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AI American Girl Doll
The scariest doll in movie history brings up existential questions about how we raise our kids.
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Destroyer of Worlds
I always wondered if cheer squads in other high schools were just as hated as ours. Maybe they had Dark Susans thriving there as well.
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Imposter Syndrome
Unchecked hubris proves fatal in Rian Johnson’s sequel to Knives Out.
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Mozart’s Ghost
As more people leave the arts, NFTs and web3 may bring new life to arts philanthropy.
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Shattered Youth
Part slasher horror, part autofiction, Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel since 2010 is also his most personal.
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Cormac McCarthy’s New Books of Revelation
The abyss stares back at the reader in the long-awaited follow-ups to The Road.
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Under the Knife, Overreached
David Cronenberg attempts to glimpse into the simultaneous self-destruction and rebirth of our species with Crimes of the Future.
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Lydia Tár, Metrosexual Metronome
Dark and darkly funny, Todd Field’s latest film is a thrilling study of a character at the mercy of her own excellence.
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Life After Westworld
The acclaimed HBO series was cancelled right when we need it most.
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Speak, Digits
In the online medium, we’re all messengers now.
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The Hyper-Vigilance Loop
Cultural moods shift faster than the time it takes to produce a piece of work – never mind release it.
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Indentured Servers
Severance and Pantheon reveal the ways our humanity can disappear amid the convergence of money and information.
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Para-Bonding
What we as online consumers get attached to is the blend of human traits and non-living objects.
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Vicious Cycle
The four-decade Halloween franchise is filled with death, rebirths, reboots, and repetition. Does it end with Halloween Ends?
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How to Review a Book Without Reading It
When it comes to modern literary criticism, bad practice is best practice.
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Partial Recall
Electric Dreams faltered in capturing the speculative brilliance of Philip K. Dick in favor of standard sci-fi clichés that may have been cutting-edge in the mid-twentieth century when the original stories were written.
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Is This All?
Olivia Wilde’s second film Don’t Worry Darling suffers from an inability to deal with the past and with people it doesn’t understand with anything other than contempt.
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She, Robot
Danisha Carter might be a deepfake or she might be an android. But she is a TikToker with a committed following in the millions.
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The Strange and Unusual Society
A goth state is unthinkable in the same way that civil war and nuclear annihilation are unthinkable. But neither is it entirely out of the realm of possibility.
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Tunnel Vision
Zach Cregger’s horror debut Barbarian is a carefully crafted reminder to never go into basement.