‘From the World of John Wick: Ballerina' Review: From Leotards to Lethal Weapons
Ballet turns out to be little more than a gimmick, however. A training montage features a few glimpses of the movie's heroine, Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas), en pointe, intercut with interludes of karate and pistol schooling as she learns to take her lumps, innovate with whatever makeshift weapons happen to be available, and figure out how to dismantle men twice her size.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
8 minutes ago
- Yahoo
'Of course': Bob Odenkirk confirms he'd be on board for more Better Call Saul
Bob Odenkirk would "of course" be on board for a new series of Better Call Saul. The 62-year-old actor first played lawyer Jimmy McGill and his corrupt alter ego Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and then reprised the role in his own spin-off series, which ran from 2015 to 2022, and he admitted if showrunners Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould had a new idea for his character, who was jailed at the end of Better Call Saul, he would be on board, though he thinks it is unlikely. He told 'Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould created that show. There are some of the best writers who ever worked in TV. 'So if they were to think of something in that world, of course I would do it. 'But I don't think so. I think they've all moved on to some more amazing projects that you'll soon see.' Of a potential plotline, he noted: 'He's not getting out [of prison]. If there's another Saul show, it takes place inside prison" The Nobody actor will always be grateful for the opportunity to have played Saul. He said: 'That part turned my life around, and I've given more to that part than anything I've done." Creator Vince has been working on new Apple TV+ sci-fi drama Pluribus, which stars Bob's Better Call Saul co-star Rhea Seehorn, and the actor teased the programme - which will be released in November - is "going to be a great one". Bob said: 'Look forward to the best written show on TV for years to come." The veteran actor previously admitted he is "fine with moving on" from playing both Saul and his assassin character Hutch from the Nobody movies because they are both tough roles to play. He told The Hollywood Reporter: 'They're guys who, for different reasons, have pretty big chips on their shoulders, and that's hard to play after a while. You can't just carry that guy around all the time.' Bob suffered a heart attack during the filming of the final season of Better Call Saul and he recently recalled how he was lucky that co-stars Ray Campbell and Patrick Fabian were nearby as he likely would have died had the incident happened in his trailer. He told Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend: "It was during Covid shooting, so we were separate from the crew. "And luckily, I didn't go to my trailer. If I'd gone to my trailer, I wouldn't be here, because they don't bother you (in the trailer)." But his co-stars' screams for help were initially mistaken as laughter at first due to the social distancing provisions in place on the set. He said: "It took a few seconds to realise people were screaming." Bob was grateful to the show's medical officer Rosa Estrada as she "immediately" began CPR after learning that no defibrillator would be available for 15 minutes.
WIRED
11 minutes ago
- WIRED
Teachers Are Trying to Make AI Work for Them
Aug 18, 2025 6:00 AM Since the start of the AI boom, teachers have been tasked with figuring out if LLMs are helpful tools or a cheat code. This is how they're bringing AI to their curricula. ILLUSTRATION: VIVIENNE SHAO One day last spring, in a high school classroom in Texas, students were arguing about who to kill off first. It was a thought experiment with a sci-fi premise: A global zombie outbreak has decimated major cities. One hundred frozen embryos meant to reboot humanity are safe in a bomb shelter, but the intended adult caretakers never made it. Instead, 12 random civilians stumbled in. There's only enough food and oxygen for seven. The students had to decide who would die and who would live to raise the future of the human race. It wasn't an easy choice. There was Amina, a 26-year-old actress, and Bubak, her husband. Also, a nurse named Marisa, a farmer named Roy, and others. Bubak, who had a criminal record, was a hard sell. So were the useless-yet-likable extras. For years, English teacher Cody Chamberlain had let students debate the ethics and logistics of saving humanity on their own—until he decided to throw AI into the mix. Chamberlain fed the scenario to ChatGPT. It killed Bubak and saved his wife—not because she was useful in other ways but because she could bear children. 'That's so cold,' the students gasped. It was. But for Chamberlain, it offered something new: a dispassionate, algorithmic judgment his students could think about critically. 