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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.”

Pioneered by our team and now widely used as a standard in the field, RCS is the classically hardest benchmark that can be done on a quantum computer today. You can think of this as an entry point for quantum computing — it checks whether a quantum computer is doing something that couldn’t be done on a classical computer. Any team building a quantum computer should check first if it can beat classical computers on RCS; otherwise there is strong reason for skepticism that it can tackle more complex quantum tasks.

Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

“Maybe another portal is his open chest. He just goes, ‘Please come in, come in,’” says Craig. “It applies to art. It applies to everything. Letting one’s self go. If you don’t do it, how can you ever know? That tragedy of not doing that is greater than the embarrassment of doing it. We’re defined by those moments in our lives.”

“I’m really interested in the repression of others,” Guadagnino says. “I realize many, many times I go back to the theme. The idea of being so vulnerable and ready to be. He doesn’t have a sense of pride or a protection of social codes.”

Starkey, the 31-year-old “Outer Banks” actor, was met with the very different challenge of playing a character with few words on the page and a cryptic presence. He theorized that Allerton is in retreat because it’s “as if you’ve lived your whole life and never seen your own reflection, and someone puts a mirror in front of your face.” “A question I asked early on was: Is Allerton aware of the game that he’s playing? Is he aware that he may have some power over Lee, and does he like it?” says Starkey. “Luca’s answer to that was: ‘That’s a very good question.’”

They are simply lovers who experience a passing connection. Their search for something deeper (which eventually takes them on an ayahuasca trip overseen by a shaman played by an unrecognisable Lesley Manville) is thwarted by what the director calls the “asynchronous” nature of their dynamic.

How loud was the conversation back then over authentic casting? “It was never even discussed,” Craig says, looking askance. Guadagnino is equally dismissive: “Sexuality is not one thing. Is it five things, is it seven? There is no such thing as ‘the gay’.” Craig has another thought: “Sexuality is a very modern idea,” he says. “People’s sexuality, or whatever they desire, is as individual as a fingerprint.”

Does sharing a vocation reduce the chances of being asynchronous? “No, it enhances them because film-makers are radical narcissists who just want to do their own thing. It’s a disaster.”

Guadagnino goes into splutter mode again. “I would never put myself on the same shelf as Daniel. Come on, he’s an icon! I’m a grey, balding Italian-Algerian director who’s made some movies. I’m boring.” Craig leans forward: “So am I. Let’s say I wasn’t famous, and I was a free agent. It either happens or it doesn’t happen. Those moments are magic. I think of moments like that from my life and, my God, they’re electrifying. Whereas if you’re out on the prowl, that’s really sad. And look, Lee sort of was on the prowl. But he wasn’t looking for what he found with Allerton. That’s what I’m interested in capturing as an artist. The moment where you go, ‘Oh fuck!’”

A big chunk of Americans ignore news completely, or get it sporadically from TikTok, X, or YouTube. Rather than seeking it out, people are exposed to snippets of current affairs as part of curated news feeds, often from obscure or disreputable sources (only 3% of Facebook’s content is political news).

Meanwhile, the right has capitalized on the decline of legacy media, expertly curating a profitable and thriving ecosystem of podcasters, influencers, alt-tech platforms like Rumble, and media companies like the Daily Wire propped up by conservative billionaires and funders. Young talent is found in spaces like TikTok, developed and incubated in spaces like PragerU, promoted by other influencers, and amplified by social media spaces that prioritize conservative content.

No matter how liberal they are, left-wing billionaires are unlikely to support creators who advocate for socialism or the abolition of wealth hoarding.

Influencers are not bound by journalistic ethics or objectivity and are free to take funding from companies, PACs, and wealthy donors. They speak directly to the concerns of younger people, pushing populist messaging. Entry points into this right-wing ecosystem come through various forms of entrepreneurial hucksterism. Young people faced with high housing costs, dwindling job prospects, and inflation — regardless of what economic statistics say — seize on webinars and YouTube videos by people claiming that you can hustle and grind your way into economic success, whether through crypto, dropshipping, multi-level marketing schemes, or OnlyFans.

we now understand a lot about why false information spreads (it’s a combination of emotional appeal, partisan animus, and algorithmic amplification). But we are no closer to solving the problem at its center: How can we find common ground when we can’t agree on basic facts?

