#everything from the beginning to now has been the result of understandable science and the actions of physics

[transmechanicus]

I know that logically everything that happens beyond my knowledge is a result of entirely mundane forces, but also I've got terminal pattern recognition and number association autism. So when two huge Admech reveals come on the day of and right after a really shit personal holiday, the Powerwolf album is releasing on another Day That Will Be Hard, and consistently throughout my undergrad warhammer reveal shows, codex releases, and band album drops would be like The Day after a major exam or challenge, it is really hard not to start considering that a subtly divine level of correlation.

[secretmellowblog]

On the subject of the Titanic ‘submersible’ that was lost in the deep with all its wealthy tourists— it’s so insane/eerie in hindsight to read this article from the Smithsonian that interviews the CEO Stockton Rush long before the disaster.

Despite the Smithsonian supposedly being an organization that cares about science and truth, and the fact that there were SO MANY obvious red flags from the beginning and so many people criticizing the company…..the article is a puff piece uncritically glorifying the CEO’s obviously terrible submersible project. It compares him in glowing terms to Elon Musk. It is an article about how private ventures like those of Stockton Rush and Elon Musk can and should be the future of the world.

We’ve obviously learned now that there were whistleblowers at the company who were warning for a long time that Stockton Rush’s submersible was unsafe— only to be fired and then sued. It makes sense the submersible was so unsafe, because the CEO in this interview is open about how he has no background in underwater engineering and is annoyed by quote “regulations that needlessly prioritize passenger safety.”

Soon after, the private [submersible] market died too, Rush found, for two reasons that were “understandable but illogical.” First, subs gained a reputation for danger. Working on offshore rigs in harsh locations like the North Sea, saturation divers, who breathe gas mixtures to avoid diving sicknesses, would be taken in subs to work at great depths. It was the world’s most perilous job, with frequent fatalities. (“It wasn’t the sub’s fault,” says Rush.) To save lives, the industries moved toward using underwater robots to perform the same work.

Second, tourist subs, which could once be skippered by anyone with a U.S. Coast Guard captain’s license, were regulated by the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993, which imposed rigorous new manufacturing and inspection requirements and prohibited dives below 150 feet. The law was well-meaning, Rush says, but he believes it needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation (a position a less adventurous submariner might find open to debate). “There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown—because they have all these regulations.”

The fact that Stockton Rush (who was piloting the submarine when the disaster happened) is on record complaining about the evils of regulations that prioritize people’s safety, and the Smithsonian uncritically regurgitated that rhetoric in their glowing puff piece about how rich tycoons like Elon Musk and Stockton Rush are going to save the world is just…..in hindsight of how everything ended it’s just so much horrible black comedy? It’s like a satire about the dangers of uncritically worshipping the rich.

It is mentioned in the article that Rush chose to make his submersible in a different shape, and with a different (cheaper) material than is usually used for submersibles. The article frames this as a result of daring innovation, and not of negligence/ignorance. This passage in particular, which in context is supposed to portray Rush’s critics as joyless naysayers who were proven wrong by the noble tycoon, is pretty foreboding in hindsight:

Rush planned to pilot the sub himself, which critics said was an unnecessary risk: Under pressure, the experimental carbon fiber hull might, in the jargon of the sub world, “collapse catastrophically.”

And then!!

The exact problem that happened to Titan this weekend, happened on Titan’s very first test voyage to the Titanic! The experimental carbon fiber hull had an issue and it caused communications to break down!

The dive was going according to plan until about 10,000 feet, when the descent unexpectedly halted, possibly, Rush says, because the density of the salt water added extra buoyancy to the carbon fiber hull. He now used thrusters to drive Titan deeper, which interfered with the communications system, and he lost contact with the support crew. He recalls the next hour in hallucinogenic terms. “It was like being on the Starship Enterprise,” he says. “There were these particles going by, like stars. Every so often a jellyfish would go whipping by. It was the childhood dream.”

Both Rush and the article writer treat this as a fun quirky story, instead of a serious safety failure and red flag with his experimental macgyvered regulation-flaunting submersible.

Other highlights from the article include:

Stockton rush saying that if 3/4 of the planet is water, why haven’t we monetized it?

Stockton saying we will “colonize the ocean long before we colonize space”

Lots of weird pro colonialism stuff in general??? This article loves colonialism and thinks it’s cool

Rush saying he plans for this to eventually help find more underwater resources for the US to exploit and profit from

Elon musk comparisons. The article writer does not mention that Elon Musk’s rockets explode and therefore it would be a bad idea to get in one of them, because that would imply it’s a bad idea to get into the submersible

Stockton rush seeing himself as Captain Kirk

The article writer comparing the tourists who plan to join Rush to Englishmen who went on colonialist journeys to Africa as if that’s like, a good thing. So much pro colonialism stuff in this article

So many sentences about Stockton Rush being handsome when he literally just looks like some guy

The article beginning with an editor’s note from years later disclaiming that the extraordinary submersible they’re advertising in this article is uh. It’s now uhhhh

But yeah it really does just bring home how so many organizations that supposedly care about scientific truth or journalistic integrity are willing to uncritically platform propaganda for wealthy CEOS. It’s frustrating how easily people fall for the fake myths that careless wealthy people invent for themselves, and even more frustrating that supposedly respectable institutions will platform irresponsible lies that end up getting people killed.

Rush is such an obvious and simple example of this, and his negligence is “only” killing five people including himself. But to me it feels like a cautionary tale to bear in mind when it comes to uncritical puff piece media coverage of similar “daring tycoon innovations” by people like Bezos or Musk.

[writingrapscallion]

Twin Switcheroo

I'm sure this has been done before, but lately I've been imagining an AU where, instead of Grunkle Stan being the one to meet the twins in Gravity Falls, it's Ford.

It all starts years ago, when Stan breaks Ford's perpetual motion machine. Rather than hide what he did, Stan comes clean to Ford and the two manage to fix the machine, leading to them becoming closer. However, Stan still feels a bit betrayed when Ford leaves to go to West Coast Tech.

A few years later, things are much the same as in canon. Ford graduates with honors (as well as three doctorates) and receives a large research grant for a project of his choice. In this universe, McGucket went to West Coast Tech, so he's still friends with Ford. Stan has still become a con artist and is actually in a pretty bad situation, facing potential charges for his illegal activity. However, Stan gets a call from Ford promising to make all his legal problems disappear if he comes to work as Ford's lab assistant in his investigations of a strange town: Gravity Falls.

When Ford realizes the strangeness of Gravity Falls, he decides he needs people he can trust to help him (and he wouldn't mind having some muscle to help him with the more dangerous problems). And so, along with his old friend McGucket, he decides to ask Stan for help since in this universe they're on much better terms.

Stan quickly accepts. It feels almost too good to be true: he and his brother can finally have the adventure that they always wanted. Sure, the cryptids of Gravity Falls are often dangerous and always disturbing, but at least he's with his brother. Unfortunately, much like in canon, thinks start to go wrong.

Ford makes his deal with Bill and creates the portal. McGucket is sucked into it and goes insane, abandoning the project. Stan begins to notice that Ford is becoming more and more erratic and disturbed, and can't understand why his brother doesn't seem to trust him. Things come to a head when Ford tells Stan to leave, and take the journal as far away as possible. Understandably, Stan freaks out.

His relationship with his brother was better than in canon, but Stan still felt abandoned when Ford left for college. With Ford gone, he'd been reduced to a petty grifter, without a home or family. The past few months have been the best of his life: he has a home, plenty of adventure, and, most important of all, his brother besides him. But now Ford wants him to leave.

The two start to fight and, suddenly, the portal switches on! Except in this universe, it's not Ford who's pulled in, but Stan. Ford is devastating, realizing what he's done to his brother, and does everything in his power to try and bring him back, but unfortunately, Ford already hid two of the three journals in places even he isn't able to reach (perhaps he even wiped his memory to prevent Bill somehow forcing him to retrieve them) and without Bill's insight, he has no clue how to reactivate the portal.

Timeskip to the present day. Ford has a reputation as a brilliant but reclusive scientist. His contributions to Physics and other fields of science have allowed him to win multiple Nobel Prizes and many other awards. However, he doesn't seem to care about any of this (he states to Dipper at one point he only publishes his results to ensure a steady supply of grant money).

Ford is kind but distant with his family. He's never met Mabel or Dipper before the start of the series, but he has written to them and sends them presents for their birthdays. Dipper idolizes his uncle, and is a lot more interested in science than in the original series as a result of his aspiratons to be like his Grunkle. His correspondence with his Grunkle is overly formal and often includes stuff like descriptions of science fair projects and requests to work as a lab assistant for his Grunkle (requests that are gently denied). Ford considers Dipper to be a promising young scientist. Meanwhile, Mabel being Mabel sends him stuff like videos of herself sticking gummy worms up her nose. Ford is mildly confused but very fond of his grand-niece.

The series starts when Mabel and Dipper are sent to spend the summer at their Grunke's place. They are both very excited to meet him (Dipper a bit more than Mabel due to his hero worship of Ford). Ford is happy to see them too, and gets along well with the pair when he's with them. However, he spends most of the day in his laboratory, working on unknown experiments, and leaves the kids to play around town. Ford often sends his two lab assistants, Soos and Wendy to look after the pair. Soos and Wendy are much the same as in the actual show— although Ford could probably hire anyone he wants to work in his lab since he's a famous scientist, he doesn't want to involve anyone outside of the town for fear of attracting unwanted attention to his real work.

A few days into his time in Gravity Falls, Dipper discovers the journal hidden near the metal tree. In this universe, the journal's slightly different. Each of Ford's three lab assistant wrote their own journal, marked with their own symbol (it wouldn't be much of a mystery who wrote them if the journal had Ford's six fingers on the cover). The first book, still owned by Ford, has the standard six fingered hand and is written by him. The second one, which has fallen into Gideon's possession, is written by McGucket and has a symbol based on his glasses on the cover. Finally, the journal Dipper finds is marked with the same symbol as Grunkle Stan's fez.