'ChatGPT said we needed her, like Handmaid's Tale –style,' he says. 'And the kids were like, 'That's ridiculous.' It was weird for ChatGPT to finally not have an answer key but something the kids could push back on.' Teachers have long used technology to personalize lessons, manage workloads, or liven up slideshows. But something shifted after ChatGPT's public launch in 2022. Suddenly, teachers weren't just being tasked with figuring out how to incorporate iPads or interactive whiteboards into their lessons. They had to decipher how to deal with a technology that was already crash-landing into their students' lives, one that could help them study or help them cheat. A quarter of teachers surveyed by Pew in the fall of 2023 said they thought AI provided more harm than benefits; 32 percent thought the tech was a mix of good and bad. Educators faced a choice: Try to fight off AI, or find a way to work with it. This fall, AI will be more embedded in US classrooms than ever. Teachers are deploying large language models to write quizzes, adapt texts to reading levels, generate feedback, and design differentiated instruction. Some districts have issued guidance. Others have thrown up their hands. In the absence of clear policy, teachers are setting the boundaries themselves—one prompt at a time. 'It's just too easy and too alluring,' says Jeff Johnson, an English teacher in California who instructs other teachers on AI incorporation in his district. 'This is going to change everything. But we have to decide what that actually means.' Teaching has long relied on unpaid labor—nights spent googling, planning, adjusting for special education or multilingual learners. For Johnson, AI can provide the kind of assistance that can curb burnout. He uses Brisk to generate short quizzes, Magic School to streamline lesson planning, and Diffit to create worksheets tailored to different skill levels. He doesn't use AI to grade papers or answer student questions. He uses them to prep faster. 'That alone saves me days and weeks,' Johnson says. 'Time that can be better spent interacting with students.' Jennifer Goodnow, who teaches English as a second language in New York, feels similarly. She now plugs complex readings, like essays or book excerpts, into ChatGPT and asks it to create separate versions for advanced and beginner students, with corresponding depth-of-knowledge questions. Amanda Bickerstaff, a former teacher and CEO of AI for Education, an organization that offers training and resources to help educators integrate AI into their classrooms, puts it bluntly: 'Teachers are incorporating AI because they've always needed better planning tools. Now they finally have them.' The same goes for students with individualized education plans, commonly called IEPs—especially those with reading or processing disabilities. If a student struggles with comprehending text, for instance, a teacher might use generative AI to simplify sentence structures, highlight key vocabulary, or break down dense passages into more digestible chunks. Some tools can even reformat materials to include visuals or audio, helping students access the same content in a different way. Chamberlain, Johnson, and Goodnow all teach language arts, subjects where AI can offer benefits—and setbacks—in the classroom. Math teachers, though, tend to be more skeptical. 'Large language models are really bad at computation,' Bickerstaff says. Her team explicitly advises against using tools like ChatGPT to teach math. Instead, some teachers use AI for adjacent tasks—generating slides, reinforcing math vocabulary, or walking students through steps without solving problems outright. But there's something else teachers can use AI for: staying ahead of AI. Nearly three years after ChatGPT became available to the public, teachers can no longer ignore that their kids use it. Johnson recalls one student who was asked to analyze the song 'America' from West Side Story only to turn in a thesis on Simon & Garfunkel's song of same name. 'I was like, 'Dude, did you even read the response?'' he says. Rather than ban the tools, many teachers are designing around them. Johnson has students draft essays step-by-step in a Google Doc with version history enabled, which allows him to track students' writing progress as it appears on the page. Chamberlain requires students to submit their planning documents alongside final work. Goodnow is toying with the idea of having students plug AI-generated essays into assignments and then critique the results. 'Three years ago, I would've thrown the book at them,' Chamberlain says. 