Maybe, suggests the defeated interviewer, "Inland Empire" should be approached like James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake": Accessible as lyrical art, but filled with puzzles for those wanting to go deeper. Lynch nods, swigging one of his tepid cappuccinos. "Yes, with James Joyce, word combinations conjure things. He uses them as an art form and a language for abstractions. Cinema is its own language. As the sound and picture get going and things begin to happen, it can get pretty abstract, but it's a language that says something that can't be said in words -- or maybe could, by a poet."

"I like films that hold abstractions," he says. " 'Getting it' is a subjective thing, because we're all different, and each interpretation is as valid as another. The audience is putting things together as they go. If there's a bump in the intellectual understanding, let it happen. Have that experience, and then later mull things over. Let intuition kick in. It's a higher knowingness. If you try to put it into concrete terms, you're gonna block it."

One thing we read was a quote that I’ve known for years, and loved, from Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, who said that we can only understand our life backwards, but we’re forced to live it forwards. And I think that’s the confusion we all feel, is that we always learn too late. We go through things that are completely inexplicable and mysterious. And then years later, we realize.

She suddenly starts realizing how she is building an experience of relationships, and how all the paradoxes that you see specifically in the film show how she is trapped in one role in one relationship then takes on a completely different role in the next one—maybe even the role of the other partner in the first one. You’re on different sides of the fence in certain discussions, going forward. And you become a richer person through those sometimes painful experiences, a more whole person and perhaps a more accepting person in terms of accepting others.

There’s a great book by a British writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, which came out a few years ago, called Missing Out, where he says that, in the therapy room, what he experiences with people a lot is that he realizes that people live their whole life with this big, imagined part of themselves. All the what ifs that never happened. That relationship they think they might or should have had or would have in the future, if they only broke away from the relationship they were in. Or that job they’re going to start doing one day. And it actually becomes your self-perception and your feeling of identity. And, suddenly, life has passed. And that whole imagined self was also a part of who you were, but it was unspoken or unlived. And this is life.

I thought that was an interesting notion, the negotiation between the imagined self and the real self that plays out in time. That’s a big theme that I can make several films about, but this one was specifically through the character of Julie.

I don’t really believe that we can see ourselves fully. So much is subconscious. There’s so much history and so much memory that we can’t access.

That’s the feedback we’re getting from people who’ve watched the film, is that it’s okay to be ambivalent and feel that things are not in full order. If we can add a consoling notion around that, I think we’re good.

The idea in psychology of “good enough” can be fine. Maybe there is a life where not everyone becomes that unique snowflake that we are all raised to believe that we have to be to be anything. Maybe there is a place of acceptance in a simpler life, a less turbulent life, without feeling that we’re losing the progressivity of thought or humanity in our own personal life. Maybe the exterior appearance of that success is less interesting than fulfilling it on a more intimate level, in one’s personal life. I don’t know. These are big questions, and I don’t want to come off as pretentious. But I think you’re touching on something that we indirectly have talked about a lot in making this film. Julie is this slightly idealized child from early on. She has good grades. She got into medical school. And she feels this pressure to do something really special. That is complicated for her.

what if COVID allowed people to take that step that they had been yearning for, sometimes, to say that the meritocratic society that we live in—particularly in America but also in Norway, to a large extent—where we are feeling that we are so responsible for fulfilling the utmost potential of ourselves, and we carry that alone, that that is a quite a stifling notion for a lot of people? That’s quite a heavy burden to carry: to feel that if you don’t do the greatest thing you could do, you’re a loser.

There wasn't that kind of clarity from a musical position on Queer. He threw out lots of different things that were kind of riddles to solve, but, eventually, what we decided on was leaning into Burroughs and the idea of the cut-up technique and using samplers. It felt like an organic way to tell the story musically.

Reznor: I just found some notes from a call with Luca. So I'll read [them to] you. Here was our directions: "Love could feel like dread—Stockhausen. Lee towards lover—engulfing, overwhelming, an uncompromising approach. He's a broken, lonely man—unknown reciprocation, unsure throughout, but still beautiful. I like the scale of an orchestra—bipolar. Make the score bipolar. Burroughs was like this, from Old America, but contemporary—the score should be like that. Maybe electronic element—Ayahuasca." Okay—go write a score.

the original cut was significantly longer, at least an hour longer than what's in theaters now. And a lot of what was taken out was a more surreal element that was exciting and alters the way the film feels quite a bit. When a lot of that got removed, it was hard for us to understand what the film became, because it shifted the tone of it quite a bit in certain ways.

It became disorienting at times to also quantify the impact the whole film has. You know what I mean? We're watching three-minute chunks, a week of this three-minute and then a week of that seven-minute segment, assuming it sits atop the scaffolding that got us there and leads to what's happening.

sometimes, when you start taking those pieces out, it becomes harder to understand. What you're working on is now affected because it doesn't have that stuff you know is there because you watched it, but it's not there. That's the part of filmmaking that I find tricky. We've experienced it with [David] Fincher as well on some things. To be able, as a director, to remain objective with that many moving parts, that's what feels... When people have said, “Do you ever think about directing?”—it's like, I've thought about how I know I couldn't do it. I thought about, “Well, I'd like to do it,” but it's like, the ability to be able to remain objective about so many things, that feels daunting to me. And as composers we feel like we're able to microscope in to get really close up on things.

Guadagnino said in a press release shared with Our Era, “What struck me most was the strangeness of it — it’s the most accessible of his works, but what connected me to it was something I could feel within myself at the time: the idea of craving contact with somebody who reflects you, who you connect with on the deepest conceivable level.”