The contents of the Journal are a bit different than the original. Although Stan does write about their supernatural encounters, his style is far more informal than his brother's, often making jokes or mocking comments about the creatures they encounter. Occasionally, Ford takes over to write a section when Stan can't be serious, so the journals a mix of the two of their writing. Stan jokingly refers to his brother as "Mr. Scientist" throughout the Journal, unintentionally concealing the fact that Ford's the main researcher.

A few hours after finding the Journal, Dipper speaks to Ford, suspecting that the old man is Mr. Scientist (although he doesn't mention the Journal, only his knowledge of supernatural occurences in Gravity Falls, so Ford doesn't know he has it). However, Ford feigns disbelief in the supernatural, hoping to prevent his nephew from diving too deep into the secrets of Gravity Falls.

Although Ford's performance successfully convinces Dipper that he's not the Author (AKA Mr. Scientist), Dipper is not deterred in the slightest by his Grunkle's skepticism and instead takes it as a challenge. To prove his credentials as a scientist, he's going to prove his Grunkle wrong, face down the supernatural, and bring back evidence (cue two seasons of Phineas and Ferb style antics where the evidence disappears as soon as he tries to show it to Ford).

[blazehedgehog]

Given they’re soft rebooting again… what’s your Jurassic world 4/jurassic park 7/ Jurassic animals and also Triassic and Cretaceous animals make life difficult: the movie pitch? I feel like, as fun as the sequels can be, they’ve lost the science parable and horror/thriller elements of the classic - for all its faults; at least lost world has that.

Hmm... I'm gonna think like a movie executive. What's hot right now? AI's hot, right? It's the buzz. I propose a hard reboot.

Crichton's original novel opens with this big screed about a near future where we have "designer genetics." Genetic manipulation gets easier and easier and I think it's said Jurassic Park takes place in a world where it's getting to the point that parents can custom-order what kind of kids they'll have by selecting specific genetic traits. (It's been a while since I've read it)

Jurassic Park the movie shows human beings physically modifying genetic code by hand using VR displays, but Mr. DNA also admits that "a full DNA sequence contains 3 billion genetic codes." So it's ridiculous to assume that a human being could edit the genetic code by hand. One sequence would take years to get right, maybe even a lifetime.

So our story is that we have some 20 something silicon valley tech bro. He got outrageously rich off of crypto and NFTs and was smart enough to cash out early. We frame him as altruistic but around the edges we can see maybe he's not the greatest person. It's suggested he knew crypto was kind of a scam, which is why he got out early, but obviously he was in crypto at all to begin with, which does not bode well. But he's supposedly "one of the smart ones." Now he's rich! And cool! And using his powers for "good." He's beloved in pop culture.

The next wave is here. Neural network LLM Artificial Intelligence. He's all in. It's the next crypto. And he starts a company that uses LLM AI to "solve the genetic algorithm." He spins this out into a financial empire where people can custom-order pets with specific traits. But obviously people with a lot of money start wondering if maybe they can get more... exotic products.

With the realm of cats, dogs and parrots conquered, our techbro begins phase 2: recreating extinct animals. This is a guy who thinks he's going to save the world by restoring lost links in the food chain (without doing enough research to see how that would change our existing ecosystem, since he could be resurrecting an invasive species).

He's going to debut the first of his phase 2 work at an event he's calling Jurassic Park, because he's going to demonstrate the first living dinosaurs in 65 million years. Jurassic Park will continue to operate as a massive nature reserve; a symbol of his control of life itself.

Obviously: everything goes wrong. The AI has never had to change this much genetic code before. It has to make up whole entire sections of DNA. The end result is unpredictable, but techbro is confident that if the AI sequenced things well enough that something could actually hatch from the egg, then it's safe.

It is not safe.

Not only do we not understand anything about dinosaur behavior, these technically aren't even dinosaurs. They're genetic mutants. The on-site dinosaur expert brought in with the press to verify Jurassic Park's claims quickly realizes that while some of these dinosaurs are accurate in some ways, a lot of them have hard deviations away from known science. Muscles that aren't quite right, appendages that aren't the right size, things like that. Maybe their brains and brain chemistry are slightly different.

The question remains whether known science was wrong or whether the AI made something up that was never true.

The question is brought up again when we learn a technician within Jurassic Park sabotaged everything intending to steal the genetic learning data from techbro's servers. Techbro says the thief poisoned the data and that's gotta be why there's mutations.

The security systems fail. The thief has left them to their creations. Jurassic Park as we know it happens.

Since a lot of movies have to deal with this, all throughout this, nobody has phones. To prevent leaks, all of their phones were confiscated before they entered Jurassic Park and locked in a security checkpoint. Our techbro, maybe as a sign of solidarity, even gives his phone to the security guy. We could even say maybe they've been having security issues beforehand, to set up the thief hacking everything before he actually does it.

Anyway, since our thief sabotaged the park's own communication channels, a lot of the movie is about getting back to that security checkpoint, breaking in, and getting their phones so they can call for help.

Oh, and also: all of Jurassic Park's vehicles are electric, too, and tied into the security mainframe. Since the park's whole security system was hacked and disabled, none of the vehicles can be operated. The only thing that works are these little golf carts, but they're small, can't go very fast, and offer little protection. Maybe our survivors try one, it gets smashed by a triceratops, and they're too far away from the depot to go back for a new one. So a lot of the movie is them traversing the park on foot.

As they're being chased by dinosaurs through the park itself, they end up deep in the core of a genetics lab. And it's here we learn the dark truth: there is a wide margin of failure. The recently deceased specimens are all kept for study and learning and there's a lot because the AI fails often, and it has to be taught not to do that. We see dozens of disfigured animals. Bits and pieces of dinosaurs, pets, and even, in one tank... human parts. These tanks are labeled "phase 3."

Not only are the mutated dinosaurs not the work of sabotage, this guy's been trying to create genetically modified people. We have our big "what have you done?" moment of horror. One of the last surviving members of the press is going to blow the whistle on this place. It's over. Maybe it's someone we build up as the techbro's new friend discovering that their hero wasn't who he said he was.

Just then, a dinosaur bursts in and kills that person. Drama! Tragedy!

Obviously, the survivors find a way out. Techbro has to live with his own conscious. Multiple people died at his hands on this day and he had a hand in creating some of the worst sins against nature mankind has ever seen.

(Or maybe we stick to the original Jurassic Park book and he dies just before getting on the escape chopper.)

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

A feud over spending cuts between hardline and centrist Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives raises the risk that the federal government will suffer its fourth shutdown in a decade this fall.

Members of the hardline House Freedom Caucus are pushing to cut spending to a fiscal 2022 level of $1.47 trillion, $120 billion less than President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to in their May debt ceiling compromise.

With Republicans also seeking higher spending on defense, veterans benefits and border security, analysts say the hardline target would mean cuts of up to 25% in areas such as agriculture, infrastructure, science, commerce, water and energy, and healthcare.

Centrists, who call themselves "governing" Republicans, say their hardline colleagues are ignoring the fact that their priorities are rejected by Democrats who control the Senate and White House, and that spending will wind up near the level agreed by McCarthy and Biden anyway.

The result is a major headache for centrist Republicans from swing districts that Biden won in 2020 and others with constituents in the firing line of hardline spending targets.

"The reductions are so deep," said Representative Don Bacon, a centrist Republican from Nebraska. "They want to make everything a root canal."

Hardliners view the 2024 fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1 as a test of Republican resolve to reduce the federal debt and move on to reform social programs including Medicare and Social Security.

"I don't fault any individual member for raising concerns and wanting to make sure that the bill is right for them and for their district," said Representative Ben Cline, who belongs to the Freedom Caucus, the conservative Republican Study Committee and the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus.

"What there has to be is an understanding that for there to be 218 Republican votes, the spending needs to be in line with pre-COVID levels rather than the debt-limit agreement."

One significant source of frustration is hardline demands for cuts to bills that have already been vetted by the 61-member House Appropriations Committee.

"We're not, willy-nilly, just trying to give money away. We're trying to focus and prioritize," said Representative David Joyce, a member of the appropriations committee who heads the 42-member centrist Republican Governance Group.

With Democrats opposed to hardline proposals, McCarthy can afford to lose no more than four Republican votes if he hopes to pass all 12 appropriations bills before funding expires on Sept. 30.

"I do not know how they get themselves out of this jam," said William Hoagland, a former Senate Republican budget director now at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank.

TRICKY PATH

When the House returns from summer recess on Sept. 12, lawmakers will have 12 days to complete their bills and hammer out compromise legislation with the Senate or risk a partial government shutdown.

McCarthy acknowledged last week they may have to resort to a stopgap funding bill, known as a "continuing resolution," or CR, to keep federal agencies open.

That option could be complicated by hardline demands that it include some of former President Donald Trump's border policies, which Democrats reject.

Some House Republicans say the challenges are similar to disagreements McCarthy has overcome on other major legislation, including an April Republican debt ceiling bill that cemented his negotiating position in talks with Biden.

"The more appropriations bills we can get across the finish line, the more we'll have the leverage we need to negotiate a good deal with the Senate," said Representative Dusty Johnson, who chairs the Main Street Caucus, whose members describe themselves as "pragmatic conservatives".

Failure would mean another costly government shutdown starting in October, which would be the fourth in a decade.

SHUTDOWN RISK

House Freedom Caucus members say a shutdown could be necessary to achieve their objectives.

"It's not something that the members of the Freedom Caucus generally wish for," said Representative Scott Perry, who chairs the group of roughly three dozen conservatives.

"But we also understand that very little happens in Washington that's difficult, without someone or something forcing it to happen," he told Reuters.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in Congress, said last week that Republicans will be to blame for any new shutdown "if the House decides to go in a partisan direction."

