Chisulo.a

As the days spent in social isolation drag on, the utility of all the subscription-based streaming services available online and through your TV only grows—and so does the difficulty of deciding how to use them. If you, like me, are having trouble figuring out what to watch during these overwhelming times, I’m here to help. There are troves of great films available on every app, even if some of them are buried by algorithms that hide them from the front page. Here are some choice options to match a variety of sheltering-in-place moods, available on Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, or the Criterion Channel.

---

If you’re feeling trapped at home: A Ghost Story

The protagonist of David Lowery’s meditative tale of love and loss is an unnamed man (played by Casey Affleck) who is killed in a car accident and begins to haunt his own house, wearing a white sheet and solemnly watching his wife (Rooney Mara) until she moves out. Since he’s tied to the building, the movie becomes a strange fairy tale about watching as things change, powerless to stop them. That may sound harrowing, but the film revels in the beauty of the passage of time as well as the tragedy, and has a great (if inadvertent) depiction of social distancing. (Netflix)

If you’re feeling nostalgic for human connection in the city: Frances Ha

Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s effervescent collaboration (he directed; she stars; they wrote together) might be the best movie in both of their storied careers. Following a 27-year-old dancer (Gerwig) trying to scrape out a life in New York, it perfectly captures the intense need for close friendship that people have in their post-college lives, and the pain and joy that comes with that. It’s also a terrific snapshot of New York in the early 2010s that will provide a bit of comfort for anyone missing the city’s busy streets. (Criterion Channel, Netflix)

If you feel like you’re living the same day over and over: Groundhog Day

An obvious choice, perhaps, but no wonder—Harold Ramis’s film is one of the most reliable and delightful pieces of entertainment in Hollywood history. The plot’s template has been much-copied over the years: Bill Murray’s misanthropic newsman travels to a quaint town and gets stuck endlessly reliving the second of February, unable to break out of the loop. It’s not only a wonderful romantic comedy, but also a slyly spiritual tale, a parable of self-improvement that never feels preachy and that reveals more depth on every viewing. (Netflix)

If you’re fantasizing about going on the road: Lost in America

Albert Brooks’s 1985 satire of an upper-middle-class couple buying an RV and trying to shed their bourgeois trappings is just as biting as it was upon release. Most of all, it’s an object lesson in looking before you leap—sure, the open highways and the great unknown might seem tempting, but even with a fully loaded Winnebago, problems will spring up sooner than you think. (HBO Now, Hulu)

If you want to luxuriate in movie-star charm: Out of Sight

Steven Soderbergh’s sizzling neo-noir has long been one of my go-to films for summoning a good mood. Though it’s an expertly made work with a sharply funny screenplay, its real magic comes from its fantastic central couple, played by George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. Both are early in their careers, but they already sparkle with superstar appeal, particularly in what might be the best love scene ever filmed. (HBO Now, Hulu)

If you’re looking to indulge your paranoia: Pi

Darren Aronofsky’s debut thriller was made in 1998 for $60,000, featured a cast of total unknowns, and focused on mental illness, mysticism, and math. Even so, it became a cult hit because of Aronofsky’s deft but surreal storytelling. It’s a great portrayal of cabin fever, starring Sean Gullette as a shut-in who is either going slowly insane or has found a mathematical way to predict the future and communicate with God. Or both. (Hulu)

If you’re looking for something meditative and satisfying: Jiro Dreams of Sushi

David Gelb’s 2011 documentary about the Japanese master chef Jiro Ono perfects many of the visual tropes that cooking documentaries rely on—montages of food being delicately assembled to orchestral music, and lush close-ups of individual meals. That this imagery is now ubiquitous doesn’t make it any less watchable, and the serenity of Jiro’s approach to sushi versus the bluntness of his relationship with his children remains totally transfixing to watch. As a bonus, Netflix is also currently streaming Documentary Now!’s perfect send-up of Jiro, an episode titled “Juan Likes Rice and Chicken.” (Hulu, Netflix)

If you’re looking to broaden your horizons: Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project

Though Scorsese is a master of cinema in his own right, one of his most significant contributions to the medium is his film foundation, which restores and preserves some of the world’s best movies in order to bring them to a wider audience. Criterion currently has 17 of these from countries such as Senegal, Thailand, Turkey, Brazil, and Cuba, all gathered in one neat package. The service also has many other collections worth browsing, including retrospectives of the acting careers of such legends as Burt Lancaster, Wendy Hiller, and Max von Sydow, with more cycling in all the time. (Criterion Channel)

If you want to settle in for a long watch of one of the best movies of the century: Zodiac

David Fincher’s greatest film is two hours and 37 minutes long and better than any true-crime documentary. Its narrative of the Zodiac Killer’s crimes becomes a reckoning with America’s never-ending obsession with murder, and with the even more intoxicating fallacy that every problem—no matter how frightening or obscure—can be solved. Zodiac is always worth watching, but right now, it offers a cautionary tale of a government and its private citizens haphazardly coming together in a time of crisis. (Netflix)

If you just want to laugh: Midnight Run

Martin Brest’s 1988 buddy comedy, starring Robert De Niro as an irascible bounty hunter and Charles Grodin as his curmudgeonly quarry, is, in my opinion, the most watchable film ever made. I defy you to turn on Midnight Run for even 30 seconds without getting instantly sucked in. Every scene is funny, the humor is never overplayed, and the lead actors unlock performances from one another that you might have thought impossible. If self-quarantining is getting you down, I recommend 126 minutes of Midnight Run, stat. (Hulu)

I am not usually one to see a glass as half full, especially when any idiot can see that it’s half empty, as it is right now. But the new quarantine regime that is forcing even the most outgoing person indoors does, to combine metaphors, gild the glass with a silver lining: It has relieved considerable pressure on the introvert community. The world has caught up with us at last.

