Category Archives: Nihilism

Neta Bar is a business administration sophomore and opinion columnist for Mustang News. Her views reflected in this piece dont necessarily reflect those of Mustang News.

With Everything Everywhere All at Once, the studio A24 has proven that they have their finger on the pulse of the world today and they have expanded its target audience while simultaneously zeroing in on the stories that will indulge the unique needs of these fresh eyes. In other words, this film has something for everyone, without sacrificing the storytelling integrity that A24 exhibits without fail.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a multifaceted film, with layers ranging from existential philosophical commentary to Pixar-esque wholehearted comfort. Like a choose your own adventure, the audience is given all they could possibly ask for the viewer just has to choose which theme they will take away.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is stylistically individualistic and thematically distinct. However, it would be remiss not to acknowledge the cinematic parallels found both in the plot and in the delivery. We see an experimental take at philosophical commentary as the film grapples with existentialist themes and the teetering line between nihilism and absurdism. In this way, one could compare Everything Everywhere All at Once to a healthy fusion of the feel-good optimism of Pixars Soul and the harrowing experience that is Charlie Kaufmans Synecdoche, New York. That is to say, this movie is one of optimistic nihilism, with the simple yet poignant bottom line: nothing matters, everything matters.

And with that, the aforementioned choose your own adventure comes into play. One movie-goer could walk away from the film with a takeaway of disheartening pessimism, that happiness can only be fleeting and each of us are extraordinarily small and powerless in the face of the nature of the world. However, another could leave this cinematic experience a more hopeful person than when they entered it. Perhaps joy is hard to come by, but it is everything and it is everywhere.

The climax of the film highlights exactly that. As Evelyn deescalates the violent mob by fighting fire with a fire extinguisher connecting each individual with their respective pleasure the film visually demonstrates how no joy is too outlandish nor too mundane. The blind rage that the mob exudes evidently stems from a place of not just sadness, but confusion. A feeling of such utter lostness occurs and without a way to cope, so we turn to the suit of armor that is apathy, isolation and, most effective of all, anger.

The choose your own adventure hits another fork in the road as the film extends the opportunity for the theme of depression, if the viewer so chooses to interpret it that way. Everything Everywhere All at Once hits the closest to home at this point, particularly when Joy attempts to make her mother understand the incurable hopelessness and pain that she endures at nearly every moment of the day. She is desperate for someone to not fix or take it away, but at the very least, to understand. She wants someone to share the darkness, comically personified by the Everything Bagel, that plagues all facets of her life, no matter if theyre good or bad.

The film is earnest in this depiction of depression while successfully steering clear of being clich. Instead, there is a visceral feeling of understanding and sorrowful comfort, one that was desperately needed by countless moviegoers.

This film graciously allows the viewer freedom of choice. Not so much in the sense of cinematic interpretation, as each theme can be fairly easily deduced, but rather, one can choose to what extent they walk away with hope and to what extent they see a reflection of their own psychological afflictions. They can choose to let the silence of Joy and Evelyn as rocks in a different universe be a moment of healing peace, or one of powerful introspection. Nonetheless, one common denominator remains consistent: Everything Everywhere All at Once is a work of thought-provoking, potentially life-changing art, if the viewer so allows it.

Originally posted here:

"Everything Everywhere All at Once" is life-changing, in this universe and every other one - Mustang News

A few weeks ago, the person behind the New York Times Pitchbotnot a bot at all, but a Twitter account whose posts satirize New York Times headlines and articleswas at his home, in Rochester, New York, doing laundry with one hand while tapping out, with the other, one of his most frequent refrains on Twitter: Dems in Disarray. But the tweeta parody of what NYT Pitchbot considers one of the medias laziest constructionswouldnt send. Whoops! read an alert from Twitter. You already said that.

Thats part of the shtick; all told, NYT Pitchbot has tweeted Dems in Disarray more than four hundred times. In this case, the Twitter app had malfunctioned. NYT Pitchbot had already sent identical versions of the tweet seconds apart, and was attempting to send a third to his 150,000-plus followers. All the better, he supposed.

Though his subject matter might suggest otherwise, NYT Pitchbot does not work in media or politics. He is a fifty-two-year-old math professor and father of two who describes himself as a committed Democrat of the slightly hardcore left. He is anonymous on Twitter, and asked to remain so for this story, citing personal and professional concerns. (CJR contacted him via email and spoke with him on the phone, verifying his association with the Twitter account over direct message. He shared his real identity with CJR, which we verified with two other sources.)

NYT Pitchbot began his sideline in online political commentary in the early 2000s, posting anonymous comments on blogs, focusing much of his energy on one called Balloon Juice (i.e., hot air). Under the alias Doug J, he mounted ironic defenses of George W. Bush to let off some steam and provoke the blogs founder, John Cole, a conservative undergoing a liberal transformation.

Trolling is what you would call it, but it wasnt malicious, says Cole. It was basically pointing out that what I was saying was stupidtaking things to their logical extremes. Doug J, Cole says, was a crowd favorite. So in 2009, Cole asked him to start writing posts for Balloon Juice directly.