'Now it's more like, 'Show me your process. Where were you an agent in this?'' Even so, detecting AI use remains a game of vibes. Plagiarism checkers are notoriously unreliable. Districts have been reluctant to draw hard lines, in part because the tools are moving faster than the rules. But if there's one thing almost everyone agrees on, it's this: Students need AI literacy, and they're not getting it. 'We need to create courses for high school students on AI use, and I don't know that anybody knows the answer to this,' Goodnow says. 'Some sort of ongoing dialog between students and teachers on how to ethically, question mark, use these tools.' Organizations like AI for Education aim to provide that literacy. Founded in 2023, it works with school districts across the US to create AI guidance and training. But even in the most proactive schools, the focus is still on tool use—not critical understanding. Students know how to generate answers. They don't know how to tell whether those answers are inaccurate, biased, or made up. Johnson has begun building lessons around AI hallucinations—like asking ChatGPT how many R's are in the word 'strawberry.' (Spoiler: It often gets it wrong.) 'They need to see that you can't always trust it,' he says. As the tools improve, they're also reaching younger students, raising new concerns about how kids interact with LLMs. Bickerstaff warns that younger children, still learning to distinguish fact from fiction, may be especially vulnerable to over-trusting generative tools. That trust, she says, could have real consequences for their development and sense of reality. Already, some students are using AI not just to complete tasks but to think through them—blurring the line between tool and tutor. Across the board, educators say this fall feels like a turning point. Districts are rolling out new products, students are getting savvier, and teachers are racing to set the norms before the tech sets them itself. 'If we know we're preparing students for the future workforce—and we're hearing from leaders across many different companies that AI is going to be super important—then we need to start now,' Bickerstaff says. That's what teachers like Johnson and Goodnow are doing, one prompt, one student, one weird apocalypse scenario at a time.
New York Times
11 minutes ago
- New York Times
Pain took football away from Andrew Luck; what brought him back to Stanford?
PALO ALTO, Calif. — He built his house on the water thinking he'd never leave. It was five minutes from the Indianapolis Colts' practice facility. It's where his kids would grow up, where he and his wife would ease into middle age. It's where he imagined storing a Super Bowl ring or two. Life was simpler then, 'a binary existence' Andrew Luck once called it, when he still had so much in front of him. Advertisement 'I was gonna play until I was 40 or 45,' he says. For a moment, the thought lingers. A smile creases his face. 'You think you're invincible. At least I did.' Then came the pain, four miserable years of it, and football became the enemy, the root of his unhappiness. His smile fades. 'I fell out of love,' Luck says, reducing one of the most shocking retirements in NFL history into five tidy words. The end was a blur of sleepless nights and naked truths and a well of guilt that's never really gone away. He tried moving on. A game would flash across the TV and he'd groan. He'd have dreams about football, and his old life, and everything he'd left behind. For a while it felt like he was in a fog. I can't be 30 years old and retired, he'd tell himself. This is ridiculous. Then, something he didn't see coming: The game that was once brutally beaten out of him slowly began to pull him back in. His look these days is far more college professor than former All-American quarterback: wiry glasses, trendy sports coat, slim-fit slacks. The Paul Bunyan biceps that once bulged beneath his shoulder pads are gone. Andrew Luck is a skinny 35-year-old. Most days, he's thrilled if he has the time to sneak in a 20-minute workout. He's nine months on the job as general manager of the Stanford University football program. He texts staffers as early as 6 in the morning and as late as 9:30 at night. He calls season-ticket holders and asks them to renew. He sells. He scouts. He fundraises. He builds hope. He jumps on the practice field and runs the offense for a few snaps, revving that same raspy cadence that Jim Harbaugh taught him on these same fields 17 years ago. He recruits over the phone and welcomes prospects into his office. 