Books
fromBig Think
1 day ago4 classics that were basically written as propaganda
Authors often write novels to promote ideologies and influence public opinion through emotional appeals and symbolism.
The story imagines a distant future where the few thousand surviving humans on Earth are separated into different colonies, including an all-gay colony where a toxic couple finds their 'twisted games' may put the rest of their peers in danger.
Kick off with Ridley Scott's 1982 OG Blade Runner: The Final Cut, which stars Harrison Ford as a special agent on a mission to exterminate escaped androids. Ford is joined by Ryan Gosling in the Denis Villeneuve-directed Blade Runner 2049, which is sure to whet your appetite for Dune: Part Three - hitting cinemas this December.
The politics never go away; they just change form. All the same things go on. There's always this emergency that needs to be dealt with, a fear of otherness, a fear of things you can't control. With that, you get complicity or apathy. It's cyclical.
I think that the most important feature of theater is the act itself. It's not actually what is said or what is done. It's not the plot or the storyline. It's the act of gathering human beings in space and time together to experience something.
Back in December, when SFWA announced that it was updating its rules for the Nebula Awards. Works written entirely by large language models would not be eligible, while authors who used LLMs "at any point during the writing process" had to disclose that use, allowing award voters to make their own decisions about whether that usage would affect their support.
Each series explores technology that feels just one step ahead of reality. In the era of AI, it feels more and more timely. Ben does a lot of research and we have advisers who inform us about the latest developments. Not just from the Met and counter-terror but military consultants as well. They're banks of information and a lot more open than you'd expect because it's all off the record.
BBC Threads, directed by Mick Jackson, follows two families in Sheffield as they try to survive a direct hit from a nuclear bomb. It pulls no punches as its characters fall one by one, before ultimately only focusing on pregnant Ruth (Karen Meagher) as she tries to survive and carve out a life for her and her child. Meticulously researched, it presents a bleak picture of what civilization would look like after nuclear winter, including the ozone layer weakening, resulting in blindness and skin cancer, and the degradation of the English language itself.
A study found that reading banned books predicted civic engagement more strongly than personality traits. Reading banned books showed zero correlation with grades, violent crime, or nonviolent crime in adolescents. Reactance theory explains why censorship backfires: Restricted freedoms activate curiosity and thinking.
A vast, miserable proletariat squanders its days in meaningless toil. Society is under the control of ultra-wealthy business magnates. In order to pacify the underclass, the ruling class pins its hopes on a technological solution: artificial intelligence. Welcome to the year 2026, as envisioned in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
Subsequently, runaway children turned the valley into a fortress, surviving on food they could catch or grow, with occasional forays into the towns below. Riley has heard the rumours, but it is only when she sees a green-clad boy or is it a girl? hovering outside her bedroom window offering directions on how to find Nowhere that she realises this might be her chance to escape and save her little brother from their sadistic guardian.
This isn't your average pandemic thriller; here, the infected meld with inorganic material in their surroundings, until their outward contours and their personhood are gone. Thibault Emin's film starts with a little whiff of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's Delicatessen. After their one-night stand, hypochondriac Anx (Matthieu Sampeur) and impertinent Cass (Edith Proust) find themselves bunkered up in one corner of a madcap apartment block.
I'm thrilled with any chance to collaborate with the Harvard Film Archive and to make use of Harvard's collection. I've taught several of Kubrick's films in different courses over the years, but never all of them together and never on the big screen. It is a unique opportunity. The HFA is one of Harvard's treasures. I'm really grateful to them for making this happen.
Boris Karloff stands tall as one of film history's most iconic performers, particularly within the horror genre. Foremost known for portraying some of the most iconic monsters in film history, from his work as Frankenstein's Monster in Frankenstein, Imhotep in The Mummy, or voicing The Grinch himself, Karloff had a few distinctive attributes that made him one of the most memorable stars of the era.