Disputes over funding and policy have shut down the federal government three times in the past decade: once in 2013 over healthcare spending and twice in 2018 over immigration. A 35-day shutdown that began in December 2018 and ran into January 2019 cost the economy 0.02% of GDP, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

This time, the slim 222-212 House Republican majority could pay a political price. A shutdown would disrupt the lives of Americans barely a year before the 2024 election, when Republicans must defend 18 House seats in districts that Biden won in 2020.

McCarthy could face the prospect of having to resort to a CR that requires bipartisan support to pass, neutralizing the hardliners, analysts said.

That could endanger McCarthy's speakership under a deal he struck allowing a single lawmaker to move for his dismissal.

Would the House Freedom Caucus end McCarthy's reign over a CR?

"I wouldn't go that far," Perry said. "That's a final option. We want to work with the leadership. We want to work with Kevin, and we think that we can."

[reflections-in-a-critical-eye]

Both sets of shippers in the BTS fandom are so damn annoying to me

Me: here's the factual reasons everything you said is wrong. Here's the correct version of the mistranslation you're using. This is the setting of the joke you've taken out of context. This is them doing the exact same thing with their other friends. That's not even them in the picture you're spreading. Your friends husbands co-workers Korean dad is incorrect about what he said - it's simply not true. You're citing this thing as fact but only one fan saw it and you're still using a wild amount of guesswork to reach your conclusion

Tkkr: Their love is so deep that others are jealous. Anyway let's celebrate their wedding anniversary tomorrow

Me: Yeah I think they have different jobs now. It's not a big deal. They're still together

Jkkr: Do you think they broke up!!!!!!

Me: well technically we don't know if they were ever together but I don't think this is a reason to think...

Jkkr (hysterical): Everything was a lie! Love is dead! I knew it! I knew it! No wonder they did zero dance challenges together (the ultimate sign of love)! They've been oscar worthy method actors this whole time! I knew seven was autobiographical! They are straight white men after all (not Jimin)! I've fallen and I can't get up!

You'd have to read like half of this post that I made last year, but once you get past that, you'll find some of my thoughts on this issue and what is my stance on this particular type of positioning in the fandom.

From a critical perspective, you're not bringing anything new and it's a dead end conversation from the beginning because of your premise. One is not like the other and never has been, but somehow this is a discourse perpetuated by large subsections of the fandom. Conversation on shipping practices and shipper fan behavior could be productive and interesting, if only we would at least try to minimize our own bias for the sake of it. Not completely because it's impossible, but we could try. And it's also a conversation that cannot take place if we don't know or refuse/forget to have a somehow cohesive image of each shipper group, with its characteristics and other relevant aspects.

I never went out of my way to correct people here and there because I don't feel the need to, but also because I understand when there's a possibility for understanding and conversation and where there's not. Again, that comes as a result of the knowledge we would have about shipping group dynamics and characteristics.

And lastly, it's K-Pop shipping, not rocket science. It can be taken seriously from a research/fandom studies perspective, but using it as ladder for us to get up on our high horse? Not for me.

[arataka-reigen]

I'm not putting Frankenstein in this list because I already made up my mind to participate in Frankenstein weekly anyway.

Again, I reserve the right to go against the results of this poll but I will still try to be faithful to it

Brief synopsis for each of these books if any of you are interested in knowing more about it (probably not, but, oh well):

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut: Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber's son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming "unstuck in time."

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born -- a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam -- and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity.

The Witcher - The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski (it's the witcher. idk what else to say)

Wayward Children - Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire: Children have always disappeared under the right conditions; slipping through the shadows under a bed or at the back of a wardrobe, tumbling down rabbit holes and into old wells, and emerging somewhere... else. But magical lands have little need for used-up miracle children. Nancy tumbled once, but now she’s back. The things she’s experienced... they change a person. The children under Miss West’s care understand all too well. And each of them is seeking a way back to their own fantasy world.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee: it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father--a crusading local lawyer--risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.

All Tomorrows by Nemo Ramjet: The story begins in the near future, as burgeoning population pressures force humanity to terraform and colonize Mars. After a brief but violent civil war between the two planets, the genetically engineered survivors begin a new wave of colonization, spreading across the galaxy. Everything is looking up for the human race... until the colonies encounter the Qu, technologically advanced aliens on a religious mission to remake the universe. Although humans fight valiantly, the Qu easily overpower humanity; as punishment, the aliens decide to genetically modify the survivors, turning most of them into mindless, animalistic creatures before departing.

The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin - After her best friend dies in a drowning accident, Suzy is convinced that the true cause of the tragedy must have been a rare jellyfish sting--things don't just happen for no reason. Retreating into a silent world of imagination, she crafts a plan to prove her theory--even if it means traveling the globe, alone. Suzy's achingly heartfelt journey explores life, death, the astonishing wonder of the universe...and the potential for love and hope right next door.

PJO - The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (reread) - This would be a reread, i'm gonna do it sooner or later, but you get to decide if i do it sooner than later.

[theprayerfulword]

September 08

Acts 20:35 I have shewed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how He said, It is more blessed to give than to receive.

Matthew 25:35 Jesus said, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

2 Corinthians 9:8 And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.

2 Corinthians 8:7 Since you excel in everything — in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in complete earnestness and in the love we have kindled in you — see that you also excel in this grace of giving.

2 Samuel 9:1 Now David said, “Is there still anyone who is left of the house of Saul, that I may show him kindness for Jonathan’s sake?”

Galatians 5:14-15 For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 15 But if you bite and devour one another, beware lest you be consumed by one another!

May you seek justice, encourage the oppressed, defend the cause of the fatherless, and plead the case of the widow, for if you are willing to do right and be obedient to the Spirit, you will eat the best from the land. Isaiah 1

May you remember the promise of the Lord that He will restore judges as in days of old and counselors as at the beginning, causing Zion to be redeemed with justice and her penitent ones with righteousness, as He thoroughly purges away the dross and removes all impurities, breaking the rebels and sinners even as those who forsake the Lord will perish. Isaiah 1

May your desire be to go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, so that He will teach you His ways and you will know how to walk in the light of the Lord, following His paths, though the land is filled with superstitions from the East and divination is practiced by pagans, for the Lord alone will be exalted in that day. Isaiah 2

My child, I am the revelation of the Father to you. I came in the flesh to show you the Father. I emptied Myself of all rights and privileges and opinions so that the Father's will would be done. I spent nights alone in prayer, communing with the Father, away from all other voices and influences, so that you could hear what the Father says and see what the Father does. I scorned the pain and the shame of being misunderstood, rejected, despised, betrayed, falsely accused, condemned, beaten, humiliated, tortured and crucified, for the sake of showing to you the Father's heart of love for you. I am the only way to the Father. The majesty of creation and the grandeur of the world declare the existence of the Father and cause men to honor Him, but only I have shown the nature of God in flesh to men, and He has given Me His name, the only Name by which men may be saved from their sins. Though a hunger for the Father can awaken and develop from viewing nature and studying science, from finding beauty in dew on a spiderweb and hearing the song of a bird, from contemplating the marvelous complexity of the body which your soul has been given to dwell in for a while, you must understand that the hunger-driven desire to know the truth cannot be satisfied outside of a Spirit-given revelation of who I am and the development of a personal relationship with Me as you come to a saving knowledge of what I have accomplished in obedience to the Father's desire for fellowship with you. The result of your every effort, apart from Me, is death. Your every attempt to create, develop, sustain, and mature any accomplishment is subject to the laws of this world which, under entropy, will slow, wear down, decay, and end. This world is currently ruled by death, and all objects and actions born of this world are subject to that rule. Only what is born of the Spirit, born from heaven, re-created and not of or from this world can contain life, and life more abundantly. I am that life, and only from Me can that life come forth. You are given that life when you come to the Father through Me, in that Name which the Father has given Me to bear, and no power of this world or the world to come can or will separate you from the Father as you abide in Me. Know Me so that you may know the Father, and be able to go forth, led and empowered by My Spirit, to declare Me as the Way, the Truth, and the Life which comes from, and leads to, the Father of Lights in heaven.

May your obedience be complete before the Lord, that you may wage war, not as the world does but with weapons that have divine power to demolish spiritual strongholds which set up arguments and pretensions against the knowledge of God, and take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. 2 Corinthians 10

May you have the discernment to see and recognize the person who does not make God his stronghold, trusting instead in the wealth and power gained by destroying others, for that person will be brought down by God to everlasting ruin, but the righteous will flourish in the house of God, and be fruitful as an olive tree, as they trust in His unfailing love and praise Him forever for what His has done. Psalm 52

May you hope in the name of the Lord, for His name is good, and He is worthy to be praised in the presence of His saints. Psalm 52

[softfists]

Complaining about work stuff, blah blah blah

I feel like an ass complaining about it because there are so many worse jobs in the world, but so far my new postdoc has been not only unpleasant but unpleasant in a way I hadn't anticipated. And that's kind of fucking with my head. My new lab looks excellent on paper. I joined because I respect and admire the professor's work and strategically speaking, he's a professor whose trainees become professors. The job market sucks so badly that your only hope of making it is by publishing big papers in these big labs. But now I've looked behind the curtain and seen a level of sloppiness and disengagement with the actual intellectual work of science that is honestly shocking. Everything is about getting the next biggest, shiniest paper in the biggest journals, which would be fine if it didn't come at the cost of rigor. It's appalling how many times in the short time I've been here I've seen people plowing forward on huge, HUGE studies without the kinds of obvious controls or validation I'd scold a second year grad student for not running. What's worse is that they don't seem to be deliberately neglecting those experiments -- they seem unaware of why they would be necessary in the first place. The number of times I've had to explain basic concepts, basic technical information about experimental design, or mouse models, etc. etc. Crazy. There's a lot of "technical support" postdocs and grad students get, so many of them don't run their experiments themselves, and as a result have very little understanding of how their data is actually generated and how that should contextualize their interpretations (or experimental design further upstream). Instead they can just keep doing more and more and more and more without thinking very hard about what they're doing. I've been holding my tongue a lot in the face of it because no one likes the new guy who waltzes in, thinks he knows it all, and tries to tell everyone how to do their jobs. At the same time, I know, factually, that I do in fact know more and people are Doing It Wrong. It's a hard line to walk.

