Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian is so deeply rooted in the golden age of cartoonishly hypermasculine pulp fantasy that it’s hard to imagine a bold, feminist take on the character. But Altered Innocence’s new film She Is Conann, from French writer / director Bertrand Mandico, takes the classic Conan myth to new heights with its mind-bending visuals and story of how humanity’s capacity for violence transcends gender.
Technology
She Is Conann is a glamorous fever dream about finding beauty in barbarism
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25318354/10400314_Conann35SanjaVoiture_color_resultat.jpeg?ssl=1 "She Is Conann is a glamorous fever dream about finding beauty in barbarism")
Set in a shapeshifting world where time and space morph in a chaotic, dream-like way, She Is Conann tells the story of how an unassuming young girl goes on to become a legendary barbarian after her village is ransacked by a band of bloodthirsty marauders. At 15 years old, Conann’s (Claire Duburcq) fate seems all but sealed after her mother is murdered and she’s enslaved by Sanja (Julia Riedler) — a vicious warrior who stalks the land in search of vulnerable targets to hunt for sport. But with nothing but her own life left to lose, Conann chooses to embrace the currency of her world — grotesque barbarism — in order to save herself. In making that decision, she inadvertently sets into motion events that go on to shape the course of human history.
In She Is Conann’s most basic plot beats and its depiction of a nightmarish world where sexualized ultraviolence is the norm, you can see flashes of John Milius’ testosterone-soaked 1982 Conan the Barbarian movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. But rather than simply trying to subvert Howard’s hypermasculine creation with a story centering women characters, She Is Conann taps into one of the most fascinating aspects of the original Conan mythos to stunning effect.
Before Conan was a fully realized person, the barbarian was merely the past life of another character featured in “People of the Dark” — Howard’s 1932 short story originally published in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror about a man discovering the existence of his previous incarnations. She Is Conann takes the idea to the next level by introducing Conann not just as an ordinary singular girl but also as an older woman (Françoise Brion) taking stock of the many lives she led on her way to becoming an icon of war and destruction.
Fifteen-year-old Conann is just one piece of the puzzle, and her terror speaks to how she’s at the very beginning of her epic. But that fear gives way to something more complex and dangerous as Conann meets the demon Rainer (Elina Löwensohn) and her own 25-year-old self (Christa Théret), who must literally murder her past counterpart in order to move forward into their shared future.
Instead of chronicling Conann’s life in a traditionally linear fashion, She Is Conann zeroes in on these pivot moments of self-annihilation / realization as a way of exploring the many different forms that barbarity can take. This is all long-forgotten history to the elder Conann — an ethereal woman wandering the depths of hell in search of her memories. But it’s all new and terrifying to the film’s younger Conanns, who enter the film as representations of specific decades in which the titular barbarian truly established herself as a force to be reckoned with.
Through Anna Le Mouël’s production design, you can see how She Is Conann came into shape as a film after Mandico spent time cultivating ideas for other Conan-focused projects at the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers. Especially in its opening act, as the elder Conann’s first finding herself in the underworld, the film feels like an abstract stage play meant to evoke the sense of shock that can come with looking back at the arc of one’s life. The film’s play-like quality makes its brutal, beautiful transitions from one Conann to the next easy enough to understand as a metaphor for the barbarity of destroying one version of yourself to become another.
But while She Is Conann presents the decades of Conann’s life as vignettes, they are each so richly textured that it’s hard to imagine any of them being as powerful without cinematographer Nicolas Eveilleau’s ability to highlight their intricate details. Despite its gory portrayals of disembowelment, She Is Conann is often a shockingly beautiful film defined by an exquisitely high-fashion aesthetic that costume designer Elise Cribier-Delande brilliantly uses to explore the many facets of Conann’s identity.
No two Conanns are exactly alike, but they are all women whose desires — for vengeance, for understanding, for other people — ultimately drive them to be the best at what barbarians do. As She Is Conann hurtles toward its conclusion, Conann herself becomes an increasingly fascinating and macabre figure, but it’s the film’s ideas about what barbarism looks like that are most inspired. Though it might be hard to imagine depictions of murder, cannibalism, and war as poetic things of arresting beauty, that’s the mode She Is Conann exists in, and it’s a sight to behold.
She Is Conann also stars Sandra Parfait, Christophe Bier, Karoline Rose Sun, Holly-Rose Clegg, Yuming Hey, and Anna Raisson. The film is currently scheduled for a limited number of theatrical screenings in various cities across the US, but the film is also available to preorder on DVD and Blu-Ray.
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I’ve recommended several OLED gaming monitors to readers over the years, and I’ve finally taken my own advice to buy one. Alienware’s new 27-inch 1440p QD-OLED has all the features that I want and a low $350 price that was too tempting to ignore.
The AW2726DM model has five things that make it stand out for the price: a 1440p QD-OLED screen with lush contrast, a fast 240Hz refresh rate, a semi-glossy screen coating to enhance details, a low-profile design without flashy RGB LEDs, and a great warranty (three years with coverage for burn-in).