'Hi, I'm Andrew,' he'll tell them, like they didn't just walk past a floor-to-ceiling image of him in the hallway, back when he was young and strong and in his cardinal No. 12, looking to throw deep. No. 1 overall pick in the NFL Draft, it reads. Maxwell Award winner. Walter Camp Award winner. Johnny Unitas Golden Arm winner. And on and on. The banner above speaks for itself: 'QUARTERBACK FOR THE AGES.' Luck claims the job offer was a surprise, and there's a running joke inside the building about how he first reacted. He likes to tell his staff that he played it cool, nodded his head and promised to think about it for a few days. Most don't buy that version. It was last October. Luck was meeting with new Stanford president Jonathan Levin, discussing the sagging state of a once-proud program. The Cardinal were in the midst of a fourth straight three-win season. At one point, Levin threw out an idea. Advertisement 'Why don't you just run football?' he asked. Luck's impulse, he told close friends, was to jump out of the chair and scream 'HELL YEAH!' Those friends aren't entirely sure he didn't. So, for the second time in five years, Luck's plan for the future took a sudden turn. In 2022, he'd moved his family — he and wife Nicole have two young daughters — from that house they built in Indianapolis to Palo Alto while he earned his master's in education. Degree in hand, they were headed out of state, retreating to a small town in the mountains. Luck was going to coach high school football and fade even further from public view. But this was Stanford, a place and a program that remained deeply important to him. 'The story of my identity, a huge part of it, is coming here,' he says. This is where Harbaugh taught him to bark out plays like a real quarterback, with a gravelly voice that cut through the wind and crowd noise. It's where he and his teammates would hum the Darth Vader theme from 'Star Wars' on their walks to the most grueling practices of the season. It's where he learned there were no shortcuts in turning around a program that was 1-11 when he committed and 11-2 when he left. Now that program needed him, badly. Luck had a chance to lead a team again. 'He's not a back-of-the-room guy,' says David Shaw, Luck's coach for his final college season. 'He never has been.' The job Levin proposed was both innovative and intentionally vague. In the professionalized world of college football, a handful of programs have identified the need for a CEO-type who oversees the entire operation while simultaneously acclimating to the demands of the NIL era. Stanford was falling behind. Levin knew it. Under prior leadership, the school had stubbornly refused to embrace NIL deals as recruiting inducements, leaving its roster lacking the talent needed to compete at the national level. Advertisement The Stanford football program Luck would be taking over was not the Stanford football program he left. The role, Levin decided, couldn't be a ceremonial one. He wasn't hiring Luck to be a figurehead. He was hiring him to save the team. 'Did we need him? A thousand percent we needed him,' says Matt Doyle, the Cardinal's longtime director of operations. 'There was no one else.' Had the job been offered two or three years ago, Luck says, he wouldn't have been ready. He was still processing the end, trying to answer the questions his retirement forced him to confront. If he wasn't a quarterback, what was he? For a while, he was a stay-at-home dad, cleaning bottles and changing diapers and shuttling his daughters to and from daycare while Nicole's career as a field producer for ESPN and NBC took off. 'I can tell ya, I have some serious empathy for stay-at-home parents,' Luck says. 'Because that is a calling.' In his free time, he skied. He surfed. He fished. He camped. He went to therapy. Eventually, he started watching football again. 'At one point, I was like, 'I have almost three-fourths of my life left. I'm tired of being stuck.'' The game had battered him, then emptied him. He needed time to grieve. The more he did, the more it hit him: that was part of his story, too. The end. The pain. The decision he never questioned and the bitterness he wouldn't let creep in. Even at his lowest point, while tears reddened in his eyes after he'd been booed off his home field the night he retired, Luck stood behind a lectern and thanked football for the hard moments that led him there. He was grateful, even for the scars. 'When your love for the game is born at a young age, that's deep inside you,' his former Stanford teammate Tavita Pritchard says. 'The end hurt, but it didn't change that for him.' Advertisement Luck knows he could've been anything — as a Stanford undergrad, he majored in architectural design, and in the NFL he'd routinely wow teammates and coaches with thoughts on world history and geopolitics (his offensive linemen once gave him grief for reading a book on concrete). Retirement offered a clean slate, the chance to explore any arena he wanted. Instead, Luck found himself looking for a way back into football. He watched his old teammate T.Y. Hilton haul in a 53-yard bomb for the Dallas Cowboys and screamed like he'd thrown the pass. He considered starting a clinic for high school coaches. In grad school, he volunteered at Palo Alto High just so he could be around quarterbacks again. Those afternoons reminded him why he'd fallen for the sport in the first place. There was a purity to it, Luck always felt, this sense of raw brutality that he first came to crave as a teenager: it was 11-on-11, our best against your best, with nowhere to hide. Everything that followed — the hype, the accolades, the attention, the money — was merely noise to him. The emotion he carried with him wasn't regret, but something else. He knew he'd made the right decision. He just hated what he left behind. 