The lab is so big the PI can't possibly scrutinize every lab member's data. All he can see is the splashiness, the ~novelty~ of the newest finding and whether it supports the hypothesis. The incredible pressure from above to constantly produce makes people sloppy, and the technical support enables them to generate mountains of that poorly powered, poorly controlled slop at an incredible speed.

This seems to be universal once a lab hits a certain size and level of prestige. Thankfully, there seems to still be some level of quality control before publication, because the lab's published work so far has been solid. But the time for running important controls and pilots shouldn't be right before publication, both because it's a waste of everyone's time and resources, and because you don't want to create an anchoring bias from the early, bad pieces of data. One of these days, that anchoring bias is going to lead to shitty work making it out the door. If it hasn't already. There are so many ways data can be unsound that are not obvious unless you can directly see how it was generated.

I knew all of this going in. But it's different to actually experience it. It's soul-crushing in a way I didn't expect. It made me feel crazy for a while, too, as if I was the only one who could see how wrong all of this was, until a tech privately confided that he was also very frustrated by the way the lab operates and had seen all the same problems I had. So I guess I don't feel crazy anymore, just frustrated and disappointed.

People warned me that being a postdoc would be much lonelier than being a grad student because you don't have the same social structure of a program and cohort. I was prepared for that and felt somewhat RIP To You But I'm Different about it because I've never had very high social needs to begin with. What I was not prepared for was how scientifically lonely it would feel, with everyone disengaged and burned out and approaching science like a monkey on a typewriter. Doing science feels exuberant and joyful to me in the same way I imagine playing music feels to artists. And for me, it's also been a very communal joy. Some of my happiest memories from grad school were having lively discussions with my thesis committee, or debating with people at journal club, or emailing data and bouncing ideas back and forth with my advisor. Back then, those things didn't happen nearly as often as I wanted them to, either. I thought they'd be a given here, in a lab that's capital E Elite. Instead, many of the same problems I had with my grad school labmates are playing out on a larger scale here, except now there's even more infrastructure and resources to enable people's incompetence.

I'm sure a lot of my frustration might just be growing pains and that once I'm out of the job/life adjustment phase in six months I'll be better able to regulate my feelings about this. And once I can fall into the rhythm of doing my experiments and writing grants and papers, I'll be able to distract myself from other people's nonsense and just focus on doing my work to my standards. I asked my grad school advisor how he stays sane in the face of this, and he said: even if other people are putting out crap, I know that my pieces of the scientific puzzle are well-made and fit together.

I'm trying to internalize that, but right now, it's hard to see past the nearly endless daily frustration. I remember feeling very anxious and uncertain and out of my depth at the start of grad school, but it didn't feel bad in the way this feels bad. In some ways, I think feeling out of my depth might actually make me feel better right now, because then I'd just be focused on keeping my head above the water rather than on all the things that make me feel angry and disappointed. Also, excitement was the other side of the coin of start-of-grad-school-anxiety. Drinking from the firehose was hard, but once I learned to do it, it became fun. Hell, it was sort of fun even when I couldn't do it effectively. I don't know if "being pissed off about people's scientific standards" has a natural conclusion that is fun or fulfilling. Instead, I'm googling around for biotech or pharma jobs at night, even though I know industry has its own set of problems. It would be easier if I were just all, fuck academia, I'm done about it, but no, I still want to do research and I still want to run my own lab one day. I just hate feeling this way and want it to stop.

[seyedjafari]

Seyed Jafar Jafari Teaches How to Reveal Inner Potential

Seyed Jafar Jafari:

The human potential is limitless, and for those who have been able to unlock its vast resources, the sky is only the beginning. Seyed Jafar Jafari is one of such people, and now he spends his life building a roadmap for others to follow.

Seyed Jafar Jafari, also known as Master Jeff, is an Iranian American educator and start-up investor. He is based in Los Angeles, California, and is the founder and CEO of PSC Academy, Inc. Seyed Jafari was born and raised in Iran. As a teenager, he was extremely shy and reclusive. Although he desired to interact with his peers and those around him, he felt confined and cut off from society – this, being the resultant accumulation of habits he had developed early on, leaving him socially awkward when it came to the outside world.

Jafar Jafari started his journey into self-improvement at the age of 18. He had become dissatisfied with his lack of confidence and began searching for answers to what could be done to create a change in a person’s outward expression. His search took him on travels throughout the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, researching multidisciplinary fields of philosophy and social sciences. Eventually, he arrived at a simple yet profound conclusion that if a person changed his/her habits, they would change their lifestyle.

On the strength of this discovery, Seyed Jafari began applying his theory in his life. Over time, the once timid and reclusive teenager transformed into a confident, direct, and outspoken young man. The remarkable change he noticed in himself inspired the idea that he could teach his methods to others. Consequently, he set about developing personalized training seminars to help others change their limiting habits and reveal their hidden potential. With this, he had found his purpose and carved a niche for himself leading to what is known today as the PSC Academy  – an institution whose mission is to unearth and hone human potential and ability.

In 2016, Jafari moved to Los Angeles to expand his reach and lay the PSC Academy branch’s foundations in America. He found the American culture uniquely attuned to self-reflective improvement, with an extraordinary drive to live as their authentic selves. Seyed Jafari, inspired by such an “unparalleled” verve, has spent the past four years building friendships and connections with like-minded people.

At the core of his training is the drive and enthusiasm to help his students discover who they are. Over the last 20 years, Seyed Jafari has traveled to more than 32 countries and trained over 100,000 students. From those wanting to change their lifestyle to those who wish to discover their inner potential to those who want to enhance personal and professional performance.

When asked the type of companies he prefers to invest in, Jafari’s response is always the same, “I do not invest in companies. I invest in people.”

During the pandemic, Seyed Jafari shut down all his planned seminars overseas and transitioned to a virtual platform for his American and global audience. Despite all the challenges, he is as determined as ever to help people find an opportunity in every situation. Perhaps more than ever, people need to learn to look inwards to find the positivity and will to adapt to the present circumstances and take advantage of it.

“Human resilience is a fascinating thing. Everything comes down to how a person reacts – negatively or positively. My work is to help people take advantage of their situations and find their opportunities,” says Jafar.

Seyed Jafar Jafari is among the very best in his work on the human energy core and discovering inner potential. He realized that most people access it unconsciously or are entirely unaware of this immense “Inner superpower.” He desires to give people a chance to experience it and teach them how to understand and be in control of it. He hopes to see better, happier, and more successful people globally and reach out to more people to build a better foundation for the next generation. Seyed Jafari will officially launch his courses in North America in 2021.

Learn more about Jafar Jafari on Instagram.

[dankusner]

So You Think You’ve Been Gaslit

When Leah started dating her first serious boyfriend, as a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Ohio State, she had very little sense that sex was supposed to feel good.

(Leah is not her real name.)

In the small town in central Ohio where she grew up, sex ed was basically like the version she remembered from the movie “Mean Girls”: “Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.”

With her college boyfriend, the sex was rough from the beginning.

There was lots of choking and hitting; he would toss her around the bed “like a rag doll,” she told me, and then assure her, “This is how everyone has sex.”

Because Leah had absorbed an understanding of sex in which the woman was supposed to be largely passive, she told herself that her role was to be “strong enough” to endure everything that felt painful and scary.

When she was with other people, she found herself explaining away bruises and other marks on her body as the results of accidents.

Once, she said to her boyfriend, “I guess you like it rough,” and he said, “No, all women like it like this.”

And she thought, “O.K., then I guess I don’t know shit about myself.”

Her boyfriend was popular on campus.

“If you brought up his name,” she told me, “people would say, ‘Oh, my God, I love that guy.’ ”

This unanimous social endorsement made it harder for her to doubt anything he said.

But, in private, she saw glimpses of a darker side—stray comments barbed with cruelty, a certain cunning.

He never drank, and, though in public he cited vague life-style reasons, in private he told her that he loved being fully in control around other people as they unravelled, grew messy, came undone.

Girls, especially.

Sometimes, when they were having sex, Leah would get a strong gut feeling that what was happening wasn’t right.

In these moments, she would feel overwhelmed by a self-protective impulse that drove her out of bed, naked and crying, to shut herself in the bathroom.

What she remembers most clearly is not the fleeing, however, but the return: walking back to bed, still naked, and embarrassed about having “made a scene.”

When she got back, her boyfriend would tell her, “You have to get it together. Maybe you should see someone.”

A few months after they broke up—not because of the sex but for “stupid normal relationship reasons”—Leah found herself chatting with a girl who was sitting next to her in a science lecture.

It emerged that this girl had gone to the same high school as her ex, and when Leah asked if she knew him the girl looked horrified.

“That guy’s a psycho,” she said.

Leah had never heard anyone speak about him like this.

The girl said that, in high school, he’d had a reputation for sexual assault.

Some of what she described sounded eerily familiar.

“The idea that he would want to have power over a girl while she was asleep was as easy for me to believe as the idea that he needed air to breathe,” she said.

“It reminded me of every sexual experience I had with him, where he had all of the power and I was only a vessel to accept it.”

Leah went back to her dorm room and lay in bed for almost two days straight.

She kept revisiting memories from the relationship, understanding them in a new way.

Evidently, what she’d understood as “normal” sex had been something more aggressive.

And her ex’s attempts to convince her otherwise—implying that she was crazy for having any problem with it—were a kind of controlling behavior so fundamental that she did not have a name for it.

Now, six years later, as a social worker at a university, she calls it “gaslighting.”

These days, it seems as if everyone’s talking about gaslighting.

In 2022, it was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year, on the basis of a seventeen-hundred-and-forty-per-cent increase in searches for the term.