Craig disclosed he would have worked with Guadagnino on any opportunity, but, to be able to work with him on this specific film, Craig felt incredibly gracious. He wanted to show viewers that Lee’s addiction doesn’t define him. His discomfort with who he is does; causing him to always look for an escape in something, someone or some place.

For characters to fully come to life on-screen, as one sees with Starkey and Allerton and Craig and Lee, the cast needs to feel the story is in good hands. That comfortability and care oozing on set is what allowed Craig and Starkey to let go of who they are and go the distance emotionally and mentally to become their characters’ complicated selves.

While Queer depicts a very specific time and place, its themes - longing, loneliness, and the limits of what we can seek in another person; what they can do for us and what we must do for ourselves - remains universal.

“In my mind, the images and sets for Queer had to be coming through the eyes and mind of Burroughs,” says Guadagnino. “Thirty years after I started thinking about the novel as a movie, I was still committed to the idea of recreating Mexico City, Panama City and Ecuador as if these were artificial places reflecting the anguish and desire and imagery of Burroughs’ source material,” Guadagnino said in a press note shared with Our Era.

For the first two parts of the movie Lee has a certain undoneness to his clothing with his Hemingway silhouette. This contrast to Allerton’s uptight, refined and juvenile collegiate look creates a sort of sexual allure to him that captivates Lee upon laying eyes on Allerton for the first time. Their costumes highlight the two men’s stark incongruities - their age, their stations in life, their psychology.

The liberation created on set is what queer people seek to obtain.

There’s an oppressed feeling from both characters. Most times, it felt like Lee and Allerton were slightly cracking themselves open into who they were; always running to some place or to someone new. While the two men were able to open with one another at times, this film shows their personal struggles with being queer. Open queerness is a freedom that is priceless, but a price Lee and Allerton cannot afford. It’s this lack of freedom that many queer people experienced in the 20th century that creates a turmoil in them that leads them to feel that freedom through other means: seeking what others can offer.

Now that I have more of an understanding of filmmaking and an understanding of costume within film, it’s helped me build a team around it—and I would like to continue doing it, because for me, it’s a great escape from my job. It helps me balance out a bit, and being creative without the commerce element feels like a very different exercise—it’s about characterization, and there’s no preciousness around it representing just one vision.

That’s what I love about very good cinema: Those textures you find in the 1950s or ’60s with the clothing—it’s never just a flat surface. You have Lee, played by Daniel, at the beginning wearing this shirt that’s optic white…. [There’s] this idea of it being pristine, like cocaine. By the end of it, after his heroin trip and everything else getting darker and darker, it becomes dirtier…. I like following those threads. With costume, you can do things like that which are more subtle, whereas sometimes with fashion, it has to be loud for people to grab on. In film, you have to lure the audience in and let them know who the character is in a way that unfolds. It’s not about the bang of fashion where it’s a 15-minute show that has to sell you this one idea.

What I find amazing about these pieces is that, as you said, they could be plucked out of a store today, and I did quite like having those things in the film—because sometimes we feel like we’re inventing everything now, but then you realize there were people in the past who were even further ahead than we are.

As the creative director of a fashion house—or two fashion houses—you’re always the decision-maker and the person everyone is turning to to weigh in on everything and have the final say. Working as the costume designer, did it feel pleasant to relinquish that total control for a little while? Yes, I enjoy it. It’s quite nice sometimes to be submissive in life. [Laughs.] I quite like not being in that driving seat all the time, because it makes you think differently when you’re back in the driving seat. I think it’s really helped me with my journey within fashion. It’s nice to restart—it keeps your feet on the ground. I think, in fashion, it’s very easy to levitate off the ground. It helped me to rechallenge myself, and to have those moments in Rome where I really felt like a student again, saying, “I don’t know how this works—but how do I make it work?”

I think with Loewe, for example, it might have affected the way I really reduced the menswear down in the recent show. It became a form of textural classicism—very precise. And I think Allerton may have inspired this idea of building a perfection that is almost like an armor, but then ultimately, you see that there are holes in it—in the trouser, in the sweater. It all looks very together at first, but then you realize it’s not.

I think it’s really important for me to keep doing my day job, because it sharpens my knife outside of it. And I think they can dovetail into one another.

We were actually introduced by Karla Otto. It was one of those meetings where I felt like I had known Luca all my life. We were meant to just have a coffee, but then we chatted all afternoon. I just feel like we are searching for the same things but in different fields, so it’s really nice to be able to collaborate in this way—which requires a huge amount of trust in each other—but pushing each other too. And there are not many people, I think, who understand clothing as deeply as Luca does.

I think Allerton may have inspired this idea of building a perfection that is almost like an armor, but then ultimately, you see that there are holes in it—in the trouser, in the sweater. It all looks very together at first, but then you realize it’s not.

there were plenty of memorable moments for Jonathan Anderson—but few were quite as awe-inspiring as his first day of filming, walking through the back lot of Rome’s legendary Cinecittà Studios. “One of my favorite films is Sunset Boulevard, and it reminded me of the scene when Norma goes to the studios, and there’s just cinema happening,” Anderson says over Zoom from Los Angeles, where Queer had premiered the night before, with genuine wide-eyed wonderment. “You enter into one of those dark spaces and find a stage lit as a 1950s Mexican street. Then you’re in the middle of the jungle. If you were to ask a child what cinema is, it would be this.”

