Jia Tolentino: We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse. “Pregnancy is more than thirty times more dangerous than abortion. One study estimates that a nationwide ban would lead to a twenty-one-per-cent rise in pregnancy-related deaths. Some of the women who will die from abortion bans are pregnant right now. Their deaths will come not from back-alley procedures but from a silent denial of care: interventions delayed, desires disregarded. They will die of infections, of preëclampsia, of hemorrhage, as they are forced to submit their bodies to pregnancies that they never wanted to carry, and it will not be hard for the anti-abortion movement to accept these deaths as a tragic, even noble, consequence of womanhood itself.”
Steven Johnson: Natural Magic. “When Charles Babbage encountered an automaton of a ballerina as a child in the early 1800s, the ‘irresistible eyes’ of the mechanism convinced him that there was something lifelike in the machine. Those robotic facial expressions would seem laughable to a modern viewer, but animatronics has made a great deal of progress since then. There may well be a comparable threshold in simulated emotion—via robotics or digital animation, or even the text chat of an AI like LaMDA—that makes it near impossible for humans not to form emotional bonds with a simulated being.”
Vulture’s interview with Bill Hader about the end of Barry, season three. “The very first shot of the entire series is not funny. It’s a dead body and that was very much on purpose. You’re just trying to do what’s honest for the characters and the story. When we got to those last two episodes, it felt like we were forcing things to be funny. It undercut what you wanted the characters to go through. When you’re doing a show about a murderer and dealing with domestic violence and trauma and PTSD and conversion therapy of a gay man, you can’t really be that funny at times. If you’re going to portray it honestly, the comedy comes from other moments, like in life.”
ArtNet: Surrounded by Visitors, the FBI Seized 25 Works Purportedly by Basquiat From a Florida Museum in a Mid-Day Raid. “The exhibition, titled ‘Heroes and Monsters’, was due to close June 30 before traveling to Italy. ‘A show like this, with supposedly unknown, unseen works by Basquiat would be a tremendous financial gain for any museum,’ Levin said. ‘The fact that there wasn’t one U.S. institution that had inquired and arranged to travel this show prior to the F.B.I. investigation speaks silent volumes.’”