I should point out, to strike a personal note, that I live alone; already I can hear you say to yourself, “There’s a big surprise.” When newscasters tell Americans that we are entering a “strange new way of life” or a “new normal,” or moving into “unfamiliar territory,” I know they’re not talking to me. I and millions like me have been trying to self-isolate for years. We are the hopeful practitioners of antisocial distancing.

[Read: The dos and don’ts of social distancing]

That February was the virus’s American debut is fitting, because many introverts were still recovering from the trauma of the end-of-year holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s. (Introverts recover slowly.) Each year from late November to early January, we are subjected to a period of unrelenting cheerfulness, with entreaties from our extrovert brothers and sisters to join the fun, come out of our shell, loosen up, party down, stop being such a fuddy-duddy.

Well, there is no party to join now, and if there were a party and the host, by definition an extrovert, was popular enough to attract more than nine guests, it would quickly be declared a public menace. All our lives, introverts have known there was something wrong with large parties. We just couldn’t quite put our finger on what it was, and even if we could, we would have probably kept it to ourselves. We now look prescient rather than merely neurotic.

Assuming, that is, people look at us at all. We usually go unnoticed by design. We are the people who spent the night of our senior prom working on an arts-and-crafts project, who whiled away weekends burrowed in the stacks at the college library, who later on preferred to eat alone at corner tables in restaurants with a book propped up on the salt shaker, ignoring the occasional puzzled or pitying glances from the extroverts at the bar.

[Read: All the cozy things keep me going]

Replace the restaurant corner table with a tub of takeout, eaten over the sink standing up, and you can see how everyone else’s new normal conforms to our old normal. I have never known an introvert who washed his or her hands fewer than a dozen times a day; it’s our version of calisthenics. Hugs, long a source of terror for us, are now generally understood to be as violent and unwelcome as decapitation. The elbow bump is a social greeting most introverts can live with, far superior anyway to the viral autobahn of the handshake. A brief, awkward wave at six paces would be best of all. Indeed, for a true introvert, any encounter closer than six feet constitutes foreplay.

Only recently has introversion been deemed a social force, thanks to the writer Susan Cain. She became an unofficial spokesperson, a very soft-spoken spokesperson, when she published Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking a few years ago. As nonleader of a nonmovement, Cain replaced the late writer and memoirist Florence King, author of Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. So deep was Florence’s introversion, she once told me, she had recently bought a used car on the condition that the seller remove every seat but the driver’s. “Now I’ll never have to give anybody a ride,” she said.

In truth, King was as much a misanthrope as an introvert; despite lots of overlap, the two are not the same. Cain speaks for the introvert qua introvert. Her book became a huge best seller with the aid of the internet, which allowed its target audience to buy as many copies as they wished without having to go to the store. Her theme was perhaps novel to some people, but not to us: This is the extroverts’ world; the introverts just live in it.

“Introversion,” Cain wrote, “is now [considered] a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.” Her book was a catalog of the ways in which society is designed around the pleasures and benefits of the extroverted: open floor plans in the workplace, team-building exercises everywhere, office calendars that let the boss and co-workers track your every move. Our culture’s heroes on the screen or the athletic field are always extroverts, our weirdos and deviants invariably portrayed as introverts—that shy, retiring neighbor who always kept to himself until the cops got the idea to dig up his basement floor.

[Read: This is how the pandemic ends]

If Cain’s book, readable, clever, and popular as it is, was intended as a revolutionary manifesto, it largely failed. It is very difficult to coordinate an uprising of people who would rather not leave the house.

Now, though, the virus has done what a revolution never could: The social order has been upended, and extroverts find themselves living in the introverts’ world. How the outgoing, the world-beaters, the Good Time Charlies and Charlenes will react is anybody’s guest, but take it from one who knows: Introversion isn’t so terrible, even with the alternately sad and horrifying news that makes introversion a societal necessity, even a matter of life and death.

Consider: As Cain points out, the world’s most introverted country, Finland, is also the world’s happiest.

How introverted are the Finns? Here’s how: You can tell a Finn likes you if he’s looking at your shoes instead of his own.

That’s a joke the Finns tell on themselves! Just because people are introverted doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun. We just don’t want to overdo it, is all.

Several seconds after the invention of the personal computer, people predicted that our jobs would eventually be emancipated from the office, and home would be the thrilling future of work.

Consider me your correspondent from the future. And let me tell you, as someone working from home this week, it’s not entirely thrilling. My desk is a kitchen counter, the constant cleaning of which makes for good procrastination, and my cafeteria is an emergency-stocked fridge, the routine raiding of which makes for even better procrastination.

[Read: The problem with telling sick workers to stay home]

Joining me this week are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people taking refuge from the coronavirus. Not all, to be sure. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 29 percent of Americans can work from home, including one in 20 service workers and more than half of information workers. So while servers are still manning the restaurants, the technology sector has effectively gone remote. Amazon, Apple, Google, Twitter, and Airbnb have all asked at least some of their employees to stay away from the office.