Moving forward, we should not be concerned with isolated incorrect facts, but with the deeply-rooted stories that circulate at all levels of culture and shape our points of view. The challenge for 2025 is to confront these deeper epistemic divides that shape how Americans understand the world; in other words, the ways we arrive at the knowledge that forms our perspective.

Guadagnino reminded me that as we come of age, we decide for ourselves what informs us, and spoke to the first time he read Burroughs. “You enter into the language of Burroughs and you understand, at 17 years old, that there are ways we can express ourselves that are so wide, sophisticated, complicated, and that you never have to adapt to a logic that is preordained.”

Burroughs in fact traveled there in 1952; The Yage Letters chronicles his experiments in his letters to Ginsberg. He was obsessed with the idea that yage could enhance telepathy. In the hallucinatory new scenes, the connection between Lee and Allerton goes to places the earthbound book could never take it.

When the screenplay is his own, firmly in Guadagnino’s hands, it’s actually fabulous — and a relief after the earlier conflict between the director and his material. At the same time, it makes no sense. That’s the most Burroughsian nod in this film: the sheer randomness and trippy outrageousness of the end. It’s very Naked Lunch — both the book and David Cronenberg’s 1991 film inspired by Burroughs, which was clearly on Guadagnino’s mind.

It’s paying more of a tribute to an adaptation of a different Burroughs book, a film that feels genuinely Burroughsian but has less of a basis in the underlying text than his own. Something is off, the essential is missing, and this may be why I didn’t feel Burroughs’s spirit.

still, I wept through scenes of Guadagnino’s film — including a hallucinatory reference to Joan’s death in which Lee does the same failed William Tell routine with Allerton — but it wasn’t for Joan or Burroughs; it was for James’s lover Michael Emerton, who  killed himself with a   gun. I wept as this beautifully designed movie, with gorgeous men in well-cut suits, gave me time to think about the karmic connections that both blessed and cursed me. I wept for Billy Jr., whose mother Burroughs had killed. Then I wept for Burroughs, and I wept for Joan.

I wept for the portrayal of transactional sex that was the “romance” the director referred to. I wept as I questioned notions of intent and integrity in transactional relationships: mine with younger, troubled men who lived on the fringes of gay culture; Burroughs’s with James; and James’s with me. Those relationships, for better or worse, follow the karmic path laid down for me 40-plus years ago. That karma, at least for me, as I flew through the past making sense of it, was neutralized by the acceptance of its very existence, its painful impact on me and those affected by it, and, finally, by releasing it. That was Guadagnino’s gift to me.

Most poignantly, I wept for James, who lives alone, unable to walk, with a brain injury that was inflicted during a gay bashing and made worse by his falls at home and sustaining further concussions. But there has been some nice news for him, as a double LP of his work as a singer-songwriter is being released on Lotuspool Records. And he told me he liked Guadagnino’s Queer — though he quibbled with the casting and look of Allerton — and that’s even better news. Guadagnino liked hearing that

On the Zoom with Guadagnino and Anderson, I wanted to ask about legacy. Are there responsibilities we who make art or work in the arts have to our elders, to the radical spirits who pushed open the doors? I mentioned the affluent gay men, usually heteronormatively married, who “rent a womb” and maybe buy an egg to drop in it so their children have their genes — all of which seems to me to be the furthest thing from queer. In response, some signifiers were mentioned. Anderson speaks to the look of the film, citing George Platt Lynes’s influence; they both chimed in about Powell and Pressburger (the Archers), of The Red Shoes; I mentioned Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s adaptation of Jean Genet’s Querelle, which Guadagnino said, indeed, influenced him. The point has been missed, and the clock is ticking. I move on, disappointed.

Will this film ignite a radical spark in younger viewers — be they queer or not? That’s what Burroughs did for me and for many, many of his readers

The craftsmanship of the film is sterling on many levels. But it is not the book I know by the writer I knew so well. It is stylish in the modality of fashion — having a “look”; it is beautiful in its entirety as a complete visual construction. It is, essentially, a gay location film. It is romantic, something of a travelogue — you might want to go where it is set, eat at the restaurants, while wearing the clothing, certainly in the company of some of the flawless boys cast. But it is not the world that the book conjures for most readers, certainly not me. This is the work of the director — as any film should be.