I don’t think we were clear enough by saying fewer people came in under President Biden than came under Donald Trump. It’s clarity of the message, and if that’s what Bernie’s talking about, and that’s what Joe Manchin’s talking about, we weren’t clear in our message as to what things are, then I agree with that. And that was one of the concerns I expressed about saying we haven’t put forth what was done. It’s our legacy, too. [Pelosi bangs on the table.] The rescue package. [Pelosi bangs on the table.] Infrastructure Bill. [Pelosi bangs on the table again.] The CHIPS Act. But that didn’t come across as well as it should have. So I think if you’re talking about messaging, you’re talking about communications, that’s one thing. If you’re talking about what we stand for versus what they stand for, the public’s in for a big surprise.

I think that any vice president is, like it or not, tied to the record of the president. I think what Biden did was great, and being tied to his record is a great thing but not the way the record was perceived. This is a record of job creation. Sixteen million jobs as opposed to the record of her opponent who had the worst job-creation record since Herbert Hoover. Yes, 16 million jobs, turning around inflation, all the things that we did to build the infrastructure of America, reduce the cost of prescription drugs.

President Trump has promised to use the Justice Department and the attorney general to go after his perceived enemies. He has said that over and over again, and you’re one of them. Well, you would think that that would be enough reason for people not to vote for him. But that’s what he said. So when people say to me, “Why do you think our democracy is in danger?” I’ll say, well, let’s define our democracy. What is democracy? Free and fair elections? Peaceful transfer of power, independence of the judiciary, the rule of law, all of those kinds of things are part of a democracy. So if he’s going after those things, and thank God, the only, shall we say, peace of mind that we have today is that we don’t have the assault on the system that would have been there had Kamala Harris won. That isn’t right. It shouldn’t be that way. And that he would say — maybe thought it, might even want to do it, but to say it and the American people will say, “That’s OK with me ”?

What’s your relationship now to the work back then? Are you as passionate? I really had to think about that. My analysis of that is, you’re a different person with different needs. A lot of that is based on confidence. When you’re starting out in an art form or anything in life, you can’t have confidence because you don’t have experience, and you can only get confidence through experience. But you have to be pretty confident to make a film. So the only way you counterbalance that lack of experience and confidence is absolute passion, fanatical spirit. And I’ve had this conversation over the years with filmmaker friends: Am I as passionate as I was in my 20s? Would I risk my whole life? If it was my best friend or my negative drowning, which do I save? The 20-something self goes, I’m saving my film! Now it’s not that answer. I’m not ashamed to say that, because all that passion doesn’t go away. It disperses a little healthfully. I’m passionate about more things in the world. I care about more things, and that serves me. The most fascinating relationship we all have is to ourselves at different times in our lives. You look back, and it’s like, I’m not as passionate as I was at 25. Thank God. That person was very insecure, very unkind. You’re better than that now. Hopefully.

there are three big categories of barriers. The application barrier, the interview barrier, and the document barrier. And that’s what we spent most of our time iterating on and building a system that could slowly learn about those barriers and then intervene against them.

The application is asking, “Are you convicted of this? Are you convicted of that? Are you convicted of this other thing?” What is that saying to you, as a person, about what the system thinks of you?

Often they’ll call from a blocked number. They’ll send you a notice of when your interview is scheduled for, but this notice will sometimes arrive after the actual date of the interview. Most state agencies are really slammed right now for a bunch of reasons, including Medicaid unwinding. And many of the people assisting on Medicaid are the same workers who process SNAP applications. If you missed your phone interview, you have to call to reschedule it. But in many states, you can’t get through, or you have to call over and over and over again. For a lot of people, if they don’t catch that first interview call, they’re screwed and they’re not going to be approved.

getting to your point about how a website can fix this —  the end result was lowest-burden application form that actually gets a caseworker what they need to efficiently and effectively process it. We did a lot of iteration to figure out that sweet spot.

We didn’t need to do some hard system integration that would potentially take years to develop — we were just using the system as it existed. Another big advantage was that we had to do a lot of built-in data validation because we could not submit anything that was going to fail the county application. We discovered some weird edge cases by doing this.

A lot of times when you want to build a new front end for these programs, it becomes this multiyear, massive project where you’re replacing everything all at once. But if you think about it, there’s a lot of potential in just taking the interfaces you have today, building better ones on top of them, and then using those existing ones as the point of integration.

Government tends to take a more high-modernist approach to the software it builds, which is like “we’re going to plan and know up front how everything is, and that way we’re never going to have to make changes.” In terms of accreting layers — yes, you can get to that point. But I think a lot of the arguments I hear that call for a fundamental transformation suffer from the same high-modernist thinking that is the source of much of the status quo.

If you slowly do this kind of stuff, you can build resilient and durable interventions in the system without knocking it over wholesale. For example, I mentioned procedural denials. It would be adding regulations, it would be making technology systems changes, blah, blah, blah, to have every state report why people are denied, at what rate, across every state up to the federal government. It would take years to do that, but that would be a really, really powerful change in terms of guiding feedback loops that the program has.

when you start to read about civic technology, it very, very quickly becomes clear that things that look like they are tech problems are actually about institutional culture, or about policy, or about regulatory requirements.

If you have an application where you think people are struggling, you can measure how much time people take on each page. A lot of what technology provides is more rigorous measurement of the burdens themselves. A lot of these technologies have been developed in commercial software because there’s such a massive incentive to get people who start a transaction to finish it. But we can transplant a lot of those into government services and have orders of magnitude better situational awareness.