In the past decade, the word and the concept have come to saturate the public sphere.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, Teen Vogue ran a viral op-ed with the title “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America.”

Its author, Lauren Duca, wrote, “He lied to us over and over again, then took all accusations of his falsehoods and spun them into evidence of bias.”

In 2020, the album “Gaslighter,” by the Chicks (formerly known as the Dixie Chicks), débuted at No. 1 on the Billboard country chart, offering an indignant anthem on behalf of the gaslit: “Gaslighter, denier . . . you know exactly what you did on my boat.”

(What happened on the boat is revealed a few songs later:

“And you can tell the girl who left her tights on my boat / That she can have you now.”)

The TV series “Gaslit” (2022) follows a socialite, played by Julia Roberts, who becomes a whistle-blower in the Watergate scandal, having previously been manipulated into thinking she had seen no wrongdoing.

The Harvard Business Review has been publishing a steady stream of articles with titles like “What Should I Do if My Boss Is Gaslighting Me?”

The popularity of the term testifies to a widespread hunger to name a certain kind of harm.

But what are the implications of diagnosing it everywhere?

When I put out a call on X (formerly known as Twitter) for experiences of gaslighting, I immediately received a flood of responses, Leah’s among them.

The stories offered proof of the term’s broad resonance, but they also suggested the ways in which it has effectively become an umbrella that shelters a wide variety of experiences under the same name.

Webster’s dictionary defines the term as “psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.”

Leah’s own experience of gaslighting offers a quintessential example—coercive, long-term, and carried out by an intimate partner—but as a clinician she has witnessed the rise of the phrase with both relief and skepticism.

Her current job gives her the chance to offer college students the language and the knowledge that she didn’t have at their age.

“I love consent education,” she told me. “I wish someone had told me it was O.K. to say no.”

But she also sees the word “gaslighting” as being used so broadly that it has begun to lose its meaning.

“It’s not just disagreement,” she said. It’s something much more invasive: the gaslighter “scoops out what you know to be true and replaces it with something else.”

The term “gaslighting” comes from the title of George Cukor’s film “Gaslight,” from 1944, a noirish drama that tracks the psychological trickery of a man, Gregory, who spends every night searching for a set of lost jewels in the attic of a town house he shares with his wife, Paula, played by Ingrid Bergman.

(The jewels are her inheritance, and we come to understand that he has married her in order to steal them.)

Based on Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play of the same name, the film is set in London in the eighteen-eighties, which gives rise to its crucial dramatic trick: during his nighttime rummaging, Gregory turns on the gas lamps in the attic, causing all the other lamps in the house to flicker.

But, when Paula wonders why they are flickering, he convinces her that she must have imagined it.

Filmed in black-and-white, with interior shots full of shadows and exterior shots full of swirling London fog, the film offers a clever inversion of the primal trope of light as a symbol of knowledge.

Here, light becomes an agent of confusion and deception, an emblem of Gregory’s manipulation.

Gregory gradually makes Paula doubt herself in every way imaginable.

He convinces her that she has stolen his watch and hidden one of their paintings, and that she is too fragile and unwell to appear in public.

When Paula reads a novel by the fire, she can’t even focus on the words; all she can hear is Gregory’s voice inside her head.

The house in which she is now confined becomes a physical manifestation of the claustrophobia of gaslighting and the ways in which it can feel like being trapped inside another person’s narrative—dimly aware of a world outside but lacking any idea of how to reach it.

The first recorded use of “gaslight” as a verb is from 1961, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and its first mention in clinical literature came in the British medical journal The Lancet, in a 1969 article titled “The Gas-Light Phenomenon.”

Written by two British doctors, the article summarizes the plot of the original play and then examines three real-life cases in which something similar occurred.

Two of the cases feature devious wives, flipping the gender dynamic usually assumed today; in one, a woman tried to convince her husband that he was insane, so that he would be committed to a mental hospital and she could divorce him without penalty.

The article is ultimately less concerned with gaslighting itself than with safeguards around admitting patients to mental hospitals.

The actual psychology of gaslighting emerged as an object of study a decade later.

The authors of a 1981 article in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly interpreted it as a version of a phenomenon known as “projective identification,” in which a person projects onto someone else some part of himself that he finds intolerable.

Gaslighting involves a “special kind of ‘transfer,’ ” they write, in which the victimizer, “disavowing his or her own mental disturbance, tries to make the victim feel he or she is going crazy, and the victim more or less complies.”

On its way from niche clinical concept to ubiquitous cultural diagnosis, gaslighting has, of course, passed through the realm of pop psychology.

In the 2007 book “The Gaslight Effect,” the psychotherapist Robin Stern mines the metaphor to the fullest, advising her readers to “Turn Up Your Gaslight Radar,” “Develop Your Own ‘Gaslight Barometer,’ ” and “Gasproof Your Life.”

Stern anchors the phenomenon in a relationship pattern that she noticed during her twenty years of therapeutic work: “Confident, high-achieving women were being caught in demoralizing, destructive, and bewildering relationships” that in each case caused the woman “to question her own sense of reality.”

Stern offers a series of taxonomies for the stages (Disbelief, Defense, Depression) and the perpetrators (Glamour Gaslighters, Good-Guy Gaslighters, and Intimidators).

She understands gaslighting as a dynamic that “plays on our worst fears, our most anxious thoughts, our deepest wishes to be understood, appreciated, and loved.”

In the past decade, philosophy has turned its gaze to the phenomenon, too.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/phpe.12046

In 2014, Kate Abramson, a philosophy professor at the University of Indiana, published an essay called “Turning Up the Lights on Gaslighting,” which she has now expanded into a rigorous and passionately argued book-length study, “On Gaslighting.”

Early in the book, she describes giving talks and having conversations about gaslighting in the decade since publishing her original article: “I still remember the sense of revelation I had when first introduced to the notion of gaslighting. I’ve now seen that look of stunned discovery on a great many faces.”

The core of Abramson’s argument is that gaslighting is an act of grievous moral wrongdoing which inflicts “a kind of existential silencing.”

“Agreement isn’t the endpoint of successful gaslighting,” she writes.

“Gaslighters aim to fundamentally undermine their targets as deliberators and moral agents.”

Abramson catalogues the ways in which gaslighters leverage their authority, cultivating isolation in the victim and leaning on social tropes (for example, the “hysterical woman”) to achieve their aims.

Outlining the various forms of suffering that gaslighting causes, Abramson stresses the tautological bind in which it places the victim—“charging someone not simply with being wrong or mistaken, but being in no condition to judge whether she is wrong or mistaken.”

Gaslighting essentially turns its targets against themselves, she writes, by harnessing “the very same capacities through which we create lives that have meaning to us as individuals,” such as the capacities to love, to trust, to empathize with others, and to recognize the fallibility of our perceptions and beliefs.

This last point has always struck me as one of gaslighting’s keenest betrayals: it takes what is essentially an ethically productive form of humility, the awareness that one might be wrong, and turns it into a liability.

Any argument in which two people remember the same thing in different ways can feel like a terrible game of chicken:

the “winner” of the argument is the one less willing to doubt their own memories—arguably the more flawed moral position—whereas the one who swerves first looks weaker but is often driven by a more conscientious commitment to self-doubt.

Being a philosopher, Abramson spends a good deal of time defining the phenomenon by specifying what it isn’t.

Gaslighting is not the same as brainwashing, for example, because it involves not simply convincing someone of something that isn’t true but, rather, convincing that person to distrust their own capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood.

It is also not the same as guilt-tripping, because someone can be aware of being guilt-tripped while still effectively being guilt-tripped.

At the same time—and although Abramson recognizes that “concept creep” threatens to dilute the meaning and the utility of the term—her own examples of gaslighting sometimes grow uncomfortably expansive.

(And her decision to use male pronouns for gaslighters and female pronouns for the gaslit also reinforces a reductive notion of its gender patterns.)

Both the book and her original essay open with a list of more than a dozen “things gaslighters say,” ranging from “Don’t be so sensitive” to “If you’re going to be like this, I can’t talk to you” to “I’m worried; I think you’re not well.”

It’s hard to imagine a person who hasn’t heard at least one of these.

The quotations function as a kind of net, drawing readers into the force field of the book’s argument with an implicit suggestion:

Perhaps this has happened to you.

Growing up in Bangladesh as the daughter of two literature professors, a woman I’ll call Adaya often had difficulty understanding what other people were saying.

She felt stupid because it seemed so much harder for her to comprehend things others understood easily, but over time she began to suspect that her hearing was physically impaired.

Her parents told her that she was just seeking attention, and when they finally took her to the family doctor he confirmed that her hearing was fine.

She was just exaggerating, he said, as teen-age girls are prone to do.

Adaya believed what her parents had said, though she kept encountering situations where she couldn’t hear things.

It wasn’t until her mid-thirties, in 2011, that she finally went to see another specialist.

This was in Iowa, where she’d moved for a graduate program in writing after her first marriage, in Bangladesh, fell apart.

The clinician told her that her middle-ear bone was calcifying; it was a congenital problem that had almost certainly affected her hearing for at least twenty-five years.

Waiting for a bus home from the hospital—in the middle of winter, with a foot of snow all around her—Adaya called her mother to tell her.

She responded without apology (“You’re old enough to take care of yourself, so take care of yourself”), and let another six years pass before casually disclosing that the family doctor had found something wrong with Adaya’s hearing, all those years before.

When Adaya asked why they had kept this from her, her mother replied, “I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want you to be weak about it.”

Of all the people who approached me on X with testimonies of gaslighting, I found Adaya and her story particularly compelling because her diagnosis eventually offered her a kind of irrefutable confirmation—something the gaslit crave, but often never receive—that allowed her to confront the dynamic directly.

For Adaya, the damage of her parents’ deception went beyond the hardships of her medical condition.

“It made me feel that what I was experiencing in my body was not real,” she told me. “All my life I was told I was lying and exaggerating. . . . In those years when my sense of self was being formed, I was being given a deficient version of myself.”