Early contributions included criticism of Times columnist Thomas Friedman (writes entire columns about the wonders of free tradewithout citing a single figure) and earnest admiration for Glenn Greenwald, now NYT Pitchbots bte noire. (What really gets me is this combination of nihilism and stupidity, says NYT Pitchbot, citing Chris Cillizza as another offender.) Around the same time, Pitchbot says, he was banned from the New York Times online comment section, for a disparaging remark submitted on the launch of The Conversation, a column-in-dialogues by David Brooks and Gail Collins.

Doug J still occasionally posts on Balloon Juice, where he also raises money for liberal causes and Democratic candidates. (Through the online donation platform ActBlue, hes brought in more than $2.8 million to date.) He joined Twitter in 2009, taking @dougjballoon as his handle, but didnt start tweeting regularly until four years ago, when his first child was born. With kids and full-time teaching, it was easier to tweet than blog, he said.

In 2019, @DougJBalloon changed his name on Twitter to New York Times Pitchbot, committing to a new bit. He was encouraged by a conservative journalist friend and inspired by other pitchbot accounts, particularly one, now retired, that satirized The Federalist, a conservative online publication. Its a tricky thing, because The Federalist is so insane. How do you parody it? he says. What I think is more interesting is just how much of that same kind of stupidity is embedded in ostensibly left-center establishment journalism.

With his account, NYT Pitchbot imagines the Times formula for stories as a kind of wheezing algorithm, a bot churning out contrarian headlines and half-baked hot takes. I was a lifelong liberal Democrat, begins one mock pitch for the Times opinion section. Then reproductive rights activists held a vigil in front of Brett Kavanaughs house. Another: Ukrainians Have Sunk the Russian Warship Moskva. Heres why thats bad news for Joe Biden. (Like Dems in Disarray, Bad News for Biden is something of a catchphrase for the account.)

NYT Pitchbot is a lifelong Times reader and a current digital subscriber. Obviously, I think the New York Times does fantastic journalism, he says. Still: Ive always had a lot of issues with how the media handles national politics. Like, I really thought that what went on around the Iraq War was insane. He finds the Times framing of political coverage grating, and criticizes its opinion section as contrarian, focused on concern-trolling liberalsengaging in disingenuous criticism. Theres this obsession the Times has with attacking other liberals, he says. Beyond an attempt at balance, I think part of it is thats the ecosystem that they live in, and they find the people around them irritating.

NYT Pitchbots first viral tweet came in March 2020, as covid lockdowns began. (Sources close to Jared and Ivanka said that privately the couple opposes the pandemic.) The tweeta dig at the Times reporter Maggie Haberman and her coverage of the couplegained NYT Pitchbot thousands of followers overnight. To date, the accounts most popular tweet was during the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. (We wanted to understand whats happening in Afghanistan. So we talked to three unvaccinated Trump supporters at an Arbys in Harrisburg.) But the authors favorite pitches are more baroque, combining several jokes. (Times have been tough in this Ohio town ever since the woke mob shut down the old ivermectin factory.)

The account has made a particular hobby of mocking the Times obsession with man-on-the-street style interviews at Rust Belt diners. (Nearly 90 percent of people admitted to hospitals due to Covid are unvaccinated. But in this Ohio diner, nearly 90 percent of unvaccinated diners dont believe that matters.) Those jokes are intended to sting not the interview subjects, but rather the Times reporters who conduct the interviews. These are stories written with a note of condescension that presume a wealthy, urban reader. They fly in, they look for people to say stupid things, and they leave, says NYT Pitchbot. I think its kind of dehumanizing. (By frequently focusing on white people, he adds, these articles reinforce the false idea of an exclusively white working class.) The Pitchbot account currently links to an online shop where supporters can order a T-shirt, mug, or onesie printed with in this ohio diner So far, two hundred items have been sold.

Often, in replies to NYT Pitchbot tweets, others try their hand at the formula, riffing along. NYT Pitchbot sometimes retweets them. Recently, another contributor, a journalism professor who likewise asked to remain anonymous, began sending ideas over direct message. I thought, This is the best media criticism Im seeing of the New York Times, says the journalism professor, who is now responsible for roughly a quarter of the Pitchbots output. Then theres help from the Times itself: when real Times headlines verge on self-parody, NYT Pitchbot simply shares them without comment. (Opinion | Biden Could Make the World Safer, but Hes Too Afraid of the Politics.)

With Biden in office, NYT Pitchbot believes, the Times has abandoned the position it had staked outa kind of anti-anti-Trumpism, as reflected in the hiring of conservative columnists like Bari Weiss and Bret Stephensand returned to its usual form. The Dems are back in disarray. Everything is bad news for Democrats, he sayswhich is, of course, good news for his account.

In 2017, when the Times eliminated its public-editor role, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., then the papers publisher, claimed the position was no longer needed, in part because social media platforms like Twitter could perform the same functions. Does that mean, I ask NYT Pitchbot, that hes the Times public editor?

He considers the question. The one thing that I would hope is that being made fun of for their really mindless rhetoric would make them change their headlines a little bit, he says. But ultimately, he adds, a real public editor would be infinitely preferable to randos on Twitter.

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The bot that saw the Times - Columbia Journalism Review

Regarding Retired judges oppose recall of Boudin (Letters to the Editor, May 12): The opposition to recall of the criminal defense lawyer turned San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin by retired judges ignores Boudins practices, his dereliction of duty to San Franciscans and taxpayer expectations.

