Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• How to Prevent Gun Massacres? Look Around the World - Australia, Britain, Canada, and other countries have enacted reforms that turned mass shootings into rare, aberrational events rather than everyday occurrences. - link

• Will an Emergency Law Used to Keep Out Migrants Become Permanent? - At the start of the pandemic, the Trump Administration invoked an obscure provision called Title 42 to effectively stop migration. Even as other COVID restrictions are lifted, anti-immigration politicians insist that it remain in place. - link

• America’s Redistricting Process Is Breaking Democracy - Democrats have tried to keep up with Republican gerrymandering—and everyone is losing. - link

• Joshua Ferris Reads “The Boy Upstairs” - The author reads his story from the June 6, 2022, issue of the magazine. - link

• Two Mothers Confront the Unimaginable in Uvalde - Years of frustration with the local police and school officials have boiled into rage. - link

From Vox

• A study gave cash and therapy to men at risk of criminal behavior. 10 years later, the results are in. -

  

  Liberia found a stunningly effective way to reduce violent crimes. Now the US is trying a similar experiment.

  What if someone told you that you could dramatically reduce the crime rate without resorting to coercive policing or incarceration? In fact, what if they said you could avert a serious crime — a robbery, say, or maybe even a murder — just by shelling out $1.50?

  That’s such an incredibly good deal that it sounds too good to be true. But it’s been borne out by the research of Chris Blattman, Margaret Sheridan, Julian Jamison, and Sebastian Chaskel. Their new study provides experimental evidence that offering at-risk men a few weeks of behavioral therapy plus a bit of cash reduces the future risk of crime and violence, even 10 years after the intervention.

  Blattman, an economist at the University of Chicago, never intended to conduct this study. But in 2009, he was hanging out with an acquaintance in Liberia named Johnson Borh, who showed him around the capital city of Monrovia. Since Blattman studies crime and violence, Borh took him to visit the pickpockets, drug sellers, and others living on the margins of society.

  Along the way, they kept running into guys who were sitting on street corners, eking out a meager living by shining shoes or selling clothes. When these men spotted Borh, they’d run to give him a hug. Blattman recalls that when he asked the men how they knew Borh, they’d say something like, “I used to be like them,” and point to the nearby pickpockets or drug sellers. “But then I went through Borh’s program.”

  That’s how Blattman learned about the program Borh had been running for 15 years: Sustainable Transformation of Youth in Liberia. It offered men who were at high risk for violent crime eight weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT, as it’s called, is a popular, evidence-based method of dealing with issues like anxiety, but Borh adapted the therapeutic strategy to deal with issues like violence and crime.

  Meeting with a counselor in groups of around 20, the men would practice specific behavioral changes, like managing anger and exerting self-control. They’d also rehearse trying on a new identity unconnected to their past behavior, by changing their clothes and haircuts and working to reintegrate themselves into mainstream society through community sports, banks, and more.

  Blattman wanted to formally study just how effective this kind of program could be. He decided to run a big randomized controlled trial with 999 of the most dangerous men in Monrovia, recruited on the street. The results were so promising that they’ve already inspired a sister program in a very different city: Chicago.

  In Chicago, the murder rate is troublingly high, and the police fail to solve 95 percent of all shootings. Finding a way to prevent shootings and other violent crimes is an urgent priority — not only in that city, but across the US, as the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, remind us. Given that direct interventions like removing guns are largely blocked by political polarization, and trying to crack down on crime after the fact carries with it risks of policy brutality, we desperately need new solutions to the problem of violence.

  Therapy plus cash was a surprisingly successful combo

  The 999 Liberian men were split into four groups. Some received CBT, while others got $200 in cash. Another group got the CBT plus the cash, and finally, there was a control group that got neither.

  A month after the intervention, both the therapy group and the therapy-plus-cash group were showing positive results. A year after the intervention, the positive effects on those who got therapy alone had faded a bit, but those who got therapy plus cash were still showing huge impacts: crime and violence were down about 50 percent.

  But Blattman didn’t dare to hope that this impact would persist. Experts he surveyed predicted that the effects would steeply diminish over the years, as they do in many interventions.

