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Enlarge / This is Apple’s Vision Pro headset. It looks a bit like a particularly bulky pair of ski goggles, with the materials and design language of Apple’s AirPods Max headphones. (credit: Samuel Axon)
Apple has been forced to make drastic cuts to production forecasts for the mixed-reality Vision Pro headset, unveiled last month after seven years in development and hailed as its most significant product launch since the iPhone.
The complexity of the headset design and difficulties in production are behind the scaling back of targets, while plans for a more affordable version of the device have had to be pushed back, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the manufacturing process.
Apple has already flagged that the $3,500 “spatial computing” headset device will not go on sale until “early next year,” a lengthy gap from its June 5 launch. Analysts have interpreted this as being more to do with supply chain problems than allowing developers time to create apps for the Vision Pro.
Even though it's often employed innocently, there's an inherent element of tragedy in the phrase "ahead of their time" when it's associated with unsung or overlooked geniuses in a field. If one is "ahead of their time," odds are they'll never live to see the impact their existence inspired or receive the adulation they so richly deserve. — Read the rest
High impact meets compact design in Division Twelve’s new Twigz café collection, created in collaboration with design duo Jones & de Leval. The furniture family’s throughline is a minimal frame with a small footprint, proving you don’t need visual heft to make a big impact. Twigz’s design details are ready to add plenty of interest to any small space, with both indoor and outdoor options available. Combine stackable chairs, benches, and tables to create a unique setup that’s all your own.
Twigz offers plenty of options to make it happen. Steel or upholstered chairs, round or rectangular table, and 20 powder coat colors are your creative playground. The one thing you won’t have deliberate is whether to play up form or function – Twigz does it all. Furthermore, the collection does so while being fully carbon neutral. Watch below to learn more about Twigz:
A work of absurdist art that entertains, but also carries a surprisingly grown-up message about taking responsibility for the state of our politics.
The post Derry Girls and the Absurdity of Adulthood appeared first on Public Books.
Yesterday’s newsletter was called “You don’t need a vision,” and seemed to be a big hit with some folks. (A few people told me this was their favorite letter.) Took me a few hours to read and respond to all the comments.
In the letter, I suggest that instead of worrying about some grand vision for your life, you focus on practice:
Establish a daily practice and use it as a way of getting through your days. Sometimes creative work really is just going through the motions. You don’t necessarily need a vision. Stick to your practice, and things will appear.
There’s a Sex Pistols song with the lyric, “Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it.”
That’s where I am. I don’t have a grand vision for the future… but I have a practice, and I am curious to see what turns up, and that’s why I get up in the morning.
I’ve had fun lately posting “rough drafts” — little mind maps — of the newsletter online as a kind of #showyourwork style tease.
On a micro level, I rarely have a “vision” for the Tuesday newsletter — I think about it often throughout the week, and I keep a list of potential topics, but I wait for Monday morning to wake up, do some kind of exercise, and then work on it most of the day. (I block off all of Monday on my calendar to write.)
Read the newsletter here.
Over the past few months, in the lead-up to the publication of my book, I’ve used this space to share brief excerpts. Now the book is out! If you want a copy, you can order it from the University of Michigan website (or other popular book ordering places!). In case you haven’t decided whether this book would be a good addition to your library, here’s a brief overview.
I wrote Thriving as a Graduate Writer because I believe graduate students can reframe their experience of academic writing. We all know that writing is at the heart of the academic enterprise. It is both how we communicate and how we are assessed. That combination can be brutal for any writer, and it’s particularly fraught for graduate writers, who must learn disciplinary writing practices while being judged on their early efforts. Recognizing these challenges is valuable; graduate students are better off knowing that their difficulties with academic writing are entirely legitimate. This recognition, however, is only the first step. The next step must be to find ways to ameliorate those challenges.