There’s this starting point thesis: Tech can solve these government problems, right? There’s healthcare.gov and the call to bring techies into government, blah, blah, blah. Then there’s the antithesis, where all these people say, well, no, it’s institutional problems. It’s legal problems. It’s political problems. I think either is sort of an extreme distortion of reality. I see a lot of more oblique levers that technology can pull in this area.

LLMs seem to be a fundamental breakthrough in manipulating words, and at the end of the day, a lot of government is words. I’ve been doing some active experimentation with this because I find it very promising. One common question people have is, “Who’s in my household for the purposes of SNAP?” That’s actually really complicated when you think about people who are living in poverty — they might be staying with a neighbor some of the time, or have roommates but don’t share food, or had to move back home because they lost their job.

I’ve been taking verbatim posts from Reddit that are related to the household question and inputting them into LLMs with some custom prompts that I’ve been iterating on, as well as with the full verbatim federal regulations about household definition. And these models do seem pretty capable at doing some base-level reasoning over complex, convoluted policy words in a way that I think could be really promising.

caseworkers are spending a lot of their time figuring out, wait, what rule in this 200-page policy manual is actually relevant in this specific circumstance? I think LLMS are going to be really impactful there.

It is certainly the case that I’ve seen some productive tensions in counties where there’s more of a mix of that and what you might consider California-style Republicans who are like, “We want to run this like a business, we want to be efficient.” That tension between efficiency and big, ambitious policies can be a healthy, productive one. I don’t know to what extent that exists at the state level, and I think there’s hints of more of an interest in focusing on state-level government working better and getting those fundamentals right, and then doing the more ambitious things on a more steady foundation.

California seemed to really try to take every ambitious option that the feds give us on a whole lot of fronts. I think the corollary of that is that we don’t necessarily get the fundamental operational execution of these programs to a strong place, and we then go and start adding tons and tons of additional complexity on top of them.

I’m so viscerally disgusted by 95% of the things that I have to do to promote this movie. To operate in these hallowed halls of capitalism and not feel absolutely insane, it requires some kind of taking the red pill. Or privilege-tinted sunglasses.

“‘The Matrix’ is very in conversation with trans themes that my work is also interested in: this feeling of unreality that can be a potent metaphor for being trans in the world or figuring out that you’re trans,” they continue

I’m very suspicious of any externalized representation of transness,” Schoenbrun confesses. “Trans experience is something that’s classically represented by Hollywood as this very external force, when actually it is so internal.

Back to “The Matrix” and feeling not quite right in the world: that is a much more potent, relatable way of talking about how it feels to be trans but not quite understand it yet. As opposed to, ‘I looked in the mirror and wanted beautiful lashes and locks.’”

“I worked really hard to make this film weird, like a provocation,” Schoenbrun says. “I’m structuring my life in a way where I can keep my values and my gaze outside of a system. I describe it sometimes as angry sex between art and commerce.”

“To be trans is not just a thing I was born with, but a political ideology and a decision to exist in a certain way that’s non-normative and challenging the hegemonic structures of power,” Schoenbrun continues. “I want to stay a person who I like. Too much power and too much collaboration with a system of power, I start to get hives.”

“Everyone has a Maddy. Most queer people have someone who’s shepherded them through the discovery of their own queerness.”

VCs need to believe that your company could be a billion-dollar business and generally lack imagination — you need to paint a vivid picture of this path for them, starting with the striking protagonist character you play in your company’s story.Your alter ego should never lie, but it should be completely comfortable showing the fullest expression of your ambition to people who probably intimidate you. Fundraising is a snap judgment game — most VCs are trying to pattern-match you to a founder archetype who already won. They index primarily on IQ, self-belief, experience, and personability (in that order). A general rule of thumb is that to be taken seriously in SV, male founders would benefit from acting warmer, while female founders are taken more seriously when they act colder. Both benefit from acting a little entitled.

a VC’s job is to make a diversified portfolio of bets — you are only one. Most founders find being around VCs distracting and draining because they feel pressure to perform the role of ‘impressive person.’ If you can’t immediately capture value from your performance… why waste your energy?

don’t expect the average investor to provide much value beyond money and connections. This makes the 10% of investors who can be legitimately useful to your business worth their weight in gold. Develop litmus tests to identify the valuable ones quickly and avoid wasting your time trying to convince nonbelievers.

our goal here is to spend as little time fundraising as possible — which requires being strategic about the order in which you talk to investors and how you talk about where things stand as you progress through the raise. The combined force of controlling those two variables are what “generates momentum” during your fundraise process.

Make a list of all the investors you know and can get introduced to, ordering them by the ones you most want on board to the ones you couldn’t care less aboutTalk first to a few low-stakes investors at the bottom of your list to practice your pitch and identify common investor questions and critiques you’re going to getIf available to you, next get a few investors who already wanted to give you money on board so you have a dollar amount you can say you’ve raisedWork your way up your investor list, talking to the investors you most-want-on-board-but-still-need-to-convince last (this optimizes your odds they say yes)

This all goes by much faster if you court investors similarly to how hot girls treat their many potential suitors. If your raise is already a little taken and you exude an air that you don’t need them, mimetically-minded investors become much more interested.

If you’re anything like me, you will worry intensely about not making a fool of yourself. It will probably go ok, but not as amazing or illuminating as you’d hoped. You might leave and feel a deep sense of lostness set in. This is all very normal. In time you will see them in increasing clarity, often noticing the differences between your and their values and why you would not enjoy living their life at all.

the people on pedestals probably hate being there. It’s lonely, hard to trust that the intentions of the new people around you are pure, and you often feel like you’re constantly letting people down. In the end, idolization hurts everyone involved.