Boudin claims a desire to prosecute those in power, but has abrogated City Hall corruption responsibility in favor of the U.S. Attorneys office. Hed rather prosecute police officers than burglars, robbers, repeat offenders and shoplifters. City Hall graft is inexcusable; so is Boudins failure, which is why voters (not retired judges) should recall him so he can return to the Public Defenders Office, his true professional love.

Quentin Kopp, retired San Mateo County judge,

San Franciso

The initiative to recall San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is obviously well-funded. A deluge of slick, printed materials and even television ads. Who is paying for those expensive materials and ads?

Remember, please, that Boudin was elected as a reaction against Mayor London Breeds attempt to appoint Suzy Loftis as district attorney. City voters dont like mayoral appointees. (Former incendiary Supervisor Chris Daly was elected as a direct reaction to Willie Browns attempts to put a lackey on the Board of Supervisors.)

As is too often the case, recalls are typically funded by wealthy interests that are displeased that they failed to buy an election. The Boudin recall appears to be yet another example of that.

Riley B. VanDyke, San Francisco

Regarding Layoff drama as firefighters refuse vaccine (Bay Area & Business, May 19): As a firefighter for 40 years, I am sure of one thing, the exact job of a firefighter is public safety. We are there to protect the citizens from all immediate dangers, including the virus that has taken 1 million American lives now.

I not only believe all firefighters should be vaccinated to protect the public, but also to protect the fellow firefighters they share a house with. If you dont care enough about the public to get your vaccination, get another job; your heart isnt into the one you have.

Robert Nice, Redwood City

Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing using part of the state budget surplus payments to health care workers to retain them. Dumb idea! I am an registered nurse at a Bay Area hospital. Id love an extra 1,500 bucks but it wouldnt affect my decision to stay or leave. We are so short-staffed, I get asked almost daily to work extra shifts or stay extra hours. Exhausted staff are quitting. The money wont make anyone stay who doesnt want to theyll maybe stay until they cash the check. And were one of the hospitals in decent shape!

Use the surplus money for: paying nursing school instructors more theres a backlog for students trying to get into nursing school, give hospitals and skilled nursing facilities restricted funds for the of hiring additional staff, and require higher pay for non-registered nurse workers and emergency medical technicians we are short on all these people. EMTs get minimum wage or barely more to save lives.

The $1,500 is just buying votes and I already generally support Newsom but not on this.

Katherine Feallock, Richmond

Regarding Is Musk a good agent of chaos? (Open Forum, May 17): Thank you, Jackie Mansky, for spotlighting Norman Spinrads Agent of Chaos in the Open Forum. Those 70s science fiction titans: Spinrad, Brunner, Vonnegut, Farmer, Delany (and a host of others) foretold our current world with wit, erudition and humanity.

Todays Agents of Nihilism: Bannon, Farage, Jones, Carlson seek only to disrupt, destroy and profit. Embrace entropy!

Carey Stevenson, Richmond

Correction: An earlier version of What a chaotic time we live in misstated the type of 70s titans the writer was referring to.

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Letters: This retired judge supports recalling Chesa Boudin and putting him back where he belongs - San Francisco Chronicle

Mark Walsh looks at the latest releases, in an article sponsored by Cambridge Arts Picturehouse.

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Do you ever look back on your life and wonder what might have been? What if youd had cereal instead of toast this morning? What if youd followed your dream and gone to swim with dolphins? What if you had massive sausages instead of fingers?

Well, maybe you havent wondered about the last one, but Daniels have, and theyve set about exploring the infinite possibilities of the universe with a film thats equal parts thrilling and dramatic, hilarious and thought-provoking.

Daniels the collective name for writer / directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert had only one possibility in mind to star in their travel through the multiverse, Michelle Yeoh. In her multiverse of an acting career, shes been a martial arts star, a Bond girl, a Star Trek captain and even played Santa, so who better to play the only woman who can save every one of these parallel universes? She plays Evelyn, facing a tax audit of the laundromat she runs with her husband Waymond, who suddenly discovers the ability to travel between different universes. In these she has been everything from a martial arts master and a chef to a movie star, but there may not be any where she has a successful relationship with her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu).

With a supporting cast including Ke Huy Kwan (returning to acting after an early career most famous for Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom and The Goonies), James Hong and Jamie Lee Curtis, Danielss exploration of lifes unlimited possibilities explores everything from love to nihilism and truly feels as if no possible outcome is left unexplored.

The film has a boundless energy, and is likely to leave some audiences crying with tears of laughter while others are caught up in the emotional crisis between Evelyn and Joy.

Its an epic, magnificent film thats completely unexpected from directors whose only previous work of significance was the Daniel-Radcliffe-corpse movie Swiss Army Man. Prepare to be moved, bewildered and supremely entertained in the first strong contender for film of the year.

Top Gun: Maverick

There are two types of people in this life: those to whom if you say, I feel the need, they will instantly affirm with you, the need for speed", and people who should probably then skip to the next film.

For those in the former group, chances are you havent lost that loving feeling for Tony Scotts Eighties cheesefest where pilots with unparalleled skill and nicknames of varying degrees of success are sent to the danger zone after being trained with the best of the best. So far, so clichd, yet this belated sequel has actually ended up being one of the years most anticipated films.

Thirty-six years after Maverick and Iceman first launched themselves off an aircraft carrier faster than the speed of sound, Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer are returning to mentor a new generation of pilots. Iceman has become an admiral, but Maverick has resolutely resisted anything approaching promotion; this might mean hes the ideal man for the job when his old rival needs someone to prepare a group of talented rookies for a specialised and dangerous mission.