  So it was a great surprise when, 10 years later, he tracked down the original men from the study and reevaluated them. Amazingly, crime and violence were still down by about 50 percent in the therapy-plus-cash group.

  Blattman estimates that there were 338 fewer crimes per participant over 10 years. Given that it had cost just $530 per participant to implement the program, that works out to $1.50 per crime avoided.

  In short, it worked extremely well. But why did the combination of CBT and some cash work?

  Practice makes perfect

  The most plausible hypothesis, according to Blattman, is that the $200 in cash enabled the men to pursue a few months of legitimate business activity — say, shoe shining — after the therapy ended. That meant a few extra months of getting to cement their new non-criminal identity and behavioral changes. “Basically, it gave them time to practice,” Blattman told me.

  A couple of caveats: The study relied largely on self-reported data about what behaviors participants were and weren’t engaging in, which could raise concerns of experimenter demand (where participants tell experimenters what they want to hear). Also, of the 999 men initially recruited into the study, 103 had died by the time of the 10-year follow-up.

  That might make you wonder whether the more violent men, who could have been more resistant to the effects of the program, were just missing from the reevaluation, artificially making it look as if violent crime had dropped more than it really had.

  But there are caveats to the caveats. For one thing, the study authors didn’t rely only on self-reported data; they also observed how participants acted in incentivized games where, for example, they’re given a choice between getting $1 now or $5 next week (a good example of self-control and future-oriented thinking). “Our treatment effects are strong and persistent in these outcomes,” the study notes.

  By interviewing friends and relatives of each participant who died, the authors also determined the cause of death. They identified only 26 violent deaths. And even when they modeled what would happen to their results if they plugged in “good” outcomes for missing control group members and “bad” outcomes for missing treatment group members, the positive treatment effect for therapy-plus-cash largely remained.

  Upending the mainstream approach to crime

  Inspired by the program in Liberia, Chicago has been implementing a similar but more intensive program called READI. Over the course of 18 months, men in the city’s most violent districts participate in therapy sessions in the morning, followed by job training in the afternoon. The rationale for the latter is that in a place with a well-developed labor market like Chicago, the best way to improve earnings is probably to get people into the market, whereas in Liberia, the labor market is much less efficient, so it made more sense to offer people cash.

  “We’ll have more results this summer,” said Blattman of the READI program, which he is helping to advise. So far, “it doesn’t look like a slam dunk.”

  Still, Chicago is eager to try these therapy-based approaches, having already had some success with them. The city is also home to a program called Becoming a Man (BAM), where high schoolers do CBT-inspired group sessions. A randomized controlled trial showed that criminal arrests fell by about half during the BAM program. Even though effects dissipated over time, the program looks to be very cost-effective.

  But this isn’t just a story about the growing recognition that therapy can play a useful role in preventing crime. That trend is part of a broader movement to adopt an approach to crime that is more carrot, less stick.

  “It’s all about a progressive, rational policy for social control. Social inclusion is the most productive means of social control,” David Brotherton, a sociologist at the City University of New York, explained to me in 2019.

  Brotherton has long argued that mainstream US policy is counterproductively coercive and punitive. His research has shown that helping at-risk people reintegrate into mainstream society — including by offering them cash — is much more effective at reducing violence.

  To give one striking example from Brotherton’s research: In 2007, the crime-riddled nation of Ecuador legalized the gangs that had been the source of much of the violence. The country allowed the gangs to remake themselves as cultural associations that could register with the government, which in turn allowed them to qualify for grants and benefit from social programming.

  Can you guess what happened to the murder rate over the next few years?

  That’s right. It plummeted.

• The young, rich, anti-capitalist capitalists -

  

  “I sometimes joke that there are way more socialists who need a financial adviser than there are socialist financial advisers.”

  Andrea Pien is a 35-year-old millionaire. A wealth manager once warned her to carefully steward her money, saying that inherited wealth was often squandered away in just a few generations. “But my partner and I aren’t planning on having children,” Pien said. “What are we hoarding money for? Especially when the world is literally burning.”

  So in March 2020, Pien hired Phuong Luong, founder of financial planning firm Just Wealth, to help her redistribute some of her wealth back to society. That means taking some of it out of Wall Street and investing it in ventures that promote human well-being and economic fairness over profits.

