Going back to the well of great science-fiction novels I should have read long ago but didn’t, here’s one that I now believe is the single best depiction of the literal end of the world. This book is singularly focused on a slow and detailed description of exactly how the Earth is destroyed and has little else. Even the identity and motivations of the alien attackers are left as mere guesses. The aliens are simply so much more powerful than humans that they don’t even need to explain themselves and there is no question of fighting back. The downsides are that it’s very USA-centric so we have little idea of what is happening in the rest of the world and there are no women point of view characters. But I admire its audacity and like it a lot.
This was Luis Buñuel penultimate film and also one of his most highly regarded ones so it naturally belongs on my list. I have neither liked all of Buñuel’s work that I’ve seen nor can claim to understand them all. But I’m confident that just about everyone will find this black comedy hilarious even if you don’t much care for making sense of it. Since it has an episodic structure, there’s no overall story to track and you can take in the absurdity of each situation on its own. But if you do put your mind to it, you can try to discern a deeper meaning to it and that’s why Buñuel is such a genius of cinema.
I believe this is the first DreamWorks animated film we’ve seen in a very long while as the revamped studio title card stood out for me. I added this to my list as I’ve heard about the successful children’s book series it was adapted from and it does have great reviews. Initial impressions were great due to its vibrant visuals and watercolor-based art style. But the writing is nothing special at all, being an updated version of the standard mother-child bonding story. Mind you, it’s not a bad execution at all but it doesn’t deserve its rave reviews and it’s very much a film aimed only at children.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi is probably Japan’s mostly highly regarded director of the moment and we’ve already seen a few of his works. This one was shot with non-professional actors and a visibly low budget. I only warmed to it at the scene where the representatives of the developer meet the local residents. Pegging it as a film about NIMBYism, I was instantly hooked. Yet Hamaguchi is a far more complex and subtle director than that and the ending left me stunned. I had to think about it for a bit and look up what others had to say about it online to get what it means. It does sort of make sense and explains the film’s title but I don’t think this will be among my favorite of this director’s works.
I’ve skipped a whole string of major biopics of famous musicians because they were only mediocre as films. Still, the great thing about the genre is that they’re easy to watch and you can be certain that at least the music is enjoyable. This one places the music in an even more central role than most and barely even attempts to be a biography of Bob Dylan. It covers only a tiny slice of the legendary singer’s life from 1961 to 1965 and aims to relate the mythos rather the facts. By its end, we don’t get to really know who Dylan is but we do get to understand why his rise as a folk singer was such a big deal and that’s a worthy story in of itself.
I opted not to watch this series when it popped up on Netflix but changed my mind after watching Thunderbolts of all things. Part of the creative team for what must be the best MCU entry in years also worked on Beef and the shared DNA is especially obvious in the very last episode. The series starts off with a bang as a road rage incident between two strangers escalates into a protracted feud. I loved it as a deep dive of two psychologically damaged people who allow a minor incident destroy their lives. I liked it less though when it starts spreading itself too thinly by developing the supporting characters. It’s good but maybe tone down on the crazy escalation and dramatic twists.
I always prefer it when the science news is both highly significant and relatively easy to understand and directly relevant. Most of the articles in this batch seem to fit these criteria.
We’ll start with the news that is the least approachable but it’s really not that bad. Since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) started delivering data, the results have seriously challenged longstanding assumptions in cosmology. The latest one is a claim that the mysterious Little Red Dots seen by the telescope is a primordial black hole with the mass of 50 million Suns. The issue is that according to our current understanding of how galaxies are formed, it should be impossible for such massive black holes to form so early in the history of the universe. So this adds more evidence that to the gathering pile that present theories about the birth and expansion of the universe are just wrong.
Next we have the discovery that a single mutation in horses led to them becoming rideable by humans and thence changed the course of history. The gene in question is called GSDMC and the researchers the date of the mutation to about 4,200 years ago. In horses, this mutation is known to reshape vertebrae, improve motor coordination and boost limb strength. They were able to show that the frequency of the mutated GSDMC variant shot from 1% to nearly 100% in a few centuries as humans specifically bred horses with the mutation they spread all across Eurasia.
One uplifting bit of news is the discovery of a process that turns plastic into fuel at 95% efficiency in one step. Other processes already exist but they include dechlorination as a separate step for PVC to avoid releasing toxic compounds. Their new process is apparently do it in a single step and handle mixed PVC materials and polyolefin waste, which includes both polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), together. There’s no mention of how expensive this is or whether this can be scaled but it still sounds like good news to me.
There’s been a great deal of debate lately about allowing smartphones in classrooms with many countries opting for a ban. This paper which covers a randomized controlled trial involving 17,000 students found that a ban did result in better grades, but the improvement was very minor. Perhaps more significantly, they also found that students exposed to the ban became more supportive of phone-use restrictions, suggesting that a ban might be popular with both parents and students. Yet this is very far from the last word on this issue as others have pointed out that the study fails to account for the possible benefits of using smartphones in schools. This is one area in which many commentators feel like they need to have their say.