In the three decades since the original, Tom Cruise has remodelled himself as one of the worlds foremost action movie stars, so its no surprise that he and the other pilot actors underwent rigorous training before filming at high speeds in real planes. Joseph Kosinski (TRON: Legacy, Oblivion) takes over the directorial reins, and a team of writers including Mission: Impossible scribe Christopher McQuarrie have upped the emotional stakes, with one of the rookies (Miles Teller) playing the son of Mavericks original co-pilot, Goose. Top Gun: Maverick looks set to deliver the perfect blend of turbocharged action and throwback sentiment in a film which looks set to take our collective breath away.

A-Ha: The Movie

Heres a piece of trivia to lodge somewhere at the back of your brain, just in case it comes up at a pub quiz next time youre there.

What was A-has only UK number one? Youd think maybe Take On Me, with its iconic animated video, or maybe their Bond theme The Living Daylights, but in fact it was their second single, The Sun Always Shines On TV.

Take On Me did top the charts around the world, including the USA, and Thomas Robsahms documentary explores the history and dynamic of Norways most famous pop trio.

His film follows guitarist Pl Waaktaar-Savoy, keyboard player Magne Furuholmen and singer Morten Harket over a four year period, exploring both the bands meteoric rise to success partly fuelled by their own self-belief and the tensions that have also existed within the group over their four decade career.

Having split up in 2010, they reformed a few years later and the film features candid interviews with the band as well as stage performances of all those chart-topping greatest hits.

Culture Shock and Gaspar No Presents

One of the shock-jocks of modern French cinema, Argentine-born director Gaspar No has provoked strong reactions across his career with acclaimed films including Irreversible, Enter The Void, Love and Climax, and while his latest Vortex marks a more restrained impulse, his examination of the difficulties of approaching the end of life using a split-screen technique throughout is his most compelling film to date.

Hes curated a season of films under the Culture Shock banner which show the breadth of his cinematic influences. Michael Hanekes Amour (showing June 6) is a film from a kindred spirit whos also pushed cinematic boundaries to their limits and explores similar themes to Vortex around dementia and death. The season also includes Umberto D (May 23), Vittorio De Sicas neorealist classic about a man and his dog facing eviction from their apartment, Tokyo Story (May 30), Yasujir Ozus masterpiece about an elderly couple visiting their children, and Sunset Boulevard (June 13), Billy Wilders darkly comic noir starring Gloria Swanson as a fading silent film actress.

The Culture Shock season also features a chance to catch another masterpiece, Dutch director Paul Verhoevens English language debut Robocop (May 25), here restored to the directors original vision. Sharply satirical, comically violent and endlessly quotable, it deserves its place in this series of films showcasing directors at the peak of their powers.

Read more from Mark Walsh

From golfs hilarious Phantom of the Open to The Worst Person in the World

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Why Everything Everywhere All At Once is a contender for film of the year - plus a look ahead to Top Gun: Maverick - Cambridge Independent

Swamy Rotolo in Jonas Carpignanos A ChiaraPhoto: Neon

A common experience while growing up is realizing that ones parents are not quite the monoliths one imagined them to be as a child. Adolescence is a process of acclimating ones internal perceptions to the realities of the world around them, and a time comes in almost everyones life when they discover that not all families are like their own. This is the reality that writer-director Jonas Carpignano explores in A Chiara, the third film in his informal trilogy of films set in the Calabrian region of Italy. Observing his own story from a dispassionate distance, Carpignano tracks a teenage girls evolving betrayal as her sense of reality collapses around her in a film that proves affecting, albeit inconsistently.

The titular Chiara Guerrasio (Swamy Rotolo) is a 15-year-old in a well-to-do family, patriarchally led by her father Claudio (Claudio Rotolo). Following a bombastic celebration of Chiaras sister Giulias (Grecia Rotolo) 18th birthday, Chiara witnesses the explosion of the family car, after which Claudio is nowhere to be found. Though her mother Carmela (Carmela Fumo) is determined to act as though nothing out of the ordinary is happening, Chiara quickly discovers the news is reporting that her father is a fugitive with connections to the mafia, driving Chiara to a crisis of faith in her parents and outrage that threatens her role in their domestic happiness.

B-

Swamy Rotolo, Claudio Rotolo, Grecia Rotolo, Carmela Fumo

In theaters May 27

Cinematographer Tim Curtin does an excellent job of complementing Chiaras escalating sense of betrayal through a camera that remains committed to capturing her emotional state, restrained enough to retain a strictly observational distance, but intimate enough that we are connected to her journey even when communicated with a muted expression. Carpignanos choice to cast A Chiara with non-professional actorsprimarily members of the Rotolo familyallows for a lived-in naturalism with his characters, albeit through performances that linger without compelling dramatic flourish. Consequently, the film draws upon the dynamics of a real family to examine a fundamental gap between the harmony of domestic life and the forbidden fruit of ill-gotten gains, all without feeling staged or crafted by external storytelling conceits.