  Pien is one of a small but growing number of wealthy people seeking a more radical approach to investing. Some call it the seemingly contradictory term “anti- capitalist” investing; others refer to it as “transformative investing.” In general, proponents are going beyond merely disincentivizing unethical behavior in companies. They’re trying to shift more of the balance of financial power into the hands of the working class, transforming an economic system that they believe has unjustly given just a few people control over a majority of the capital. Some investors want to spend down all of their wealth through anti-capitalist investing, while others still want to get a return on their investments but make sure these investments are into ventures they feel promote social justice.

  Financial professionals in the space say they’ve seen rising interest in this kind of investing strategy in recent years, and they attribute some of the interest to social justice becoming a bigger priority in the aftermath of the 2020 racial justice reckoning and a deeply unequal pandemic that killed so many Black and brown working-class people.

  Another factor fueling this small shift: A lot of money is changing hands in the US right now. Over the next 25 years, American baby boomers will pass on some $68 trillion to their children. It will be the biggest wealth transfer in US history, but the money won’t be handed out evenly. Even more wealth will get concentrated at the top.

  Kate Barron-Alicante, a financial adviser and director of impact at wealth management firm Abacus Wealth Partners, who helps some clients with transformative investing, told Recode, “What I’m seeing are more people who are on the other side of that wealth transfer who want to do it differently,” she said.

“I sometimes joke that there are way more socialists who need a financial adviser than there are socialist financial advisers,” said Zach Teutsch, a financial adviser and founder of Values Added Financial, a financial advisory firm for progressives. “People are really yearning for this. They want an adviser who shares their disdain for a US economy that’s dominated by obscenely wealthy multi-billionaires.”

The yearning is there, but an important question to ask early on is how much of an impact anti-capitalist or transformative investing will have.

Attempts to invest ethically aren’t exactly new. The concept of socially responsible investing dates back centuries, and today there are a variety of approaches that fall under this umbrella. In recent years, they’ve attracted increased skepticism about their efficacy and ethics. The positive impact socially responsible investing strategies claim to have is often hard to measure, and there isn’t a single rigorous definition for what “socially responsible” means — what’s ethical to one person might be unforgivable to another.

“There’s been a huge amount of interest, but also a huge amount of competition and marketing dollars spent by those larger investment firms that are basically looking to make a quick buck,” said Sonia Kowal, president of Zevin Asset Management, an investment management firm that focuses on socially responsible investing. “There’s a lot of impact washing going on.”

Because it’s a relatively new idea, anti-capitalist investing doesn’t yet have a clear-cut definition. Anti-capitalist investments and efforts fall across a spectrum, and not everyone would use the term “anti- capitalist” to refer to them. As Pien told Recode, “I wouldn’t go so far as to describe myself as anti-capitalist because I still participate in this economy. … But I would like a world that’s different from the current capitalist system that we have.”

Making up part of this spectrum is “transformative investing,” whose goal is to transform the “extractive economy” — meaning the system we have now, where finite resources are extracted and only a few people are rewarded with profits — into a “regenerative economy” where capital is spread more equitably and controlled more democratically. It’s a concept popularized by Resource Generation, a social justice organization whose members are wealthy young Americans who have made a commitment to redistributing all or most of their money.

Operating at the more radical end of the anti-capitalist investment spectrum is a firm like Chordata Capital, which offers an explicitly anti-capitalist approach to wealth management. Some of Chordata’s clients don’t want any return on their investments, and they might work on a plan to spend down their wealth over a period of 20 years.

“Sometimes when we use that language, [anti- capitalist investing], people say it’s a paradox. I think that comes from a place of people believing that there’s no real alternative to capitalism,” said Kate Poole, who leads Chordata with co-founder Tiffany Brown.

Poole advises clients on making investments into worker cooperatives, which are businesses that are owned by workers whose profits are shared among them, or community-controlled loan funds, like the one run by the Boston Ujima Project, which gives working-class members a vote on which participating businesses in their community should get funding.