In the book, I offer a discussion of principles, strategies, and habits that I think can help. (The table of contents can be found below, so you can see the breakdown of this material.) The principles point to a way of thinking about academic writing. Since writing takes up so much time and energy, it is worth exploring foundational ideas that can ground a writing practice: writing as thinking; writing as revision; writing as reader awareness; writing as authorial responsibility. Those principles lead into concrete strategies that can transform the experience of creating and revising an academic text. The heart of this book is the five chapters that unpack these approaches to working with text: managing structure; managing sentences; managing punctuation patterns; managing momentum; and building a revision process. The final element of the book is the consideration of writing habits. Even with a solid approach to academic writing and range of useful strategies to hand, we all still need to find ways to get writing done. Graduate writers, in particular, need exposure to writing productivity advice that is rooted in their unique experience of academic writing. This chapter provides a range of strategies to help build a consistent and sustainable writing routine: prioritizing writing; setting goals; finding community; developing writing awareness; and grounding productivity in writing expertise.
This book is a short (only 226 pages!) self-study text. You can read through the whole book—in whatever way works for you—and then use it as a reference. The manner in which you refer back to the book will depend on what you currently need to concentrate on. Most readers will benefit from returning to two chapters: Establishing a Revision Process (Chapter Eight) and Developing Sustainable Writing Habits (Chapter Nine). Those chapters are organized around charts that are distributed throughout the chapter (and that appear again at the back of the book). Since every writer has their own challenges and their own optimal writing process, I urge readers to take those charts and rework them—on an ongoing basis—to suit their needs. In addition to the charts, you will also find other resources at the end of the book: guides to using the book in a graduate writing course or graduate writing group and brief account of the blogs and books that I most recommend to graduate writers.
Overall, this book aims to inspire graduate writers to think differently about the nature of writing and then offers concrete strategies for managing both their writing and their writing routines. It was a labour of love to craft the writing advice that I offer everyday—here and in the classroom—into a more coherent and enduring form. I hope it gives you the capacity to approach this indispensable part of academic life with more confidence and more enjoyment. I look forward to hearing what you think!
Thriving as a Graduate Writer is now available from the University of Michigan Press. To order your copy, visit the book page. Order online and save 30% with discount code UMS23!
rcayley
I know, I know. There are few things more tedious than taking a popular TV show and applying it to a sector – there have been “Manage the Ted Lasso Way” and “The Ted Lasso method of Leadership” type posts aplenty. But hear me out. The angle here is more about the writing and how it relates to traditional TV than Lasso himself (and no, you don’t have to be a fan of the show).
So Ted Lasso ended last week, amidst a wave of pieces declaring that it was about time and it had in fact, been rubbish all along. I think TV critics sometimes fall in love with a series, and then become embarrassed at a later date at their weakness in showing humanity, so double down on the need for cynicism. You certainly saw that in pieces like this in the Guardian (they also bad mouth The Good Place to demonstrate their anti-nice credentials). I’m not going to defend it as TV, it was a bit corny and sentimental, and I think it had run its course.
But I think the critics miss how unusual it is in its writing. The Guardian piece bemoans that all the drama takes place off screen (eg Nate leaving West Ham), as if this is accidental. I see it as a deliberate and radical attempt to subvert our expectations of conflict and confrontation. Conflict drives so much of TV, and often lazily so. Nearly all of soaps such as Eastenders is driven by people doing nasty things to each other and shouting a lot. It’s stressful to watch. I had a similar reservation when watching the classic of the ‘nice’ genre, Parks and Rec. When the Rob Lowe character was introduced I was gearing myself up for conflict. I knew how this would go – he would be controlling, try to close them down, there’d be tension. But of course, that wasn’t what that show was about, and his character became an integral and likeable part of the show.
This is difficult writing – conflict is easy. The saying that happiness writes in white ink on a white page should be seen as a challenge, not an admission of defeat.
Which brings me to education. When people talk of a ‘pedagogy of care’ I think it can seem a bit woolly, maybe a bit hippy. But it’s actually a radical notion in the same way that producing a drama that centres kindness is radical. Gita Mehrotra talks about care as a pedagogical anchor, and says that “I especially had concerns about students not taking the course seriously, being seen as a push-over, or being perceived as an ineffective instructor.” This was during the pandemic and her focus on “flexibility, humanity, community care, and personal and family health” were reciprocated by students with greater engagement.