Chiara is constantly treated as a child with the inability to understand exactly who her father is and the dangers she poses to him by inquiring into his business and disappearance. Her mother and sister repeatedly tell her that she is incapable of understanding, but they refuse to speak to the reality of their patriarchs criminal lifestyle because it exposes their willful ignorance or knowing complicity. This growing gulf between Chiara and her family leaves her isolated in her search for truth, as emblematized by her recurring trips to the gym to run the treadmill alone, forever in pursuit, yet trapped in an artifice from which she cant break free.

Unfortunately, the stylistic choice to follow Chiaras story at an arms length distance from the moral judgment of her family adversely impacts the films tone and pacing. Most particularly, the protracted examination of Chiaras feelings of normalcy serve as an effective juxtaposition for her emotional development in the lead-up to her revelatory quest for answers, but proves overly passive in examining the family dynamic for an extended period of time. The films commitment to the mere observation of its performers, instead of calculatingly framing them, gives A Chiara a looseness that allows the mind to wander just as much as it invites contemplation, a problem that tightens as Chiaras circumstances and dilemmas become more concrete but remains persistent throughout.

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Notably, A Chiaras plotting is at its tightest and most compelling in its climax and epilogue, where the results of Chiaras moral dilemma come to a head and Carpignano converts unspoken turmoil into explicit text, a narrative tactic that solidifies a heartbreaking narrative in danger of spinning out into nihilism. In observing that space between childhood and adulthood, A Chiara contemplates a character who is forced to grow up too fast, acknowledging the cost of family secrets and weighing the consequences of upholding a status quo that obscures reality. Though the path to its conclusions is at times more plodding than meditative, the finale is a subtle, emotional twist of the knife that makes the journey worth taking.

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A Chiara explores a teenager's discovery of unexpectedand universaladult truths - The A.V. Club

In the early months of the pandemic, Stephanie Hsu found herself standing in front of a bookshelf, weeping. I realised, says the 31-year-old, that all these writers had taken the time to write these books to keep us company [in a way] that they didnt even know we would need. They didnt even foresee the type of huge life change that many of us went through. And yet they felt a pull to finish a story. There was something very profound about that moment, where I felt the weight and the presence of art.

Hsu is telling me this in an attempt to explain what it meant to her to play a multiverse-destroying, dildo-nunchuck-wielding supervillain in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Honestly, this movie is everything that I could possibly want from a work of art, she says. It is mind-expanding, medium-expanding, and it provides immense amounts of healing. And that is all I ever want art to do. That, she adds, and to make the world a better place.

If that sounds like a big ask, Everything Everywhere Hsus first ever studio film and a surprise runaway hit at the US box office is up to it. Written and directed by the writing-directing duo known as the Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) who previously cast Daniel Radcliffe as a farting corpse in Swiss Army Man it is an absurd, profound, ludicrously ambitious film that takes on the very meaning of life, goodness and the universe while also being stupidly good fun.

The film follows Michelle Yeohs Evelyn, a frazzled Chinese-American laundromat owner who is being audited by a cantankerous tax inspector (Jamie Lee Curtis, clearly having a ball). Meanwhile, her downtrodden daughter Joy (Hsu) is trying, and failing, to get her mother to welcome her girlfriend into the family.

Here is where things get weird. Through a series of improbable events that would be as frustrating to explain as a dream, it transpires that this is just one of infinite multiverses, and Evelyn must jump between them, experiencing every possible version of herself, in order to stop an existential threat known as Jobu Tupaki, who turns out to be her daughter Joy from a different multiverse, whose mind has splintered into something godlike and vengeful.

Oh, and theres a black-hole bagel, a world in which everyone has hot-dog fingers, and an extended joke involving the Pixar film Ratatouille.

It could have been atrocious, but, says Hsu, I think the first thing that I said out loud when I watched the final cut was: It works. It really works.

Hsu is on a video call from her kitchen in Los Angeles. It is 8am there, a time at which she is not usually ready to be talking to people, she says with a laugh. Hsu is not quite a newcomer she played Mei Lin in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and had a blink-and-youll-miss-it role in Marvels Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings but this role is surely her star-making one. She is brilliant, embodying a swaggering nihilism one minute, a repressed vulnerability the next.

Hsu loves that Everything Everywhere is not centred on our identities, she says. Its so wild and singular. This is not a film about race, nor queerness, yet they are woven into its very fabric. I know there are people who are going to see the movie with their families, and the movies so crazy that maybe they wont even talk about the queer relationship, but its there. And that is significant.

She gently pushes back, though, when I compare it to those Marvel and Disney offerings that offer gestures towards progressiveness without actually taking any risks. I think that every attempt, if it is done with care, chips away at the same stone, she says carefully.

Take that Pride flag pinned to the jacket of one of the characters in the new Doctor Strange film. The beauty of a big-budget film that can sneak that in, says Hsu, is if that somehow doesnt get noticed by certain governments and it gets approved, thats a huge deal.

Everything Everywhere has been banned from release in countries such as Saudi Arabia; Doctor Strange has not. The people who need to see that little Pride flag are going to see it, and that can be enough to carry something through, you know?

There was a time when Hsu might have thought differently but she has been telling herself lately that when it comes to social progress, she can only do so much. Because theres so much that I cannot control: how the pendulum swings in culture, what is woke to talk about in media, and how people like to capitalise on identity for reasons that are not necessarily pure, she explains. So what helps me is to slow down and to understand that progress is nuanced. At the very end of the day, I have to have hope.