The coronavirus outbreak has triggered an anxious trial run for remote work at a grand scale. What we learn in the next few months could help shape a future of work that might have been inevitable, with or without a once-in-a-century public-health crisis.

Even before the pandemic struck, remote work was accelerating in the U.S. The share of the labor force that works from home tripled in the past 15 years, according to the Federal Reserve. Two of the accelerants are obvious: living costs in metros with the highest density of knowledge workers, and technology, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, that moves collaboration and gossip online.

But the early returns from America’s home offices are mixed. In The New York Times, Kevin Roose writes from his makeshift quarantine bunker that remote work impedes the creative sparks that fly when we are interacting with actual people rather than their thumbnails on Slack.

In the 2016 paper “Does Working From Home Work?” a team of economists looked at Ctrip, a 16,000-employee Chinese travel agency that had randomly assigned a small group of its call-center staff to work from home. At first, the experiment seemed like a win-win for workers and owners. Employees worked more, quit less, and said they were happier with their job. Meanwhile, the company saved more than $1,000 per employee on reduced office space. But when Ctrip rolled out this policy to the entire company, it caused a mess. One complaint swamped everything else: Loneliness.

Beyond lost creativity and companionship, the gravest threat to many companies from remote work is that it breaks the social bonds that are necessary to productive teamwork. Several years ago, Google conducted a research project on its most productive groups. The company found that the most important quality was “psychological safety”—a confidence that team members wouldn’t embarrass or punish individuals for speaking up.

[Read: Agoraphobia and the telecommuter]

But online communications can be a minefield for psychological safety, according to Bill Duane, a former Google engineer who now works remotely as a corporate consultant and researcher. “Whenever we read a sentence on Gchat or Slack that seems ambiguous or sarcastic to us, we default to thinking, You fucker!” Duane told me. “But if someone had said the same thing to your face, you might be laughing with them.”

Office banter, bad jokes, and even unctuous corporate talk in the hallways can be dismissed as empty blather. But Duane calls these things “the carrier wave for psychological safety.” Almost everything that doesn’t feel like work at the office is what makes the most creative, most productive work at the office possible.

Remote work might not work for many people in the future. But the status quo is already failing millions of people.

As jobs concentrate in downtown areas without affordable housing, workers’ homes are pushed into the far suburbs. The American commute is a psychological and environmental scourge that increases depression, divorce, and fossil-fuel emissions. The average commute in the U.S. recently hit an all-time record of 27 minutes one-way. That’s almost an hour a day spent away from friends and family, in a machine coughing fumes into the sky. Allowing people to work closer to home—whether at a coffee shop, in a co-working space, or on a couch—could be a win for work-life balance, for happiness, and for the biosphere.

The geographic concentration of jobs also means that the powerful industries are clustered in a handful of rich cities. Eighty percent of U.S. venture-capital investment goes to just three states—California, New York, and Massachusetts—and about 70 percent of all internet-publishing jobs are either in the Acela corridor between Washington and Boston or the western crescent from Seattle to Phoenix. A future with remote work might annoy some, but that annoyance must be weighed against an alternative future where much of the middle class is financially barred from corporate headquarters in finance, media, and tech.

“With housing shortages on the coasts, you have more extremely talented people living outside those metros,” said Hiten Shah, an entrepreneur and adviser to remote-work companies such as Automattic. “As a result, companies have to build remote-work features into their culture to get access to that talent.”

Another downside of headquarter-based work is that the concentration of labor in high-income metros can attract people from the same socioeconomic pool, who share the same ideas and blind spots. “One thing that’s not talked about enough is that being distributed, you have a less homogenous culture,” said Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of the search engine DuckDuckGo, whose workforce is distributed around the world. “Working remotely, people are never forced to get a drink after work. You’re not substituting work socialness for community socialness. They are in their own communities. So you’re really getting real diversity of thought.”

I have presented two pictures of remote work. In one picture, it is a desolate and lonely experience that often saps creativity and collapses the narrow distance between labor and downtime. In the next picture, it is a boon to social life, family life, egalitarianism, neurodiversity, and the planet itself. The messiness of the remote-work picture is a sign of the idea’s infancy.

[Read: The dos and don’ts of ‘social distancing’]

“Right now, remote work isn’t working for most companies,” Shah said. “That’s because we spent the last 120 years learning how people can be productive in an office.” The rise of the telegraph and the railroad in the late 19th century didn’t just give us retail, advertising, and mass distribution; it also gave us managerial capitalism—middle managers, top managers, and modern hierarchies at corporate headquarters. The 21st-century economy has already changed retail, advertising, and mass distribution. Perhaps inevitably it will also change work and management.

But first, companies will have to learn that remote work is different work. Managers will have to get better at judging productivity by setting and monitoring specific goals rather than using the proxy of office attendance. Workers will have to adopt extraordinary conscientiousness when it comes to dividing their day into deep work, office communications, personal time, and civic or family life. Employees will have to develop new habits, such as keeping copious documentation of every meaningful work interaction, so that teams across space and time are always up to speed on what’s happening “down the hall.” And bosses will have to normalize more video conferencing and corporate retreats, because their employees will continue to crave face-to-face interaction.

