I find it tremendously hopeful that “Stoner” is thriving in a world in which capitalist energies are so hellbent on distracting us from the necessary anguish of our inner lives. “Stoner” argues that we are measured ultimately by our capacity to face the truth of who we are in private moments, not by the burnishing of our public selves.

The story of his life is not a neat crescendo of industry and triumph, but something more akin to our own lives: a muddle of desires and inhibitions and compromises.

The deepest lesson of “Stoner” is this: What makes a life heroic is the quality of attention paid to it.

Americans worship athletes and moguls and movie stars, those who possess the glittering gifts we equate with worth and happiness. The stories that flash across our screens tend to be paeans to reckless ambition.

It’s the staggering acceleration of our intellectual and emotional metabolisms: our hunger for sensation and narcissistic reward, our readiness to privilege action over contemplation. And, most of all, our desperate compulsion to be known by the world rather than seeking to know ourselves.

The emergence of a robust advertising culture reinforced the notion that Americans were more or less always on stage and thus in constant need of suitable costumes and props.

Consider our nightly parade of prime-time talent shows and ginned-up documentaries in which chefs and pawn brokers and bored housewives reinvent their private lives as theater.

If you want to be among those who count, and you don’t happen to be endowed with divine talents or a royal lineage, well then, make some noise. Put your wit — or your craft projects or your rants or your pranks — on public display.

Our most profound acts of virtue and vice, of heroism and villainy, will be known by only those closest to us and forgotten soon enough. Even our deepest feelings will, for the most part, lay concealed within the vault of our hearts. Much of the reason we construct garish fantasies of fame is to distract ourselves from these painful truths. We confess so much to so many, as if by these disclosures we might escape the terror of confronting our hidden selves.

revelation is triggered by literature. The novel is notable as art because it places such profound faith in art.

The fact that she’s having an affair with an intern from her own company, risking everything that she’s built, is part of the turn-on. The spark plug of Kidman’s performance is that she plays this sick recklessness as something fully human: the expression of a woman too compartmentalized to put the different parts of herself together. She’s caught up in an erotic fever, but it’s one that’s laced with agony.

Many filmmakers have interrogated the dream factory that employs them, but only David Lynch understands that to capture its insidious beauty requires rendering it a dream itself, in all of its prismatic glory. While “Mulholland Dr.” is — and is about — a dream, it feels like a disservice to the film to describe in such elemental terms.

it’s eminently possible to pull apart the surrealism in Lynch’s masterpiece to determine “how it works,” but doing so can’t ruin or even explain the film’s magic, which lies in how Lynch organizes every element at his disposal until real and unreal become indistinguishable.

their journey from A to B animates the desperate mystery at the film’s core, which revolves around personal identity and encompasses a web of taciturn mobsters, dopey hitmen, soothsaying cowboys, and ambitious filmmakers cut down at the knees.

Watts’ disarming portrayal of a wide-eyed naif evaporates the instant Betty enters a crucial audition; when it’s over, Watts and her character(s) suddenly feel unknowable and out of reach, just like movie stars.

the ugliness of the factory’s gears become readily apparent, and “Mulholland Dr.” becomes about the despair and heartbreak that comprise Hollywood’s background.

Time and again, Yang’s characters return to the feeling that something isn’t enough. A child’s presence isn’t seen as enough comfort to his comatose grandma if he can’t think of something eloquent to say. The effort spent on a massive video game project at work inevitably means not spending enough time with family (and vice versa). And the makeshift pile of memories and bonds that we acquire over the course of a lifetime — always doing our best — never feels like enough when we compare it against our Platonic fantasies of what could have been.

The finished film feels like a parting gift from an artist — already at the end of his tragically short life — who came to appreciate that a well-lived human life contains more poetry than all of the planet’s art put together.

David is unique because the love he carries for Monica quite literally allows his mommy to be real again, and in doing so it sees him become the only son humanity has left. The super robots designate him as an original because he actually knew a living person — he’s the realest boy in the whole wide world. And so the artifice of their experiment gives way to the most genuine of truths:  Love doesn’t exist in defiance of time — love is the defiance of time. And like David, the movie that Spielberg has made about him will never age a day.

There’s a lively cinematic subgenre that deconstructs the rise and fall of a relationship by jumping around in time—two excellent examples are “Blue Valentine” and “Two for the Road”—and this movie carries on that tradition with panache, and adds many spectacularly blocked, framed, and edited scenes of athletic competition that, taken together, feel like a tennis fan’s answer to a boxing picture.