She mentions James Hong, the 93-year-old actor who plays her grandfather, Gong Gong, in Everything Everywhere. Hes getting his Hollywood star tomorrow; hes been in more than 500 movies, and he started working at a time where people were in yellow face. They wouldnt cast any Asian people. When I think about that, embodied in one persons lifetime, it helps me to understand that what I am dreaming of is going to take time.

Things werent easy for Hsu, either. When she was growing up in California, her mother, who had moved to the US from Taiwan as a teenager, pointed at the TV screen and told her there was no way she could be an actor, because no one on there looked like her. When she got the script for Mrs Maisel, she was scared of the jokes that I might find on the page slanty eyes, broken English, she wrote in a piece for The Hollywood Reporter. Her fears were unfounded, but given what she had grown up watching, not unwarranted.

So what does slowing down mean exactly? Well There is a long pause. When I was younger, I would feel really angry when change was not happening at the pace I wanted it to. And it would enrage me to the point where I would lose my capacity for compassion. Ever the careful conversationalist, she umms and ahhs for a moment about whether to bring something up. Eventually, she decides with a laugh that it is worth it. Roe v Wade, she says. That is so enraging.

We are speaking just a few days after a leaked memo revealed that the US Supreme Court plans to overturn the legalisation of abortion in America. It is so enraging for so many reasons, continues Hsu. And the thing is, I dont know the answer. So even though I am so enraged now, I am also, I think, being a little more honest with feeling like I dont have all the answers.

Perhaps what I mean by slowing down is feeling incredibly determined about trying to move things forward, but also giving myself space to be unclear of how to make it better.

It can be tiring, I say, to have to constantly justify your own rights and existence. Well, totally, says Hsu. Im very tired of saying no all the time. Naomi Klein wrote this book, No is Not Enough, and she says that if were just debating all the time, trying to take the man down, fighting, that is not enough. There has to be a yes that we can all get behind. To set a fire takes a shorter amount of time than to grow a new possibility.

She has also discovered, thanks to Everything Everywhere, that there can be a place for nihilism in the world. Up until this movie, Id been trying to find meaning and beauty and synchronicities, and a feeling that youre connected to something larger than yourself fate, in some ways, she explains. But that can be very debilitating, because its a confusing time to be alive right now. I dont know why there was Covid. Theres no way to put meaning to any of these things that are happening. And nihilism takes the pressure off a little bit. We know nothing. We simply do not know what is coming our way, nor how to solve the current batch of problems.

She laughs. We are all small and stupid. But maybe thats OK. Maybe we are all just trying our very best.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is in cinemas now

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Everything Everywhere All At Once's Stephanie Hsu: 'I can't control what's woke to talk about' - iNews

Politics and criminal justice dont mix well. A case in point: Slovakias ongoing prosecution of its former prime minister, Robert Fico. Instead of holding the notoriously corrupt pro-Russian leader to account for his transgressions, the proceedings have both empowered and radicalized him at a pivotal moment for Central and Eastern Europe.

After the Slovak legislatures refusal to place him in police custody at the request of the prosecutors office last Wednesday, Fico enjoys both a massive bully pulpit in parliament and on social mediaand the martyrdom of a criminal prosecution. If his trial, moreover, does not result in a jail sentence, it seems almost inevitable that an embittered, radicalized version of Fico will emerge stronger as the country heads for a parliamentary election in early 2024.

Fico had to resign his office under public pressure after the murder of the journalist Jn Kuciak and his fiance, Martina Kunrov, in 2018. Four years later, he is being charged with criminal conspiracyunrelated to the murder itself but involving contacts with some of the same actors.

Together with the then-interior minister, Robert Kalikalready in police custodyFico is alleged to have pressured civil servants, particularly those from revenue authorities, into providing him with confidential information about their political opponents, including the countrys former president, Andrej Kiska. Such information, typically involving tax arrears or discrepancies in tax returns, was then leaked or released openly in Ficos political campaigns aimed at discrediting or intimidating voices critical of the government.

Slovakia is not the only country in Europe where a leading political figure has faced criminal prosecution. In the 2000s, Italys former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who has faced numerous criminal charges in his colorful political life, was sentenced and later acquitted on statute of limitations grounds of wiretapping and publicizing conversations between a number of prominent bankers protected by bank secrecy rules.

In the neighboring Czech Republic, former Prime Minister Andrej Babi faces criminal charges over EU subsidy fraud, worth a little over $2 million. The oligarch-turned-populist transformed the ownership structure of his signature countryside resort, The Storks Nest, to make the project eligible for the EUs financial support targeted at small and medium businessesnotwithstanding the fact that Babi has been the largest private-sector employer in the Czech Republic.

Yet, the stakes in the Slovak case seem much higher. For one, it is not just about grift. Rather, prosecutors allege, there was not much daylight between Fico, top-ranking police and interior ministry officials, and oligarchs and mobsters friendly to his party, SMER. This all gives credence to the idea of Slovakia as a mafia state.

Second, relative to the expectations built by Ficos opponents following the murders of Mr. Kuciak and Ms. Kunrov, the criminal charges listed in the 105-page long indictment are somewhat abstract and complex to navigate. Together with a heavily process-oriented judiciary, it is very likely that any eventual sentence will be appealed on procedural grounds, leading to protracted legal proceedings.