Still, a bad match of director and material renders confusion at best, emptiness at worst; I worried that this film could potentially misconstrue the importance of Burroughs’s role as a visionary queer writer for future generations. I was incapable of explaining this to Guadagnino and Anderson, in our 20-minute Zoom, not to mention it might have stopped the interview. But I tried.

It wasn’t just the peculiar casting of a beefy daddy like Daniel Craig as the Burroughs character, William Lee, or pretty Drew Starkey as the aloof, younger love interest, Eugene Allerton, who spends the film looking great in fabulous knitwear by Jonathan Anderson, Guadagnino’s friend and the film’s costume designer, but nothing like the image of the character I had in my head.

Each level gives you completely different information, depending on what Google thinks the user might be interested in. Maps are a true masterclass for visualizing the same information in a variety of ways.

Viewing the same text at different levels of abstraction is powerful, but what, instead of switching between them, we could see multiple levels at the same time? How might that work?

A portrait lens brings a single subject into focus, isolating it from the background to draw all attention to its details. A wide-angle lens captures more of the scene, showing how the subject relates to its surroundings. And then there’s the fish eye lens—a tool that does both, pulling the center close while curving the edges to reveal the full context.

A fish eye lens doesn’t ask us to choose between focus and context—it lets us experience both simultaneously. It’s good inspiration for how to offer detailed answers while revealing the surrounding connections and structures.

Imagine you’re reading The Elves and the Shoemaker by The Brothers Grimm. You come across a single paragraph describing the shoemaker discovering the tiny, perfectly crafted shoes left by the elves. Without context, the paragraph is just an intriguing moment. Now, what if instead of reading the whole book, you could hover over this paragraph and instantly access a layered view of the story? The immediate layer might summarize the events leading up to this moment: the shoemaker, struggling in poverty, left his last bit of leather out overnight. Another layer could give you a broader view of the story so far: the shoemaker’s business is mysteriously revitalized thanks to these tiny benefactors. Beyond that, an even higher-level summary might preview how the tale concludes, with the shoemaker and his wife crafting clothes for the elves to thank them.

This approach allows you to orient yourself without having to piece everything together by reading linearly. You get the detail of the paragraph itself, but with the added richness of understanding how it fits into the larger story.

Chapters give structure, connecting each idea to the ones that came before and after. A good author sets the stage, immersing you with anecdotes, historical background, or thematic threads that help you make sense of the details. Even the act of flipping through a book—a glance at the cover, the table of contents, a few highlighted sections—anchors you in a broader narrative.

The context of who is telling you the information—their expertise, interests, or personal connection—colors how you understand it.

The exhibit places the fish in an ecosystem of knowledge, helping you understand it in a way that goes beyond just a name.

Let's reimagine a Wikipedia a bit. In the center of the page, you see a detailed article about fancy goldfish—their habitat, types, and role in the food chain. Surrounding this are broader topics like ornamental fish, similar topics like Koi fish, more specific topics like the Oranda goldfish, and related people like the designer who popularized them. Clicking on another topic shifts it to the center, expanding into full detail while its context adjusts around it. It’s dynamic, engaging, and most importantly, it keeps you connected to the web of knowledge

The beauty of a fish eye lens for text is how naturally it fits with the way we process the world. We’re wired to see the details of a single flower while still noticing the meadow it grows in, to focus on a conversation while staying aware of the room around us. Facts and ideas are never meaningful in isolation; they only gain depth and relevance when connected to the broader context.

A single number on its own might tell you something, but it’s the trends, comparisons, and relationships that truly reveal its story. Is 42 a high number? A low one? Without context, it’s impossible to say. Context is what turns raw data into understanding, and it’s what makes any fact—or paragraph, or answer—gain meaning.