Rose and Adams remind us that there are implications for the educators also, with burnout, the tyranny of always on demand and over-demanding students as possible factors. In addressing the question “who cares for the teachers?” Maha Bali emphasises the institutional role in creating environments that facilitate this. Care begets care I guess.
In my last post I was asking the question (which Dave Cormier neatly summarised in the comments) “If AI is good at repetitive things, and we’re not going to do them anymore, how are we going to design things that aren’t repetitive?” The whole education system needs to look quite different. And similarly, using care as a pedagogical anchor raises big questions – what does assessment look like? How does funding work in such a system? What are the external quality assessments for care?
Like Ted Lasso, a pedagogy of care can look vague, even bland on the surface, but if you scratch that surface you find a beating heart of radical reform beneath.
I’ve written a great deal about TV — three short books on negative character traits in contemporary television, a peer-reviewed article and now a planned book on Star Trek, and countless blog posts and online publications. I’m even teaching a course that’s primarily about television this fall, namely a study of Watchmen and its HBO adaptation (with the latter being the main object of interest for me). Yet I find myself a big exhausted and disengaged by the culture of TV commentary. Part of that is simply the fact that there has been a vast overproduction of commentary and “takes.” Many of these pieces are written by people I admire and are of very high quality, but the sense of being rushed or forced somehow haunts even the best pieces for me.
I would like TV analysis to be “insight recollected in tranquility,” and the current online publication culture simply is not compatible with that. Trying to keep up is the only way to effectively get read, at all. In six months, no outlet is going to publish your piece about how you just realized something about Succession — there’s a window, and that window is now. I can blog about it and my friends will see it and maybe even like it, but that’s no way to build a reputation or a career as a writer. I understand that it’s a privilege that my full-time teaching job allows me (and in many ways requires me) to sit that out, and perhaps part of my fatigue is a form of survivor’s guilt, because there are many possible alternative timelines where I might have been pushed out of academia and seen the TV commentary game as the only way to maintain some kind of intellectual engagement in my work.
I don’t think that overproduction or weird personal vibes are the only factors here, though. There’s a fundamental unclarity about the task of TV writing. Sometimes, as in episode-by-episode write-ups, the task seems to be to help people remember what happened or process basic plot points — or keep up with events on the show without actually watching it. I notice that sometimes people respond to those write-ups as though they contain “smart” commentary, when it seems to me that they are mostly just summary. Everything about that corner of the TV writing game makes me feel sad — though I would totally accept a TV write-up job for a Star Trek series if offered.
The write-up partly makes me feel sad because I can tell that the writers know the task is beneath their dignity and beneath the dignity of their readers. This is not the case for the true lowest of the low — the kind of TV commentary that suspends disbelief permanently and responds to events as though the characters were real people. This seems to characterize a lot of the Succession takes circulating right now. They amount to gossip columns about fictional characters. At a slightly higher level, perhaps, are speculations about what might happen, especially if they are keyed into what would please or surprise fans the most. Though the latter concerns are superficial, they at least bring into view the show’s status as an intentionally crafted aesthetic object, rather than a window into a fictional but “real” world.
But this is the problem — the TV show’s status as an aesthetic object is never fully secure. Even “prestige drama” is haunted by the anxiety that it’s still just… TV. Is Mad Men a soap opera? Is Succession a weird kind of sitcom? Clearly they are. But are they just that? It’s never okay for a TV show to be precisely and exactly a TV show, and especially to typify a TV genre. The greats have to somehow transcend their medium. The Wire was, famously, like a Victorian novel. Except it wasn’t a novel — it was a TV show, with visual storytelling parcelled out in serialized hour-long units. Even film seems to have enough prestige at this point to be an object of aspiration, so that the most poorly-paced blob of formless content on Netflix can be pitched as a “10-hour movie.” And surely much of the prestige of “prestige TV” comes from the adoption of cinematic-quality production values and performances, though that gap has been narrowing.
