Latest news with #AmericanLife
Time Magazine
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
'Serial' Is on The 100 Best Podcasts of All Time
True Crime It's the show that started the podcasting true-crime boom. This American Life producer Sarah Koenig's 2014 investigation into the murder of Hae Min Lee and ensuing trial of Adnan Syed captured the attention of Internet sleuths who mapped phone towers and dissected motives on Reddit threads. It launched an entire cottage industry. If you somehow have not listened to the show, it is worth bingeing the popular series to hear how its producers nail down what would become a formula for the genre. The show evolved in real time as new clues popped up and new interviewees emerged, surfacing in part because of the podcast's popularity. The journalists then sorted through the best way to present theories responsibly, wrangle with Syed's sudden fame, and contend with the conflicting camps backing his presumed guilt or innocence. Their thorough examination of the case helped lead to a judge reducing Syed's sentence but also launched thousands of think pieces on the ethics of true-crime reporting. Serial went on to produce seasons on the criminal justice system in Cleveland and Guantanamo, among other topics, but none has pervaded the zeitgeist quite like that first mystery.
Bloomberg
30-06-2025
- Politics
- Bloomberg
Stephen Miller Directs Trump's Policies on Immigration, Ivy League
The Trump White House is moving at a far faster clip in 2025 to remake the federal government and American life, in large part because Stephen Miller has put the agenda on steroids. Miller, 39, has amassed power and influence through nearly a decade in President Donald Trump's orbit. Long seen as the driving force behind the West Wing's immigration policies, Miller is now also leading the campaign to bend the nation's top universities to Trump's will.
The Guardian
21-05-2025
- The Guardian
Derek and Quentin, twins from Indiana who live in the woods: Robin de Puy's best photograph
My first trip photographing Americans was in 2015, when I drove 8,000 miles across the country on a Harley-Davidson. I'd spent too long caught up in assignments and wanted to take some time off from commercial and editorial work to follow my own creative urges. America offered an opportunity to explore a landscape I didn't know, and was far enough away from my home in the Netherlands to ensure it wouldn't be easy for me to just go back if things got difficult. I think Europeans often don't understand how tough life in America can be. I wanted to show real, underrepresented people who are just trying to survive, while also drawing attention to how rich their lives can be. At a time when people seem increasingly polarised in their views, my images seek to challenge the assumptions that often divide people, and to focus on the common experiences that connect us. This picture is from a more recent series, American, which I undertook with my husband between 2022 and 2024. Again, I took portraits of people we encountered while driving from state to state and we also recorded interviews and documented their stories on film. I spotted Derek and Quentin from our car as we were driving through Elkhart, Indiana. They were wearing hoodies and their faces were hidden. I don't know what it is that attracts me to people, it's just this gut feeling – I see certain people and feel I need to talk to and observe them. So I jumped out of the car and ran towards them. I said something like: 'Hey, are you brothers?' They said: 'Yeah, yeah,' but they were not really looking at me. I told them I was a photographer and film-maker from Amsterdam, and when they heard the word 'Amsterdam' they were suddenly interested. I discovered they were 29-year-old twins who lived nearby in a tent, in woodland behind a friend's trailer home. These boys had never learned how to have a 'normal' life – how to organise everything, show up to a job, all the basic things. Their mom has a severe mental health condition and never stays in the same place for long and their dad died of an overdose a couple of years ago. Their grandma had taken care of them until they left and started living on the streets. But they have each other, and if you asked them, they would say they had a good childhood. This was where they felt at ease and wanted to live. If you didn't know their story, you could look at this picture and think they are maybe runners or cyclists. Then you see the tattoos – Quentin, on the left, has a little star under his eye. Their skin is white where it's been covered by T-shirts but their necks and forearms are tanned, and the colour of their skin and hair is echoed by the orange flowers in the background. They're also unconsciously mirroring one another in the way they're holding their hands. There's so much going on in this picture that it's a little confusing. But because of that, you keep staring, and that, for me, is a way to break something open – people who see this photograph are curious and always want to know more about these boys. I use a medium format camera because I love capturing the texture of people's skin and hair, and the twins were fascinated by that and the other tech we were using – the film camera and sound equipment. They're really into machines and electronics. You can see in their gaze that they're communicating with me, their posture is open. That's how I like to approach these portraits – they're a collaborative process. I love being in that moment where the subject is as completely focused on me as I'm focused on them and we're reacting to one another. Even when my work exhausts me, it's not something I can just park, or detach myself from. I always say that through my photography, I've created my own family. Just like Randy, who I formed a close bond with on that first trip across America and still speak to daily, I've stayed in regular contact with Derek and Quentin. They are very dear to me. Born: 1986, Oostflakkee, the NetherlandsTrained: The Photo Academy, 'Mary Ellen Mark, Egon Schiele, David Lynch, Richard Avedon, Larry Clark and Harmony Korine (I love Kids and Gummo). And many, many moreHigh point: 'The documentary about my work (directed by Simone de Vries, director of photography Maarten van Rossem) being nominated for an International Emmy; meeting and photographing Randy and all the other great human beings; the little road trip along The Loneliest Road of America to check out the billboards with pictures from American – with some of the people who were on the billboards; driving 8,000 miles on my motorbike through storms and sunshine, through cities and mountains to shoot one of my best series'Low point: 'There are low points often. Some worse than others. Most low points are the ones that I create in my own mind'Top tip: 'Don't be afraid to go back and do it again, make it better, try again, again and again' See more at American by Robin De Puy is published by Hannibal Books
Washington Post
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Pete Rose and Donald Trump, what a double-play combo
Our polymath president should concentrate on his fields of intellectual mastery — geopolitics, macroeconomics, renaming mountains and gulfs — and spare a smidgen of American life from his perfectionist interventions. Including baseball. Does anyone believe that Major League Baseball would be reinstating Pete Rose if one of the president's whims had not demanded it? Never mind MLB's lawyerly rationale that the rule against gambling by baseball people need not protect the game from deceased gamblers. MLB has aligned baseball with the zeitgeist, which is no longer persnickety about lying and contempt for norms. Exhibit A is Rose's twice-elected rehabilitator.