In the current panic, Twitter is filled with rosy predictions that the virus will be an inflection point in the future of distributed work. But a pandemic is not an appropriate time to determine what kind of labor arrangement is optimally productive on a per-worker basis. It is rather a moment for companies to build out the kind of technology and culture that, when the economy is back to full force, could make remote work easier for those who want to take advantage of it in a future where white-collar work might involve a little less commuting and a little more home.

The other day, I was scrolling through Netflix, looking for a distraction from all the pain of my hair and all my terrible car opinions, seeking out some quality space-travel-focused sci-fi, because I love that crap. As I was scrolling, looking at the thumbnails of the various movies and shows and whatever, I realized…

Read more...

As scarce as Disney+ originals might be at the moment, Disney is apparently being picky about just what reaches its streaming service. Hollywood Reporter sources claim Disney+ developed and ditched three originals in the past year, including an unann...

Black Mesa has had a lengthy development journey, to say the least. In 2006, fans of Half-Life decided to port the game to the then-new Source engine (upon which Half-Life 2 was based). Valve had actually done so itself, but the results were poor. Cr...

Conservation photographer Jennifer Warner visited the Children’s Pool in La Jolla, California on Tuesday in order to photograph the pupping harbor seals that have taken up residence on the beach. She soon noticed some juvenile gulls chasing each another around and causing a ruckus; one of them had what she thought at…

Read more...

South Korea's Korean Air Lines and Asiana Airlines said on Monday they are suspending flights to Daegu, the country's fourth-largest city with the largest number of coronavirus cases, for the time being.

It's not just Facebook and Google fighting false coronavirus information. Twitter has permanently banned financial site and conspiracy promoter Zero Hedge after it shared a story that not only made unsubstantiated claims that a Wuhan-based scientist...

You know how sometimes you just want your car to smell like a glorious pine forest, where it smells so intensely and fiercely piney that you just have to light up a smoke to really appreciate it all? Why shouldn’t you do that? What should stop you from experiencing this joy? Maybe the fact that doing so could blow up…

Read more...

Neal Stephenson's influential Snow Crash is finally poised to reach screens, although you'll have to be picky about where you watch it. HBO Max has ordered work on a TV series adaptation of the sci-fi novel that will be written and co-run by the Sco...

Earlier this year Genius announced it suspected Google of copying its lyrics data -- now it's thrown its weight behind a lawsuit accusing the company of exactly that. According to Genius, lyric licensing company LyricFind pulled lyrics directly from...

If your car was on fire, would you consider running around and yelling “HELP! HELP! My car is on fire? Does anyone have diarrhea and can shit-squirt the fire on my car away?” No? Well, perhaps you should, because languid streams of raw sewage does seem to work for putting out a car fire, as we can see in this Russian…

Read more...

Even before Donald Trump was facing impeachment over his dealings with Ukraine, his indifference toward that country’s fate was a punch line in neighboring Russia.

Vladimir Putin is calling the White House, begins one joke that’s been making the rounds. “Hello, Donald? I would like to discuss Ukraine with you.”

Trump: “What’s Ukraine?”

Putin: “Thanks, Donald!”

This genre of dark political joke—the anekdot—has been a staple of Russian humor at least since Soviet times, and anyone associated with the Kremlin is fair game. Though he’s lampooned far less often than Putin is, Trump has become a subject of numerous anekdoty because of his odd fascination with, and deference to, his counterpart in Moscow. Trump has asked Putin to prove that he never helps Trump, declares one current anekdot. Another asserts, Trump has fired all his intelligence chiefs. He will be getting all information from its source: Putin.

When I was a college student in the U.S.S.R., anekdoty circulated mainly by word of mouth. Today they abound on the internet. (Many of the anekdoty in this article are drawn from online forums; the rest I’m recounting from memory.) They still offer a glimpse into how everyday Russians see their leaders and their country’s relationship with the world. Every society has jokes, of course, but cynical humor serves an additional purpose in societies where the media are under state control and intentional disinformation abounds.

In an environment as repressive as the Soviet Union or, to a considerably lesser degree, Putin’s Russia, anekdoty are a medium by which regular people can comment on the world they observe with their own eyes. During the Cold War, U.S. intelligence agents collected anekdoty—partly because the jokes were funny, and partly because they were, as a former CIA official once told Quartz, “reflective of the public mood.” In the years since, doctoral dissertations and journal papers have mined them as a source of intellectual folklore.

Anekdoty are the only thing I miss about Soviet totalitarian socialism. They spat on the boot on our faces. They asserted dignity among the daily insults of lawlessness; they salvaged truth and sanity in the dizzying spin of propaganda absurdities. The anekdoty I remember best deployed sarcasm and humor against brutality, hypocrisy, and poverty. For example:

How do we know that Adam and Eve were Soviet citizens? They had one apple between the two of them, they had no clothes, and they believed they were living in paradise.

Why do the KGB thugs always walk around in threes? One can read, one can write, and the third keeps an eye on the two intellectuals.

Beyond offering powerless citizens a measure of catharsis and the ability to exact a certain kind of revenge, Soviet-era anekdoty bared the entrails of the regime, chronicled its evolution, and offered portents of its future. In the late 1970s, the perspicacity and the nastiness of jokes about semi-comatose leaders such as Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev presaged the radical change that later arrived with Mikhail Gorbachev.