Beware of intellectual dementors and clout demonsIntellectual dementors will try to eat your ideas and interestingness — not necessarily to copy you, but to wring your brain dry to amass knowledge themselves. They often play mini IQ games/tests of will in conversation and masquerade as investors while never actually investing. Clout demons are similar, but view people less as brains and more as stepping stones towards supreme social status. The power move to protect yourself from both is to simply abstain from playing their games — give as little info on yourself and your ideas as possible and reflect their questions directly back at them.

People will help you if you ask for what you want clearly and concisely

Knowing what you want requires a lot of upfront soul-searching, followed by strategic and long-term thinking once you’ve committed to a thing (I can’t really demystify this more). Once you’re all in, I highly recommend diligently keeping a list somewhere of the top three things you currently need help with so when people ask, you’re ready.

You don’t want to make people feel like you’re using them but you do want to use your social capital for things you care about. General rule of thumb: ask for things either 1) after a positive interaction or 2) completely out of the blue with a concisely written and compelling email/text. Tone matters because you don’t want to sound desperate and you do want to show you know how to play the game (write like the founder you most admire talks).

once we’ve taken action on behalf of something, our brain assigns more value to said thing. Tim Keller: “The feeling of love follows the action of love.” Love is a strong word here, but the point stands — help people help you. Startups are long-term games, so it only makes sense to do them with people you truly want to be around for a very long time.

if you just think about the business model of the internet as — there’s a box that you can upload some content into, and then there’s an algorithm between you and an audience, and some audience will find the stuff you put in the box, and then you put an infinity amount of stuff into the box, all of that breaks.

more and more of the stuff that you consume is designed around pushing you towards a transaction. That’s weird. I think there’s a vast amount of white space in the culture for things that are not directly transactable.

We constantly ask huge amounts of the population to do things that are very rote. Keep inputting this data on forms, keep filling out this tax form. Some lawyers arguing for the Supreme Court, a lot of them just write up various contracts. And that’s a good job in the sense that it pays well, it’s inside work, but it doesn’t ask you to be that full of a human being.

I think a lot of organizations are not set up for a lot of people to use judgment and discernment. They treat a lot of people like machines, and they don’t want them doing things that are complicated and step out of line and poke at the assumptions in the Excel doc. They want the Excel doc ported over without any mistakes.

I think a lot of organizations are not set up for a lot of people to use judgment and discernment. They treat a lot of people like machines, and they don’t want them doing things that are complicated and step out of line and poke at the assumptions in the Excel doc.

I distinctly remember life before computers. It’s an experience that I had quite viscerally. And that shapes my view of these tools. It shapes my view of these companies. Well, there’s a huge generation now that only grew up in this way. There’s a teenage generation right now that is only growing up in this way. And I think their natural inclination is to say, well, this sucks. I want my own thing. I want my own system of consuming information. I want my own brands and institutions.And I don’t think that these big platforms are ready for that moment. I think that they think they can constantly be information monopolies while they are fending off A.I.-generated content from their own A.I. systems. So somewhere in there all of this stuff does break. And the optimism that you are sensing from me is, well, hopefully we build some stuff that does not have these huge dependencies on platform companies that have no interest at the end of the line except a transaction.

these models in their most reductive essence are just statistical representations of the past. They are not great at new ideas.And I think that the power of human beings sort of having new ideas all the time, that’s the thing that the platforms won’t be able to find. That’s why the platforms feel old. Social platforms like enter a decay state where everyone’s making the same thing all the time. It’s because we’ve optimized for the distribution, and people get bored and that boredom actually drives much more of the culture than anyone will give that credit to, especially an A.I. developer who can only look backwards.

the idea is, in my mind at least, that those people who curate the internet, who have a point of view, who have a beginning and middle, and an end to the story they’re trying to tell all the time about the culture we’re in or the politics we’re in or whatever. They will actually become the centers of attention and you cannot replace that with A.I. You cannot replace that curatorial function or that guiding function that we’ve always looked to other individuals to do.

I think as the flood of A.I. comes to our distribution networks, the value of having a powerful individual who curates things for people, combined with a powerful institution who protects their integrity actually will go up. I don’t think that’s going to go down.

Guadagnino brought them Challengers, which will be released this month. Reznor said, “He started us down a path, saying, ‘What if it was very loud techno music through the whole film?’ ” (This is exactly what it turned out to be.)“I wish I had his notes,” Ross said of Guadagnino. “His notes were so fucking funny on what each piece was meant to do.”“Oh, yeah,” Reznor said. “ ‘Unending homoerotic desire.’ It was all a variation on those three words.”

the early television speaker technology was closer in design to a telephone: built to maximize vocal range over other things. But in Cinema we’re a lot more free. This was mixed in Dolby Atmos, native. So sound was always a very key strategy.

I think TV is so dialogue-driven because in the early days, you couldn’t really have very cinematic images. You’re just looking at a small screen. What are you gonna do? You gotta tell me the story with talking.

our aim in Dune, which is a vast ensemble piece with a complex story and complex backgrounds and Frank Herbert’s almost fractal approach to storytelling, we had to have utter clarity and delivery of ideas.

There’s been some recent discussion about burdensome amounts of dialogue in film because of the influence of Television. From my background in Britain, it’s probably something I recognize more as the heritage of Radio and Theater rather than Television.

