Crystal Lake has dropped to mixed reviews (spoilers; Fanfare), but many horror-themed shows began streaming in 2026, e.g. Widow's Bay (14 Emmys; Fanfare); Carrie (episode 1; Fanfare); The Boroughs; Something Very Bad is Going to Happen (Fanfare); The Beauty (Fanfare); Below (Fanfare); The Shards; and Coven Academy. Animation in English includes The Doomies, Among Us (based on the game; Fanfare), and Stranger Things: Tales from '85. Also streaming in the US in languages other than English: Human Vapor (Japan; based on the classic film), My Sad Dead (Argentina; based on stories by Mariana Enriquez), I Would Rather Die (Mexico), City of Blood (Germany), shows in Korean like Spooky in Love, The East Palace, & If Wishes Could Kill (Fanfare), and a lot of supernatural anime. See also 2025, 2024, and 2023 including Junji Ito shows (previously).

PBS News Hour (9/16/2026), "Exhibition explores connection between Black women and the works of Shakespeare": "There's a sort of longstanding myth that Shakespeare's world was not a diverse world ... Black women ... lived and worked in London at the same time that Shakespeare was living and writing there ... Black women, as artists, as creators, as theater professionals themselves have used Shakespeare to tell their own stories." Video on Youtube. An excerpt from the exhibition catalog edited by Patricia Akhimie introduces the entire open access collection of essays, including Shanelle E. Kim's article on Frances DeBerry, the game show contestant mentioned on PBS News Hour. See also Esther Ferington's quiz on Black women and Shakespeare and Patricia Akhimie's previous lecture on "The Goodness of the Night: Editing Othello" (transcript).

Karin Wulf (9/2026), "The Family History of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, and the Politics of Genealogy": "a team ... has been working with a strand of Thomas Jefferson's hair to compare recovered DNA with that contributed by descendants of Sally Hemings ... More problematic is the failure of most of the flurry of media attention ... to resist tired and tiresome framings ... History regularly skips or dismisses the essential history of family." Wulf's other posts on "Reading Family History" (2, 3, 4, 5, 6), her course on "Gender, Sexuality and Family in the Early Modern Atlantic World," and other posts / tidbits. Also this month, an interview with Marcia Biederman on a later family's history: "the true story of an Alaska Native woman" with "villainous relatives: the mother- and sister-in-law from hell, who welcomed Agnes by showing her to a stark, unheated attic room." Via.

Alejandro Zuleta (Public Books, 9/9/26), "The Saddest Cattle in the World: Atahualpa Yupanqui, Empire, and the Sound of Stolen Land": "There is a couplet that contains the essence of Argentina's colonial and postcolonial political economy, a poetic image that speaks a thousand words and synthesizes imperial ideology in one definitive swoop. Atahualpa Yupanqui wrote it, and it is the last couplet of the refrain in 'El arriero' (1944), one of his most transcendent songs ... 'The sorrows are ours. The cattle are not.'" Lyrics to "El Arriero" and more. Songs like "Luna tucumana," "Viene clareando," "La Añera," "Zamba del grillo," and "Chacarera de las piedras" are often covered. Several were in the film Horizontes de piedra, including "El Arriero." But many of Yupanqui's songs were co-written by Paula Nenette Pepin, about whom there's a recent album and documentary in French.

Pamela Toler (History in the Margins, 9/5/26), "The Great Panic of 1893": "occasionally an event, or person, or book, or idea ... shows up in footnotes or casual asides ... if it's interesting or important enough, I share it ... Lately, the Great Panic of 1893 has become insistent." Neil Flanagan (The Birth of a Capital, 9/4/26), "How often do you think about the 1893 World's Fair?": "what draws us to an event, story, or image depends less on the context of the events than the context we inhabit." Photos / maps / VR of the fair. Foods, sweet treats, and "orange cider" of the fair. Pall Mall Magazine and RIBA Journal on the fair. And other magazines that began in 1893 feature Ida Tarbell on "Pasteur at Home," famous prints, rules for psychic / occult investigators, articles on orchidology and astronomy, "Last Week's Paris" followup on anarchists, and the first story of Sexton Blake.

Anthony Tommasini (LitHub, 9/10/26), "Beauty in Ambiguity: On Marian Anderson's Lifelong Love For Schubert": "When selecting songs ... she always looked first to Schubert, 'the composer I love best,' who wrote 'hundreds of them,' each 'more beautiful than the last.'" E.g.: Ständchen (No. 4 in D. 957); Der Tod und das Mädchen (D. 531); Ave Maria (D. 839); and Erlkönig (D. 328) i.e. Goethe's poem based on a ballad also adapted in Benedikte Naubert's 1792 "The Erl-King's Daughter." Classical Voice North America on Tommasini: Anderson "feared she would be remembered for breaking barriers rather than for her artistry." At LitHub, Tommasini discusses "Wohin?" and "Ungeduld" from D. 795, but also "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child." He mentions Roland Hayes singing Schubert as an influence. At Largehearted Boy, he makes more suggestions.