CATEGORIES
Drowning in Slop - A thriving underground economy is clogging the internet with AI garbage-and it's only going to get worse.
SLOP started seeping into Neil Clarke's life in late 2022. Something strange was happening at Clarkesworld, the magazine. Clarke had founded in 2006 and built into a pillar of the world of speculative fiction. Submissions were increasing rapidly, but “there was something off about them,” he told me recently. He summarized a typical example: “Usually, it begins with the phrase ‘In the year 2250-something’ and then it goes on to say the Earth’s environment is in collapse and there are only three scientists who can save us. Then it describes them in great detail, each one with its own paragraph. And then—they’ve solved it! You know, it skips a major plot element, and the final scene is a celebration out of the ending of Star Wars.” Clarke said he had received “dozens of this story in various incarnations.”
The City Politic- The Other Eric Adams Scandal The NYPD shot a fare evader, a cop, and two bystanders. He defends it.
On Sunday, September 15, Derell Mickles hopped a turnstile, got asked to leave by cops, then entered the subway again ten minutes later through an emergency exit. This was at the Sutter Avenue L station, out by his mother's house, five stops from the end of the line. Police said they noticed he was holding a folded knife. They followed him up the stairs to the elevated train, asking him 38 times to drop the weapon.
Can the Media Survive?
BIG TECH, Feckless Owners, CORD-CUTTERS, RESTIVE STAFF, Smaller Audiences ... and the Return of PRINT?
Status Update
Hannah Gadsby's fascinatingly untidy tour through life after fame and death.
A Matter of Perspective
A Matter of Perspective Steve McQueen's worst film is still a solid WWII drama.
Creator, Destroyer
A retrospective reveals an architect's vision, optimism, and supreme arrogance.
In Praise of Bad Readers
In a time of war, there is a danger in surveying the world as if it were a novel.
Trust the Kieran Culkin Process
First, he nearly dropped out of Oscar hopeful A Real Pain. Then he convinced Jesse Eisenberg to change the way he directs.
The Funniest Vampires on TV
What We Do in the Shadows is coming to an end. Its idiosyncratic brand of comedy may be too.
The Water-Tower Penthouse
Gigi Loizzo and Angel Molina's apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx looks out on Yankee Stadium.
The Nobu You Don't Know
As he celebrates his downtown restaurant's 30th anniversary, Nobu Matsuhisa discusses the disaster and depression that nearly ended his career before it began.
New 'American'
Radio Kwara is a mission statement masquerading as a neighborhood tavern.
Getting Around: Christopher Bonanos
A Whole New Fifth Avenue And it's about time.
780 MINUTES WITH ...Tim Walz
How the vice-presidential candidate cuts through the miasma of Democratic panic.
Early and Often: David Freedlander
Momentum vs. Machine The Trump and Harris campaigns battle it out for every last vote.
Inside the Patriot Wing - January 6 rioters are running their jail block like a gang. They're leaving more adicalized than ever
Early in the evening of July 13 in an isolated cell block of the D.C. Jail, about two miles east of the Capitol Building, a dozen detainees charged with some of the most violent crimes committed on January 6, 2021, were participating in a thousand-burpee challenge. The group made up roughly half of the inmates held in the block, a special unit sequestered from the jail’s other prisoners and known to its residents as “the Patriot Wing.” The challenge was in honor of a former resident of the unit, a fitness evangelist, who had recently been transferred out to serve a five-year prison sentence for attacking police officers with a floor lamp, a shoe, a nightstick, and a spiked club made from a broken table leg and nails.
A Body of Horrors - How The Substance turned Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley into one of the year's best movie monsters.
Coralie Fargeat's outré satire about modern beauty standards is a cautionary tale and 2024's wildest psychodrama, in which Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley slowly transform into a modern Frankensteined wonder. When Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore), a 50-year-old actress turned TV fitness instructor, is fired by a network executive who deems her too old, she makes a Faustian bargain, injecting herself with neon-green plasma that lets her live every other week as a sexy, spotless 20-something named Sue (Qualley). But each time Sue overstays her welcome, parts of Elisabeth's body age at punishing rates. Soon enough, she will become Monstro Elisasue, a distorted ogress who looks like Anjelica Huston in The Witches, if that movie had been 17 times more sinister.
Theater - Artificial Theatrics - Ayad Akhtar's play about AI is missing a human touch.