However, the financial services industry currently isn’t built for transformative investing. The general principle of investing is to minimize risk and maximize profit by holding different kinds of assets instead of putting all your eggs in one basket. It’s more difficult to maintain asset diversity when you’re avoiding all publicly traded stocks. Financial advisers are also required by law to manage their clients’ investments through custodians, which are often large banks, that safekeep assets. “Many of these firms don’t custody investments outside of Wall Street,” said Luong. That means investing into a small, community-based business requires investment advisers to do more research and paperwork than when you’re investing in traditional investment vehicles that include many publicly traded companies.

It can also be a challenge to find worthy non-Wall Street options that align with transitioning to a regenerative, more equal economy. Kelly Cahill, a 34-year-old Resource Generation member, told Recode, “I liked the idea of moving my money to community-based investments instead of the stock market, but … where do I put it?” While an increasing number of retirement funds — which are the most common way that most Americans hold stocks — are offering socially responsible investment options, unless you can hire a financial adviser, it’s unlikely you’ll have the knowledge and access to do community-based investing.

Cahill, who received a significant settlement due to an accident, initially followed common financial advice and put half of her money into the stock market. “I ignored it for a year,” she recalled. “And then when I finally did look at it, I was just blown away by how much it grew in that time.” She realized she didn’t need all of it, so she joined Resource Generation and found a financial adviser who could help her redistribute a third of it into community-based investments.

Resource Generation offers a database of financial professionals and firms qualified to help people with transformative investing. For now, the list is still small, with fewer than 30 investment firms able to provide at least some off-Wall Street investment options and transformative investing support. But Nadav David, an organizer at Resource Generation who helped create the database, told Recode there’s been an uptick in interest.

“Within the last several years, I’ve definitely seen much more conversation about actually fully divesting from Wall Street and from public markets, and more in communities,” he said. Meanwhile, Resource Generation’s membership has grown. According to the organization, at the end of 2019, it had 702 members; by the end of 2021, it had 1,155.

“We’re interested in ending inheritance as we know it, and being the last generation of people to be able to accumulate wealth in this way,” David said.

As transformative investing grows, even if it remains a niche part of the financial market, emphasizing how it’s different from other kinds of ethical investing will become even more important, especially if it wants to avoid the haziness that surrounds socially responsible investing. As of now, the latter is vastly more popular. In 2020, almost 36 percent of professionally managed assets globally were classified as socially responsible investments. Within this category, environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) integration was the most popular strategy — a little over $25 trillion in assets used ESG integration in 2020. This includes factoring in a company’s carbon footprint or how well it treats employees when calculating the risk or return on an investment, because such factors could impact the financial performance of the business. ESG doesn’t necessarily prioritize social values over financial performance.

In comparison, only $352 billion went toward impact or community investing. Still, that $352 billion is a 42 percent increase since 2016. It speaks to the growing appetite for alternative investment strategies beyond the surface-level impact washing often associated with ESG investing.

While no one seems to be under the illusion that radical investing alone will solve the problem of wealth inequality, the emergence of this trend suggests that the next several decades may be transformative for the financial services industry. For a small number of wealthy young Americans coming into inheritances, it isn’t enough to donate to a few charitable causes — one of the loudest critiques of big philanthropy is that it lacks transparency and is undemocratic. They’ve recognized a need to move beyond feeling guilty about their own privilege and the profound inequality that exists in the world. They’re attempting to alter the power imbalance in the relationship they have with others, and feel as though they’re part of a community that’s not just connected by wealth.

Pien recalls her late father’s advice on how to manage money. “He said, ‘Listen, Andrea, I know you like to redistribute money, but know that you need to have at least $13 million to be absolutely secure,’ which I thought was absurd,” she said. “Part of why I want to participate in this movement of redistribution is that my dad worked really, really hard — and was really isolated. He didn’t have a lot of close friends.”

“I want the future to look like everyone having a little bit more than enough,” Pien continued. “Everyone being able to feel affirmed in their identities and feel connected to their communities around them — not isolated.”

• 15 unmissable movies from this year’s Cannes -

  

  The films that scandalized and enchanted audiences at the world’s most prestigious film festival — and how to watch them soon.

