Weekly Reader: Stories from Across Paste Media

Enjoy some good stories this weekend.

By Lauren Tousignant  |  October 3, 2025 | 8:03pm
Photos: The Onion/Roqayah Chamseddine/iStockphoto/Wizards of the Coast/Getty Images
Weekly Reader: Stories from Across Paste Media

If you left time open this weekend to keep Taylor Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl, on repeat—and are suddenly finding yourself with more free time than expected—we’ve rounded up the best stories from across Paste Media’s five sites just for you. This week, we’re highlighting The Onion’s mockumentary on Jeffrey Epstein, a report on Israel’s latest attack on Lebanese citizens, a review of the new Spider-Man card game, and a reflection on the state of the album industry. Showgirls not included.

From Splinter

A Year After the Pager Attacks, Israel’s Assaults on Civilians Continue by Roqayah Chamseddine

This massacre in broad daylight comes after months of violations against Lebanon’s sovereignty—over 4,600 violations of the so-called ceasefire—resulting in nearly 200 deaths and hundreds of injuries. Every day Israel finds new, more barbaric ways to kill and maim Lebanese citizens, while it continues to carry out crimes against humanity in nearby Gaza. Nothing has changed, and the world continues as it was, our deaths in this part of it rendered as nothing more than background noise in this ongoing catastrophe.

From Endless Mode

Cameron Kunzelman looks at how Magic: The Gathering’s new Spider-Man set, and its awkward digital rebrand for Magic’s video game app, is an ill omen for the future of the popular card game. “Magic: The Gathering seems to be going through a crisis,” he writes. “They are creating a true deluge of product, and those products are coming quickly. The company recently announced that there will be seven marquee set releases coming in 2026. That’s a lot of cards, and four of those sets are going to be Universes Beyond, meaning that they are external intellectual property being brought into the Magic fold. These sets are affirming if you like these brands, but the more there are, and the more they are inconsistently released across the various places you can play Magic, the more it feels like the whole apparatus is an excuse for monetizing brands and not a delicate meeting of designer efforts, corporate demands, and player desires.”

From The AV Club

“[T]the main true-crime element missing from Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile is the structural audience conditioning, where heavy-handed cliffhangers and artificial maybes keep you tuning in by planting uncertainty. While its talking heads repeat “allegedly” between every other word and initially pose ridiculous questions (“Was he ever even alive to begin with?”), the mock-doc is mainly one of clarity. Here, Epstein’s heinous crimes and top-level connections are as obvious as the “government-sanctioned assassination” that took place during the “34,689,652 minutes” of footage missing from his cell’s security cameras. Embedded in this goofy version of events is an affirming obviousness, freed from the fear of litigation that clouds much of the serious coverage around Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. When Epstein drives O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco to Pedophile Island, it’s just another nod to the overwhelming evidence of guilt caught up in a media storm.”

From Paste Magazine

Who Gets to Be an ‘Album Artist’ in a Single Artist’s World? by Cassidy Sollazzo 

This isn’t new—singles have always been the most efficient way to break through. What’s changed is the machine surrounding them, the way a viral TikTok, random playlist add, or dragged-out rollout can crown or flatten an artist before the album even arrives. Apps like TikTok and Spotify have become the end-all-be-all of general music discovery, as their algorithm-based suggestions flatten the listening pool into a one-size-fits-all box. Singles are the easiest entry points because of the inherent infrastructure through which people are getting their music. Why parse through a full LP when your streaming service has already told you which songs from it to play and rewarded you for doing so?

From Jezebel

For well over a decade now, the Jezebel commenters have collectively been spooking the pants off the internet at this time of year. A lot has changed in that period of time (for you, for me, for Jezebel, for our poor miserable world), but I’m pleased to be proving that the more things change, the more they stay the same: our scary story contest is back for another year.

 
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