Is "Challengers" too ambitious for its own good? Or too much? Or less than meets the eye, as the late, great Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris might have put it? Probably. It kinda gets sucked into the vortex of its own narrative and technical ambitions in the final stretch.

Tennis is an elegant and simple sport. Players stand on opposite sides of a rectangle, divided by a net that can’t be crossed. The gameplay is full of invisible geometry: Viewers might trace parabolas, angles, and lines depending on how the players move and where they hit the ball. It’s an ideal representation of conflict, a perfect stage for pitting one competitor against another, so it’s no wonder that the game comes to stand in for all sorts of different things off the court.

The “Battle of Sexes” match in 1973, between Billie Jean King and then-retired Bobby Riggs, has since been mythologized as a turning point for women’s sports. If the social allegory of the Ashe-Graeber match was subtextual, the one in this spectacle—which ended in a decisive victory for King over the cartoonishly chauvinistic Riggs—was glaringly explicit. At a time when women’s liberation was becoming a force that threw all sorts of conventions into question, and plenty of people were for or against the gains of the movement, seeing the debate represented by a game of tennis surely had a comforting appeal. For those with more regressive beliefs, rooting for Bobby was certainly easier than really articulating a justification for maintaining massive pay disparities between men and women, both within and outside of professional tennis.

Within their love triangle, tension arises with the dawning recognition that in a one-on-one sport, there’s always another person who doesn’t have a place on the court. Save for the night they meet, when Tashi induces Art and Patrick to kiss each other for her entertainment, the three of them rarely engage with one another at the same time: Someone is always watching from the stands, whether literally or metaphorically.

During Patrick and Tashi’s brief romance, a post-coital conversation seamlessly transitions into a discussion about Patrick’s poor performance as a pro, and eventually becomes a referendum on why their relationship doesn’t work. Confused, and trying to make sense of it all as their banter swiftly changes definitions, Patrick asks: “Are we still talking about tennis?” “We’re always talking about tennis,” Tashi replies. Frustrated, Patrick tersely retorts: “Can we not?”

As the linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue in their 1980 book,Metaphors We Live By, “Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” In other words, we’re always talking about things in terms of other things—even if it’s not always as obvious as it is in Challengers. Metaphors are more than just a poetic device; they’re fundamental to the way language is structured.

No matter what issue is at stake, or how grand it may be, it can always be reduced to an individual’s performance on the court.

While Patrick is still dating Tashi, and Art is transparently trying to steal his best friend’s girl, Patrick playfully accuses Art of playing “percentage tennis”—a patient strategy of hitting low-risk shots and waiting for your opponent to mess up

Art asks for Tashi’s permission to retire once the season is over. Art knows that this would be the end of their professional relationship—he would no longer be able to play dutiful pupil to Tashi. But it might also be the end of whatever spark animated their love in the first place, as you can’t play “good fucking tennis” in retirement. Tashi says she will leave Art if he doesn’t beat Patrick in the final. Tired of playing, but unable to escape the game, Art curls up in his wife’s lap and cries.

I Saw the TV Glow is such a uniquely, devastatingly queer story. Two queer kids trapped in suburbia. Both of them sensing something isn’t quite right with their lives. Both of them knowing that wrongness could kill them. One of them getting out, trying on new names, new places, new ways of being. Trying to claw her way to fully understanding herself, trying to grasp the true reality of her existence. Succeeding. Going back to help the other, to try so desperately to rescue an old friend, to show the path forward. Being called crazy. Because, to someone who hasn’t gotten out, even trying seems crazy. Feels crazy. Looks, on the surface, like dying. And to have that other queer kid be so terrified of the internal revolution that is accepting himself that he inadvertently stays buried. Stays in a situation that will suffocate him. Choke the life out of him. Choke the joy out of him. Have him so terrified of possibly being crazy that he, instead, lives with a repression so extreme, it quite literally is killing him. And still, still, he apologizes for it. Apologizes over and over and over, to people who don’t see him. Who never have. Who never will. Because it’s better than being crazy. Because it’s safer than digging his way out. Killing the image everyone sees to rise again as something free and true and authentic.

the story is pulled from Mago’s perspective into 3 subsequent perspectives over the years: Lena, the best friend; Joseph, the ex-husband and father; and finally Monstrilio himself. It is a stylistic choice that (mostly) works and allows us to see how these events radiate outward across many lives.