Irish Times
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Zuckerberg saying AI will cure loneliness is like big tobacco suggesting cigarettes can treat cancer
In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 1996, on the publication of his novel Infinite Jest, the late writer David Foster Wallace voiced some ideas about technology that seem increasingly prescient with every year that passes. He began by talking about television, which was one of the major subjects of his work, representing as it did a nexus of many of its central themes: technology, addiction, pleasure, loneliness and the all-consuming presence of corporations in contemporary American life. Wallace, who struggled with substance abuse throughout his life, often spoke of television as his original addiction. (Infinite Jest, which itself seems to be increasing in relevance, partly centres around a piece of film, known as 'the Entertainment', that is so endlessly compelling that its viewers forego all human contact and bodily sustenance in order to never stop watching it. They eventually die of starvation and neglect.) READ MORE Television was powerfully seductive, he said, because it answered some basic human social needs – for company, for entertainment, for stimulation, for talk – without requiring anything of the viewer in return. There was none of the risk, none of the potential for unpleasantness or awkwardness or pain, inherent in human relationships. This was why it was so seductive, and also why it led, after long periods of watching, to feelings of profound emptiness. And then, unprompted, he began to talk about the internet, a technology which in 1996 was still in a prelapsarian state of dial-up innocence – no social media, no YouTube , no Google even – but with whose darker potentials Wallace had long been preoccupied. 'The technology,' he said, 'is just gonna get better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die.' Alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but who want our money. It would be hard to identify a darker premonition of our own time or a more unsettlingly accurate one. The average American has fewer than three friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, like 15 friends — Mark Zuckerberg I thought of Wallace last week, and of this remark in particular, when I heard Mark Zuckerberg , whose company Meta is investing tens of billions of US dollars in developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology, speaking on a podcast about his vision for the near future. Having touched on the way people will use AI for internet search, and for information processing tasks, he addresses what seems likely to be the primary use for the technology in Meta's case, given the company's foundation in monetising human interactions and its recent movement toward more passive content-consumption. 'I think as the personalisation loop kicks in, and the AI gets to know you better and better, I think that will be really compelling,' he said. 'There's this stat that I always think is crazy, which is that the average American has fewer than three friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, like 15 friends.' The reality, he said, is that people don't feel the kind of connection to the world that they would like, and they are more alone than they would like. The implication here – and the implication of all that investment in AI – is that this technology, with its personalisation loops and its improving ability to pass for a human intelligence, will answer that need. It barely needs to be pointed out here that Zuckerberg – who does not love you, and who wants your money – is as responsible as anyone on earth for the increased atomisation of technologically advanced western societies, for the swelling tide of loneliness and isolation he himself invokes. (I'm guessing that America is, if not exactly a special case, an outlier in terms of the friendship statistics he's talking about. We Irish – and Europeans more generally – are by no means immune to these trends, but I think it's fair to say we have a healthier social environment than work-obsessed Americans.) That Zuckerberg is now addressing himself to that problem and that the solution he is proposing is, in effect, chatbots – well, it's like a tobacco company addressing the problem of smoking-related illness and death by suggesting that people smoke more. Idea that a cure for these ills might be found in technology designed to replace the need for other humans is troubling, absurd Like almost everyone I know, I use Zuckerberg's products. I haven't used Facebook in years – has anyone? – but I do use Instagram . One aspect that's become unignorable about the experience of using Instagram in recent years is that though you probably joined it to see photos of your friends, and to interact with them, that's not really what it's for any more. Instagram, largely in response to the transformative success of TikTok , has become a place where you consume content, most importantly advertising. You can still interact with your friends there, of course, but you are almost certainly doing it less and less, as their posts – to the extent that your friends are even still posting – are overwhelmed by influencer content, personally targeted advertisements and random AI slop. It has become a place, in other words, where you are alone with images on a screen. It has become a more addictive, and generally more toxic, form of television. It has become 'the Entertainment'. It is inarguably true that the internet and social media have – along with all the other baleful and related effects like the erosion of social trust, the cultivation of conspiracy theories, the growth of political extremism – made people more lonely and isolated. The idea that a cure for these ills might be found in an even more sophisticated technology, one designed to replace the need for other humans, is as troubling as it is absurd. Machine lovers, machine therapists, machine friends. The cure is the disease itself. It's a solution that can only lead to a deeper emptiness, and to a lonelier and less human world.