'I'll always have guilt about how it ended,' Luck says. 'I let my teammates down.' That's always what fueled him, through a ruptured kidney and torn abdominal muscles and a ravaged throwing shoulder: the locker room. When he chose to return to Stanford for his senior year — turning down the chance to go No. 1 in the draft — all he told Shaw was this: 'I gotta finish with my guys.' He didn't finish with his guys in the NFL. All that pain got in the way. Six years later, that's what bothers him most. Stanford's HR department needed a resume, so Luck cobbled one together. He'd only ever had one job, 'if you don't count clock operator my senior year of high school,' he says, laughing that hyuk-hyuk-hyuk laugh of his. Professional quarterback, he wrote on the application. Seven years. Under references, he listed the first three names he could think of: Chris Ballard, the Colts' GM; Frank Reich, his last coach in the NFL; and Jacoby Brissett, his former backup and close friend. Reason for leaving: Retired. Advertisement 'Not that simple, huh?' Luck says. Then he jumped in. He picked Ballard's brain, wanting to learn everything he could about building a team. He visited Celtics president Brad Stevens in Boston. He called up Oklahoma City Thunder GM Sam Presti. He learned how difficult high school recruiting is. 'What are we missing?' he kept asking his staff. 'What do we need?' Since his arrival, the high-five count in the building has skyrocketed — it's how Luck likes to end meetings. Doyle estimates they're averaging between five and eight a day. 'People ask me all the time, 'Does Andrew really come to the office?' Doyle says. 'I'm like, 'He's here all day, every day.'' Luck has become the public face of the program, the emcee at fundraising events, the star of social media posts, the sounding board for former Stanford stars sick of watching their alma mater slog through losing seasons. It's been a stunning reversal for a man who was all but invisible the first few years after he retired. Luck's not simply tolerating the spotlight; he seems to be enjoying it. 'I did not take this job to hide in a cocoon,' he says. But even luring the program's 'Quarterback for the Ages' back to campus might not be enough. The gig is among the toughest in the sport: Not only is Luck tasked with turning Stanford around, but he must do so while the ground shifts beneath his feet. Years of conference realignment, including the dissolution of the traditional Pac-12, left Stanford and archrival California in the lurch. The Cardinal now play in the Atlantic Coast Conference, with half their road games taking place on the opposite coast. And consider: In an exercise that attempted to place a valuation on every team from the Power 4 conferences — the SEC, Big 10, Big 12 and ACC — The Athletic ranked Stanford 60th out of 68 teams. Advertisement 'College football is hard right now,' says Pritchard, a Cardinal assistant for 12 years and now the Washington Commanders' quarterbacks coach. 'And Andrew's going to try and do this in a way that still feels very Stanford.' The question is: Can that way still work? Shaw, the winningest coach in program history, leans on something he used to tell Luck and his teammates all the time: 'The fact that it's hard, that's what makes it great.' The program has finally decided to pay players — 'We're serious about it,' Luck vows — but won't earn a full slice of media rights money from the ACC for several seasons. The school won't bend on academics, either, and compared to other schools, Stanford's transfer rate remains incredibly low. How will Luck navigate a new era for the sport in which some top prospects prize a fat payout over a prestigious degree? 'We've got a lot to prove,' he says, undeterred. 'I'm fine with that.' It wasn't until late March that most in the college football world fully grasped his authority. He had been on the committee that hired Troy Taylor as head coach in 2022, but after two third-party investigations into Taylor's behavior were made public in an ESPN report, Luck decided the program needed a reset. (Taylor sued ESPN last month, alleging defamation.) It was the first time Luck had ever fired someone. He did not enjoy it. But it was not the athletic director's call to make. It was his. 'I'm in charge of the program,' he says. 