M’s perspective being saved for last is not just because it is the best section of the novel and wraps up all the disparate elements into a tight punch of a finale, but because M’s feeling and needs are constantly being pushed aside to fit the ideas of what the other character’s think they need (this is most evident in the surgery aspect). This makes for an excellent look at the way the push and pull of families affects everyone, especially the younger ones caught up in it, and is made more ominous and chilling through the lens of horror.

On one hand we have the fact that M is quite literally a monster created out of a dead child’s lung, yet despite his form he is no less a part of the family or loved like a child. But in later portions of the novel he transforms into a human form which helps him disguise who he is inside. And what he hungers for cannot be hidden. Hunger is a quite a dynamic symbol here, being both his literal hunger but also as an investigation into sexuality.

it does all sort of touch on the idea that queer sexuality is often othered or seen as unnatural despite being very normal and natural, especially to the person having those emotions.

It invites us into its labyrinthine structure and form, it allows us space to explore. Rohrwacher implicitly makes the case against coherence: much of life exists beyond our understanding and so, to express it except through abstraction and suggestion, is to flatten and obscure the depths of beauty and truth in the snatches of a conversation half-heard in a Robert Altman film, or a language only partially understood. Because, to quote another artist whose work feels far older than their time, “There are cracks in everything, that’s how the light gets in”.

LinkedIn, Reddit, and Blind abound with enraged job applicants and employees sharing tales of how difficult it is to book paid leave, how Kafkaesque it is to file an expense, how nerve-racking it is to close out a project. "I simply hate Workday. Fuck them and those who insist on using it for recruitment," one Reddit user wrote. "Everything is non-intuitive, so even the simplest tasks leave me scratching my head," wrote another. "Keeping notes on index cards would be more effective." Every HR professional and hiring manager I spoke with — whose lives are supposedly made easier by Workday — described Workday with a sense of cosmic exasperation.

If candidates hate Workday, if employees hate Workday, if HR people and managers processing and assessing those candidates and employees through Workday hate Workday — if Workday is the most annoying part of so many workers' workdays — how is Workday everywhere? How did a software provider so widely loathed become a mainstay of the modern workplace?

This is a saying in systems thinking: The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID), not what it fails to do. And the reality is that what Workday — and its many despised competitors — does for organizations is far more important than the anguish it causes everyone else.

In 1988, PeopleSoft, backed by IBM, built the first fully fledged Human Resources Information System. In 2004, Oracle acquired PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion. One of its founders, David Duffield, then started a new company that upgraded PeopleSoft's model to near limitless cloud-based storage — giving birth to Workday, the intractable nepo baby of HR software.

Workday is indifferent to our suffering in a job hunt, because we aren't Workday's clients, companies are. And these companies — from AT&T to Bank of America to Teladoc — have little incentive to care about your application experience, because if you didn't get the job, you're not their responsibility. For a company hiring and onboarding on a global scale, it is simply easier to screen fewer candidates if the result is still a single hire.

A search on a job board can return hundreds of listings for in-house Workday consultants: IT and engineering professionals hired to fix the software promising to fix processes.

For recruiters, Workday also lacks basic user-interface flexibility. When you promise ease-of-use and simplicity, you must deliver on the most basic user interactions. And yet: Sometimes searching for a candidate, or locating a candidate's status feels impossible. This happens outside of recruiting, too, where locating or attaching a boss's email to approve an expense sheet is complicated by the process, not streamlined. Bureaucratic hell is always about one person's ease coming at the cost of someone else's frustration, time wasted, and busy work. Workday makes no exceptions.

Workday touts its ability to track employee performance by collecting data and marking results, but it is employees who must spend time inputting this data. A creative director at a Fortune 500 company told me how in less than two years his company went "from annual reviews to twice-annual reviews to quarterly reviews to quarterly reviews plus separate twice-annual reviews." At each interval higher-ups pressed HR for more data, because they wanted what they'd paid for with Workday: more work product. With a press of a button, HR could provide that, but the entire company suffered thousands more hours of busy work. Automation made it too easy to do too much. (Workday's "customers choose the frequency at which they conduct reviews, not Workday," said the spokesperson.)

