metazine

Instead of fearing that LLMs will replace me by writing better essays, I’d love to hear how they can support me write essays better.

The story of humanity in space is not over, but the reality is that Musk is probably already yesterday’s man. The apogee of his arc was most likely the chainsaw tableau onstage at CPAC — and what a pathetic apogee it was: a man in late middle age, haunted and horribly unhappy, drug-addled and gibbering, further in that moment from Mars than he had ever been. If he has a legacy in space, it is less likely to be the Martian accomplishment and more likely to be that he took Kennedy’s dream and made it tawdry, partisan, and stupid.

The point of all this cataloging — which is less schematic in Lewis’s presentation than my summary suggests — is to help us recognize traces of enemy feminism when we encounter them in the present. And we will encounter them, Lewis argues, because they’re everywhere.

I always got moody on Sunday afternoons when I woke up from a long nap and it was already dark outside, as if I had wasted the only Sunday of my life. I had a hunch that six years of elementary school was really an escalator with a starting point but no end. I told my mom I couldn’t picture myself in junior high or high school. She was appalled, taking my comments as a fatalistic premonition of premature death.

Storm is a quick study. When he doesn’t know, he inserts Japanese, like he’ll get back to you with the translation. His eyes twinkle. He’s a trickster. You got to love that Storm.

Adams will be remembered for his petty corruption, his self-mythologizing, and his ignominious dealmaking with the Trump White House; but he should also be remembered as the mayor who got New Yorkers to stop tossing giant bags of trash onto city sidewalks as if there were no alternative. You can laugh at a New York mayor who walks into a press conference wheeling out a trash can, beaming as if he invented the contraption, while “Empire State of Mind” blares triumphantly in the background. But truly, Adams’s proclaimed “trash revolution” represented a tremendous advance over abysmal past practice.

So, in the cramped airplane’s limited sightlines, I looked for clues about whether these were just regular Midwestern dads, like me, flying for work, or whether they were regular Midwestern dads, flying for work, to terrorize and disappear people. How would I know the difference?

Years after defending his dissertation, perhaps unable to adapt or evolve, he appeared stuck in an eternal limbo that would give any student the night sweats. On the other hand, John seemed an extreme version of a kind of intellectual ideal. Wasn’t the freedom to read for much of the day one of the draws of graduate school, after all?

More than fifty years since its thirty thousand inhabitants—most of them Greek-Cypriots—fled before the advancing Turkish army, the resort city of Varosha on Cyprus’s southeastern coast has been reborn. Now, from 8 AM to 6 PM every day, visitors are free to enter this modern wasteland through a casually guarded gate and wander a small portion of its once-thriving streets. From what I’ve seen, the tourism may be less dark than dumb, kitschifying the skeletal city into yet another selfie backdrop.

If the enshrinement of a salary cap does not yet feel entirely inevitable, the prospect of a lockout does, at least amongst the baseball commentariat. The tenor is the same: the situation has gotten out of hand, and the mythical fan, an amalgamation of conventional wisdom and vibes transubstantiated into hypothetical flesh and blood, is now for the first time starting to side with management over labor.

The Dodgers’ model, like the city’s, depends on endless escalation, infinite growth; more spending, more spectacle, more winning. The Reds, meanwhile, live on prayer and parsimony. When you know the ending before the first pitch, fandom curdles into masochism.

If the Democratic discourse du jour pits populist socialism against technocratic “Abundance, ” nobody seems to have told New York City voters. One the same day that a majority chose Zohran Mamdani to be the second-ever democratic socialist occupant of Gracie Mansion (and a decidedly more fervent. ..

I find comfort in the thought that cinema is not just moving pictures; it sets hope in motion! . . . It is a sensory journey . . . in which . . . even pain can find new meaning.

Maybe you know the drill: metahistorical intrigue and antiauthoritarian politics; several deep benches’ worth of quirky characters toting loudly emblematic affectations and not-strictly-probable names; song-and-dance numbers with rhythmically typeset lyrics and toy instrument arrangements, plus screwball wordplay and cartoon pratfalls and gags, gags, gags.