The fish eye lens takes this same principle and applies it to how we explore knowledge. It’s not just about seeing the big picture or the fine print—it’s about navigating between them effortlessly. By mirroring the way we naturally process detail and context, it creates tools that help us think not only more clearly but also more humanly.

I got the sense that their entrepreneurial spirit had led them to the sort of scam that leads you to wear a shirt with a huge dollar sign on it alongside a number of similar young men willing to wear that same shirt, the type of scam that encourages you to work out with and find community among your new colleagues, the type of scam that answers the two dominant questions posed by the young American man in 2024: what will make this mean something, and how can I get rich as quick as possible?

I think young men have turned more conservative because “conservatism,” as it were, is the mode of politics that makes the most sense in Scam America, and these young men are the Scam Generation.

America has always been a nation of grifters, con men, and schemers; what’s different in Scam America is the scope and form. America in 2024 is not a fallen or crumbling empire; it is an enshittified product, a tired casino, a website losing ad revenue, a restaurant line full of private delivery drivers.

America is a casino now, and the young men voting for Trump are the sort of young men pounding free drinks at the blackjack table and toasting the pit boss. A vote for Trump is a vote for a cig inside, for another round, for the line to keep going up, up, up. Does that mean this configuration is permanent? Maybe, maybe not. Casinos are windowless so that you cannot tell the time; they pump in oxygen to keep you alert. They do this, of course, because their owners know that in time everybody loses. The young men of Scam America are not necessarily out of reach, but if the left wants any chance at swaying them, it should plan ahead to when party’s over and the hangovers kick in.

I didn’t keep my end of the agreement and I started a fight last night, off the cuff. I said, “Give me a policy. Give me one thing about the economy. Explain to me like I’m dumb how things are gonna get better.” He got mad at me, but then today we’re fine. He’s done it to me, too. Every once in a while, one of us will do a little jab. But I try to stay away, because I don’t wanna rock the boat, and I also appreciate him not rocking the boat. I can’t put up signs and neither can he. I have some Harris-Walz T-shirts that I wear when I’m not with him, to be respectful. We can’t talk about politics, but I think it’s for the best, because we are happily married.

He’s been a little quieter this race, especially after Biden dropped out. Before he would make fun of Biden a lot, send me little memes. I would just send back, “I’m still gonna vote for him. He didn’t try to overthrow the government. He didn’t try to grab me by a private part.” He’s also said, “Of course, I’m pro-choice, but that’s not what I’m voting on.” I don’t just vote for me; I think about my future daughter-in-law, my own daughter, my nieces. If you ask him, he’ll just say, “The economy.” I don’t think that makes him a cruel or bad person, just a person who is thinking about their small business, their bank account. Even though I don’t think he’s correct, he is coming from a place of what he thinks will affect him.

Netanyahu is the same leader who released Sinwar from prison. Netanyahu encouraged Qatar to fund Hamas, emboldening and sustaining the organization. Netanyahu trusted Sinwar, he helped Hamas become what it is today, and he helped it secure its power in the Gaza Strip. He apparently underestimated Sinwar so much (or was so distracted by his own legal troubles) that October 7 happened in the first place. Netanyahu has failed to get the hostages home. The IDF was only able to kill Sinwar after a year of devastating, blunt-force violence across the entire Gaza strip, and now it appears to be settling in for a long-term insurgency. The hostages are still hostages and the war rages on, having spread to seven fronts (as Netanyahu himself says).

no, I don't "give him credit" for killing a leader he supported in order to topple an organization that his policies helped embolden. I credit Netanyahu with a failed strategy to fund Hamas, a massive national security failure that allowed October 7, and the failures of war and diplomacy that have put Israel in the position it is in now.

DNA might contain health information, but unlike a doctor’s office, 23andMe is not bound by the health-privacy law HIPAA. And the company’s privacy policies make clear that in the event of a merger or an acquisition, customer information is a salable asset. 23andMe promises to ask its customers’ permission before using their data for research or targeted advertising, but that doesn’t mean the next boss will do the same. It says so right there in the fine print: The company reserves the right to update its policies at any time. A spokesperson acknowledged to me this week that the company can’t fully guarantee the sanctity of customer data, but said in a statement that “any scenario which impacts our customers’ data would need to be carefully considered. We take the privacy and trust of our customers very seriously, and would strive to maintain commitments outlined in our Privacy Statement.”