At the scale of a large company, this is simply too much work to expect a few people to do and far too user-specific to expect automation to handle well. It's why Workday can be the worst while still allowing that Paychex is the worst, Paycom is the worst, Paycor is the worst, and Dayforce is the worst. "HR software sucking" is a big tent.

Workday finds itself between enshittification steps two and three. The platform once made things faster, simpler for workers. But today it abuses workers by cutting corners on job-application and reimbursement procedures. In the process, it provides the value of a one-stop HR shop to its paying customers. It seems it's only a matter of time before Workday and its competitors try to split the difference and cut those same corners with the accounts that pay their bills.

Workday reveals what's important to the people who run Fortune 500 companies: easily and conveniently distributing busy work across large workforces. This is done with the arbitrary and perfunctory performance of work tasks (like excessive reviews) and with the throttling of momentum by making finance and HR tasks difficult. If your expenses and reimbursements are difficult to file, that's OK, because the people above you don't actually care if you get reimbursed. If it takes applicants 128% longer to apply, the people who implemented Workday don't really care. Throttling applicants is perhaps not intentional, but it's good for the company.

I couldn’t help but wish that other missing parts had been included in the adaptation: a scene that uses a billiard table as a metaphor for a particle accelerator; Liu’s deeper exploration of the VR game, which allows the reader to try to untangle its collection of mysteries along with the characters instead of just watching them solve it; more details about the ingenious “human computer” in VR, which looks cool but isn’t really explained on-screen.

Tashi Duncan is exactly what we have been missing from our screens; a selfish, messy, calculated woman who wields her intelligence and sensuality as weapons. She’s a cheater, a woman unable to see beyond her own needs, who refuses to lie even when she could save someone the heartbreak of the truth — “unlikeable” by all standards. When her golden retriever malewife of a partner Art tells her he loves her, she simply looks over and purrs “I know” in response. It is coolly dismissive and self-assured in a way that we do not usually get to see Black women behave onscreen.

Tashi Duncan is too formidable a character to be pushed around, least of all by white stans who don’t know what it means to strive beyond the approval of men. The story underneath all the tennis is about Tashi’s heartbreak, the mourning over the loss of her career and the identity it gave her and how she forges ahead anyway.

in every charged moment we see between Patrick and Art, Guadagnino makes it clear that the center of their connection is Tashi. Even the now infamous churros scene revolves almost entirely around Tashi. Patrick says that he likes seeing Art riled up, that he enjoys seeing him willing to connive and fight for something — even if that thing is his girlfriend. Even their lust for one another is moderated by her, unleashed by her. They would have stayed perfectly content meandering in suggestion if she had not forced them to confront their attraction for one another tongue-first in that bedroom scene.

Tashi Duncan is a woman so in control of herself that even in her greatest moment of heartbreak — sitting alone under a tree with an injury that has ruined her chance at doing the only thing she knows how to do — does not allow herself to break. Zendaya’s portrayal of her is glorious here. You watch the hurt, pain, grief, anger, and then finally resolute determination pass over her face as she makes her choice. She will not mope. That moment makes the woman we meet years later, who tells her husband that her love is absolutely conditional on his success as a player.

Tashi Duncan is utterly unique, a manifestation of a particular kind of female rage that makes her hard to forget or even fully hate. It’s what makes the boys so obsessed with her.

Challengers is filled with details like that, people and places that may not matter to the drama but are integral to dropping us into a world that feels authentic and joyful. Joyful because Guadagnino’s delight in them is contagious; you can feel his affection for every cheap hotel and country club tennis court and all of the unimportant people whose lives are built around them. There are a lot of wonderful, trashy American locations in this movie and every one of them Guadagnino films as if it were a beautiful villa somewhere in Northern Italy.

And you always get the sense that they love what they’re doing, leaning deep into their material and capturing it with a cinematic verve that is often unexpected but never pretentious. Even when I feel totally lost to the plot of Guadagnino’s Suspiria, I can feel his love for the theatricality of Tilda Swinton’s old age makeup or the fountaining blood pumps that end the film.

But what brings this all together is the battery life. I observed real-world uptime of about 15 hours, a figure that is unheard of in the PC space. And when you combine this literal all-day battery life the MacBook Air’s light weight and thinness, and its lack of active cooling, what you end up with is a unicorn. We just don’t have laptops like this that run Windows. It feels miraculous.