If Fico walks away exonerated, his position will be strengthened still. Forced into resignation in 2018, the disgraced figure of a former prime minister was written off both by his opponents and political allies. In fact, SMERs leading cadres left in 2020 to form Hlas (Voice), a new populist center-left party led by SMERs former deputy leader Peter Pellegrini.

Yet, over the course of the pandemic, Fico orchestrated a political comeback of sorts by keeping a strong grip over his party and by poaching disaffected voters, including from the Neo-Nazi right. He brought SMER from single digits in the polls in the fall of 2020 very close to its earlier position as the countrys main catch-all party.

The narrow vote in parliament on Wednesday, in which the pro-Western, center-right governing coalition failed to deliver on one of its key campaign promises despite enjoying a comfortable majority of seats is a major challenge to a government that was formed ostensibly to fight the corruption of Ficos years. It is also a testament to the former prime ministers extraordinary ability, while in opposition, to peel off legislators away from their parties.

Out of power, Fico has grown more unhinged in his conspiracy-mongering and anti-EU and anti-American rhetoric. As prime minister, he grumbled occasionally about post-2014 sanctions on Russia, but Slovakia rarely opposed common positions at EU summits. And while Fico looked up to illiberal regimes to the north and south of Slovakia, he shied away from ruthless efforts at incumbent entrenchment, which also shielded him from international scrutiny.

In opposition, SMERs outlook has hardened dramaticallyparticularly as a result of the departure of more moderate voices led by Pellegrini from the party. Earlier this year, Facebook banned SMERs deputy leader ubo Blaha from its platform for spreading hoaxes about COVID-19 vaccines and various hate-inciting content. In the wake of Russias invasion of Ukraine this year, SMER has taken explicitly pro-Kremlin positions, alleging genocide of Russian-speakers in Donbas and labeling those who had called for a strengthened forward presence of NATO in Slovakia as traitors. At the May 1 rally in the town of Nitra, a video reveals he and the partys leadership is urging the crowds to shout that Zuzana aputov, the countrys pro-Western president (and a former anti-corruption activist) was an American wh*re.

When you strike at a king, Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, you must kill him. If Ficos prosecution fails, not only will his position among SMERs supporters be strengthened but the outcome will exacerbate the sense of nihilism among those who disliked the corrupt practices of his era. That would set the stage for his return in 2024, or possibly sooner, as a leader of an openly pro-Russian, anti-Western, nostalgist political coalition that would make Viktor Orbn and his ilk pale in comparison.

Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. Twitter: @DaliborRohac.

Image: Reuters.

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Slovakia Shows How Politics and Justice Just Don't Mix - The National Interest Online

This article was originally published here

CNS Neurol Disord Drug Targets. 2022 May 16. doi: 10.2174/1871527321666220516110620. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: COVID-19 pandemic is related to anxiety, depression, and psychotic symptoms either directly due to invasion or inflammation caused by the virus or indirectly due to related psychosocial stress: fear of infection, social isolation, and financial burden.

CASE PRESENTATION: We present a 28-year-old female case of post-COVID major depression with psychotic features and Cotards syndrome with no previous psychiatric history. Her complaints were initially described by the sadness of mood with early morning worsening, diminished interest in almost all activities, anhedonia, increased anxiety, ideas of worthlessness, hopelessness, guilt, decreased sleep, and appetite. Then, she developed severe depression with psychotic features such as delusions of persecution, poverty, and nihilism. Nihilistic delusions included a description of everything coming to an end. She thought that her organs were no more working. Later she negated her existence and started believing that she was dead. The patient recovered after a combination of sertraline and olanzapine treatment.

CONCLUSIONS: This case of a COVID-19 patient with psychotic depression and Cotards delusion highlights the importance of evaluating mental health status and may contribute to our understanding of the potential risk of central nervous system impairment by SARS-CoV-2 infection.

PMID:35578886 | DOI:10.2174/1871527321666220516110620

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Treatment of major depression with psychotic features and Cotard's syndrome after COVID-19 infection in a previously healthy patient: a case report -...

Our contemporary decadence can be exhilarating. While life is faster, more hectic, more oversaturated than probably ever before, there are upsidesplaying games with friends across the world, instantly having tchotchkes delivered to your door, and so on. Of course, many decry the modern world's moral decadence and with cause. Like a sort of Potemkin village, humans have built a castle of technology on a foundation of sand, failing to plan ahead or account for ourselves as part of the muck from which we sprung.

Xenoglyph is keenly aware of this extremely tenuous existence. On their new LP Spiritfraud, the mysterious black metallers have crafted a Byzantine monstrosity. While much of black metal is fixated on some distant Nordic past warped by unhealthy nostalgia, Xenoglyph traces a meandering path from the recent past to the doomed future. Buoyed by currents of psychedelic synthesizers and propelled by eerie and unsettling black metal riffage, Spiritfraud is exploration of humans' inability to get out of our own way. This album asks whether or not we should've locked ourselves in a panopticon of our own makingXenoglyph plays a sort of Ian Malcolm role here, warning the worst is to follow.

From the hallucinatory squalls of "Mainframe Equilibrium" to the nihilistic whorl of "Acclamations of Emptiness," Xenoglyph uses a digital palette to paint a maximalist epic. There are moments adjacent to symphonic black metal and passages of pure dissonance, but the album feels wired together by melodic throughlines and deep sorrow. Spiritfraud feels like the work of a group genuinely interested in how we got here. This is no meandering philosophic screed, but an earnest effort to deal with the consequences of the unchecked pursuit of growth for its own sake.