In recent years, there’s a tendency towards specialism and specialists, from the job market to identities to relationships to education and more. Conversations around university education, for example, tend to be focused on high-earning job prospects, rather than on developing multidisciplinary ways of thinking. The job market tends to favor people who have had a clear, laddered path to success.

Curiosity for curiosity’s sake is not discouraged, per se, but it’s not clearly monetizable either, and therefore can be deprioritized.

As of January, a third of Americans still believed the election was riddled with fraud, including nearly 75% of Republicans who say Joe Biden did not win the election legitimately. This is despite the fact the “evidence” has been little more than misleading social media videos and ridiculous affidavits signed by people who “observed vote counting” but clearly did not understand what they were witnessing.

Fox News and Newsmax notably issued on-air corrections and apologies for misleading their viewers — making it abundantly and explicitly clear that they had no information to support the egregious claims they had peddled for months on end. Fox News host Lou Dobbs, who aired and echoed Powell’s claims on his show, no longer has a job, reportedly for his role in spreading those lies.

Even One America News (OAN), our nation’s best attempt at a pro-Trump state media outlet, issued a comically long disclaimer before airing a two-hour documentary based on The Big Lie that the election was stolen. It also quietly removed stories about Dominion from its website without explanation or notification to its readers.

It feels daunting to sit down and say I’m going to write a book, a script, a story—who do I think I am? But under the umbrella of a project that isn’t for anyone but yourself, you can feel you finally have permission to take “creating” seriously as a verb, regardless of the product that comes from it.

“We are in a new phase of the war,” the military said in leaflets dropped over the area. “These areas are considered dangerous combat zones.” A later statement said three projectiles were identified crossing from northern Gaza into Israeli territory, with no injuries reported. Frantic residents fled again. “Since Oct. 7 to the present day, this is the 12th time that I and my children, eight individuals, have been homeless and thrown into the streets and do not know where to go,” said one, Samia Khader.

Religion prescribes, but even religion doesn’t give you the reasons for its prescriptions—that’s why it’s called faith. Like a child who doesn’t understand why she has to sleep before 9 P.M. (and has to take the unsatisfactory answer of “because you’re still growing!”), we can’t comprehend why our soul needs holy vitamins. And we don’t need to.

You can’t “think” your way to the soul. You also can’t “feel” your way to it. The soul is at the core of everything; when you neglect it, it doesn’t just go away, it turns to weird forms of obsession, addiction, and nihilism. It’s not something you grasp; it’s something that grasps you. It’s why our qualitative experiences are treated mechanistically, like how screen time-limiting apps temporarily block your social media addiction without addressing the real reason for your anxiety, loneliness, or envy.

Mr. Musk came to hate what he saw as Twitter’s two-tiered class system of the verified and unverified, and to him, selling off the check marks was the ultimate democratization of the site. Soon after completing his acquisition, he assigned Ms. Crawford to assemble a team and gave her a deadline of Nov. 7, 2022, for Blue’s relaunch. She had 10 days to deliver or risk being fired, three people with knowledge of the conversations said.

Many of the employees on the Blue team came to view the project as pointless at best and, at worst, something that could undermine trust. If everyone could be verified, then no one would truly be verified. As one Blue worker later wrote in a journal: “It was such an obvious train wreck, that the main job of everyone on the team was to make sure it was the safest train wreck possible.”

While many people saw the check mark as a designation of fame, it became an important part of Twitter’s utility. It marked the real accounts for brands like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, making the platform much more attractive to advertisers. And it signified authenticity for governments and emergency services, which provided information about train delays, elections and tornado warnings.

Mr. Sacks insisted that they should raise the price to $20 a month, from its current $4.99. Anything less felt cheap to him, and he wanted to present Blue as a luxury good. “Chanel could make a fortune selling a $99 bag, but it would be a one-time move,” he wrote. “A ‘promotional offer’ may not be the position we want. A luxury brand can always move down-market, but it’s very hard to move up-market once the brand is shot.” Jason Calacanis, a friend of Mr. Musk’s, disagreed. “It should be $99 a year,” he insisted. During one meeting, he launched into a spiel about how Twitter users were more likely to open their wallets for a $100-per-year subscription if it seemed slightly cheaper at the $99 price, as though he had just watched a YouTube video explaining the basics of consumer psychology.