But cross-device platform features like AirDrop (seamless file copy between Apple devices), AirPlay (seamless audio/video redirection between Apple and compatible third-party devices), Continuity (a suite of cross-device integration capabilities), Sidecar (use an iPad as an external display for the Mac), Handoff (the ability to pick up work on another device and continue from where you were), and others are all great arguments for moving to the Apple ecosystem.

It’s the little things, like effortlessly opening the lid with one finger and seeing the display fire up instantly every single time. Or the combination of these daily successes, the sharp contrast with the unpredictable experience that I get with every Windows laptop I use, experiences that are so regular in their unpredictableness, so unavoidable, that I’ve almost stopped thinking about them. Until now, of course. The attention to detail and consistency I see in the MacBook Air is so foreign to the Windows ecosystem that it feels like science fiction. But having now experienced it, my expectations are elevated.

The intransigent Zoomer modernity of Zendaya’s screen image — a face that, because of “Euphoria,” will probably always seem to me as if it’s “seen an iPhone” — is the perfect foil for a role so rooted in pre-Code comedies like “Design for Living,” and she harnesses that disconnect in a way that allows Tashi to have this entire movie by the balls without ever foot-faulting into invulnerability.

There isn’t an inch of nudity apart from some extras in the locker room showers, and yet Guadagnino shoots the climactic match with a stylistic vulgarity that suggests what sports might look like if Brazzers suddenly took over for ESPN. Slo-mo, Wong Kar-wai-esque step-printing, floor-angle shots from underneath the court, racket POV shots, ball POV shots … every point is defined by a different technique, each rally existing within its own self-contained universe in which sex doesn’t exist and tennis is the only form of human expression.

Living in an immigrant, multilingual family will open your eyes to all the ways humans can misunderstand each other. My story isn’t unique, but I grew up unable to communicate in my family’s “default language.” I was forbidden from speaking Korean as a child. My parents were fluent in spoken and written English, but their accents often left them feeling unwelcome in America. They didn’t want that for me, and so I grew up with perfect, unaccented English. I could understand Korean and, as a small child, could speak some. But eventually, I lost that ability.

I became the family Chewbacca. Family would speak to me in Korean, I’d reply back in English — and vice versa. Later, I started learning Japanese because that’s what public school offered and my grandparents were fluent. Eventually, my family became adept at speaking a pidgin of English, Korean, and Japanese.

This arrangement was less than ideal but workable. That is until both of my parents were diagnosed with incurable, degenerative neurological diseases. My father had Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. My mom had bulbar amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Their English, a language they studied for decades, evaporated.

It made everything twice as complicated. I shared caretaking duties with non-English speaking relatives. Doctor visits — both here and in Korea — had to be bilingual, which often meant appointments were longer, more stressful, expensive, and full of misunderstandings. Oftentimes, I’d want to connect with my stepmom or aunt, both to coordinate care and vent about things only we could understand. None of us could go beyond “I’m sad,” “I come Monday, you go Tuesday,” or “I’m sorry.” We struggled alone, together.

You need much less to “survive” in another language. That’s where Google Translate excels. It’s handy when you’re traveling and need basic help, like directions or ordering food. But life is lived in moments more complicated than simple transactions with strangers. When I decided to pull off my mom’s oxygen mask — the only machine keeping her alive — I used my crappy pidgin to tell my family it was time to say goodbye. I could’ve never pulled out Google Translate for that. We all grieved once my mom passed, peacefully, in her living room. My limited Korean just meant I couldn’t partake in much of the communal comfort. Would I have really tapped a pin in such a heavy moment to understand what my aunt was wailing when I knew the why?

For high-context languages like Japanese and Korean, you also have to be able to translate what isn’t said — like tone and relationships between speakers — to really understand what’s being conveyed. If a Korean person asks you your age, they’re not being rude. It literally determines how they should speak to you. In Japanese, the word daijoubu can mean “That’s okay,” “Are you okay?” “I’m fine,” “Yes,” “No, thank you,” “Everything’s going to be okay,” and “Don’t worry” depending on how it’s said.

In their quest for social change, givers like Arnold are reluctant to support “causes”; they want to “solve problems—big ones,” as Callahan puts it. But, in Arnold’s case, lessons had to be learned along the way. His early forays into philanthropy, including an effort to reform public pensions, were scorned, with critics noting that Enron’s collapse had resulted in the loss of billions of dollars in pension funds.