On a sunny morning, begins one late-Soviet-era joke now memorialized online, Brezhnev goes out on the balcony of his apartment, looks to the east, and says, “Hello, sun!” The sun replies, “Good morning, dear Leonid Ilyich, the beloved leader of our glorious socialist motherland, the hope of all progressive humanity, and the guardian of peace on Earth!” In the evening, Brezhnev admires the beautiful sunset and fishes for a compliment: “Hello again, sun!” The sun answers, “Poshyol na khuy—go fuck yourself—I am in the West now.”

Jokes like these spread most widely when the level of oppression is significant but not overwhelming. Under Joseph Stalin, state terror was ubiquitous and savage. Anekdoty about him did not circulate widely while he was alive, just as there are almost certainly no equivalent jokes about the Kims in North Korea today. In a liberal democracy, meanwhile, political jokes are rendered superfluous by the castigation of top leaders in parliaments and the media, and by citizens’ power to change what the government does.

When Putin became acting president on New Year’s Eve in 1999 and was elected president of a fearless and hopeful Russia three months later, anekdoty about him were in short supply. But soon enough, the new leader was an object of fear. Putin opens the refrigerator and sees a plate of quivering gelatin, one joke went. “Stop shaking!” Putin says. “I am only getting the milk.”

Rampant corruption has now become the target of a new generation of anekdoty: “Vladimir Vladimirovich, how much is two divided by two?” In this widely circulated joke, Putin responds: “As always: one for you and three for me.”

How do the Putins divide their property? another anekdot asked, after Putin divorced his wife, Ludmila, in 2014. The answer: Along the Ural Mountains.

In recent years, Putin has reinvented himself as a wartime president. Yet even before the wars in Ukraine and Syria, and before his incessant touting of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, the government-controlled TV, from which three in four Russians get their news, had been portraying him as the great defender of a fortress Russia that is perennially besieged yet somehow always victorious. The public warmongering grew deafening after the annexation of Crimea.

Over the past two years, the proportion of Russians who tell pollsters they fear war has risen from one-third to one-half. In some anekdoty, there are additional signs of unease. The Russian words krem (cream) and Krym (Crimea) are not perfect homophones but are close enough, as are kolyaska (a baby carriage) and Alyaska (Alaska). Hence the joke in which the former Olympic-champion gymnast Alina Kabaeva, widely rumored to be Putin’s girlfriend and the mother of his child, calls her mother in a panic. I swear I asked him for krem, not Krym, she says. And now I am afraid to even mention a kolyaska!

Russia’s joke-writers also imply that future conquests are only a matter of time. On the Estonian border, another anekdot goes, a border guard is filling out Putin’s entry form. “Occupation?” the officer asks. “Not today,” Putin replies. “Just tourism.”

The official veneration of Putin is all the more jarring today, as the Russian economy is slowing to a crawl. Annual growth has averaged 1 percent over the past decade, and half of a percent since 2013. According to the official state statistical agency, the Roskomstat, 49 percent of Russian families have money only for food and clothes. Not even the ascent of a Moscow-friendly American president provides consolation. As one anekdot online declares: Trump has won! Great! But who are we now going to blame for all our problems?

Whatever Trump’s faults, real or imagined, the anonymous Russian wags who dream up anekdoty do not presume that he will govern indefinitely. Putin is another matter. Although he is ineligible to run again after his current term runs out in 2024, many anekdoty suggest that he will not leave. Here’s one:

“Do you think Putin will ever relinquish the presidency?”

“Of course!”

“When?”

“Immediately after the coronation!”

Amazon's push into sci-fi increasingly entails some of the biggest names in the business, both on-screen and off. After months of waiting, Amazon has ordered a Prime Video series adaptation of William Gibson's sci-fi novel The Peripheral that will b...

Australia has proposed another in a series of zany attempts to control the internet. This time, the government wants to do facial scans to confirm a user's age before they can watch porn or gamble online, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Then,...

Apple isn't cutting corners with its TV+ version of Isaac Asimov's Foundation. The tech giant has cast its first two stars for the show, choosing Chernobyl's Jared Harris (above) to play math genius Hari Seldon and Halt and Catch Fire's Lee Pace as...

Drivers in Auburn Hills, Michigan, got a heck of a surprise last Saturday night when an electronic billboard starting playing porn. The billboard, located alongside I-75 North between University Drive and highway M-59 in Auburn Hills, began playing t...

The U.S. Department of Justice examined using fentanyl in lethal injections as it prepared last year to resume executing condemned prisoners, a then untested use of the powerful, addictive opioid that has helped fuel a national crisis of overdose deaths.

Hulu might not have the answer to The Great Question, but it's cooking up something tHGttG fans may appreciate... if it does things right. The streaming platform is developing an adaptation of Douglas Adams' beloved classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to...

Researchers at Stanford University have created glasses that track your eyes and automatically focus on whatever you're looking at. The so-called autofocals, detailed in a paper published in the journal Science Advances, could prove a better solution...

You may recall that, thanks to an issue with faulty sensors in the Boeing 737 Max flight control systems, those planes have been grounded after multiple crashes were found to be related to the issue. Grounded planes are, by definition, not in the air, and as such need to be stored, on the ground, somewhere. In the…

Read more...

