The most enduring images of The Creature in pop culture actually have next to nothing to do with the way he's described in Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus; in the book, he's eight feet tall with yellow, translucent skin, and most importantly, he's incredibly intelligent - so much so that he's able to eloquently narrate his own story for a chunk of the novel.
Roald Dahl made his career writing children's books that dared to be mean (yes, sometimes in rather unfortunate ways). Across almost 20 novels, the British author spun fantastical tales with unsentimental wit, infusing his work with darkly morbid humor, blithe child endangerment, rotten and antagonistic adults, and a willingness to occasionally laugh at the misfortune of others. And no other work of Dahl's gets more pitch-black than "The Twits," a thin, acidic little text about deeply repugnant people.
Can training a goshawk cure grief? Or treat it, in some way? Will keeping it indoors hooded so that it remains calm and then taking it out hunting allow you to reconnect radically with nature in a way that prissy townies will never understand? Or is this just a domesticated festival of cruelty to both bird and prey and a symptom of serious depression?
Back to selection(2025), directed by independent Argentinian collective Pin de Fartie El Pampero Cine member Alejo Moguillansky, is less an adaptation of Samuel Beckett's one-act play Fin de Partie (1957) than a centrifugal expansion unfolding into multiple nested narratives riffing on the play's themes: death, departure and the approach of an ending. Marking a tonal shift from Moguillansky's ensemble comedies, Pin de Fartie possesses a sense of wistful tragedy.
The production has received backlash for the casting of Margot Robbie as Catherine and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, with critics calling for a Black actor to play the latter character, described in the book as having dark hair, dark eyes and dark skin. Fennell explained her decisions, recalling the moment she wanted to scream when she saw Elordi with sideburns on the Saltburn set, as he reminded her of Dirk Bogarde and looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read.
If the experience of watching One Battle is so propulsive that you leave the theater feeling like you haven't taken a breath in hours, Vineland is far more digressive, switching genres by the page, with a plot that's more varied than the relatively simple man-tries-to-rescue-daughter story of One Battle. For one thing, Vineland has significant supernatural elements, including the existence of a class of person called a Thanatoid-souls caught between life and death.
A disproportionate amount of your success comes from your effort in the last 5%. Let's use fitness examples and then bring it back to work and life. Picture doing a plank. If you're feeling type A, do one after reading this. When you get to the point where you are ready to drop, say to yourself, "Just five more seconds." Count out loud, and you can do it.
I was reading Brandon Sanderson's latest novel, Wind and Truth, when I came across a sentence that stopped me cold: "A stronger current makes for stronger fish." That's it. That's what entrepreneurship is. We're constantly encountering currents that either facilitate what we want to accomplish-the businesses we want to build, the lives we want to create-or they oppose us, trying to sweep us into dangerous waters. These currents change all the time. They vary in strength depending on where you are in your journey. And here's the thing: they're mostly invisible until you learn to feel them.
But Lego franchise games seem to have turned a corner now, as Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga was a nicely refreshed take on the entire series, even as it retained the core Lego game collectathon loop. Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight looks to be an even greater departure, standing firmly on a love of Batman across all his media incarnations.
Thematically, ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ is about a group of Australian prisoners of war constructing the Burma railway in the mid-1940s, focusing on the lasting trauma of conflict and imprisonment.
The season two cliffhanger ending and tease of what's to come in season three just didn't land for a lot of people, and there are a lot of questions from viewers as to whether the show can survive the loss of Pedro Pascal's Joel.
Disney's latest musical, while visually appealing and entertaining, lacks the innovative spirit of its predecessors, resulting in an experience that's adequate but not memorable.