Moskovitz and Tuna weren’t keen to embrace traditional development organizations, which they are inclined to view as lethargic and bureaucratic. For them, grant making is akin to venture-capital investing: they want to act decisively and disrupt traditional models and structures. They have contributed $32 million to a group called Give Directly, which is not interested in vaccinating children, digging wells, building toilets, and creating schools. Rather, it gives cash handouts to the poor, who are free to spend the money as they wish. Callahan is skeptical of the ideology guiding Moskovitz and Tuna—who favor Silicon Valley mantras such as “empower individuals over institutions”—but he knows they are too influential to ignore. The couple will give away hundreds of millions of dollars every year. They are not yet thirty-five years old.

There are growing concerns about the influence and reach of the superwealthy: “Philanthropy is becoming a much stronger power center,” Callahan says, “and, in some areas, is set to surpass government in its ability to shape society’s agenda.” The state has retreated; the givers have advanced.

in many U.S. cities, elected officials are overwhelmed by debt obligations, and as a result have precious little money to spend on parks, museums, and other public services. The givers have no such constraints. In Boston, the Barr Foundation has done much to shape the city’s arts, culture, and political milieu. In Houston, Richard Kinder is helping to forge a massive network of urban trails. In Detroit, the Kresge Foundation is contributing funds for a new light-rail system. In New York, the Leon Levy Foundation has helped to revitalize a pair of Brooklyn landmarks, the Brooklyn Public Library and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. These are worthy endeavors, but Callahan is right to express concern about a fundamental shift of power from a “hollowed-out public sector” to elite private givers who are not fully accountable and operate in dark corners.

In 2008 Stephen A. Schwarzman, another cofounder of Blackstone, gave $100 million to the New York Public Library at a moment when the Library was secretly undertaking a dubious real estate and construction scheme. For nearly a decade, the NYPL refused to reveal how Schwarzman’s money was being utilized. Only in recent months did the Library account for the gift’s use: the $100 million formed part of the endowment and will soon be used for new renovation projects.

Under an initiative backed by Broad and like-minded funders, L.A. could add hundreds of new charter schools in a decade. Broad is quick to refute allegations that he is overreaching: “I think everyone is getting heard,” he informed Callahan. “We’re getting heard, the philanthropists. The unions and administrators are getting heard. Overall, we’re creating debate.”

That may be so, but increasingly the debate is among people who already agree. The Givers makes a persuasive case that the superwealthy are expanding their influence at a moment when many Americans are bolting from civic and political life. The author, drawing on the scholarship of Theda Skocpol, evokes an earlier era when mass-membership organizations such as trade unions flourished, giving ordinary citizens a certain degree of influence vis-à-vis elite power structures. These days, he writes, “We’re fast moving toward a future where private funders, not elected officials and the citizens they answer to, choreograph more of public life.”

Of the top eighty American foundations, only twenty-six post detailed information about their current grant making on public databases. The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, endowed by Warren’s wealth, “has no real website and the information available on its grant making through tax returns is always a few years out of date,” Callahan notes.

The Givers is alive to these and other contradictions in the philanthropic sector and poses thorny questions for elected officials and nonprofit leaders: why is a check to a right-wing think tank tax-deductible but a check to a conservative senator is not? Why are many large foundations spending a mere 5 percent of their assets each year when they can easily afford to spend more? Why do so many foundations exist in perpetuity, instead of “spending down” and closing their doors? Why is the sector so lightly regulated by government, particularly the IRS? Finally, what exactly is the public getting in exchange for colossal tax breaks granted for philanthropy, which mainly go to rich people?

The Givers, which went to press before Donald Trump was elected, concludes with a stark and prescient warning: the nonprofit sector should initiate its own reforms, before politicians do it with a heavier and more mischievous hand. “It’s not okay,” he warns, “to settle for a status quo in which the foundation world remains forever a black box.” His proposals for change—the creation of a new U.S. federal office of charitable affairs, a reevaluation of what should qualify for tax-exempt status, trustee boards that are more inclusive and transparent—are not likely to be embraced in Trump’s Washington, however.

Katz, writing after Trump’s victory, argued that Callahan has sidestepped the central issue: Our current dire political situation is the product of both traditional American anti-statism and a very different and deliberate assault on the state by plutocrats. We do not have so many billionaires, and thus mega-foundations, because we now have a larger and more adept entrepreneurial class, but because the structure of (mostly federal) economic policy has been captured by people of wealth, who have rewritten the laws to enable themselves to become extraordinarily rich…It seems to me that the new plutocrats are in fact the problem, and they are quite unlikely to be part of the solution, as Callahan contends.