Today Alabama enacted a law that will require, as a condition of parole, that some convicted child sex offenders undergo “chemical castration.”

The new law will mean that those who abused children under the age of 13 will be injected with hormone-blocking drugs before leaving prison. The medication will have to be administered until a judge, not a doctor, deemed it no longer necessary.

A similar bill was proposed last year in Oklahoma but met strong opposition. The former Soviet republic of Moldova also passed a law mandating chemical castration for child sex offenders, in 2012. It was repealed the following year on grounds that it was a “violation of fundamental human rights.”

Unlike castrating a bull, chemical castration does not involve removing a person’s testicles—though the Alabama bill’s sponsor, Representative Steve Hurst, initially advocated the surgical approach. Instead, the procedure uses various drugs to render the testicles irrelevant. In most cases, medication triggers the pituitary gland to reduce testosterone to prepubescent levels. During debate of the bill, Hurst said that if chemical castration, which has a stated goal of decreasing libido to prevent future crimes, “will help one or two children, and decrease that urge to the point that person does not harm that child, it’s worth it.”

If we could put ethical considerations about nonconsensual medical treatment aside, it still wouldn’t be clear whether this approach will have the desired effect on recidivism. Most research in the area puts sexual desire low on the list of reasons people assault children. The best predictor of sexual assault is not libido, research has shown, but “an early and persistent general propensity to act in an antisocial manner during childhood and adolescence.”

The physiological effects of androgen blockers are well established, because the drugs used in chemical castration are also commonly used in people with cancer, especially of the prostate, where testosterone can help tumors grow. In addition to lowering libido and causing sexual dysfunction, the sudden removal of androgenic hormones has been known to impair performance on visual-motor tasks and cause declines in bone density, increased rates of fractures, and depressive symptoms.

It has been well demonstrated that surgical castration, which has been practiced in various places for millennia, makes sex offenders either unwilling or simply unable to commit future offenses. The evidence on chemical castration is much less clear. In the same way that removing the hands of a bread thief could theoretically help prevent future crimes, rendering a person’s genitals less virile makes certain acts less feasible. But unlike other therapeutic approaches, chemical castration (or surgical castration, for that matter) does not address the antisocial instincts that often underlie such crimes.

Some ethicists argue that child offenders are diseased, and it is only humane to treat them—even sometimes without consent. This is predicated on the basic idea that assault is a result of an imbalance of hormones, whereby too much testosterone leads to rape. On the whole, however, sex offenders do not have higher levels of testosterone than the average male. A recent meta-analysis of research found “no evidence to suggest there is anything chemically wrong with sexual offenders.”

Assault is not a typical outlet for those who have strong libidos or think often about sex. The desire to take another person by force has long been known to be primarily about power and dominance. If chemical castration is indeed effective, the meta-analysis notes, “it is not because it is treating an abnormal medical condition, but rather because it is inhibiting sexual functioning in the same way it would for most humans.”

In psychiatry, there are some accepted uses for androgen-blocking medications. As the Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Fred Berlin has noted, in these cases drugs are used for “diminishing the intensity of the eroticized urges that energize unacceptable para-philic behaviors”—in other words, when a person is concerned about acting on urges they know to be wrong or illegal, and so seeks preventive help. Other people seek help when an all-consuming libido becomes a problem in daily life.

Research has found small reductions of recidivism among convicted sex offenders when they request chemical castration in conjunction with other therapeutic measures. Small studies have found that recidivism decreased when offenders received antidepressant medications, not anti-testosterone medications.

These findings largely leave the question of whether the technique should be used to the realms of ethics and legality, not medicine. Some legal scholars believe mandatory chemical castration violates the Eighth Amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishment. The University of Florida law professor John Stinneford has called the practice “maiming” and “impermissibly cruel.” (Hurst, the Alabama bill’s sponsor, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Even when chemical castration is voluntary—which other legal scholars argue can never be the case, due to the coercive subtext of lessening prison sentencing for seeking the procedure—treatment of “hypersexuality” has a loaded history in the United States and elsewhere. The medical establishment and government have long erred on the side of narrowly defining normalcy and punishing “deviancy,” as they have with homosexuality, which was removed from psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders only in 1973.

This change came after researchers began documenting in mainstream journals the wide variations in human sexuality. The range of what was “normal” began to separate from morality and expand to show that the idea of what constitutes sexuality is vast and complex. Today, the psychiatric establishment still uses a diagnosis of hypersexual disorder, but the concept has shifted from a more rigid imposition of norms to an idea about how a person relates to sex. There is no cutoff for what is too much sexuality. Some people have sex multiple times a day; others rarely have sex. Hypersexual disorder is currently defined only insofar as it causes distress: When you lose your job because you need to keep having sex, or when your relationship falls apart because you lose all interest in sex, you may have reason to seek care.

If there is a role for the medical community in preventing assault, it is to help equip willing patients relate to people in healthy ways—to treat whatever psychological element precludes healthful, pro-social behavior. If such people find themselves in court, they could be offered the same option. This has been the suggestion of some physicians in South Korea, for example, who argue that chemical castration can be an effective tool for offenders who want and consent to the treatment “within the context of simultaneous comprehensive psychotherapeutic treatment.” Denmark has implemented options for “sexological treatment” of some sex offenders that includes therapy and androgen-blocking medications.