If we can’t hold firm to the TV show as a worthy aesthetic object, then, we inflate its importance in another direction — usually by turning it into a source of political insight. Every show produced in the US can be pressed into service as a window into the American soul, almost by definition. How this is supposed to work is unclear to me. The American people did not produce the show. There was not an election in which they got to choose which shows would be made. Ratings provide some kind of measure of popularity, which must mean there’s some kind of resonance there. But I’ve seen similar claims made that, for instance, Star Trek: Enterprise — by all standards a failed show, which struggled to stay above a million viewers in its final seasons — demonstrated how Americans tried to navigate the tensions in a post-Cold War world or whatever. How can we draw any real evidence for American attitudes in general from such a marginal entertainment product?
Even less plausible than the political reflection thesis is the quest for a political prescription in the TV show, which of course always manages to fall short of the critic’s (usually unstated) standards of “correct” politics, or “correct” representation, or what-have-you. Sometimes such pieces seem to veer toward a disguised form of “Monday-morning show-runner” — the political prescription serves as an alibi for the critic’s preference for the plot to have gone in another direction. Strangest of all, though, are the ones that want to see positive political guidance from the TV show, or at least political “lessons.” The sense that this is what TV is somehow “for” leads to a related syndrome of lamenting that a portrayal of bad politics will somehow give people the wrong political ideas — because presumably people get their political ideas directly from TV shows.
What I’d like to see — and what I hope to practice — is a form of analysis that centers the TV show as a work of narrative art with its own strengths and limitations, its own genre expectations and standards. This would mean pausing before lamenting that the show didn’t take your preferred direction and asking why the writers did choose what they chose. It may turn out that their implicit reasons don’t make sense or work at cross-purposes with something else, such that we can lament that the urn is not as well-wrought as we wish it could be. Similarly, before reading off political messages (positive or negative) from a show, we might ask ourselves why such issues are being foregrounded.
For instance, in Andor — widely praised for its gritty political realism — we might note that the goal is to impart a kind of sophistication into an IP that is primarily oriented toward children. The same would presumably hold for the HBO adaptation of Watchmen and its unexpected centering of racial issues. The politics are not the “goal,” they are part of the aesthetic effect. And I guess sometimes people are basically saying that they like TV shows better when they align better with their politics — which is only fair, but is perhaps a point that could be stated more forthrightly, instead of dressing it up in this weird quasi-normative stance. There is nothing preventing a show from genuinely having good political lessons or — more likely — supplying powerful political metaphors, nor is it by any means impossible that a show’s politics could have deleterious real-world effects (e.g., West Wing). But I can’t help but feel we’d get a better handle on that kind of thing if we contextualized it in a formal-aesthetic analysis of the show.
Of course, there is no audience for the kind of criticism I’m calling for, because it feels like English class and everyone hated English class for stealing away their naive enjoyment of literature or whatever. So I’m left blogging, or writing for academic or para-academic presses, or just tweeting out complaints about writers who are really just doing their best. You do you, everyone! Everything is fine and nothing matters.
Succession elephant
akotsko
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I’ve spent the last few years working on a book about graduate writing. That process is now drawing to a close: Thriving as a Graduate Writer will be published in June! Between now and then, I’m going to use this space to share brief excerpts. In addition to my discussion of principles, strategies, and habits for effective academic writing, the book has short ‘asides’ that allowed me to engage with topics outside that main narrative. Over the next four months, I’ll share my favourites of those asides. As always, I’d love to hear what you think!
Breaking Points
Managing paragraph breaks sometimes works easily. You find that each topic fits comfortably within a single paragraph, with obvious breaking points. Other times, however, inserting a paragraph break can feel awkward. Here’s a familiar scenario: a paragraph that is too long to be a single paragraph but that has too much unity to naturally become more than one paragraph. If you choose to stick with one paragraph, you would likely need to lessen the detail to emphasize the unity. A second option, one that frequently makes the most sense, would be to create more than one paragraph. But if the first paragraph sets up the topic, can you break up the exploration of that topic into two or more paragraphs? This question is one that I’m asked all the time! The answer is that you definitely can, provided you manage the opening of the subsequent paragraph—or paragraphs—effectively. The beginning of the next paragraph would need to announce how it acts as a continuation of the larger topic. By echoing the language used in the first topic sentence, you can alert the reader that you are offering a continuation of that topic in the new paragraph. Finding breaking points can be challenging, but as long as you offer the reader the topic sentences that they need, you have the option of spreading your ‘single topic’ over as many paragraphs as you want.
