Simon Critchley at The Guardian:
Beginning with the Anglicanism of St Mary’s Church in Bromley, where Bowie sang in the choir, continuing with his immersion in Tibetan Buddhism in the late 1960s and on to the occultism of Aleister Crowley, Ormerod unpacks the religious preoccupations of Bowie’s art in compelling prose. But still, it all seems rather straightforward and the little stabs at philosophy (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and so on) feel a tiny bit Wiki.
But the book takes on a growing velocity when analysing Bowie’s later work, particularly in the chapter on Heathen (I’ve not read anything as good on that album). This momentum develops into fine, detailed discussions of The Next Day and Blackstar, and also Lazarus, his stunning final experiment with musical theatre. What makes these sections so good is that Ormerod deals with Bowie as text; as the occasion for close reading, which I think is what his work, like all good art, deserves.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Coppola’s adaptation cleaves relatively closely to the plot of Stoker’s novel, but Besson’s script replicates, almost exactly, only the parts of Coppola’s film that deviate from Stoker’s story. In both films, Dracula is explicitly the undead Vlad Ţepeș (the Wallachian warlord whose moniker Stoker borrowed while eschewing the rest of the actual history), in love with his wife, who dies during the Count’s fight against the Ottoman Empire. In both films, the character of Mina Murray is reimagined as the reincarnation and doppelgänger of said dead wife, and lengthy sequences are added in which Dracula and Mina have a secret courtship and fall in love. But in its deviation from Stoker’s text, Besson’s Dracula introduces some intriguing if somewhat underdeveloped ideas: Besson combines Renfield (Dracula’s asylum-bound thrall) and Lucy (his first victim) into a single character. The Van Helsing role is filled by an unnamed priest, played by Christoph Waltz, who muses about the obligations of lapsed Christians (like Dracula) to a God who has failed them. This Dracula also has all the visual hallmarks of a typical Besson film: an arresting, overblown style; intricately choreographed, dance-like action sequences (and dance sequences); slapstick with a 50 percent hit rate; weird, cutesy little CGI dudes.
An axolotl is a salamander with a superpower:
When Bad Bunny emerged from a row of towering sugar cane stalks to kick off his Super Bowl halftime show performance, it might have been easy to read the set design as little more than a lush backdrop: a tableau of Caribbean paradise imported to the Bay. Bad Bunny certainly didn’t explicitly acknowledge the sugar cane: He was too busy singing “Tití Me Preguntó,” a brash ode to his sexual prowess, which has racked up a billion streams both on Spotify and YouTube.
JAKARTA – Amid the excitement of the World Governments Summit (WGS) 2026 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), a forum usually filled with majestic speeches, technological futurism and discussions of world leaders, there was a guest whose presence was the most silent, but his message was the most resounding. Nolan is the first human to receive a Neuralink brain implant, a breakthrough that has only been present in science fiction books. And in the forum held on February 3-5, Nolan brought a simple sentence: “This technology has brought my life back.” Nolan still remembers the day he was told he would be the first subject in human history to undergo a Neuralink implant. There were no tears, no long pauses like in a movie scene. There was urgency.
We are born with a yearning for the spiritual and transcendent, and the difficult truths about life that we learn about as we grow older—such as the inevitability of death and the existence of terrible injustices—further push us towards faith. Without religion, or something close enough to religion, we are unhappy and unsatisfied. Blaise Pascal was wise when he said that secular pursuits can’t quench our thirst—“the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.” As it’s sometimes put, there is a God-shaped hole that we all need to fill.
We are only a month into 2026, yet it’s already clear what one of the major space stories of the year is going to be: mega-constellations, and the ongoing attempts to launch thousands of satellites into Earth’s orbit.
In August 1968, a visiting foreign minister from Pakistan, Mian Arshad Hussain, gave Mao a box of mangoes as a gift during a state visit. Presenting mangoes has a long tradition in Pakistan, but in China, the fruit was virtually unknown. Mao passed the box to workers occupying the Tsinghua campus in Beijing, who were attempting to control the Red Guards stationed there. The scholar of Chinese visual culture Alfreda Murck 
David Foster Wallace’s “
Why bother? What’s the point? These are questions that inevitably arise in conversations about college programs in prisons. But these questions make certain assumptions about education in general and higher education in prisons specifically. What is it, exactly, that is not worth it, according to skeptics and naysayers, about college education in prison? Ought we not to consider just what the point of education is in the first place? My position as a prisoner has given me the opportunity to contemplate the question and arrive at some insight into it.