In every case, though, the suggestion is that this would be consensual, voluntary care. It would heed the words of Berlin, the Johns Hopkins psychiatrist, who writes that chemical castration cannot “effectively assist” a person “who lacks a sense of conscience and moral responsibility by somehow instilling appropriate values.”

To have the state impose mandatory standards of behavior toward other people is one thing; to forcibly regulate someone’s internal sex drive is another.

A man’s fall from a moped caused him much stranger trouble than anyone could have imagined. According to his doctors, a bruise near his genitals left him with a days-long erection—one that eventually required a trip to the emergency room to treat. Thankfully, doctors were able to resolve his awkward complication, and…

Read more...

UFOS—our U.S. Navy pilots just keep seeing them! There was one instance in 2004, first written about in 2017, which made news briefly and then dropped off everyone’s collective radar, and now a New York Times report says that there was another interception in 2014-2015. Here’s what we know about the mystery aircraft.

Read more...

This week, car fans Brayden Tomicic and his wife Payton welcomed into the world little baby “Eaton,” who, an astute scientist could argue, is anatomically less of a human and more of a supercharger.

Read more...

Snapchat has deleted Naughty America's account and taken down the X-rated AR lenses it debuted this week. However, the porn studio isn't backing down quietly, as it's distributing the source files and directions for the lenses, and encouraging fans t...

The central character in Hulu’s new six-part miniseries Catch-22, Captain John Yossarian (played by Christopher Abbott), is nicknamed Yo-Yo, aptly so, since he spends the entirety of the story being yanked back and forth on a fragile cord between life and death. Catch-22 isn’t a perfect adaptation of Joseph Heller’s 1961 book of the same name—both because it’s a four-hour television drama instead of a 450-page novel and because perfectly adapting Heller’s satirical, tart narrative for the screen is probably impossible. But in the sense that a TV show can capture the spirit of something, Catch-22 is magical, maddening, tender, and caustic in equal measure. Its upside-down logic confronts you with the beauty of life and the monstrousness of a war whose only objective is to snuff that beauty out at every opportunity.

Like Heller’s book, Catch-22 launches in the middle of things, although it reworks the nonlinear structure of the book into a more chronological framework. In the first episode, Yossarian is a bombardier completing his pilot training at the Santa Ana Army Air Base. He’s plagued by a puffed-up lieutenant obsessed with military parades (George Clooney), consoled by the lieutenant’s comely wife (Julie Ann Emery), and hopeful that World War II might be over by the time he actually encounters it. Two months later, Yossarian is stationed in Pianosa, Italy, trying to complete a mission count that Colonel Cathcart (Kyle Chandler) keeps increasing every time the pilot gets close. Desperate to stay alive, Yossarian consults the camp doctor (Grant Heslov), who tells him about the catch-22 that governs getting out of combat duty: Anyone who wants to fly is crazy enough to be grounded, but anyone who declares himself to be crazy is obviously sane enough to fly.

This feeling of circular logic as a noose tightening around Yossarian’s neck, coupled with the frenetic energy of the first few episodes and the introduction of a fleet of supporting characters, can make it hard to get absorbed in the action early on. Catch-22, for all the time it spends looking at its protagonist, lingering over Abbott’s flaring nostrils and clenched jaw, gives little sense of who Yossarian actually is, or where he comes from, or what he wants, besides his immediate imperative of staying alive. As with the book, all we get of Yossarian is his presence, like he’s Sisyphus trapped in the underworld and bombs are his boulder. Initially, this distance feels alienating, but Abbott’s performance is so magnetic and so multidimensional that it’s hard not to be drawn in. The first time Yossarian registers the death of a fellow pilot, his face twitches almost imperceptibly. The second time, a much bloodier event that follows a jaunty sequence scored to Benny Goodman’s “Goodbye,” he seems to visibly fracture in front of the camera, as if you can watch his spirit degrading.

This constant flux between light and dark, farce and fatalism, is borne out in the miniseries’ stylistic elements. Clooney, Heslov, and Ellen Kuras take turns directing, all finding balance between scenes of striking loveliness and stark horror. The color palette has a kind of yellowing sepia tone, drawing out the dustiness of camp and the heat of explosions, but making the blue of the Mediterranean more cooling by comparison. The nail-biting action of the combat scenes is contrasted with carefree interludes of the pilots horsing around in the sea: swimming, drinking beer, diving, and dunking one another with a joy that’s as radiant as an aftershave commercial, and as short-lived. Even Yossarian, who stores tension inside every atom of his body, seems to relax in the water.

These fleeting moments of calm aren’t in the book, but on-screen they offer some respite from the claustrophobic irrationality of Catch-22’s events. The series’ writers, Luke Davies and David Michôd, excise some of the uglier moments, such as Yossarian groping a nurse whom he later starts a sexual relationship with. But they double down on the absurdity and doublespeak embedded in the story, in which any desired outcome can be logically reasoned and any truth also embodies its opposite. Chandler’s Colonel Cathcart, a sweating, grimacing, stuffed-khaki-shirt of an officer, demonstrates his bravery by sending other men to their death, and “punishes” Yossarian for an infraction by promoting him and giving him a medal. Yo-Yo’s comrades, meanwhile, get riled up by his persistent panic in Pianosa. “You know the difference between me and you?” McWatt (Jon Rudnitsky) tells him in one scene. “Me: happy happy happy. Dead. You: worry worry worry. Dead. Don’t drag me into your shit.”