Here's an ai prompt: Write me a vehicle for a movie star intent on making a debut on Broadway. Let's say he's a veteran of superhero flicks, so we want a character akin to his persona and a subject that comes with some contemporary relevance; maybe, because he played a tech genius onscreen, we have him wrestle with the vanguard of technology onstage. He's also acclaimed as a dramatic actor, so let's throw in a few hefty themes: addiction, suicide, adultery, trauma, and, for that genuine flawed great man zing, a pinch of misogyny.
Boy Meets World - Actor Mark Eydelshteyn's first English-speaking role is a vape-smoking, frenzied son of a billionaire in Sean Baker's fairy tale gone wrong.
Mark eydelshteyn and I are in a car zooming down a mountain road on the first day of the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. The young actor sits in front, while I’m in the back with two of the film’s publicists. His eyes light up as the driver informs him that his seat has a massager; he can’t believe such a thing exists. A few minutes later, he exclaims, “Guys, it really works! Let’s stop in a few minutes and change seats so you can try it out.” ¶ About half an hour later, as we settle in for our conversation in a restaurant with a dramatic view of the valley below, his buoyant mood has changed somewhat. He looks at me and asks quietly, “In your eyes, who am I?” ¶ Even stranger is what he says next: “I’m nothing.”
The System: Zak Cheney-Rice - Kamala's Comedown How the Harris campaign became a grim slog.
After an exuberant summer, an autumn chill has descended on Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. The joyous rallies that were all over the news between mid-July, when Harris replaced Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket, and the August convention, where she and Tim Walz accepted the party nomination, have quieted into more familiar spectacles. Her once-ascendant polling numbers have stalled and her campaign has become cautious, granting TV interviews mostly to a handful of local news channels in swing states. If the first month of her candidacy was an exhalation after the suffocating defeatism under Biden, the last weeks before Election Day have felt like a collective holding of breath.
Neighborhood News: The World's Largest Plumbing Repair - New York City's principal water-supply aqueduct gets a bypass operation.
The Delaware aqueduct, 85 miles end to end, is the longest tunnel in the world. It invisibly brings about half of New York City’s water, just over 500 million gallons per day, down from the Catskills to a holding basin in Yonkers. It’s about as old as Joe Biden, and it has not been drained for repairs since he was in high school. The stretch where it crosses under the Hudson (from Newburgh to Wappinger) passes through crumbly limestone, and it has been leaking for decades, now losing up to 35 million gallons of water daily. The best solution has been, as with many aging circulatory systems, bypass surgery. Getting down there required digging a pair of holes, 900 and 700 feet deep, then boring two and a half miles across to connect them. Two billion dollars and a decade later, that new tunnel is ready to connect to the old, and that means shutting the aqueduct off for eight months. Even just draining it so work can begin is a huge job. This summer, there were practice “dewatering events,” as the Department of Environmental Protection calls them. It’s a winter project because we use less water then.
Too Close to the Sun
With 143, Katy Perry joins the cursed ranks of pop flameouts this year.
The City's Newest Music Festival Was a Gay Dream
All Things Go brought young queer fans in front of many of their idols (just not Chappell Roan).
Eleven Madison Park Goes Casual, Sort Of
Daniel Humm is serving truffled tofu and negroni coladas at Clemente Bar.
A Cantonese Comeback
Cha Cha Tang can be frustrating, but it offers moments of excellence.
They Moved to Sutton Place
After 18 years in a Noho loft and three in a Paul Rudolph pleasure palace, Christine and John Gachot decided to try a prewar classic seven.
THE ACCIDENTAL DAY CARE IN MY LIVING ROOM
When our sons' Brooklyn nursery lost its license, we figured we could host the children at home until the problem was resolved. How long could it take?
HOW MUCH LONGER CAN THE ERIC ADAMS MACHINE LAST? CITY HAUL
In mid-september, shortly after the New York City police chief resigned amid a federal criminal investigation and Mayor Eric Adams’s chief counsel quit, apparently because her client wasn’t heeding legal advice, and a couple of retired Fire Department officials were arrested on bribery charges, Ingrid Lewis-Martin disappeared from City Hall.
Life Choices: Esme Benjamin Time for Canada?
Heading into the election, a cottage industry of expatriation consultants has emerged.
103 MINUTES WITH ...Owen Thiele
The ultimate L.A. nepo friend” sold a show about his own life.