It was part of a broader pattern.

From an early age, Adaya told me, she felt that she didn’t fit in with her family without quite knowing why.

Eventually, she realized that this sense of falling short had arisen from things her mother said.

She thought of herself as ugly because her mother said so, disparaging her dark skin; when she got a skin infection, she was made to believe it was because she didn’t keep herself clean enough.

“If your mother cannot see the grace and beauty in you, who can?” Adaya said.

That sense of shame and worthlessness propelled her toward an abusive marriage

(“The first boy who told me I was worth loving, I moved toward him”) and kept her in it for years.

The idea of gaslighting first began to resonate with Adaya when she finally went to therapy, in her forties.

She had gone in order to understand the dynamics of her failed marriage, but came to see that the problems went deeper.

As she wrote in one of her first messages to me, she found it easier to talk about surviving domestic violence than about the emotional violence she experienced in her childhood.

The things her mother had said about her “dislodged and disoriented and to some extent destroyed my sense of self.”

Adaya has come to divide her life into three parts:

her youth, when she believed in the version of herself shaped by her mother’s narrative;

the period of adulthood when the hearing diagnosis caused her to wrestle with that narrative;

and the current era, in which she has a stronger self-conception and is in a stable romantic relationship.

She was able to arrive at this point in part because her therapist helped her identify her relationship with her parents as one of gaslighting.

Looking back on herself when she was young, she says, “I almost feel like it’s a different person—like she is my child, and I want to take care of her.”

The psychoanalyst and historian Ben Kafka, who is working on a book about how other people drive us crazy, told me that he thinks our most familiar tropes about gaslighting are slightly misleading.

He believes that, although romantic relationships dominate our cultural narratives of gaslighting, the parent-child dynamic is a far more useful frame.

When I visited Kafka in the cozy Greenwich Village office where he sees his patients, he pointed out that, for one thing, the power imbalance between parents and their children is intrinsically conducive to this form of manipulation.

Indeed, it often happens unwittingly: if a child receives her version of reality from her parents, then she may feel that she has to consent to it as a way to insure that she continues to be loved and cared for.

(And what other sense of reality do we have at first, besides what our parents tell us to be true?)

Additionally, gaslighting later in life almost always involves some degree of infantilization and regression, insofar as it creates an enforced dependence.

Lastly, and crucially, Kafka’s orientation toward parent-child bonds stems from an essentially Freudian belief that the dynamics at play in our adult relationships can usually be traced back to those we grew familiar with in childhood.

There are many memoirs that recount experiences one might call gaslighting—indeed, the very act of writing personal narrative often involves an attempt to “reclaim” a story that’s already been told another way—but few trace the lasting residue of parental gaslighting as deftly as Lily Dunn’s “Sins of My Father.”

When Dunn was six, her father left the family to join a cult who called themselves the sannyasins and preached a doctrine of radical emotional autonomy.

At thirteen, Dunn went to spend the summer at her father’s villa, in Tuscany, where he lived with a much younger wife (they’d got together when he was thirty-seven and she was eighteen) and a rotating crew of fellow cult members.

In the entrancing but unsettling paradise of the villa—with its marble floors and grand staircases, shoddy electricity, and plentiful vats of wine—one of her father’s middle-aged friends began trying to seduce her.

After kissing her in the kitchen, his skin leathery and his breath stale from cigarette smoke, he whispered, “I want to have sex with you,” and invited her back to his camper van to listen to his poems.

When Dunn told her father how anxious these sexual advances made her, he replied that she shouldn’t be worried.

“You could learn something,” he told her. “He’s a good man. He’ll be gentle.”

(He changed his mind once he learned that his friend had gonorrhea.)

For Dunn, her father’s failure to affirm her sense of being preyed upon was far more damaging than the other man’s predation.

Years later, whenever she asked her father to acknowledge that his behaviors had affected her, he would gaslight her even more.

Echoing the teachings of his sannyasin guru, he acted as if it were inappropriate for her to blame him for any emotional damage:

“‘You can choose how you feel,’ he said, again and again. ‘It has nothing to do with me.’ ”

For years after that incident, Dunn told me, “I could never trust that what I was feeling was quite right,” because she’d been consistently told by her father that she felt too much, and that she needed to deal with these feelings on her own rather than foisting them onto others.

At fifteen, she began her first serious romantic relationship, with a much older man (he was thirty-two), and found it almost impossible to trust her suspicions about him.

Looking back, it’s clear to her that he was living with his female partner, but he said that the woman was just a roommate, and Dunn didn’t have the confidence to disbelieve him.

Instead, she told me, she got lost in obsessive thought patterns, trying to figure out whether this man was lying or if she was being paranoid; she couldn’t concentrate properly because she was so consumed by this circular thinking.

“I thought I had to work it out myself,” she said. Looking back, she sees herself frantically trying to play two roles at once: she was the anxious child, who knew something was wrong but couldn’t figure out what, and the adult who was attempting—but not yet able—to take care of things, to make them right.

Sitting in Kafka’s office thinking of Dunn and Adaya, I found myself swelling with indignation on behalf of these gaslit children, taught to feel responsible for the pain their parents had caused them.

But beneath that indignation lurked something else—a nagging anxiety coaxed into sharper visibility by the therapeutic aura of Kafka’s sleek analytic couch.

I eventually told him that, as I worked on this piece, I had started to wonder about the ways I might be unintentionally gaslighting my daughter—telling her that she is “just fine” when she clearly isn’t, or giving her a hard time for making us late for school by demanding to wear a different pair of tights, when it is clearly my own fault for not starting our morning routine ten minutes earlier.

In these interactions, I can see the distinct mechanisms of gaslighting at work, albeit in a much milder form: taking a difficult feeling—my latent sense of culpability whenever she is unhappy, or my guilt for running behind schedule—and placing it onto her.

Part of me hoped that Kafka would disagree with me, but instead he started nodding vehemently.

“Yes!” he said. “Within a two-block range of any elementary school, just before the bell rings, you can find countless parents gaslighting their children, off-loading their anxiety.”

We both laughed.

In the moment, this jolt of recognition seemed incidental, a brief diversion into daily life as we crawled through the darker trenches of human manipulation.

But, after I’d left Kafka’s office, it started to feel like a crucial acknowledgment: that gaslighting is neither as exotic nor as categorically distinct as we’d like to believe.

Gila Ashtor, a psychoanalyst and a professor at Columbia University, told me she often sees patients experience a profound sense of relief when it occurs to them that they may have been gaslit.

As she put it, “It’s like light at the end of the tunnel.”

But Ashtor worries that such relief may be deceptive, in that it risks effacing the particular (often unconscious) reasons they may have been drawn to the dynamic.

Ashtor defines gaslighting as “the voluntary relinquishing of one’s narrative to another person,” and the word “voluntary” is crucial—that’s what makes it a dynamic rather than just a unilateral act of violence.

For Ashtor, it’s not a question of blaming the victim but of examining their susceptibility: what makes someone ready to accept another person’s narrative of their own experience?

What might they have been seeking?

In addition to working as a psychoanalyst, Ashtor has studied and taught in Columbia’s M.F.A. program in creative nonfiction (where I also teach), and she thinks a lot about the connections between gaslighting and personal narrative.

I asked her how patients tend to narrate their gaslighting experiences: how often they come to her with the idea already in their minds, and how often she is the one to bring it up.

Ashtor said that, if she introduces the term, she tries to use it as a placeholder, a first step in figuring out what was at play in a relationship.

When patients introduce it—and sometimes she can sense a patient wanting her to use it first—she may be skeptical, not because they are wrong but because they usually haven’t fully reckoned with their own role in the dynamic yet.

It’s as if they are trying to close something by invoking the word—to mark it as settled, figured out—whereas she wants to open it up.

Ashtor says it frequently becomes clear that patients are very attached to the term “gaslighting,” and fear something will be taken away from them if she disputes it.

The question of what would be taken away is an illuminating one, and it raises an even trickier question: what did the dynamic give them in the first place?

The issue of susceptibility gets thorny quickly; it can appear to veer dangerously close to victim-blaming.

Ashtor doesn’t believe in the old psychoanalytic idea that everything that happens to us is somehow desired, but she does think that it’s worthwhile to investigate why people find themselves in certain toxic dynamics.

Without discounting the genuine suffering involved, she finds it useful to ask what her patients were seeking.

Ashtor wondered aloud to me whether there could be something “good” about gaslighting, and why it feels so transgressive even to suggest that this might be the case.

“There’s a real appeal in adopting someone else’s view of the world and escaping our own,” she told me. “There are very few acceptable outlets in our lives for this hunger for difference.”

Ashtor thinks that therapeutic examination of a gaslighting dynamic can bring you closer to understanding something crucial about yourself: a complicated relationship to motherhood, say, or the effects of certain imbalances or conflicts in your parents’ marriage.

The work is to “understand what’s getting enacted and why.”

One doesn’t necessarily emerge from this type of examination with a self that is entirely “cured” or integrated, but it can, as she says, allow one to “live in closer proximity to the questions and struggles that animate the self.”

In working with patients to better understand their experiences of being gaslit, Ashtor is hoping to give them a different way to engage with the impulses that led them there.

Although most accounts of gaslighting focus on interpersonal dynamics, Pragya Agarwal, a behavioral scientist and a writer based between Ireland and the U.K., believes that it’s more useful to consider the phenomenon from a sociological perspective.

“People who have less power because of their status in society, whether it be gender, race, class, and so on, are more susceptible to being gaslighted,” she told me. “Their inferior status is used as leverage to invalidate their experiences and testimonies.”

She spoke of instances in medicine in which genuinely ill patients are repeatedly told that their symptoms are psychosomatic.

Endometriosis, for example, is an underdiagnosed condition, she said, because women’s pain is often discounted.

Similarly, in the workplace, minorities who report microaggressions may be told that they are being “too sensitive” or that the offending colleague “didn’t mean it like that.”