  When it comes to setting the pace for the year in cinema, the Cannes Film Festival occupies a coveted early-summer spot, often launching films toward awards-season stardom. That includes movies like recent Oscar nominees Parasite, BlacKkKlansman, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Drive My Car, and The Worst Person in the World.

  But there’s more to Cannes than awards chatter. Filmmakers from around the globe tell harrowing, moving, and spectacular stories on the big screens over the two-week span, and the whole world shows up to watch, boo, cheer, argue, walk red carpets, and drink a lot of rosé. And after two weird years — one canceled entirely because of the pandemic, one shifted to July and lightly attended — the festival was back in full force.

  It’s impossible to see every movie at Cannes, but I did my best. Some of them are big and buzzy — like Elvis and Top Gun: Maverick — and you’ll see them soon enough. But here are the 15 best movies I saw at Cannes this year, why you should keep tabs on them, and how you can see them soon.

  Armageddon Time

  Focus Features

James Gray’s Armageddon Time is a semi-autofictional story of a sixth-grader named Paul (Banks Repeta) growing up in Queens in the 1980s who, after some trouble in his public school, ends up at a private academy at the behest of his grandfather (Anthony Hopkins). A jolt of a cameo with political implications appears midway through — I don’t want to ruin it — but the film’s broader aim is to excavate the layers of privilege that the protagonist, whose ancestors fled the Holocaust, is slowly coming to realize. Paul’s family is navigating the gluey border between being the target of anti-Semitism and enjoying the opportunities and social standing that their Black neighbors will never have. Meanwhile, Paul is caught between his left-leaning family and the children at his new school who casually drop racial slurs, or pump fists and chant “Reagan! Reagan!” at the mention of an upcoming election. It’s a truly poignant, troubling, and ultimately brilliant work of memory and self-implication.

How to watch it: Focus Features will open Armageddon Time in the US later this year.

Aftersun

A24

One of the festival’s breakout hits is Aftersun, from first-time director Charlotte Wells and starring Normal People heartthrob Paul Mescal. In the 1990s, 11-year-old Sophie (first-timer Francesca Corio) is on holiday with her father, Calum (Mescal), and for a long time Aftersun seems like it’s merely the memories of a happy childhood. But we slowly come to realize that we’re seeing those memories as an older Sophie tries to process her relationship with her father, who, while loving and supportive, is fighting his own demons. Reminiscent of Joanna Hogg’s Souvenir movies, Aftersun is directed with a sure hand and immense empathy by Wells. We’re all just trying to do our best; what is left in Sophie’s memories is immense grace.

How to watch it: A24 will release Aftersun in the US.

Broker

Neon

Hirokazu Kore-eda won the coveted Palme d’Or with his devastating 2018 drama Shoplifters. Now he’s returned with Broker, another gentle story about people on society’s margins — one that packs a considerable emotional punch. The story starts when young mother So-young (Lee Ji-eun) drops off her infant son at a church in a “baby box.” Two detectives observe the action, but more importantly, so do Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won) and Sang-hyun (Parasite star Song Kang-ho), who work under the radar as adoption brokers on the Korean “gray market.” Broker is sentimental and sweet, often funny, and a lighter take on Kore- eda’s ongoing project of exploring chosen families.

How to watch it: Neon will release Broker in the US.

Close

A24

An unspeakably tender story about young friendship and grief, Lukas Dhont’s Close is the story of Rémi (Gustav De Waele) and Leo (an extraordinary Eden Dambrine), two young teens who have been best friends since childhood. They spend nights at one another’s house and say they are closer than brothers. But when Leo is made to feel self-conscious about their relationship by classmates, who ask if they are a couple, he starts to push Rémi away, and Rémi’s reaction leads to tragedy. Incredibly understated and finely realized, Close makes use of silence and nearly imperceptible facial expression to follow Leo through the months that follow, exploring the kinds of emotions and desires that young teens often feel but rarely understand. It’s an elegant, beautiful, moving film.

How to watch it: A24 will release Close in the US.

