Keith Bradsher in the New York Times:
As an American reporter living in Beijing, I’ve watched both China and the rest of the world flirt with cutting-edge technologies involving robots, drones and self-driving vehicles.
But China has now raced far beyond the flirtation stage. It’s rolling out fleets of autonomous delivery trucks, experimenting with flying cars and installing parking lot robots that can swap out your E.V.’s dying battery in just minutes. There are drones that deliver lunch by lowering it from the sky on a cable.
If all that sounds futuristic and perhaps bizarre, it also shows China’s ambition to dominate clean energy technologies of all kinds, not just solar panels or battery-powered cars, then sell them to the rest of the world. China has incurred huge debts to put trillions of dollars into efforts like these, along with the full force of its state-planned economy.
More here.
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The Hungarian poet Géza Röhrig, the Shark Tank shark Kevin O’Leary, and Timothée Chalamet walk into a bar. The bar is the restaurant of the London Ritz, and it’s 1952. Gwyneth Paltrow is also there, at another table. O’Leary, playing the part of the ink tycoon Milton Rockwell in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, notices the tattoo on the arm of Röhrig’s character, Béla Kletzki. “He used to defuse bombs for the Nazis,” says Timothée, as the ping-pong ingenue Marty Mauser. “Tell ’em the story you told me.” “My guests are waiting,” Rockwell replies. “Wait,” says Marty, “you’re gonna love this.”
Traditionally, autumn is when publishers bring out their most ambitious novels: the buzziest debuts, the most hotly anticipated returns, the heaviest hitters. This year, many of them were also physically heavy, with page counts that climbed, dizzyingly, into the high hundreds and even four digits. (One independent press told us that producing these books broke their printer.)
On the Well desk, we see a lot of exercise fads. And while all movement is good, plenty of trending workouts 
Austere like her prose and engaged like her subjects, Sontag was my first inkling of avant-garde culture, my initial point of access to an edgy alternative to the Anglophonic modernism — Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Joyce — that represented high literature. Her European protagonists — Lukács, Sartre, Camus, Leiris, Artaud, Weil, Sarraute, Pavese, Cioran, Ionesco, Godard, Bresson, Resnais, Bergman — were exotic to me, and the notion that philosophers, writers, and filmmakers could be political was even more so. I didn’t understand the many differences among these figures, but I sensed a shared posture, one that pointed to a way around the given terms of American culture, mass versus elite, and American politics, liberal versus conservative. I, too, wanted to be against. If Sontag could cross over to my living room, maybe I could cross over to her New York downtown (which even then I took to be the name of an elective affinity as much as an actual place), and I was hardly alone in wanting to do so.
When amateur writers pitch headlines to The Onion, their jokes often flop. One reason may surprise you: They use too many funny words that wink at the reader, “wacky” elements that sabotage any chance at good parody, former Onion editor Joe Randazzo told our sister site Big Think in 2012.
IT’S 2025, and the turn to genre is old news. Since at least the 1980s, writers of “literary fiction” have been adopting the forms and techniques of popular “genre fiction”—a huge category that includes detective novels, sci-fi, spy thrillers, fantasy, horror, Westerns, and all varieties of romance. By 2012, China Miéville 
Penned in August 1925
Bilge’s description of Matthew Lillard’s facial journey in the 
Gatsby’s pink suit is, of course, a sign of his vulgarity, every bit as much as his lavish, show-off parties. And it is the vulgarian character of these parties that ties Fitzgerald’s hero to the character Trimalchio from Gaius Petronious Arbiter’s first-century literary burlesque, the Satyricon. Fitzgerald’s publisher had the good sense to reject Trimalchio in West Egg, the initial title of the novel. Fitzgerald’s commercial sense had certainly failed him when he proposed that title, though the allusion itself was sound. Both Jay Gatsby and Petronius’ Trimalchio are social upstarts—“Mr. Nobodies from Nowhere,” to steal Tom Buchanan’s phrase. Both use lavish parties in misguided attempts to pull themselves closer to the glamorous lives they desire.
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