What’s the pace, the overall pace of a film? When I say pace, I don’t just mean how fast the cuts are. I mean what is moving you, underneath? What is the big drive in the story and how do we cross-cut those? If you cut off the flow too soon, it’s just an age old editing conundrum.  In TV often – Mad Men for example is constantly doing the Chinese plate trick of going between different story strands, keeping each plate spinning, and that works in TV because of the medium.

in a feature film where you want a strong feeling of drive, it’s sometimes a better idea to kind of combine stories or to let them flow. I’m basically playing with Paul’s story, the Harkonnen story, and on Jessica laying “the Way." Irulan’s diaries always gave us an opportunity to clarify their progress. And to that end, Denis shot a beautiful amount of material of the diary room.

There wer so many more angles than we needed because he knew that we might need to improvise one [a diary scene] and we did.

There are certain design principles you can apply to this like composition, hierarchy, color theory, and so on, but to the regular consumer, it’s the gestalt of all your design decisions that ultimately makes an emotional connection. We know emotion is so much of what drives purchasing behavior so the more nebulous goal of visual design is often pulling those levers in just the right ratio to elicit a desired connection to your product.

ven something as foundational as increasing white space in your design can instantly improve a customer’s perception of your brand’s worth when it’s done intentionally.

almost all clients agree that they need better look and feel in their digital experience, that they are looking to add some type of emotional signal that’s missing. But when it comes time to accept changes that address those problems, I’ve had several instances where clients are resistant to solutions that depart too significantly from what they’re already comfortable with. Usually that reservation is overcome when I correlate the visual changes to the ways in which the user experience is improved and the resulting impact on business performance. There will be also times when a client expresses to us that they’ve never been satisfied with their brand or website and they point to competitors that evoke certain emotional qualities that they are aspiring to capture. In those cases it’s quite rewarding to be able to translate those more nebulous feelings into concrete terminology that gives us specific visual principles to bring in or improve on.

By Katharine Schwab4 minute ReadOver the last year, Ideo’s philosophy of “design thinking“–a codified, six-step process to solve problems creatively–has come under fire. It’s been called bullshit, the opposite of inclusive design, and a failed experiment. It’s even been compared to syphilis.Ideo as an institution has rarely responded to critiques of design thinking or acknowledged its flaws. But at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, Ideo partner and leader of its Cambridge, Massachusetts, office Michael Hendrix had a frank conversation with Co.Design senior writer Mark Wilson about why design thinking has gotten so much flack.“I think it’s fair to critique design thinking, just as it’s fair to critique any other design strategy,” Hendrix says. “There’s of course many poor examples of design thinking, and there’s great examples. Just like there’s poor examples of industrial design and graphic design and different processes within organizations.”Part of the problem is that many people use the design thinking methodology in superficial ways. Hendrix calls it the “theater of innovation.” Companies know they need to be more creative and innovative, and because they’re looking for fast ways to achieve those goals, they cut corners.“We get a lot of the materials that look like innovation, or look like they make us more creative,” Hendrix says. “That could be anything from getting a bunch of Sharpie markers and Post-its and putting them in rooms for brainstorms, to having new dress codes, to programming play into the week. They all could be good tools to serve up creativity or innovation, they all could be methods of design thinking, but without some kind of history or strategy to tie them together, and track their progress, track their impact, they end up being a theatrical thing that people can point to and say, ‘oh we did that.'”

“If you make something rigid and formulaic, it could absolutely fail,” he says. “You want to rely on milestones in the creative process, but you don’t want it to be a reactive process that loses its soul.”

“There is a real need to build respect for one another and trust in the safety of sharing ideas so you can move forward,” Hendrix says. “Knowing when to bring judgments is important. Cultures that are highly judgy, that have hierarchy, that are rewarding the person who is the smartest person in the room, don’t do well with this kind of methodology.”

Film geeks don't have a whole lot of tangible things to show for their passion and commitment to film. They just watch movies all the time. What they do have to show is a high regard for their own opinion. They've learned to break down a movie. They understand what they like and don't like about a film. And they feel that they're right. It's not open to discussion. When I got involved in the movie industry I was shocked at how little faith or trust people have in their own opinions. They read a script and they like it - then they hand it to three of their friends to see what they think about it. I couldn't believe it. There's an old expression that goes something like, He with the most point of view wins.

The man-child. The people who so loved playing characters that they played characters in their real lives, too, without actually transforming themselves into more mature human beings. He knew the cliché about celebrities staying developmentally the age that they were when they became famous. But how is a beloved movie star meant to change the right way? How is he supposed to grow up? How does he meaningfully evolve his life and art without killing his core?

What happens when you deliberately defy the moves that led you where you’d always wanted to go, and try something altogether different? It was a risk. But it made perfect sense. It happens. Your family members start to die. Your elders get replaced by your peers. You pack up your life and plant roots elsewhere. You put down the instrument that made you known and pick up another one instead. You plug it in. Do you hear that? That’s the buzz of something new. Wait till you hear what it sounds like when you strum.

Riverdale has gone in so many directions since it started. What did you think it was going to be?Petsch: A way to get me out of my restaurant hosting job. Charles Melton: I was a dog walker and working a Chinese takeout when I did my chemistry read with KJ and Cole for season two.In season one, Reggie was played by Ross Butler, who left to continue his role on Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why. Lili Reinhart: I had just signed a lease by myself in L.A., and I was terrified because I couldn’t afford it. This was my second time moving there to try and make it work, and I had no money and no job. I remember after my final audition, I was on the phone with my mom and told her it was the first time ever in an audition process that I felt like I truly was okay and at peace with whatever the outcome was: “I gave them my version of what this character is, take it or leave it.” That night, I found out I got it.