My own wish is that Callahan had confronted, in a more pungent way, the structural features of the behemoth that looms before him: the grant-making model itself, upon which modern American philanthropy rests. Foundation leaders advocate transparency, inclusion, and equality, but they operate in a strikingly hierarchical manner. They are a cloistered elite.

Does this top-down model—in which grantees spend immense time and energy chasing cash—inhibit the growth of dues-paying organizations, which may be more vibrant and democratic than nonprofit organizations dominated by an aloof board of trustees and an executive director? Passages in The Givers suggest that Callahan has pondered these matters, but he stops short of a full critique.

There are now more than ninety thousand private foundations, whose assets total $700 billion. These foundations supply money to more than a million tax-exempt, nonprofit organizations. Some of these nonprofits are financially secure, but many chafe under immense anxiety as they await annual grants from their masters in the foundation suites.

Major studio video game story-telling standards and IP/franchise cinema both contribute greatly to the kind of lore-focused psychologically-disinterested narrative style.

The literal deterministic storytelling of Dune or Barbie or Oppenheimer attempts to put the cat back in the bag, to soothe the audience by seemingly bold aesthetic vision while actually telling quite dull and lifeless stories that ask little of the imagination. Don't worry, we'll explain everything to you, no need to think, no need to imagine.

Bridging the gap between James’ “The Turn of the Screw” and Flanagan’s “The Haunting of Bly Manor,” Alejandro Amenábar’s “The Others” remains one the greatest and most instructive movies of its kind because it shows that denial is the real ectoplasm that binds ghost stories together, and love just the most satisfying conduit through which it might be made flesh.

The great project of someone’s life might be the pursuit of a sustainable balance between doubt and conviction, or fear and security; most people will construct and/or cling to whatever answers might spare them from the mortal horror of being hounded by certain questions. To that end, it’s no coincidence that many of the most unsettling ghost stories ever told revolve around characters who refuse to accept that they’re in one to begin with, as no other genre is so fundamentally dependent upon the power of denial. Likewise, no other genre is so determined to erode it.

Textured with Williams’ usual grain and kept alive by his keen eye for detail, “The Sweet East” essentially sees America as a series of concentric cults. Lillian is like a teenage Virgil leading us on a tour through some kind of stupid new hell where anyone who believes in anything does so with an all-defining religiosity that demands to be mocked.

Everyone sees her as the perfect screen on which to project their own narrow view of the world. That’s true of the self-obsessed filmmakers who “discover” Lillian on the street (they’re played by Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy O. Harris, both very funny as hyper-talkative artists who assume that everyone sees the genius of their inane period piece). It’s true of the hunky movie star who turns her into the paparazzi’s latest cause célèbre (Jacob Elordi), and it’s true of the set PA Mohammed (Rish Shah), who’s convinced that he alone can “save” her.

She always was something, she never is something, and the movie around her seems unsure if that’s sustainable. On the one hand, Lillian is the only character who avoids the embarrassment that naturally attends sincerity, and there’s a palpable degree of wish fulfillment baked into a character who so convincingly doesn’t give a shit (even though everyone is obsessed with her). To paraphrase one of the people she encounters, Lillian is Teflon enough to defy a digital culture that force-feeds her a series of unworthy choices, and she emerges from every encounter unscathed… whereas other characters are liable to get their heads blown off. In a film that adopts a “South Park”-like approach to making fun of everyone, Lillian is never the butt of the joke.

On the other hand, there are a few fleeting moments in which “The Sweet East” confronts its heroine with something approaching self-awareness. Her wanton use of the word “retarded” — a slur that the Dimes Square crowd embarrassingly tried to reclaim as an expression of their freedom from liberal moralizing — feels at first like an unfortunate side effect of a movie that allegedly features appearances from Peter Vack and Betsey Brown (their names appear in the credits, but I never clocked them on screen). Later, however, someone coolly confronts Lillian about that habit, leaving her at a total loss for words. When another character snipes that they “don’t like being told things about myself,” it almost sounds like the movie is admitting to a posture of its own — that it’s recognizing that lack of belief as a belief system unto itself.

This is a fun — and sometimes very funny — movie that is virtually impossible to make fun of in return, and at the end of the day, that might be the only metric of success that matters to it.