one of the more refreshing surprises on streaming television in 2023: a twist-filled combination of political thriller and police procedural set in a post-apocalyptic world. It looks like S2 will be leaning more heavily into sci-fi thriller territory, expanding its storytelling—and its striking cinematography—beyond the original silo.

(Spoilers for S1 below as well as first five minutes of S2 premiere.)

As previously reported , Silo is set in a self-sustaining underground city inhabited by a community whose recorded history only goes back 140 years, generations after the silo was built by the founders. Outside is a toxic hellscape that is only visible on big screens in the silo's topmost level. Inside, 10,000 people live together under a pact: Anyone who says they want to "go out" is immediately granted that wish—cast outside in an environment suit on a one-way trip to clean the cameras. But those who make that choice inevitably die soon after because of the toxic environment.

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The MCU's foray into streaming television has produced mixed results, but one of my favorites was the weirdly inventive, oh-so-meta WandaVision . I'm happy to report that the spinoff sequel, Agatha All Along, taps into that same offbeat creativity, giving us a welcome reminder of just how good the MCU can be when it's firing on all storytelling cylinders.

(Spoilers below, including for WandaVision and Multiverse of Madness . We'll give you another heads up when major spoilers for Agatha All Along are imminent.)

The true identity of nosy next-door neighbor Agnes—played to perfection by Kathryn Hahn—was the big reveal of 2021's WandaVision , even inspiring a jingle that went viral. Agnes turned out to be a powerful witch named Agatha Harkness, who had studied magic for centuries and was just dying to learn the source of Wanda's incredible power. Wanda's natural abilities were magnified by the Mind Stone, but Agatha realized that Wanda was a wielder of "chaos magic." She was, in fact, the Scarlet Witch. In the finale, Wanda trapped Agatha in her nosy neighbor persona while releasing the rest of the town of Westview from her grief-driven Hex.

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Confirming previous rumors , Variety reports that Amazon will be moving ahead with producing a TV series based on the popular Mass Effect video game franchise. The writing and production staff involved might not inspire confidence from fans, though.

The series' writer and executive producer is slated to be Daniel Casey, who until now was best known as the primary screenwriter on F9: The Fast Saga , one of the late sequels in the Fast and the Furious franchise. He was also part of a team of writers behind the relatively little-known 2018 science fiction film Kin .

Karim Zreik will also produce, and his background is a little more encouraging; his main claim to fame is in the short-lived Marvel Television unit, which produced relatively well-received series like Daredevil and Jessica Jones for Netflix before Disney+ launched with its Marvel Cinematic Universe shows.

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