Casey Cott: I don’t think people understand how Riverdale works. Very quickly, before you start shooting an episode — we’re talking two days — you get the script. And sometimes you don’t even have a script. You just get an email that says, “You have a recording session.” And if you’re really lucky, you get a text from Roberto that says, “Hey, we should sing this song.” Mendes: If there’s one thing that show taught us, it’s how to wing it.

Reinhart: I think it’s important to acknowledge that our show is made fun of a lot. People see clips taken out of contextBy 2019, “Riverdale Cringe” videos had become a genre online, be they TikTok reactions to particularly funny lines of dialogue or YouTube compilations of strange moments from the show. and are like, What? I thought this was about teenagers. And we thought so as well—in season one. But it’s really not been easy to feel that you’re the butt of a joke. We all want to be actors; we’re passionate about what we do. So when the absurdity of our show became a talking point, it was difficult. It is What the fuck? That’s the whole point. When we’re doing our table reads and something ridiculous happens, Roberto is laughing because he understands the absurdity and the campiness.

If you want to watch a teen show where there’s just a bunch of kids in a high school dealing with relationship drama, there’s a lot out there. Sprouse: Go watch Euphoria. Mendes:  But Roberto didn’t want to do that. I think he wanted something that was more outlandish. Sprouse: That’s the natural life cycle of a cult program. North America is the only part of the world that raises vocal opposition to the absurdity of the show. England, which has a more dry, sort of crass, sarcastic sense of humor, loves it and gets it. We find a huge audience in France that has a fascination with classic Americana. Mendes: And don’t forget Brazil! All the show’s fan accounts. We’ve done so much that anytime we get a new script or go into a new project, it’s like, I’ve done a version of this on Riverdale.

Petsch: Does anyone remember when I had my whole-ass own church in season five? I think my favorite line is “I am Cheryl Blossom, queen of the bees!” And by “favorite,” I mean that’s the only time I ever texted Roberto and said, “Please, please, please, don’t make me say this.” I had to shake honeycombs at my mother to banish her.

Mendes: I had this long line, and I remember I was like, “I fucking hate this!” I couldn’t get it, and it was so complicated, but now it’s my little party trick. Sprouse: Say it, Cami. Petsch: Say it, girl. Mendes: “Word of my exploits serving Nick his comeuppance has seeped into the demimonde of mobsters and molls my father used to associate with.” [Everyone cheers and applauds.]

When kids are growing up, their moral compass isn’t formed yet. So there’s a dark side to it where you’re not really allowed to make mistakes. You’re supposed to make mistakes growing up and then learn from them. It changes who you are and helps you become a better person. But now, through everything being recorded, your mistakes can be immortalized for people to see, and kids aren’t allowed to make mistakes because that stuff can be brought up to tear them down later. So it’s a strange world that we’re living in now, and we won’t really know the effects of it till down the line.

I’d be in front of camera, and Danny would be behind. Danny would do a rough cut, I’d do a final cut, and then I’d do sound effects and music. And Danny would focus on VFX and color. So, during the process, we were more involved with those departments. I did a lot more with the sound and the music, and Danny did a lot more with the color. But on set, Danny would be the main voice communicating. If I had something like a direction that differed from what he was saying, I’d speak with him first and then we’d do a take like that. It was good having two of us, especially with scenes that had a lot more people. Danny could focus on the main, and I could look at the peripheral stuff. I feel like having a co-director is a bit of a cheat code. I can’t imagine doing it all by myself.

Designers move from idea to a wireframe, a prototype, a logo, or even just a drawing. Developers move from a problem or feature to a coded solution that is solved and released. Both are creative, both are in aid of the end-user. The Design Engineer role is also creative and authors code but systematically translates a design towards implementation in a structured way.  I have never worked anywhere where there wasn't someone trying to close the gap. This role is often filled in accidentally, and companies are totally unaware of the need. Recruiters have never heard of it, and IT consultancies don't have the capability in their roster. We now name the role "Design Engineer" because the gap is widening, and the role has become too complex to not exist.

To write about something hard to explain, write a detailed letter to a friend about why it is so hard to explain, and then remove the initial “Dear Friend” part and you’ll have a great first draft.

To be interesting just tell your story with uncommon honesty.

Most articles and stories are improved significantly if you delete the first page of the manuscript draft. Immediately start with the action.

Each technology can not stand alone. It takes a saw to make a hammer and it takes a hammer to make a saw. And it takes both tools to make a computer, and in today’s factory it takes a computer to make saws and hammers. This co-dependency creates an ecosystem of highly interdependent technologies that support each other

On the other hand, I see this technium as an extension of the same self-organizing system responsible for the evolution of life on this planet. The technium is evolution accelerated. A lot of the same dynamics that propel evolution are also at work in the technium

Our technologies are ultimately not contrary to life, but are in fact an extension of life, enabling it to develop yet more options and possibilities at a faster rate. Increasing options and possibilities is also known as progress, so in the end, what the technium brings us humans is progress.

Libraries, journals, communication networks, and the accumulation of other technologies help create the next idea, beyond the efforts of a single individual

We also see near-identical parallel inventions of tricky contraptions like slingshots and blowguns. However, because it was so ancient, we don’t have a lot of data for this behavior. What we would really like is to have a N=100 study of hundreds of other technological civilizations in our galaxy. From that analysis we’d be able to measure, outline, and predict the development of technologies. That is a key reason to seek extraterrestrial life.