Decision to Leave

Park Chan- wook (Oldboy, The Handmaiden) brings his rich imagination and lush, masterful sensibility to film noir with Decision to Leave, a twisty thriller with nods to Hitchcock but certainly in a mystery-movie class all its own. It’s a kind of “black widow” story, centering on Hae-joon (Park Hae-il), a detective in Busan. He stumbles into a case involving Seo-rae (Tang Wei), who is a Chinese immigrant, newly widowed, and the prime suspect in the murder of her husband. Nothing is naturalistic about Park’s editing, which fades from timeline to timeline and often puts us inside Hae-joon’s head; we’re trying as hard to follow what’s going on as he is. And in the end, it becomes a swoony romance with a gloriously sharp edge.

How to watch it: Mubi will release Decision to Leave in the US.

Funny Pages

A24

A gritty little delight of a film, Funny Pages is the tale of teenaged cartoonist and comics obsessive Robert (Daniel Zolghadri), who isn’t interested in his parents’ college plans for him. All he wants is to draw — specifically, draw the kind of underground R. Crumb-style alt-comics that don’t make much money. He rents a room in a seventh-circle-of-hell-style basement apartment in Trenton, New Jersey, and picks up a job on the side; that’s how he meets Wallace (Matthew Maher), a strange guy who nonetheless had a mid-level job at a comics publisher that Robert worships. Their misadventures also function as a coming-of-age moment for Robert, who is staring down the barrel of the rest of his life and not seeing what he’d hope there. It’s a weird, smudgy, hilarious story from first-time feature director Owen Kline, and a grimy fun time.

How to watch it: A24 will release Funny Pages in the US.

God’s Creatures

A24

Anna Rose Holmer and Saela Davis (writer/director and editor, respectively, of The Fits) return to co-direct God’s Creatures, a harrowing and revealing story set in a small Irish fishing village. Troubled son Brian (Paul Mescal) returns home from years drifting abroad, to the delight of his mother, Aileen (Emily Watson), and the consternation of some others. He rekindles an acquaintance with old flame Sarah (Aisling Franciosi) and restarts the family oyster farm. But then he’s accused of sexual assault, and the small village — especially Aileen — is cast into turmoil. A carefully-tuned story about the complicated social dynamics that arise in close-knit communities, God’s Creatures is a sharp-edged acting showcase and a devastating exploration of how justice and love do, and don’t, exist alongside one another.

How to watch it: A24 will release God’s Creatures in the US.

One Fine Morning

Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island was my favorite film of 2021, so expectations ran high for One Fine Morning — and I was not disappointed. Sandra (a luminous Lea Seydoux) is a young widowed mother and a translator whose life is full with caring for her young daughter and her ill father, whose condition is rapidly deteriorating. Then Clement (Melvil Poupaud), a married astrophysicist and friend of her late husband, re-enters the picture, and life begins to overflow with love, and longing, and loss, and joy. Time, in One Fine Morning, passes like a poem or a song, a string of moments weighty with emotion. History and the future can’t be helped, so you have to hang on to the moment. It nearly brushes melodrama, but Seydoux’s performance anchors the film, ultimately rendering it a love letter to the present, and to the ways heartbreak and hope intertwine.

How to watch it: Sony Pictures Classics will release One Fine Morning in the US.

Return to Seoul

    <img alt="A young woman stands in Seoul at night." src="https://cdn.vox-

Return to Seoul is a stone-cold stunner. The drama centers on Freddie (fantastic newcomer Park Ji-min), born in Korea but adopted by French parents; at 25, she’s decided to visit the land of her birth for the first time. With confidence, director Davy Chou plumbs Freddie’s interior landscape — this isn’t about finding home so much as reckoning with the realization that you feel like you don’t have one. As we move with Freddie through her life’s evolutions, she continually refuses to conform to audience’s expectations. It’s the rhythm, the warp and woof of the film, that really makes it sing, the ways Freddie’s turmoil breaks the surface at unexpected moments, capturing a difficult experience like lightning in a bottle.

How to watch it: Sony Pictures Classics will release Return to Seoul in the US.

R.M.N.