In this view of gaslighting, it becomes harder to see the utility of susceptibility as a framing concept.

When I asked Agarwal about what role the gaslit party might play in the dynamic, she replied, “I don’t believe that it is the responsibility of the oppressed to create conditions where they wouldn’t be oppressed.”

What does the gaslighter want?

In the 1944 film, the gaslighter’s motivation (to steal Paula’s jewels) is so cartoonishly superficial that it seems like a stand-in for something larger—a metaphor for the desire to undermine a woman’s self-confidence, perhaps, in order to keep her dependent.

In real life, casting the gaslighter as a two-dimensional villain seems insufficient, another way of avoiding a reckoning with complicity and desire.

The question of the gaslighter’s motivation often becomes a chicken-or-egg dilemma: whether their impulse to destabilize another person’s sense of reality stems primarily from wanting to harm that person or from wanting to corroborate their own truth.

Think of the college boyfriend who convinces his girlfriend that all sex involves violence—is his fundamental investment in controlling her or in somehow justifying his own desires?

Abramson writes that both goals can be at play simultaneously, such that a gaslighter may be “trying to radically undermine his target” and also, “in a perfectly ordinary way, trying to tell himself a story about why there’s nothing that happened with which he needs to deal.”

(Indeed, as she points out, gaslighters “are often not consciously trying to drive their targets crazy,” so they may not always be self-aware enough to distinguish between these reasons.)

If the need to affirm one’s own version of reality is pretty much universal, it makes sense that a desire to attack someone else’s competing version is universal, too.

Yet, in the popular discourse, it can seem as if everyone has been gaslit but no one will admit to doing the gaslighting.

Kristin Dombek, in her 2014 book, “The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism,” discusses how narcissism, once solely a clinical diagnosis, became an all-purpose buzzword.

In her view, we hurl the accusation of pathological selfishness at others as a way of making sense of the feeling of being ignored or slighted.

Gaslighting is not a clinical diagnosis, but, as with narcissism, less precise applications of the term can be a way to take an inevitable source of pain—the fact of disagreement, or the fact that we are not the center of other people’s lives—and turn it into an act of wrongdoing.

This is not to say that narcissism or gaslighting don’t exist, but that, in seeing them everywhere, we risk not just diluting the concepts but also attributing natural human friction to the malevolence of others.

Although “gaslighting” is a term that many members of Gen Z have grown up with, one teen-ager I know expresses its perils in this vein succinctly: “Every time someone gets criticized or called out, they just say, ‘Oh, you’re gaslighting me,’ and it makes the other person the bad guy.”

It doesn’t help that the accusation is essentially unanswerable: “No, I’m not” is exactly what a gaslighter would say.

Even a third party who disputes someone’s account of being gaslit is threatening to inflict the same harm as the gaslighter.

No wonder the issue of proof is crucial in many accounts of gaslighting: the tights on the boat, the charts that show decades of hearing loss, the other women who were assaulted.

These are empirical life preservers that pull us out of the epistemic whirlpool.

In proving that our past perceptions were correct after all, they also seem to guarantee that we are correct now in our feeling of having been hurt.

Such certainty is possible only in retrospect, however. Inside the experience of gaslighting, Abramson writes, “the gaslit find themselves tossed between trust and distrust, unstably occupying a world between the two.”

Which is to say, the more adamant you are that you’re being gaslit, the more probable it is that you’re not.

On Reddit, a man laments, “My last GF loved to tell me I was ‘gaslighting’ her every time I simply had a different opinion than hers. Infuriating.”

Has he been gaslit into thinking he’s a gaslighter?

Part of the tremendously broad traction of the concept, I suspect, has to do with the fact that gaslighting is adjacent to so many common relationship dynamics: not only disagreeing on a shared version of reality but feeling that you are in a contest over which version prevails.

It would be nearly impossible to find someone who hasn’t experienced the pain and frustration—utterly ordinary, but often unbearable—that comes when your own sense of reality diverges from someone else’s.

Because this gap can feel so maddening and wounding, it can be a relief to attribute it to villainy.

At the climax of Cukor’s film, Paula confronts her husband with the truth of his manipulations.

(He has been tied to a chair by a helpful detective. She is brandishing a knife.)

He doubles down on his old tricks, trying to convince her that she has misinterpreted the evidence and should cut him free.

But Paula turns his own game against him: “Are you suggesting that this is a knife I hold in my hand? Have you gone mad, my husband?”

In a further twist, she inhabits the role of madwoman as a repurposed costume:How can a madwoman help her husband to escape? . . . If I were not mad, I could have helped you. . . . But because I am mad, I hate you. Because I am mad, I have betrayed you. And because I’m mad, I’m rejoicing in my heart, without a shred of pity, without a shred of regret, watching you go with glory in my heart!

On its surface, this final scene offers us a clear, happy ending.

The gaslit party triumphs and objective truth prevails.

But deeper down it gestures toward a more complex vision of gaslighting: as a reciprocal exchange in which both parties take turns as gaslit and gaslighter.

This is a version of gaslighting that psychoanalysis is more congenial to.

In the Psychoanalytic Quarterly article from 1981, the authors describe a “gaslighting partnership” whose participants may “oscillate” between roles: “Not infrequently, each of the participants is convinced that he or she is the victim.”

In this sense, gaslighting is both more and less common than we think.

Extreme cases undoubtedly occur, and deserve recognition as such, but to understand the phenomenon exclusively in light of these dire examples allows us to avoid the more uncomfortable notion that something similar takes place in many intimate relationships.

One doesn’t have to dilute the definition of gaslighting to recognize that it happens on many scales, from extremely toxic to undeniably commonplace.

Ben Kafka told me that he thinks one of the key insights of psychoanalysis is that people respond to anxiety by dividing the world into good and bad, a tendency known as “splitting.”

It strikes me that some version of this splitting is at play not only in gaslighting itself—taking an undesirable “bad” emotion or quality and projecting it onto someone else, so that the self can remain “good”—but also in the widespread invocation of the term, the impulse to split the world into innocent and culpable parties.

If the capacity to gaslight is more widely distributed than its most extreme iterations would lead us to believe, perhaps we’ve all done more of it than we care to admit.

Each of us has been the one making our way back into bed, vulnerable and naked, and each of us has been the one saying,

Come back into this bed I made for you.

X

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Atomic Habits

As I was reading some lines from this book, I remembered this image: a drop of water that falls repeatedly over a rock until it erodes. The drop of water might not be strong enough by itself ―not stronger than the rock―, but continuous drops for a long period of time will end up eroding a rock, no matter how hard it is…, and I believe there is power to that image, as there is power to this book.

As human beings, attached to our constant responsibilities and somewhat repeating our days the same way, I think we need to be reminded that change is part of our lives, and that we can get stuck in the monotony and the repetition. We need change. We need positive change. We need to want positive change. And for those who are reminded about it, the message is to take constant action. To improve ourselves every day by at least just 1%. This book does this. It brings a known, not so new, but powerful perspective on change.

I now feel motivated, to be honest. I needed to hear (read), what James Clear has to say, because even as I knew that everyday hard work would help me along the way, sometimes this mindset goes into the background, and you get discouraged at times. So, I now want to discuss/share a little bit of what the author writes in this book.

He uses four main resources for his work: examples or anecdotes about people who have achieved greatness ―in their own definition of the word and sometimes in what is regarded commonly as success―, theoretical thinking that explains and provide a framework within which he can move, practical advice that can be useful to any reader, and finally, his own conclusions which provide his own touch.

At the beginning, and throughout the book, he explains and defines the basic pillar on which change sustains itself: identity. If we want change to occur, we need to understand ourselves by understanding our identity. How do we see ourselves now and in the future? What have we learned about our genes and our talents? How is our environment affecting our habits?

First, decide who you want to be. This holds at any level ―as an individual, as a team, as a community, as a nation. What do you want to stand for? What are your principles and values? Who do you wish to become? ― James Clear

Everything starts with self-awareness. Then comes the knowledge or conviction that hard constant work will help us change, not because of a goal or result, not because of a grade or a promotion, but because we are becoming a different/better type of person by changing our system of behavior. James states that we fail to change not because of the goals we set, but due to the system/processes that we have built.

You see, it is important to be reminded that what allows us to change is not the number on the scale or the better salary I receive for a promotion, what allows us to become better is the process, the everyday learning, the everyday workout, the everyday writing. This is why, most importantly, we must allow ourselves to enjoy the process, the work, even the dullness that comes with everyday practice. To change, ―if we are looking to change― towards our better self we are encouraged to improve 1% every day, with small, constant, better habits.

He uses a little bit of math, to explain everything on the book, given his background studies in sciences and behavioral economics, it is understandable that he uses mathematical models to bring a little bit of visual aid and theoretical explanations to his argument. From the «Four Laws» to the «valley of disappointment» and the «Goldilocks zone», he helps himself with graphics and equations to try and prove or generalize these concepts. Also, he mentions at the beginning, his work has been built upon the shoulders of other scientists and psychologists so, the intention to bring authority and scientific rationalization is very palpable.

This, however, does not make the book heavy or difficult to understand. His wording is easygoing, quick and comprehensible. Maybe you don’t want to finish this book in one sitting. Maybe you want to advance slowly, absorbing every piece of advice you’re given. Maybe you want to try for a week a new method or think what applies to your life. How ever you chose to read this work, you’re in for a treat.

I am not about to write here the Four Laws that will help you create better habits, nor the mathematical explanations provided. The fact is, this is all very well explained in the book, and you can also go look for the website of the author. My intention with this review is to recommend a great reading if you are in a slump or believe that you are not being the best version of yourself. I didn’t even know I needed this. Go ahead and give it a try. Five stars.