To employees, the discussions were baffling. There was Mr. Musk, a man who had built multibillion-dollar companies, soliciting advice from a small inner circle of advisers who had little experience building social networks. Sure, they used Twitter, but these rich men were not representative of the hundreds of millions of people who logged in every day.

Ms. Crawford came up with her own tactics for dealing with Mr. Musk. She quickly learned that she could challenge him in one-on-one settings. Individually, Mr. Musk could be charming, willing to engage in discussion and listen to the expertise of his counterpart. Put him in a larger group setting with people outside his inner circle or those he didn’t trust, however, and Mr. Musk’s ego ran wild. He could never be seen as inferior or uninformed.

As the new Blue came into focus, so did the fears about how it would be exploited for impersonation. What would happen if an account pretending to be a local fire department declared an emergency? Or an account posing as a politician spread a lie about an upcoming vote? Image

The weekend before U.S. voters headed to the polls, Ms. Crawford made one last attempt in a private chat with her boss. “Do you want to be blamed for the outcome of this election?” she asked. “Well, when is it?” Mr. Musk replied. “It’s in two days,” Ms. Crawford said, stunned that he hadn’t clocked the date that she and her team had been warning him about since the start of the project. Mr. Musk paused, processing. “Oh, I didn’t realize,” he said after a moment. “OK, yeah, it’s fine. We can wait. Why don’t we wait?” The launch was moved to Nov. 9, the day after the election.

A software engineer calling in to the meeting posed a question to Mr. Musk: “What would you consider a serious incident that would require us to put back such a label or some other differentiation between accounts?” Mr. Musk intertwined his fingers and paused for a few seconds. “If there’s like death or serious injury or something like that, um, you know, uh,” he said, fidgeting. “Something beyond annoyance or mild confusion — that would be enough.”

Fun fact: The exit cycles of movies can be 2x shorter than those of tech startups.

all of these emerging movements start with major capital injections, therefore, novel fundraising systems, i.e., equity crowdfunding along with increasing institutional trust, could be useful catalyzers for this new era in Hollywood.

I think they make too many. [Laughs.] I think Hollywood has to learn to be missed. Hollywood used to be, at least, not too long ago, a place where you were begging for the movie; you were begging for them to give you a new Star Wars, a new this, a new that, you just couldn’t wait … Now it kind of feels the other way around. Hollywood is like, Do you want another one, do you want another one? I’ll give you two of these for the price of one! They’re just giving people too much that they’re not even asking for, and I think that’s never a good position. The whole system that controls [the] IPs should be more precious about them, and really pace themselves, and make sure the audience is dying for one, instead of just giving them five a year.

It gets to a point after 100 years of cinema that a lot of the big ideas that we came up with have a brand. If I told you, “I’m gonna write this original movie about a bunch of kids in a colony in space, and they go to the space station, and there’s a monster in there,” you’re gonna go, “It's Alien.” And I’ll go, “Oh no, it’s not Alien, it’s something else,” you’ll lose interest right away, go like, “Pfft, it’s a rip-off.”

After faithfully following his instructions in such a way that he nearly drowns Martin, he loses the trust of the Swintons and they decide to get rid of him, just as parents might get rid of a dangerous dog. Monica cannot bring herself to return David to Cybertronics. She pauses on the way and releases him into a forest, where he can join other free-range mechas. He will not die. He doesn't get cold, he doesn't get hungry, and apparently he has an indefinite supply of fuel. Monica's decision to release him instead of turning him in is based on her lingering identification with David; in activating him to love her, she activated herself to love him. His unconditional love must have been deeply appealing. We relate to pets in a similar way, especially to dogs, who seem to have been activated by evolution to love us.

an LLM by itself is not a product - it’s a technology that can enable a tool or a feature, and it needs to be unbundled or rebundled into new framings, UX and tools to be become useful. That takes even more time.