While the pared-down plot of Catch-22 means the series almost never drags (a rarity for a streaming show), the flip side is that some supporting characters lose their significance. Aarfy (Rafi Gavron), a pipe-chewing co-pilot who commits a truly monstrous act on a weekend in Rome, seems more like a cipher in the series than what he represents in the book—the ability for American privilege to insulate itself from justice and justify anything it feels like doing. Milo (Daniel David Stewart), a profiteer who embodies the ludicrous essence of unfettered capitalism, gets more attention, but the scale and complexity of his scheming can be confusing. Tessa Ferrer, as Nurse Duckett, also seems capable of doing more than the show allows her space for.

Still, in its final episodes Catch-22 finds its emotional core, as well as its best moments of tragicomedy. There are scenes I can’t stop thinking about for the quiet ways in which they illustrate the cost of conflict, as well as set pieces that take your breath away with their synchronized grace and then their arbitrary horror. Through it all, Yossarian is the lens through which viewers see war, a self-confessed coward who’s by far the bravest man in a battalion. Catch-22, again, isn’t perfect, because Heller’s book is far too prickly and paradoxical for an easy interpretation. But it’s almost always faithful to what Heller wanted to communicate and—in its finest scenes—transcendent.

More than two decades after the last movie, another Mortal Kombat film is on the way. Pre-production will start this month and the cameras are scheduled to start rolling in Adelaide, Australia later this year. South Australia Premier Steven Marshall...

Before the release of Avengers: Endgame, the biggest opening weekend of all time for the U.S. box office was April 27–29, 2018, when the previous entry in the Avengers series, Infinity War, debuted in theaters. That film made a staggering $257 million, and theaters sold $314 million worth of tickets to all movies in total that weekend, the most money ever made in a three-day span at the time. That $314 million figure seemed like a ceiling—there’s only a finite amount of cinema seats available in the country, so if you’re selling out every show, would it even be possible to eclipse a number like that?

Last weekend, Avengers: Endgame did just that, making $356 million over just three days, with theaters selling a total of $392 million worth of tickets for all 45 movies playing that weekend. The owners of the major theater chains sent out triumphant press releases, touting the value of the cinema experience and explaining how they managed to pack in screenings for a movie with an extra-long running time of 182 minutes. Mostly, they pulled it off by sucking all the air out of the room: Recent releases such as Us, Hellboy, and Pet Sematary were largely pushed out of theaters, dropping from more than 1,000 screens apiece, and the weekend’s second-biggest film turned out to be another Marvel movie, the March release Captain Marvel, which offered a superhero alternative if Endgame showtimes were sold out.

So while Endgame is certainly a cause worth celebrating for exhibitors, a big-selling rebuke to the idea that traditional filmgoers are largely content to stay home these days, it’s also a sign that the future of the cinema experience lies largely with colossal event movies. Ticket sales have mostly been down in 2019, as studios rolled out winter offerings such as Alita: Battle Angel and The Lego Movie 2, which failed to connect on a major level with audiences. Big Marvel movies will help buoy the box office, and there are other franchise films on the horizon, mostly produced by Disney, that should be similar smash hits, such as Star Wars: Episode IX, Frozen 2, and remakes such as Aladdin and The Lion King.

Disney has charted an indisputably successful course in offering crowd-pleasing, family-friendly blockbusters that demand to be seen on opening weekend, not just for the epic visuals but also to avoid being spoiled on plot details. But this means that other big studios have scrambled to echo that approach rather than find their own. Sony teamed with Disney to release a new series of Spider-Man movies, and has launched Venom and other planned spin-offs within the partnership. Warner Bros. has pushed out films based on the DC Comics world to mixed reception, with new heroes such as Wonder Woman and Aquaman being hits, but expected slam-dunk team-ups such as Justice League falling flat. Universal is trying to turn its Fast & Furious movies into a universe of their own, with the awkwardly titled Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw coming this August.

All these efforts are designed to tap into the unique cultural appeal of the Marvel movies, which over 11 years have built up unprecedented audience goodwill around the world. The global total for Endgame’s opening week was more than $1.2 billion, another record, mostly thanks to a colossal $330 million take in China, where Marvel has found a foothold that other brands such as Star Wars have not. For box-office watchers, the next question is whether Endgame can eclipse the all-time domestic and worldwide sales records currently held by Star Wars: The Force Awakens (which made $936 million domestically) and Avatar (which made $2.7 billion globally). Both of those were Christmas films, which tend to have longer shelf lives in theaters because of the dearth of big studio offerings in January and February; Endgame will face bigger competition over the summer. But it might still beat all comers.

Every prior box-office-record holder has succeeded as a cultural milestone of sorts. Avatar pioneered new 3-D technology in cinemas; Titanic was a word-of-mouth sensation that drew teenagers in for multiple viewings; Jurassic Park marked the dawn of the CGI era; and Star Wars and Jaws were the dawn of the blockbuster itself. If Endgame bests them all, it’ll be thanks to overwhelming audience loyalty to an entire brand, a 22-film series reaching a satisfyingly undeniable conclusion (though there’s still room for plenty more Marvel movies in the future). For Disney, that’s a vindication of a decade-long strategy. For the rest of the film industry, it could sound a death knell for any other theatrical approach.