IFC Films

With films like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Graduation, Cristian Mungiu is the reigning king of the Romanian New Wave. His latest, R.M.N. (named for the Romanian abbreviation for a brain-scanning MRI), is a rigorous, naturalistic, and devastating cross-section of xenophobia. Set in a Romanian town in which the local bakery is planning to employ immigrants, it’s certainly about a particular time and place. But it’s hard to ignore that the sentiments expressed by the townspeople about the outsiders — anchored in a long, barn-burning scene at a town meeting — are being echoed in countries all over the world, including, indisputably, our own. It’s a must-see.

How to watch it: IFC Films will release R.M.N. in the US.

Showing Up

A24

Showing Up is an absolute, wry joy of a little comedy about making art and living life. The film marks another collaboration between Kelly Reichardt, her longtime writing partner Jon Raymond, and Michelle Williams, who plays Lizzy, a stressed-out artist in Portland. Her hot water is broken. Her cat caught a bird in the night. Her parents are unruly and her brother is troubled, and meanwhile she’s trying to get ready for a solo show. The film feels pulled from familiar reality for anyone who’s ever tried to make creative work — and it’s quiet, clever, and a whole lot of fun.

How to watch it: A24 will release Showing Up in the US.

Three Thousand Years of Longing

That “stories are powerful” is such an oft-repeated axiom that it’s become banal. Yet George Miller (Mad Max: Fury Road, Babe: Pig in the City) finds new life for it in Three Thousand Years of Longing, a fairy tale for adults about how myths create meaning from madness and desire imparts bittersweet joy. Tilda Swinton stars as a lonely but content narratologist who accidentally lets loose a millennia-old djinn (Idris Elba) and breaks open something in her soul at the same time. The film draws on millennia of storytelling traditions (including, most obviously, Scheherazade’s), rendering it continually surprising. Sentimental, fantastical, and unabashedly moony, it’s a romance and a storytelling apologia all in one.

How to watch it: MGM will open Three Thousand Years of Longing in the US on August 31.

Tori et Lokita

Cannes Film Festival

Brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have made a long career of telling intimate stories from people marginalized by European society: drifters, strugglers, and, increasingly, immigrants. Their recent work, including Tori et Lokita, interrogates an uncomfortable truth — that the kindness of strangers and individual charity will never be enough to overcome inhumane and unjust systems that aim to divide societies and keep people in fear. Tori et Lokita follows a young woman (a terrific Mbundu Joely) and a boy (Pablo Schils) who have fought their way as undocumented immigrants into Belgium, where they team up to scrabble for a living and, they hope, gain papers that will make legal work possible. Things turn tragic, as they have for so many, and the conclusion is damning and biting: It’s not the people fighting for their life who are their problem, but the world in which their existence is rendered expendable.

How to watch it: Tori et Lokita is awaiting US distribution.

Triangle of Sadness

Neon

Brace yourself. The latest satire from Swedish director Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure, The Square) is uproarious, bleak, drenched in bodily fluids, and practically emblazoned with “Eat the Rich” in neon lights. It starts, briefly, in the world of modeling (the “triangle of sadness” being an area between the brows often tinkered with by plastic surgeons), but soon we’re on a luxury yacht populated by the worst people in the world. From there, things go nuts. Triangle of Sadness draws on everything from Roman vomitoriums to Lord of the Flies, skewering with equal force those who make their money without scruples and those who lack the courage of their convictions to do anything about it. It’s frequently gross, blunt as a battering ram, and very, very 2022.

How to watch it: Neon will release Triangle of Sadness in the US.

Un Petit Frère

Cannes Film Festival

In 1989, Rose (Annabelle Lengronne) moves from the Ivory Coast to France with two sons in tow, searching for more opportunities for them. But life takes many twists and turns. In Un Petit Frère, we watch as decades of their lives unfold, with Rose and, eventually, her children realizing that nothing in life is simple. And ultimately, the choices of mothers and older brothers shape the destiny of the youngest. Writer and director Leonor Serraille crafts a beautifully tender portrait of a family, a gentle meditation on the meanings of memories and how our pasts mold our presents and futures.

