Leann Davis Alspaugh at Acroteria:
“Go ahead, tell the end, but please don’t tell the beginning!” begs the movie poster for the 1966 film Gambit. Why would the filmmakers prefer to blow the ending rather than beginning?
Today’s moviegoer is accustomed to film plots that mangle chronology, forcing us to reassemble the sequence of events without clear signposts from the director. Gambit doesn’t quite go that far but it does employ a number of devices to trick the viewer into thinking a certain narrative has taken place when it has not. I can’t proceed without a spoiler alert so if that’s too much for you, please stop reading.
Gambit is a heist caper starring Michael Caine as the mastermind Harry Dean, Shirley MacLaine as the bait Nicole Chang, and Herbert Lom as Ahmad Shahbandar, the millionaire mark. Shahbandar has a priceless antique bust, Dean wants it, and Nicole is brought in to distract the millionaire. The trick is that the bust, a portrait of the ancient Chinese empress Li Su resembles Shahbandar’s beloved dead wife as well as a certain Eurasian woman—Shirley MacLaine—that Harry has discovered dancing in a shabby Hong Kong club. Harry plans to ingratiate himself with Shahbandar and use Nicole to dazzle the old man while the thief executes his plan without a hitch.
More here. [Editor’s Note: My wife and I just watched this film and enjoyed it a lot.]
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When forests are cleared, wetlands drained, and slopes destabilized, entire ecosystems lose their balance. Floods, landslides, and erosion then hit both communities and wildlife alike.
You remember the scene: A camera at a Coldplay concert is showing audience members enjoying the show, with lead singer Chris Martin making a few friendly comments about each fan. The camera cuts to an attractive middle-aged couple in the midst of a cute embrace, with the man holding the woman from behind as they sway to the music. Then the couple spots the Jumbotron, and a perfectly choreographed series of panicked actions unfolds. The woman, shocked, covers her face, and turns away from the camera. The man dives to his left, out of the camera’s view. A younger woman, sitting behind them, and evidently in the know about what is happening, comes into view, the look on her face a poetic mix of horror and glee. “Oh, what?” Martin comments. “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.”
In a 1990 review
How can whole societies come to believe that the dead walk among them? Understanding that requires moving beyond theoretical approaches and engaging with tangible human communities and their world-views. We will first visit two very different societies in which the veil between life and death has been thin. The dead have been close: sometimes to be revered, sometimes to be feared, but regularly to be interacted with, if not unambiguously in a bodily form. Both case-studies manifest an endemic layer of anxiety, capable of intensifying under stress into something more concentrated and physical.
We associate Freud with the repression of thoughts and feelings. But he also described a subtler defense: recognizing an uncomfortable truth, yet acting as if it didn’t matter—a phenomenon he called disavowal. In this interview, philosopher Alenka Zupančič, a close collaborator of Slavoj Žižek, argues that disavowal is the key to understanding our political paralysis. From climate change to populism to the performative outrage of social media, Zupančič says the problem isn’t that we deny reality—it’s that we acknowledge it endlessly and keep doing nothing.
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I remember the vogue in the ’60s and ’70s for critical essays predicting the imminent “death of the novel.” In 
It’s not that the AI companies are growing their computing power slowly — surprise at the lack of compute put into new training reflects how aggressively they’ve scaled until now. Releasing a one hundred times larger model every two years would demand a tenfold increase in capacity each year, which, You says, is unrealistic. A new model every three years, he says, might be feasible, though that still requires an ambitious five-fold increase in compute every year.
In 1987, Lei Jun 雷军 was a 21-year-old student in Wuhan University’s computer science program. The book that had set his imagination alight was Fire in the Valley 硅谷之火, which chronicles the evolution of 1970s homebrew hacker culture into global titans like Apple, Microsoft, and IBM. The heroes of that story, of course, were visionaries like Steve Jobs. Lei Jun’s trajectory — he founded
A few years after I first read The Thin Place, I found myself interviewing Davis for an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, which I was editing at the time. We talked then, as we still talk now, about writing and animals and the city of Philadelphia, where part of my family is from, and where Davis was born on November 13, 1946. Her childhood in a semidetached house on Woodale Road, at the edge of the affluent suburb of Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, has found its way into many of her books. It’s there most directly in the haunted house in Hell (1998), the suburban street in Duplex, and the shared childhood memories of the mysterious “we” who narrate The Silk Road (2019). But once you have entered the labyrinth of Davis’s work, you begin to see it, or sense it, around every corner: an atmosphere of dread ruled by the rituals of parents and the patterns of convention—a place where the important things go unsaid or are spoken in code so that if the children overhear, they won’t understand. A place that anybody in their right mind would try to escape.
In Some Notes on Mediated Time – one of three completely new essays in the collection – Smith recalls how the “dreamy, slo-mo world” of her 1980s childhood gave way, within a generation, to the “anxious, permanent now” of social media. If you lived through that transition, you don’t have to be very old to feel ancient. When this estrangement is compounded by the ordinary anxieties of ageing, cultural commentary becomes inflected with self-pity. Smith’s identification with the protagonist of 
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In 1990, when Julia Ioffe was 7 years old, her family left a collapsing Soviet Union for suburban Maryland. Her new classmates never let her forget that she was the “weird Russian girl,” but the disdain, she makes clear, was mutual. Growing up, she looked down on American kids who bragged about seeing a Broadway musical or vacationing in Florida. Ioffe’s idea of a good time was going to the opera and reading Pushkin.