The title track embodies all of this. From unconventional melody to blast beat-powered waves of terror, the melancholy is palpable. Unlike other dissonant, swirling black metal of this ilk, there's a surprising tenderness herehowever, that tenderness is couched in a dazzling, spiked carapace.

Says the group:

The track "Spiritfraud" is about reflecting back to simpler times, before our lives were fragmented by the abomination that is technology and the misery that comes with realizing our very spirit was counterfeited by our own inventions. Its like technology is a game of chess with yourself, except by merely playing the game, you inevitably put yourself in checkmate.

Stream "Spiritfraud" below. The full album will infect the musical mainframe on July 15, 2022 courtesy of Translation Loss Records.

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Xenoglyph Plugs into the Mainframe of Nihilism on Spiritfraud (Early Track Premiere) - Invisible Oranges

Writer Wendy Syfret had never been a believer in 'Aha' moments before she experienced one herself a few years ago.

Walking home from work one night, and feeling somewhat disillusioned with her lot in life, she came to the realisation that it just didn't matter.

One day she'll be dead and no one will remember anyway. Welcome to generation burnout.

Australian writer Wendy Syfret's new book is titled Photo: Supplied

Nihilism has existed in one form or another for hundreds of years, and it's back in fashion, especially with Millennials who have become known as the burnout generation.

Syfret joins the show to discuss her new book, The Sunny Nihilist: How a Meaningless Life Can Make You Truly Happy, and how nihilism can be used as a weapon against our obsession with meaning.

Life has no meaning, nothing matters, everything is just chaos and it just exists, Syfret tells Jim Mora.

But rather than that being a huge bummer, it can be liberating, she says.

Nihilism can be a weapon against our obsession with meaning in modern day life, and particularly the way that our very human and very understandable desire to find meaning in our life can be commodified and sold to us and used as a way to manipulate us and tell us what our lives are supposed to look like and how we're supposed to be happy, she says.

Her aha moment came as a noisy anxiety began to swell in her, she says.

I was obsessed with my job, put everything into it. It was a complete definer of my life, I've been told that my work was important, that I was important because of the work I did, that everything was so vital and you know, you're changing the world.

And it became a way to exploit me, you don't need to pay someone as much when you tell them that they're important, meaning becomes this very thin currency that you can pass over to people that distracts them from actually saying, wait a second, like, why am I working 14 hours a day and only earning as much as a waitress?

One day she was walking home and her stress levels were next level, she says.

I wasn't sleeping, I could barely eat, I was so miserable, at a level of stress that you would think would be associated to someone who was very important, which I really have to stress,I was not.

And I was walking home one day, just literally on the edge of panic attack, thinking I've got to get through the door before I actually collapse, like I can't breathe.

And this thought popped into my head, oh my God, who cares? One day, you're going to be dead,no one is going to remember any of the things you're supposed to complete today. No one's gonna remember you. No one's gonna remember this presentation, or this article or this assignment. This is all just going to disappear one day, and none of it matters. And as I said, it sounds like it's grim but I was shocked to be just completely overwhelmed by a sense of calm and freedom and peace.

We have become fixated on meaning, she believes.

We get meaning and value confused. And something I say is, I think things are meaningless, but I do believe things have value.

Your job has value, someone is paying you for it, you should respect them, you have made an agreement to do a job for a certain amount of time. You come to it with, again, a level of respect and kind of commitment. And then you expect from your employer to give you back, again, that level of support, commitment, and hopefully a livable wage.

And I think when you actually take meaning out of it, it can make that exchange feel a lot clearer and a lot more respectful.

Photo: Allen and Unwin

Nihilism makes the world smaller and bigger for her, she says.

It kind of returns you to yourself. So, it lets you think in the moment what right now is making me happy, what is valuable? What do I need to protect and cherish and spend time thinking about; and that might be managing to drink this cup of coffee before it gets cold. It might be spending time with someone you love, it might be eating the perfect peach on a summer's day.

It is not about endlessly validating your ego, she says.

What else has value to me, what else might not be meaningful in this very romantic sense of the word, but is something that I want to protect and treasure?

For me, I'm very interested in environmental activism, the protection of the planet, community engagement around those issues. That's something where I'm like this is bigger than myself, it's more important than myself. I can focus on this beyond myself.

She is respectful of people with faith and herself comes from a religious family, she says.

I think a lot of these things give you this sense of, again, whether it's a horoscope or a biblical scripture, this sense of a second life, or a second world or we're just moving through this thing.

And this present moment is just something we need to endure and kind of fix. So, we can get to the next better thing.

And I think where nihilism comes in and sits opposite that is it can say to you stop looking at the grass being greener on the other side, and actually pause in this moment and be like what is beautiful and special and nourishing.

She hopes people will take one simple message from her book.

It's just a way to recognise the things in your life that truly make you happy, and to hold them like clearly in your hand and not let all this noise and all this dogma coming from other people clutter that away.

Wendy Syfret is a journalist based in Melbourne, she's currently editor in chief of Rise, an online sustainable magazine. She used to be the managing editor of Vice Asia and she's written for The Guardian, the ABC, British Vogue, the Boston Globe.

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How nihilism can be used as a weapon - RNZ