How to watch it: Un Petit Frère is awaiting US distribution.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Mighty Zo, Polished Girl, Saddler’s Legacy, A Star Is Born, Forever Together and Darwin shine -

• ISSF World Cup | Elavenil, Ramita and Shreya win gold in 10m air rifle team event - Elavenil Valarivan, Ramita and Shreya Agrawal outplayed Denmark 17-5 in the gold medal contest of the 10m air rifle team women’s event at the ISSF World Cup

• French Open | Rohan Bopanna makes first Grand Slam semifinal since 2015 Wimbledon - Rohan Bopanna and Matwe Middelkoop will face 12th seeds Marcelo Arevalo and Jean-Julien Roger on June 2 in the last four

• Chelsea sale saga ends as Todd Boehly’s consortium completes purchase from Roman Abramovich - The three-month process to sell Premier League club Chelsea FC has ended as the ownership has been transferred from Roman Abramovich to an investment group led by Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital

• French Open | Medvedev, Tsitsipas crash out in fourth round - Croatia’s Marin Cilic dumped Russian second-seed Daniil Medvedev out of the French Open in the fourth round, while fourth-seeded Stefanos Tsitsipas was also handed a shock defeat by Holger Rune

From The Hindu: National News

• Ayurveda College building restoration can be a model: Yaduveer - His stand gains significance since he opposes demolition of heritage structures

• Lingayat seers in Karnataka upset with ‘wrong info’ on Basavanna in textbook - Amid the escalating controversy over the revision of textbooks and alleged disrespect to ‘Rashtrakavi’ Kuvempu, Lingayat seers and leaders have objected to ‘wrong, twisted’ information on twelfth century social reformer Basavanna (Basaveshwara) in the class IX social science textbook

• India committed to be Gabon's reliable partner, says Vice President Venkaiah Naidu - Venkaiah Naidu arrived in Libreville on the first leg of his three-nation tour of Gabon, Senegal and Qatar

• Anbumani wants ordinance against online games - It need not wait for the next Assembly session, says the PMK president

• It will be no entry for BJP in 2024 Lok Sabha polls: West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee - The TMC boss said the people of India will ensure that in 2024, BJP’s politics of hate and violence find no entry into the country

From BBC: Europe

• Russian oil: EU agrees compromise deal on banning imports - The latest round of EU-wide sanctions excludes pipeline oil imports after Hungary opposed a total ban.

• Oil price rises as EU cuts Russian imports - New sanctions to block Russian oil shipped to the EU have pushed oil prices higher.

• Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff: French BFMTV journalist killed in Ukraine - Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff was covering an evacuation operation near Severodonetsk when he was killed.

• What happened at the Champions League final? - Eyewitnesses give accounts that cast doubt on French claims that fake tickets caused the chaos.

• Police at Champions League final went looking for conflict, mayor says - French police must be held accountable over what they did to fans in Paris, Liverpool’s metro mayor says.

From Ars Technica

• The best Memorial Day sales we can find on gadgets, games, and tech gear [Updated] - Dealmaster includes MacBooks, iPads, the Xbox Series S, Roombas, and more. - link

• Remembering Apple’s Newton, 30 years on - On its 30th anniversary, we look at the groundbreaking product’s enduring legacy. - link

• Bear hibernation: More than a winter’s nap - Scientists are watching to see how bears will tweak their habits as the climate warms. - link

• Which is worse for the soil—combines or dinosaurs? - Both harvesters and dinosaurs may damage the zone where roots grow. - link

• The mystery of China’s sudden warnings about US hackers - China has recently begun saber-rattling about American cyberespionage. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• I don’t understand people who commit violent crimes with guns -

  At least become a cop first so you get paid

  submitted by /u/-Iknewthisalready-
  [link] [comments]

• A family checks in to a hotel -

  The father walks up to the concierge and says “im checking in with my family, i hope the porn is disabled” The concierge responds “its just regular porn you sick fuck”

  submitted by /u/dannykings37
  [link] [comments]

• How does a non-binary samurai kill people? -

  They/Them

  submitted by /u/thoxo
  [link] [comments]

• Mr. Bigger and Mrs. Bigger have a baby. Who’s the biggest in the family? -

  The baby of course - because he’s a little Bigger.

  submitted by /u/prankerjoker
  [link] [comments]

• What did the blind man say when he touched sandpaper for the first time? -

  “What the fuck did I just read?”

  submitted by /u/1solarshadow
  [link] [comments]