Thriving as a Graduate Writer will be available in early June from the University of Michigan Press. To pre-order your copy, visit the book page. Order online and save 30% with discount code UMS23!
rcayley
Book Cover showing title: Thriving as a Graduate Writer
But I’ve gotten really disgruntled with the “prestige TV” landscape and am trying to redirect my content consumption accordingly. One thing that makes movies really great in my view is that before they shoot a movie, they write a screenplay and the screenplay has an end. Both the screenwriter and other people have read that screenplay all the way from beginning to end and they’ve tweaked and changed it and gotten it into a position where they are ready to start production. Then after a movie is filmed, the editor and director work with the footage and come up with a complete movie that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. They then ship the movie out, and it’s screened by critics who watch the entire movie before writing their review.
This does not guarantee that every movie that comes out is good. But it does guarantee that if someone tells you “‘The Menu’ is good,” they are evaluating a completed product…
By contrast, TV shows have this quasi-improvisational quality where the showrunners are constantly needing to come up with new balls to toss into the air. In old-fashioned non-prestigious “adventure of the week”-type shows, this actually works fine because the writers are not building up tension or setting unexplored plots in motion. But as serialized TV storytelling has gotten more and more common, we’re more and more often asked to show patience through early episodes or to try to find things intriguing with no ability to know whether any of it will pay off. Creators often have no idea where they’re going with the story.
Back in HBO’s heyday, the tradeoff was that The Sopranos and The Wire got to paint on a giant canvas and tell stories that are just too capacious for the movie format. But eventually networks got tired of spending that kind of money and cut back the sizes of the casts to something more normal for television.
That is from his Friday mailbag ($). The bottom line is that, like Matt, you should watch more movies and less TV.
The post Matt Yglesias on movies vs. TV appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Enlarge / Sony's PlayStation 5. (credit: Sony)
UK regulators reviewing Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard reversed their stance on a key question today, saying they no longer believe Microsoft would remove the Call of Duty franchise from Sony's PlayStation consoles.
Last month, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) tentatively concluded that a combined Microsoft/Activision Blizzard would harm competition in console gaming. At the time, the CMA said evidence showed that "Microsoft would find it commercially beneficial to make Activision's games exclusive to its own consoles (or only available on PlayStation under materially worse conditions)." The agency also raised concerns about the merger affecting rivals in cloud gaming.
The preliminary finding was a victory for Sony, which has consistently expressed doubts about Microsoft's promise to keep putting Call of Duty games on PlayStation. But Microsoft argued that the CMA's financial model was flawed and was able to convince the agency to reverse its conclusion. In an announcement today, the CMA said it "received a significant amount of new evidence."
In the 20th century, nothing screamed science fiction as well as a character with a visor. Whether it was the visor on RoboCop's helmet or the one Cyclops rocked in the X-Men comics, visors were a design choice creators used to subtly impart a story's tone and genre. — Read the rest
I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson finally has a premiere date, almost a year after Netflix announced that the show was coming back for a third season. The streaming giant has announced on Twitter that the six-episode comedy sketch series will be available for streaming on May 30th. The show was created by Saturday Night Live alum Tim Robinson, who also stars in it, and SNL producer Zach Kanin. They're not the only comics connected to the show, though: It's co-produced by The Lonely Island, the comedy trio composed of Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone.
Each episode of I Think You Should Leave is only around 16 to 18 minutes long, so you can finish a season in one sitting. There are multiple sketches per episode, mostly revolving around somebody doing something absurd in an everyday professional or social situation, as well as some pretty bizarre and over-the-top bits. Really, some parts are so weird, you don't know whether to cringe or laugh.
The show's first season premiered on Netflix back in 2019, while the second season arrived in 2021. Alex Bach, one of the show's producers, previously told Variety that Robinson and Kanin write every single script and that they "wait for the sketches to come to them" so there have been "extended periods of time between seasons."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/netflix-i-think-you-should-leave-season-3-may-30th-130212884.html?src=rss
I Think You Should Leave
A screenshot from the third season of Netflix comedy show I Think You Should Leave.
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