Fecha original de publicación: agosto 26, 2023

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Review: Leave the World Behind portrays the apocalypse of a non-conformist and disposable society

The end of the world as we know it terrifies us, as human beings we are accustomed to comfort and of course to technology that in the service of man has helped us evolve as a species and society, it is true that without this element we would not know what to do and everything would collapse. The world of entertainment has not been exempt from producing films as well as apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic series with this theme, addressing other factors such as the one in which the planet is suddenly destroyed by the appearance of zombies, giant monsters, a pandemic, or aliens, surely The global situation that we have experienced since 2020 with SARS-CoV-2, fires, wars, energy crises, racial violence, food shortages are not so foreign to us, it comforts us a little to know that, at least fiction has always been more intense than reality. This particular genre has had box office hits such as The Day of the Triffids (1962), Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Omega Man (1971), Soylent Green (1973), Mad Max (1979), Terminator (1984). ), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), 12 Monkeys (1995), ID4 (1996), The War of Worlds (2005), Im Legend (2007), WALL-E (2008), 2012 (2009), The Book of Eli (2010), Snowpiercer (2013), Greenland (2020) and A Quiet Place (2020) among many others that are an example of the vision and originality that writers and directors have to give their point of view on extinction. 2023 has been a complicated year for film and television productions, the writers' strike made it clear that things are already changing, and streaming platforms have been able to take advantage of their space to transmit their original productions, Netflix presents this year's end the Leave the World Behind film that addresses an interesting topic about a possible end of the world.

What is the film about?

A family's vacation at a luxury villa far from the hustle and bustle of the big city takes a disturbing turn when a global cyberattack knocks out their devices... while two strangers knock on the door for help, Amanda (Julia Roberts) and her husband Clay (Ethan Hawke) will have to decide whether to help by leaving their prejudices behind to survive what is the beginning of the destruction of the world as we know it. The news that the world collapses due to a cyber attack sounds very interesting, a new twist that can contribute a lot to the genre at hand, the mix between science fiction and reality is what can work, as an idea it does not need to have modern touches but rather take a point in time of our reality and modify it, it sounds straightforward but the reality is that it is not, managing these types of concepts can result in something successful or a complete failure. The film is based on the book of the same name by American writer Rumaan Alam with the collaboration of Barrack and Michelle Obama, it gives us a palpable sense of sinister fear and intrigue to what is now a feature film that may not be for everyone, or Although not everyone understands what its concept is and its current context in which we depend almost 100% on the technology that provides us with almost everything, this can be managed to the point of making it terrifying. As viewers we are used to productions of this genre being full of action with dazzling visual effects that are above their plots, this does not happen here, what we see is a more intimate experience, an introspective of the characters toward their most fears. deep and how they will have to face an imminent attack that threatens to destroy humanity as we know it, is the discovery of each of them into the unknown and what they will be able to do to survive and protect their families.

It is a rational fear that human beings have towards the unknown, the script written and adapted by Sam Esmail understands very well the general mechanics of the post-apocalyptic genre and the rules it imposes, this is the story seen from the eyes of a family pretentious and snobbish caught in a world-altering situation, Amanda Sandford's (Julia Roberts) favorite phrase is "I hate people" as she gazes jadedly from the window of her luxurious Brooklyn apartment, in contrast to her kindly husband Clay (Ethan Hawke) who is more understanding of the environment that surrounds him as well as its inhabitants, whether friends or acquaintances, his children Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) and Archie (Charlie Evans) are a couple of modern teenagers who base part of their lives on the technology that gives them their computer equipment and cell phones. Together they plan a mini vacation away from everything and everyone in a luxurious mansion on Long Island for the weekend. As often happens in other disaster productions, this film explores its strange characters more than a disaster that involves the use of special effects, it is more interested in the disintegration of society and the tension that arises from disparate people with nothing in common trying to survive together, nor are there many explanations of what happens either in its central plot or in its subplots. The director, creator, and screenwriter Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot) aims to be a watershed when it comes to the post-apocalyptic genre, many productions explore what happens outside, and very few what happens inside, that is, what the people experience. characters and what we can witness through their eyes, what their motivations and way of feeling in the face of a tragedy where there is no way out or a safe place to go, which as an audience makes us wonder what we would do in a similar situation. ordinary humans unprepared to face disasters, we have seen it in real life with earthquakes to give a more immediate example, we must recognize it, many of us become appalled and let fear and panic dominate us and we justify ourselves with something so simple as saying that we never have the time necessary to inform ourselves and prepare. Leave the World Behind proposes a conspiracy theory that comes true when they least expect it, from the beginning they leave us subtle signs of what is going to happen, of what we can expect from this film, for example, that while they are on vacation they lose the cell phone service and this is gradually growing, or while sunbathing on the beach an uncontrolled cargo ship runs aground violently on the shore, after that unexpected event and at night there is a knock on your door, is the owner of the house they have rented for the weekend, GH Scott (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha'la) have suddenly returned due to a blackout that has left the entire city of New York in darkness.

It is to be expected that the bigoted and racist Amanda suspects that these people are the real owners and does not believe that there is a blackout in the city. However, apart from a national emergency notice, the televisions have stopped working, and GH is shocked For a very different reason, these developments are beginning to align with a government plan that would seem extravagant, exaggerated, and difficult to believe if it were not for the reality of the situation. At this point, things take unexpected turns and the story becomes more interesting, the racial tension between the Sandfords and the Scotts is the central axis in a large part of the film, this could be a plausible example of the most despicable thing that can happen. being a human being, something that Amanda Sanford represents very well, she is a vicious and self-centered, pretentious, arrogant, and racist woman who gives more importance to the way of being and thinking as well as the feelings and desires of her white children than the beliefs above the emotions others may feel, specifically towards these African American guests. The script is very benevolent to itself, it does not risk calling a spade a spade, and it never openly refers to Amanda's racism but instead creates an unconvincing story to excuse her pettiness and selfishness in the face of an emergency in which she does not care. She cares about nothing more than herself and her family, nor does she manage to concretely and convincingly develop a personality for her son and relies mainly on a funny joke about the television series Friends to give her daughter an identity, one that is simpler and more materialistic, Once this is raised, the plot is better understood, although this reference that advocates nostalgia may be unnecessary when it could go deeper into other topics. Esmail's direction aims to be more artistic and profound, the rapid and oscillating movements of the camera that together with the director of photography Tod Campbell make long and ostentatious panoramic shots with reoriented compositions to show a world that little by little is falling into chaos, sheets of paper falling from the sky, corpses washed up on the beach by the tide, desolate streets, looting and very hidden violence that at times wants to be explicit until the appearance of Danny (Kevin Bacon) as a mysterious figure with an ideology that understands and represents a conspiratorial and survival society, it represents those people who have always known and who have wanted the world to face itself in a war that ends with an apocalypse, a rebel group that for years has been equipping and preparing to that moment. As an independent part of society they are prepared for everything that can happen more than anyone, this has made them deeply selfish and dangerous since when the time comes and through their knowledge they will be able to subjugate the most ignorant and weak, Danny does not seem to feel the Less compassion for his fellow men, he keeps everyone at a distance and does not want to share his possessions, recognizing only the value of money and barter, it is for him a new form of society in which the strongest are those who dominate and survive over the others. Furthermore, this idea makes the plot take another unexpected turn, it tells us that the real danger that exists in that world is not what happens to the world but how its society and the individuals in it are transformed. What works very well in this film is the fact that it presents us with something that is neither foreign nor unknown to us if we remember those days at the beginning of the pandemic when no one knew anything about what was happening, where the media was saturated with true and false news about the world situation, this has shown us the fragility of the way of life we have as humanity, some may have productions where they mock the focus on the modern version of the end of the world just to entertain but with a more terrifying perspective and a more identifiable reality. This work is very far from the typical hackneyed thriller about a post-apocalyptic world to which we are already accustomed, Leave the World Behind is a more prophetic story of what may be approaching humanity and of our sad reality of dependence on the media and technology that has condemned us to seemingly inevitable death, resulting in the extinction of everything as we know it, this panorama is what transmits to the viewer, a feeling of fear and carelessness in which we have to be more aware. The flaw it has as a film is that everything happens too quickly, by not having many explanations and a broader context of things this remains half-done, if the idea is to try to make this a saga then the failure is even greater because then it is The format in which they have presented it to us is wrong, it would work more like a miniseries that could tell in more detail what is happening and would give more time to the development of the characters, it is so evident that the script is focused on 3 things, first on a global disaster, second in a family that has to deal with this and third to face the consequences as humanity without leaving aside that moral discourse that love for the family allows everything, even the most vile acts, friendship, companionship, love and blah blah blah, an endless number of topics that we are already fed up with, what we want to see is the action of this until it reaches its conclusion and not to educate us about something that we already experience. The cast is made up of Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, Myha'la Herrold, and Kevin Bacon, a cast of superstars who give life to very different characters showing off all their talent, it's a shame that Sam Esmail's direction is far behind. below their capabilities. The score composed by Mac Quayle is just as strange and unpredictable as the film, pieces that seem to make no sense and are presented in a very concealed way to help create an atmosphere of tension. Along with this work, we can also listen to Kool's songs. & The Gang, Backstreet Boys, TV on the Radio, and the song I'll Be There For You by The Rembrandts. In conclusion, Leave the World Behind is a project that may well be experimental, it contributes something minimal to the genre but not enough to be a classic, a good idea that is poorly planned and poorly developed makes all that tension that it creates at the beginning dilute. In the end and it remains only as something that we have said here many times, in something that could have been and was not, it is disappointing that having a technical team capable of creating an entire world in chaos is not so well used, the same thing happens with the cast, top-notch actors who are reduced to making the minimum effort to develop complex characters. A film that in another format and medium could have worked better but that remains a worthy exponent on a platform that has weekly hits and that then remains in the catalog of oblivion and not even anyone will see them again, the result is something that cannot be It cannot and should not continue in sequels, it had its opportunity and wasted it masterfully, but this is already part of the non-conforming and disposable society in which we live. Leave the World Behind is now premiering on the Netflix platform. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMVBi_e8o-Y Read the full article