'I'm not sure that fully resonated with folks until then.' After Luck fired Taylor, he made one phone call. Reich, who'd been fired by the Colts in 2022 and the Carolina Panthers a year later, was pushing a shopping cart through a Costco in Virginia, 10 minutes from his lake house. In his mind, he was retired. 'I need you to come out here and coach,' Luck told him. Advertisement 'What do you mean, coach?' Reich said. He didn't know Stanford had a vacancy. 'Be the head coach,' Luck replied. 'Well, interim head coach.' Reich halted his cart. 'You've lost your mind.' 'Are you sure?' 'Are you really sure?' Reich knew the answer, but he never stopped holding out a sliver of hope that his old quarterback might change his mind. The coach shuffled through four different starters in Indianapolis after Luck retired, never finding one that lasted longer than a season. The void eventually cost Reich his job. Still, he came to admire Luck's conviction, starting with the sitdown in August 2019 that changed everything. 'I'm retiring,' Luck confessed in that meeting with Reich, Ballard and owner Jim Irsay. 'You're what?' came the response. Luck was raw and honest and unflinching that day, and never wavered in the years that followed. His coach always respected that. Which is why, both believe, this unexpected rekindling in Palo Alto can work. The two made a pact: No matter what happens this season, Reich will not return in 2026. 'Interim head coach' means one season, period. 'I love Andrew,' Reich says, 'but I love my grandkids more.' Luck puts it this way: 'The reason Frank and I have such a strong relationship is because we've been incredibly honest about everything from the very beginning.' He pauses, going back to some of the gutting moments and hard conversations they've shared. He knows what his decision six years ago cost his former coach. 'Look,' Luck says, 'I retired on him, right?' Any sort of rebuild in Palo Alto is going to take time, even with a well of alumni support. 'There's a lot of people who love Stanford who have very, very deep pockets,' Doyle says. Luck's return, and Reich's arrival, has seemed to energize recruiting: The Cardinal have welcomed 18 transfers this year compared to four last season. Advertisement Luck's pitch — to high school players, donors and the college football world at large — starts with the quarterbacks who've played there. 'Jim Plunkett, John Elway, myself.' He touts Stanford's reach: 'The best network in the world no matter what industry you want to go into.' He lauds its past success: 'Did you know Stanford has been playing football since 1892? And we've been to the third-most Rose Bowls of any program in the history of college football? 'I get fired up thinking about that. I get to steward a legacy that's been around a long time.' He is undeniably energized by both the pressure and the stakes, welcoming them like he would a blitzing linebacker on third-and-long. Our best against your best, remember, nowhere to hide. But that moxie cost him, and pain became a staple of his old job. A different kind awaits in his new one. Luck knows there's a world where he's nowhere near a football field right now — designing high-rises for a swanky architectural firm or hiding out on a ski slope in some city no one's ever heard of. Instead, he's trying to save a program that even he might not be able to save. The reality is Stanford may never win big in the NIL era. After Luck fired Taylor, one of the team's seniors, Jay Green, called him, worried about the direction of the program. 'Jay, this isn't the NBA,' Luck told him. 'We're not tanking for the first pick.' The season opens Aug. 23 in Hawaii. 'Listen, I used to play quarterback,' Luck says, letting a small smile crease his face again. 'You know when people are watching you, waiting for you to make big decisions in high-pressure situations. You make them, and you live with them.' That's the pull. That's what kept tugging at him after he walked away, and why he was ready to scream 'HELL YEAH' when offered the job. The locker room — his old locker room — needed him. Andrew Luck walked out on one. He wasn't ready to walk away from another. Advertisement 'I owe it to them,' he says of the Stanford players. 'That part of it is personal to me.' Why is why, late on a Monday evening in the spring, Luck is nowhere close to heading home for the day. A recruit stops by his office. The new GM leans in with his pitch. 'I'm Andrew …' After the visit wraps, Luck bolts into the hallway, breezing past a familiar floor-to-ceiling image just to his right. It's him in another life, back when he was young and strong and looking to throw deep, the picture of so much promise. He never gives it a glance. (Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; photo courtesy Stanford Athletics) Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle
