Entertainment

Hollywood has been on a mystery binge. Now, pick a murder of your choice

Published

2 years ago

January 14, 2024

Hollywood has been on a mystery binge. Now, pick a murder of your choice

The mystery story is a relatively recent innovation, whether dated from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 short story “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” with its amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin, or Wilkie Collins’ 1868 novel “The Moonstone,” which established many of the conventions still in use today, or even the 1887 debut of Sherlock Holmes, so popular that his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, could not kill him. But the form has made up for lost time, with mystery series filling entire bookstores and invading every other storytelling platform — theater, film, radio and perhaps most prolifically, television, where it has held fast while other genres have come and gone. It’s fantastically adaptable. Comedy, tragedy, cozy, gritty, formulaic, metafictional, historical, futuristic, highbrow, lowbrow, middle brow — something for every taste.

The advantage of a mystery, from a broadcaster or streamer’s perspective is that no matter the quality, viewers, once even a little invested, will stick around until the end just to find out who did it, or how they did it, or why they did it, even though the solution may be the least interesting aspect of the tale; often, if not inevitably, it will be a version of something you have seen before, there being a relatively few reasons people kill one another, and ways to do it, and to establish a phony alibi. This doesn’t really matter much, because above all, a mystery is an armature on which to hang a bunch of distinct, disparate characters, without the necessity of character development. (Though that is certainly allowed.) And because in this world, familiarity counts as novelty.

Although the mystery is evergreen, we seem to be in a period of expansion. Why? The pop psychologist in me would suggest in a world without answers to crises in the near and the long term, they propose successful solutions, based on demonstrable facts, arrived at through human intelligence. Tension is released instead of ongoing. And villains typically, though not always, get their comeuppance.

The critic in me, on the other hand, would observe that in follow-the-leader Hollywood, success breeds imitation, or repetition. On the big screen we have lately had Rian Johnson‘s “Knives Out” and “Glass Onion” and Kenneth Branagh‘s Hercule Poirot adaptations. On television, we’ve seen “A Murder at the End of the World,” Agatha Christie for the 2020s; Natasha Lyonne’s “Columbo”-inspired “Poker Face” (created by Johnson); “Dark Winds,” set in the 1970s, starring Zahn McClarnon as a Navajo tribal police chief; the satirical yet tightly structured “The Afterparty,” with Tiffany Haddish as its eccentric gumshoe. Even “Wednesday” was a mystery story, with Charles Addams’ dour teen its dark Nancy Drew, played by Jenna Ortega. And the starry comedy “Only Murders in the Building” is getting a secondary airing on ABC — strike-related, but whatever — after three seasons on Hulu, with a fourth to come.

In the space of a single week, four prestige major mysteries of different flavors, each with its particular pleasures, have premiered or are about to. There is “Night Country,” the fourth season of “True Detective” (HBO, Sunday) — I would call it long-awaited, but I’m not sure anyone expected to see it again — set within a sunless Arctic Circle, with Jodie Foster and Kali Reis its philosophically contrary investigators; “Monsieur Spade” (AMC, Sunday), from Scott Frank (“The Queen’s Gambit”) and Tom Fontana (“Oz”), which finds Dashiell Hammett‘s detective, played by Clive Owen, living in the south of France two decades after “The Maltese Falcon”; the fanciful, oceangoing “Death and Other Details” (Hulu, Tuesday) with Mandy Patinkin as the “world’s greatest detective,” maybe; and “Criminal Report” (Apple+, now streaming), in which London police detectives Cush Jumbo and Peter Capaldi clash over a possible miscarriage of justice.

Kali Reis, left, and Jodie Foster in HBO’s “True Detective: Night Country.”

(Michele K. Short/HBO)

The excellent “True Detective: Night Country” leads this pack. The anthology series, created by the novelist Nic Pizzolatto, began as an HBO-brand elevation of the police procedural, a metaphysical whodunit in which the dialectical double act of Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, a refined version of the odd-coupling seen in “Beverly Hills Cop” and countless other cop adventures — was the real subject of the show, or in any case, the reason for its success. The current season, created, directed and mostly written by the Mexican writer and director Issa López (“Tigers Are Not Afraid”), seems fashioned to follow closely in the footsteps of the first, but now those footsteps are tracking through the snow.

There are the same scenes of the principals driving and talking and the presentation of differing points of view, one more empirical, one more spiritual. There is the recurring, sometimes chilling presence of a mysterious folk symbol, “older than the ice probably.” And there is one reference so specific that it can only be described as fan service.

Set in the fictional Alaskan small town of Ennis, the story begins on the day of the last sunset before night moves in for six months, and runs through Christmas and New Year’s. Snowbound crime shows are nothing new, but given the demands and costs of production, they are uncommon, and special. And there’s something beautifully unsettling about all the darkness surrounding this isolated town, an environment that, without the proper gear, will kill you, and where it always seems to be the same time of day, or night.

“Tigers Are Not Afraid” was a horror film shot through with magic realism, and both those elements find a home in “Night Country.” Indeed, it begins more like a horror movie than a crime show, with a herd of suddenly stampeding reindeer, and then a delivery man discovering that the scientists at a remote research station, whose exact business no one seems to know, have all disappeared, leaving the legend “WE ARE ALL DEAD” written on a white board. (There is no actual on-screen violence in the show, but plenty of shocking images and an ongoing sense of dread. (You breathe a sigh of relief whenever someone enters a space where the lights are on and people are around.)

A severed tongue discovered on the site seems to link the disappearance to the unsolved murder of an Indigenous midwife and activist. It piques the interest of trooper Evangeline Navarro (Reis), who brings her suspicions to Ennis police chief Liz Danvers (Foster). Navarro and Danvers, physical and philosophical opposites, though they share a consuming doggedness, have a lot of old business, which will be revealed through the season, and explain much — though not everything will be explained. Foster is every bit as good as anyone who has paid her the least bit of attention since the Disney days would expect her to be; but Reis, a boxer only recently turned actor, is terrific as well.

Echoing the investigators’ conversations about the living and the dead, God and the beyond, the show plays along the lines of the natural and the supernatural, without fully throwing in with either — it leaves some things mysterious and open to discussion; that Rose (Fiona Shaw), the local bohemian, actually sees her dead husband, is merely a fact in this world, but at the same time people do things for human reasons. This isn’t a story of demons.

Ennis is one of those small isolated communities where everyone knows everyone or knows someone who does, but at the same time is afflicted by a general air of loneliness and disconnection. Even as the investigation proceeds, by fits and starts, we are involved in various well-drawn (or sketched) family and relationship and community dramas. Danvers’ teenage stepdaughter (Isabella Star LaBlanc) wants to explore her Indigenous heritage, much to Danvers’ unexplained displeasure; deputy Peter Prior (Finn Bennett) is devoted to his boss and his job to the point of endangering his marriage, and his relationship with his underling policeman father (John Hawkes); Navarro’s younger sister Julia (Aki Niviâna) has mental health issues. And this is certainly not the first mystery story in which corporate interests — the local mine — are set against the needs of the people. (See: “Dark Winds.”) It has political resonance, but it’s also the most commonplace element in a largely extraordinary series.

Clive Owen as Sam Spade in AMC’s “Monsieur Spade.”

(Jean-Claude Lother/AMC)

“Monsieur Spade” begins in the mid-1950s, as the San Francisco detective attempts to deliver the daughter of the late Brigid O’Shaughnessy — the femme fatale Spade delivers to justice at the end of the “The Maltese Falcon,” who, in this world, has subsequently gone free and later died — to her father in a small town in the south of France. The story then jumps ahead into the early 1960s; Spade, who has traded his suit and fedora for polo shirts and sunglasses, is now a French-speaking, amiable member of the community, a rich widower who fills his bags at the farmers market, pets local dogs and swims naked in his swimming pool. Teresa (Cara Bossom), the daughter, is a sullen, clever, dangerously independent teenager living in a convent, where Spade pays for her keep. And then things get nutty, with six murdered nuns, a mad monk and an Algerian golden child over whom various parties fight for possession. (The Algerian War has recently concluded, and it’s an issue here.)

Owen is the right age and shape and can do the accent, but it does seem odd not to have cast an American actor in this quintessentially American role. Unlike Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and most every other literary detective, Spade’s fame is based on a single book and film, which makes Humphrey Bogart inseparable from the character, even as it’s unfair to reckon another actor against him. (It’s impossible to imagine Bogart submitting to a prostate examination on-screen, as Clive Owen does here, though that is, of course, the point.) Owen studied Bogart’s speech patterns for the role, but he lacks his music; his portrayal is oddly static, his delivery so dry as to be almost monotonal. His Spade is forever cracking wise, but few of his remarks register as funny, either to this viewer or his interlocutors. (“Do you know where the word ‘sabotage’ comes from?” “The dictionary.”) It occurred to me that this might be intentional, to signify his being a man out of his time or place, but that feels like overthinking; the effect in any case is to render the character oddly inert, as busy as the screenplay keeps him. Still, the angrier or more frustrated or active Spade grows, the more effective Owen becomes, which does pep up the later episodes.

And, as in “The Maltese Falcon,” he is only one of a colorful cast of characters, including an impressive Bossom, a very appealing Denis Ménochet as the local police chief, who merits a series of his own; Louise Bourgoin as Marguerite, a Juliette Gréco-esque singer with whom Spade co-owns a bar; and Matthew Beard and Rebecca Root as Spade’s new British neighbors who don’t seem for a moment to be who they claim and might loosely be termed the Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre of the piece. Whatever the demerits of Owen’s performance, it isn’t fatal to an enjoyable series; he gets the job done, and is particularly good in his scenes with Bossom, whose Teresa he regards with paternal annoyance. And the series departs on a final shot and line so lovely it’s worth the getting there.

Violett Beane and Mandy Patinkin in Hulu’s “Death and Other Details.”

(Michael Desmond/HULU)

“Death and Other Details” is a Christie-style country house mystery in which the country house is a sort of bespoke ocean liner, chartered by the Collier family, who are using the occasion to pitch a business deal to Chinese investors, with whom various Colliers also have personal relationships. (It’s a cavalcade of personal relationships.) Among the travelers are Imogene Scott (Violett Beane), the Colliers’ ward, who as a child saw her mother blown up in a car in the Colliers’ driveway, and Rufus Coteworth (Patinkin), a detective who reneged on his promise to the girl to find the killers. In the course of the series, the two will go, I don’t need to tell you, from adversaries to collaborators. There is a lot of hanky-panky going on among the main characters — the ship is filled with extras who have no influence on the story — and a little romance and a lot of relationship issues, which means you do not have to wait long for a sex scene. The series hops around a lot in time and memory — Rufus and Imogene appear as witnesses in one another’s flashbacks — and is not perfectly plausible, in big and little ways, but its energy and reveals upon reveals make that moot. Patinkin, in an indefinable accent, is his usual Big Presence, but Beane holds her own, and the arrival of Linda Emond as Interpol agent Hilde Eriksen pays constant comic dividends.

Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo in Apple TV+’s “Criminal Record.”

(Apple TV+)

The absorbing “Criminal Record” takes us to modern-day London, and has that quality of crisp reality peculiar to British series (see also: “Slow Horses”); it’s not a documentary feel, but there are few layers of cinematic gloss separating the view from the viewed, and as a result one feels closer to the characters, the action and the environment. The locations are appropriate; the details of a police station and the institutional bureaucracy feel exactly right. The series has a persuasive immediacy.

The story begins with an anonymous call to the police from a woman, fearing for her life from a violent boyfriend, in the course of which she tells the operator that he’s claimed responsibility for a murder for which another man sits in prison. This falls into the lap of Detective Sergeant June Lenker (Jumbo), who runs with it farther than any of her associates would like, particularly the original investigator, Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Hegarty (Capaldi), a respected officer who clearly has something to hide and, remembering the case, describes the convicted Errol Matthis as “the poor man’s O.J.” (“Excuse me?” asks Lenker, to no response.) He’s calm and collected; she’s impulsive and patient, with a tendency to alienate her colleagues, bend and break rules and a disinclination to wait for backup — support is always too many minutes away — charging into dangerous situations with sometimes bad results.

The narrative proceeds with the usual red herrings, flurries of action and suspense and unsuspected revelations, some of which are telegraphed long before the moment they’re meant to take us by surprise. Answers will be forthcoming, but, as with “True Detective,” the real mystery resides within individuals, and how they are with one another — not only the relationship between Lenker and Hegarty, working sometimes together, and sometimes against each other, but between parents and children and partners. And Capaldi and Jumbo work beautifully together. There’s no mystery in that.

Movie Reviews

Movie Review: An electric Timothée Chalamet is the consummate striver in propulsive ‘Marty Supreme’

Published

4 hours ago

December 22, 2025

Press Room

Movie Review: An electric Timothée Chalamet is the consummate striver in propulsive ‘Marty Supreme’

“Everybody wants to rule the world,” goes the Tears for Fears song we hear at a key point in “Marty Supreme,” Josh Safdie’s nerve-busting adrenaline jolt of a movie starring a never-better Timothée Chalamet.

But here’s the thing: everybody may want to rule the world, but not everybody truly believes they CAN. This, one could argue, is what separates the true strivers from the rest of us.

And Marty — played by Chalamet in a delicious synergy of actor, role and whatever fairy dust makes a performance feel both preordained and magically fresh — is a striver. With every fiber of his restless, wiry body. They should add him to the dictionary definition.

Needless to say, Marty is a New Yorker.

Also needless to say, Chalamet is a New Yorker.

And so is Safdie, a writer-director Chalamet has called “the street poet of New York.” So, where else could this story be set?

It’s 1952, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Marty Mauser is a salesman in his uncle’s shoe store, escaping to the storeroom for a hot tryst with his (married) girlfriend. Suddenly we’re seeing footage of sperm traveling — talk about strivers! — up to an egg. Which morphs, of course, into a pingpong ball.

This witty opening sequence won’t be the only thing recalling “Uncut Gems,” co-directed by Safdie with his brother Benny before the two split for solo projects. That film, which feels much like the precursor to “Marty Supreme,” began as a trip through the shiny innards of a rare opal, only to wind up inside Adam Sandler’s colon, mid-colonoscopy.

Sandler’s Howard Ratner was a New York striver, too, but sadder, and more troubled. Marty is young, determined, brash — with an eye always to the future. He’s a great salesman: “I could sell shoes to an amputee,” he boasts, crassly. But what he’s plotting to unveil to the world has nothing to do with shoes. It’s about table tennis.

This image released by A24 shows Timothée Chalamet in a scene from “Marty Supreme.” (A24 via AP)

How likely is it that this Jewish kid from the Lower East Side can become the very face of a sport in America, soon to be “staring at you from the cover of a Wheaties box?”

To Marty, perfectly likely. Still, he knows nobody in the U.S. cares about table tennis. He’s so determined to prove everyone wrong, starting at the British Open in London, that when there’s a snag obtaining cash for his trip, he brandishes a gun at a colleague to get it.

Shaking off that sorta-armed robbery thing, Marty arrives in London, where he fast-talks his way into a suite at the Ritz. Here, he spies fellow guest Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow, in a wise, stylish return to the screen), a former movie star married to an insufferable tycoon (“Shark Tank” personality Kevin O’Leary, one of many nonactors here.)

Kay’s skeptical, but Marty finds a way to woo her. Really, all he has to say is: “Come watch me.” Once she sees him play, she’s sneaking into his room in a lace corselet.

This image released by A24 shows Gwyneth Paltrow in a scene from “Marty Supreme.” (A24 via AP)

This would be a good time to stop and consider Chalamet’s subtly transformed appearance. He is stick-thin — duh, he never stops moving. His mustache is skimpy. His skin is acne-scarred — just enough to erase any movie-star sheen. Most strikingly, his eyes, behind the round spectacles, are beady — and smaller. Definitely not those movie-star eyes.

But then, nearly all the faces in “Marty Supreme” are extraordinary. In a movie with more than 100 characters, we have known actors (Fran Drescher, Abel Ferrara); nonacting personalities (O’Leary, and an excellent Tyler Okonma (Tyler, The Creator) as Marty’s friend Wally); and exciting newcomers like Odessa A’Zion as Marty’s feisty girlfriend Rachel.

There are also a slew of nonactors in small parts, plus cameos from the likes of David Mamet and even high wire artist Philippe Petit. The dizzying array makes one curious how it all came together — is casting director Jennifer Venditti taking interns? Production notes tell us that for one hustling scene at a bowling alley, young men were recruited from a sports trading-card convention.

Elsewhere on the creative team, composer Daniel Lopatin succeeds in channelling both Marty’s beating heart and the ricochet of pingpong balls in his propulsive score. The script by Safdie and cowriter Ronald Bronstein, loosely based on real-life table tennis hustler Marty Reisman, beats with its own, never-stopping pulse. The same breakneck aesthetic applies to camera work by Darius Khondji.

Back now to London, where Marty makes the finals against Japanese player Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi, like his character a deaf table tennis champion). “I’ll be dropping a third atom bomb on them,” he brags — not his only questionable World War II quip. But Endo, with his unorthodox paddle and grip, prevails.

After a stint as a side act with the Harlem Globetrotters, including pingpong games with a seal — you’ll have to take our word for this, folks, we’re running low on space — Marty returns home, determined to make the imminent world championships in Tokyo.

But he’s in trouble — remember he took cash at gunpoint? Worse, he has no money.

So Marty’s on the run. And he’ll do anything, however messy or dangerous, to get to Japan. Even if he has to totally debase himself (mark our words), or endanger friends — or abandon loyal and brave Rachel.

This image released by A24 shows Odessa A'zion in a scene from — This image released by A24 shows Odessa A’zion in a scene from “Marty Supreme.” (A24 via AP)

Is there something else for Marty, besides his obsessive goal? If so, he doesn’t know it yet. But the lyrics of another song used in the film are instructive here: “Everybody’s got to learn sometime.”

So can a single-minded striver ultimately learn something new about his own life?

We’ll have to see. As Marty might say: “Come watch me.”

“Marty Supreme,” an A24 release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association “for language throughout, sexual content, some violent content/bloody images and nudity.” Running time: 149 minutes. Four stars out of four.

Entertainment

Scared of AI? 11 essential books for navigating our new normal

Published

6 hours ago

December 22, 2025

Press Room

Scared of AI? 11 essential books for navigating our new normal

Despite its ubiquity in our machines and in the news, artificial intelligence remains both a mystery and a source of deep anxiety across occupations and generations. My students, my readers, my colleagues and kids: We are all bewildered by the mix of hype and hope, optimism and doomerism making up the discourse around AI. On the one hand, the quest for artificial general intelligence (AGI) and a utopian belief in the life-improving promise of these emergent technologies; on the other, new algorithmic forms of injustice, the displacement of whole work forces and the limitless sloppification of language, music, video and other aesthetic forms — to say nothing of the threat of human extinction.

The 11 books described below, all published recently, give us helpful sight lines into our turbulent AI age. Some titles are hard-hitting trade nonfiction. One is an academic critique. Others are novels, fictional accounts that imagine how our world is being reshaped (and will be further transformed) by the many technologies grouped under the term artificial intelligence: deepfakes and autonomous drones, AI-enhanced medical scans and self-driving cars.

What all these books have in common is their awareness that AI is transforming our world in ways all too easy to imagine yet nearly impossible to predict.

“Vantage Point: A Novel” by Sara Sligar

(MCD)

“Vantage Point”
By Sara Sligar
MCD: 400 pages, $29

This twisty and brilliantly written thriller about a Maine family spins a tale of ambition, trauma and privilege around the proliferation of so-called deepfakes. Those AI-generated videos play an increasing role in the spread of slanderous accusations and political disinformation in today’s public sphere. Whether the footage at the center of the plot is real or computer-generated is one of the burning questions at the heart of the novel, which plumbs the nature of reality in our age of digital disinformation and virtual selves.

"The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI" by Dr. Fei-Fei Li

“The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI”
By Fei-Fei Li
Flatiron: 336 pages, $20

Though it’s been out for two years already, Li’s account of the early years of computer vision and deep learning is a refreshing break from the LLM-centric discourse dominating many discussions of AI. Li shows us the broader computational context of AI’s emergence, explaining key concepts and breakthroughs in vivid, comprehensible detail. “The Worlds I See” is also a scientific autobiography, a compelling account of Li’s personal and intellectual journey from the impoverished circumstances of a Chinese immigrant family life to a wealthy and world-leading university lab.

"Death of the Author: A Novel" by Nnedi Okorafor

“Death of the Author”
By Nnedi Okorafor
William Morrow: 448 pages, $30

“Rusted Robots” is the title of the AI-themed novel-within-a-novel that Zelu, Okorafor’s MFA-wielding protagonist, writes in the wake of a creative and professional calamity. As we encounter excerpts from the book — an Africanfuturist (Okorafor’s preferred term) narrative set in a postapocalyptic West Africa — we learn how the novel achieves phenomenal sales and success that eluded Zelu when she was writing literary fiction, even as Okorafor explores the perils of fame and new fortune. The result is a powerful meditation on the roles of disability, autonomy and privilege in the shaping of literary making in an age when art itself is increasingly threatened by machines.

“Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age”
By Vauhini Vara
Pantheon: 352 pages, $30

Vara’s moving account of her uncanny exchanges with a chatbot about her sister’s death became a viral sensation after it appeared in the Believer in 2021, at the dawn of our LLM-obsessed age. In a series of further essays, reflections and fragments, Vara — a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her novel “The Immortal King Rao” as well as a former technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal — investigates the role of digital technologies in making us who we are, and may want to become. The book bristles with insight and originality, interspersing Vara’s more journalistic expositions with excurses and fragments curated from the author’s expansive digital life.

"Notes on Infinity: A Novel" by Austin Taylor

“Notes on Infinity: A Novel”
By Austin E. Taylor
Celadon: 400 pages, $30

Though Taylor’s absorbing debut swings more biotech than AI, the novel beautifully captures the extreme techno-optimism of the multibillionaire set — in this case around the possibility of eternal human life. As Zoe, one of the protagonists, notes early on, her interest in a particular professor’s work stems from his success in “using AI neural networks to understand biological neural networks and the processes of thinking.” “Notes on Infinity” combines the traditional campus novel with the zeitgeisty tech novel, featuring Harvard students with “edge” placing “bets on the next Zuck in the dining halls.”

“Ideal Subjects: The Abstract People of AI”
By Olga Goriunova
Minnesota: 232 pages, $32

This deeply researched study examines how AI systems create “abstract people”: statistical confections, subject profiles and anthropomorphic personages that increasingly substitute for humans in digital environments. Goriunova, a cultural theorist and digital curator based in London, examines how these constructed figures and abstractions shape surveillance, governance and everyday life. What is a “digital person,” and why should we care? Goriunova’s answers prove as complex as they are fascinating.

“Annie Bot”
By Sierra Greer
Mariner: 240 pages, $19

The success of the two “M3gan” films suggests a never-ending fascination with human-like cyborgs — though in the case of “Annie Bot,” this fascination is laced with a prurient eroticism that Greer both exploits and cleverly frustrates in her insightful debut. Annie is a sexbot companion operating in autodidactic mode, learning her owner’s sexual proclivities in much the same way AlphaGo perfected the ancient game of Go. At the heart of novel, though, is a thoughtful and darkly humorous meditation on the politics of AI personhood and subjection comparable to Kazuo Ishiguro’s project in “Klara and the Sun,” and with equally harrowing implications.

“Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI”
By Karen Hao
Penguin Press: 496 pages, $32

Hao’s bestselling account of OpenAI and its neoimperial ambitions has received lots of coverage, though it deserves an even wider readership. Formerly an application engineer at a Google spinoff, Hao writes with an insider’s knowledge about the relationship between technological innovation and socioeconomic inequality around the world, from resource-guzzling data centers in Chile to ego-filled executive suites in San Francisco. Full of industry anecdotes and sobering analyses, the book is a riveting introduction to the corporate culture of artificial intelligence and its designs on all of us.

"Who Knows You by Heart: A Novel" by C.J. Farley

“Who Knows You by Heart”
By C. J. Farley
William Morrow: 288 pages, $30

Algorithmic bias and injustice are at the heart of this ingenious novel of technological innovation and corporate malfeasance. Farley’s protagonist is Octavia Crenshaw, a down-on-her-luck coder recently hired by Eustachian, an audio entertainment company exploiting new ways to bring stories to the world. After a series of mishaps and disturbing incidents at the company, Octavia teams up with another coder named Walcott to develop a bias-free AI storytelling model — only to discover the limits of her computational and political ideals. The novel is a riveting critique of Big Tech and its faux-liberal aspirations to correct the world’s wrongs.

“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All”
By Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares
Little, Brown: 272 pages, $30

Earning its apocalyptic title, this doomerist manifesto by two of the leading figures in the tech world appears in an era saturated with reckless optimism and hype. The book provides a sobering look at issues such as potential misalignments between human designers and the AI systems they release into the world, systems with goals of their own that we may not understand in time to thwart their most catastrophic outcomes. The main message: Be afraid. Be very afraid. The book offers a glimmer of hope as well, albeit a faint one, and concludes with some plainspoken recommendations about proceeding with extreme caution and slowing down.

“UnWorld”
By Jayson Greene
Knopf: 224 pages, $28

This deeply moving novel explores the aftermath of loss and the shape of grief in an age of avatars and algorithmically mediated emotion. When a teenager named Alex dies of mysterious causes, part of the burden of mourning falls on Aviva, an upload virtually confected out of pain. By imagining technologies that can shoulder our memories, our labor and our most shattering emotions, Greene questions whether AI risks nurturing a fantasy that code can heal what hurts in our inner lives. A timely meditation on AI’s allure as an escape hatch from the strain of modern consciousness, the novel quietly insists that any lasting tranquility must still be cultivated from within and shared between humans, with all our flaws.

Holsinger’s most recent novel is “Culpability,” an Oprah’s Book Club pick for summer 2025.

Movie Reviews

Movie Review: The Voice of Hind Rijab

Published

16 hours ago

December 21, 2025

Press Room

By Mylea Hardy Haunting, poignant, moving, The Voice of Hind Rijab tells the true story of a young Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab, trapped in a car with six of her slain family members under enemy fire in Gaza as Red Crescent Aid workers desperately try to save her, despite overwhelming odds. A combination of real audio recordings from the actual incident and actor portrayals, the film does more than tell the story of an innocent girl caught in the crossfire […]