When information is processed in a computer, it is being ceaselessly replicated and re-copied while it computes. Information wants to be copied. Therefore, when certain people get upset about the ubiquitous copying happening in the technium, their misguided impulse is to stop the copies. They want to stamp out rampant copying in the name of "copy protection,” whether it be music, science journals, or art for AI training. But the emergent behavior of the technium is to copy promiscuously. To ban, outlaw, or impede the superconductivity of copies is to work against the grain of the system.

the worry of some environmentalists is that technology can only contribute more to the problem and none to the solution. They believe that tech is incapable of being green because it is the source of relentless consumerism at the expense of diminishing nature, and that our technological civilization requires endless growth to keep the system going. I disagree.

Over time evolution arranges the same number of atoms in more complex patterns to yield more complex organisms, for instance producing an agile lemur the same size and weight as a jelly fish. We seek the same shift in the technium. Standard economic growth aims to get consumers to drink more wine. Type 2 growth aims to get them to not drink more wine, but better wine.

to measure (and thus increase) productivity we count up the number of refrigerators manufactured and sold each year. More is generally better. But this counting tends to overlook the fact that refrigerators have gotten better over time. In addition to making cold, they now dispense ice cubes, or self-defrost, and use less energy. And they may cost less in real dollars. This betterment is truly real value, but is not accounted for in the “more” column

it is imperative that we figure out how to shift more of our type 1 growth to type 2 growth, because we won’t be able to keep expanding the usual “more.”  We will have to perfect a system that can keep improving and getting better with fewer customers each year, smaller markets and audiences, and fewer workers. That is a huge shift from the past few centuries where every year there has been more of everything.

“degrowthers” are correct in that there are limits to bulk growth — and running out of humans may be one of them. But they don’t seem to understand that evolutionary growth, which includes the expansion of intangibles such as freedom, wisdom, and complexity, doesn’t have similar limits. We can always figure out a way to improve things, even without using more stuff — especially without using more stuff!

the technium is not inherently contrary to nature; it is inherently derived from evolution and thus inherently capable of being compatible with nature. We can choose to create versions of the technium that are aligned with the natural world.

Social media can transmit false information at great range at great speed. But compared to what? Social media's influence on elections from transmitting false information was far less than the influence of the existing medias of cable news and talk radio, where false information was rampant. Did anyone seriously suggest we should regulate what cable news hosts or call in radio listeners could say? Bullying middle schoolers on social media? Compared to what? Does it even register when compared to the bullying done in school hallways? Radicalization on YouTube? Compared to talk radio? To googling?

Kids are inherently obsessive about new things, and can become deeply infatuated with stuff that they outgrow and abandon a few years later. So the fact they may be infatuated with social media right now should not in itself be alarming. Yes, we should indeed understand how it affects children and how to enhance its benefits, but it is dangerous to construct national policies for a technology based on the behavior of children using it.

Since it is the same technology, inspecting how it is used in other parts of the world would help us isolate what is being caused by the technology and what is being caused by the peculiar culture of the US.

You don’t notice what difference you make because of the platform's humongous billions-scale. In aggregate your choices make a difference which direction it — or any technology — goes. People prefer to watch things on demand, so little by little, we have steered the technology to let us binge watch. Streaming happened without much regulation or even enthusiasm of the media companies. Street usage is the fastest and most direct way to steer tech.

Vibrators instead of the cacophony of ringing bells on cell phones is one example of a marketplace technological solution

The long-term effects of AI will affect our society to a greater degree than electricity and fire, but its full effects will take centuries to play out. That means that we’ll be arguing, discussing, and wrangling with the changes brought about by AI for the next 10 decades. Because AI operates so close to our own inner self and identity, we are headed into a century-long identity crisis.

What we tend to call AI, will not be considered AI years from now

What we are discovering is that many of the cognitive tasks we have been doing as humans are dumber than they seem. Playing chess was more mechanical than we thought. Playing the game Go is more mechanical than we thought. Painting a picture and being creative was more mechanical than we thought. And even writing a paragraph with words turns out to be more mechanical than we thought

out of the perhaps dozen of cognitive modes operating in our minds, we have managed to synthesize two of them: perception and pattern matching. Everything we’ve seen so far in AI is because we can produce those two modes. We have not made any real progress in synthesizing symbolic logic and deductive reasoning and other modes of thinking

we are slowly realizing we still have NO IDEA how our own intelligences really work, or even what intelligence is. A major byproduct of AI is that it will tell us more about our minds than centuries of psychology and neuroscience have

There is no monolithic AI. Instead there will be thousands of species of AIs, each engineered to optimize different ways of thinking, doing different jobs

Now from the get-go we assume there will be significant costs and harms of anything new, which was not the norm in my parent's generation

The astronomical volume of money and greed flowing through this frontier overwhelmed and disguised whatever value it may have had

The sweet elegance of blockchain enables decentralization, which is a perpetually powerful force. This tech just has to be matched up to the tasks — currently not visible — where it is worth paying the huge cost that decentralization entails. That is a big ask, but taking the long-view, this moment may not be a failure

My generic career advice for young people is that if at all possible, you should aim to work on something that no one has a word for. Spend your energies where we don’t have a name for what you are doing, where it takes a while to explain to your mother what it is you do. When you are ahead of language, that means you are in a spot where it is more likely you are working on things that only you can do. It also means you won’t have much competition.

Your 20s are the perfect time to do a few things that are unusual, weird, bold, risky, unexplainable, crazy, unprofitable, and looks nothing like “success.” The less this time looks like success, the better it will be as a foundation