I’ve been using Alienware’s new monitor for a couple days, and I’ve already spent hours with it playing Marathon. It was my first opportunity to see Bungie’s new first-person extraction shooter in its full HDR glory, and I can never go back. Switching on HDR wasn’t automatic, though it already looked so much better than my IPS panel without being activated.
Enabling it transformed how Marathon looked for the better, but made everything else about the OS look pretty washed-out. It’s a Windows issue, not an Alienware issue. It’s easy to enable HDR every time I launch a game and disable it afterward with the Windows + Alt + B keyboard shortcut, but unfortunately triggers HDR for all connected displays. This includes my IPS monitor that imbues everything with a terrible gray hue when HDR is on. So, using the system settings is the best way to adjust HDR for just the QD-OLED.
I landed on this QD-OLED after having spent a ton of time researching pricier models. The unanimous takeaway from reviewers was that LG’s Tandem RGB WOLED panels are some of the brightest out there, but also tend to exhibit lousy gray uniformity in dark scenes. QD-OLED monitors, on the other hand, offer slightly better contrast than WOLED and don’t suffer from those same uniformity issues. However, blacks sometimes appear as dark purple in bright rooms on QD-OLED panels, meaning they’re ideal for rooms that don’t have a bunch of light bouncing around.
There’s no perfect choice, and honestly I got tired of doing research, so I jumped in with the cheapest OLED. I’m glad that I did. Shopping for an OLED gaming monitor can be hard, but it can also be this easy. AOC makes a model that’s discounted to $339.99 at the time of publishing, and its specs are comparable.
As expected, the AW2726DM isn’t a cutting-edge monitor. Its QD-OLED panel isn’t as fast or as bright as some other pricier options, and it doesn’t have USB ports for connecting accessories. Considering its low price, it’s easy for me to overlook those omissions. I’d have a much harder time accepting them in a pricier display.
The fact that I mostly use my computer for text-based work at The Verge is what prevented me from upgrading to an OLED monitor. My 1440p IPS monitor is bright, it’s good at showing text clearly, and it has a fast refresh rate for gaming. Alienware’s QD-OLED is less bright, and some might be bothered by how text looks (I have to really squint to see the slight fringing from this QD-OLED’s subpixel layout). But I have a life outside of work, which includes playing a lot of PC games. That’s the slice of myself I bought this monitor for, and I’m so happy I did.
Photography by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge
Technology
Michael and Susan Dell surpass $1 billion in donations backing AI-driven hospital project
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Billionaire Michael Dell and his wife, Susan Dell, have become the first donors to give more than $1 billion to the University of Texas at Austin, funding a massive new medical research campus and hospital system powered by artificial intelligence.
The couple’s latest investment includes a $750 million gift to help build the UT Dell Medical Center, a planned “AI-native” hospital expected to open in 2030 as part of a more than 300-acre advanced research campus.
University officials said the project will integrate research, clinical care and advanced computing to improve early disease detection, personalize treatment and expand access to care in the rapidly growing Austin region.
The Dells’ support builds on decades of contributions to UT, including funding for its medical school, scholarships and research programs.
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Michael Dell and Susan Dell attend the Breakthrough Prize ceremony as they become the first to donate more than $1 billion to the University of Texas at Austin. ( Craig T Fruchtman/WireImage)
“By bringing together medicine, science and computing in one campus designed for the AI era, UT can create more opportunity, deliver better outcomes, and build a stronger future for communities across Texas and beyond,” Michael Dell and Susan Dell said.
The gift ranks among the largest in the history of higher education, alongside major contributions like Phil Knight’s $2 billion pledge to Oregon Health & Science University and Michael Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion donation to Johns Hopkins University.
The new UT Dell Medical Center will be developed in collaboration with MD Anderson Cancer Center, integrating cancer care into a system designed to connect prevention, diagnosis and treatment.
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The University of Texas at Austin campus at sunset. (iStock)
“We will deliver better outcomes for patients by providing research-driven cancer care that is precise, compassionate and hope-filled,” Peter WT Pisters, president of UT MD Anderson, said.
Officials said the facility will be built from the ground up to incorporate AI, rather than retrofitting older infrastructure — an approach they say could transform how hospitals operate.
Independent experts have cautioned that AI in health care can introduce risks if not carefully validated. A widely cited study published in the journal Science by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago found that a commonly used healthcare algorithm underestimated the needs of Black patients due to biased training data, highlighting broader concerns about equity in AI-driven systems.
The project also includes funding for undergraduate scholarships, student housing and the Texas Advanced Computing Center, where officials are developing one of the nation’s most powerful academic supercomputers.
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Artificial intelligence technology is expected to play a key role in diagnosis and patient care at the planned UT Dell Medical Center. (iStock)
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said the investment will help position the state as a national leader in healthcare innovation.
“Texas already dominates in technology, energy and business, and now we will further cement our leadership in health care innovation as well,” Abbott said.
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The university said it plans to break ground on the medical center later this year and has launched a broader campaign to raise $10 billion over the next decade.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
SpaceX and Cursor are now working closely together to create the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI.
The combination of Cursor’s leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX’s million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world’s most useful models.
Cursor has also given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together.
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