Last spring, Daniel Kokotajlo, an A.I.-safety researcher working at OpenAI, quit his job in protest. He’d become convinced that the company wasn’t prepared for the future of its own technology, and wanted to sound the alarm. After a...
The first episode of the new Apple TV+ drama “Your Friends and Neighbors” takes pains to explain how one can rake in master-of-the-universe money yet never feel financially secure. Jon Hamm stars as Andrew Cooper, known as Coop,...
On September 8, 1943, Italy surrendered to the Allies, and the Germans, who already effectively controlled the north of Italy, turned on their former partners and moved to take over the rest of the country. A few days...
Cruise’s wing-walking sequence was somehow even more dangerous. (“ ‘I want to be zero G in between the wings of the plane,’ ” McQuarrie recalled the actor saying.) While shooting one element of the scene—which involves Cruise jumping from one...
Can a historical novel be morally serious, even tragic, and also playful at the same time? For a writer of fiction, history is a dangerous thing to play with—one doesn’t want to be trivial or false. History itself...
“The new wine has burst the old bottles,” the playwright August Strindberg wrote, in a bullish preface to his 1888 play “Miss Julie,” setting out a catalogue of revolutionary theatrical principles. Outdated conventions needed to be cleared away,...
“Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning” has a running time of just under three hours. Within those three hours, alas, I’d say that Tom Cruise has a running time of only a minute or two. For those of us who’ve...
“When will this fucking movie be over with?” It’s a question that surfaces often at the Cannes Film Festival, where hour blurs into hour, movie bleeds into movie, and, by day nine or so, even a good picture...
I once assumed that Pavement would be forgotten by later generations, just as the knowing, sarcastic wit of the nineteen-nineties came to seem passé in the two-thousands. The band’s music was ragged and dry, the work of self-referential...
Seeing New York City from above—from the upper deck of the Empire State Building, or from the window of an airplane making an up-the-Hudson approach to LaGuardia Airport—is always a disorienting rush. There are the vast arcs of...
