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‘Left-Handed Girl’ takes on quiet shame across generations in Taipei

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‘Left-Handed Girl’ takes on quiet shame across generations in Taipei

Shih-Yuan Ma as I-Ann, Nina Ye as I-Jing and Janel Tsai as Shu-Fen in Left-Handed Girl. The movie is streaming on Netflix starting Friday.

Left-Handed Girl Film Production Co./Netflix


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Left-Handed Girl Film Production Co./Netflix

Early on in Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl, one of its protagonists, an adorable Taiwanese girl named I-Jing (Nina Ye), is told by her grandpa that her left-handedness is a curse. “Don’t use left-hand in my house,” he says to her, yanking a crayon from her left hand into her right and sending a bolt of fear through the impressionable 5-year-old. “Left hand is evil,” he scolds. “It belongs to the devil.” The premise of Netflix’s newest Mandarin-language film might seem trivial, but learning about her “devil’s hand” brings I-Jing a quiet shame that is difficult to shake. Internalizing an age-old superstition, I-Jing silently begins to navigate the bustling city of Taipei with her much weaker right-hand, which takes on a life of its own. What she doesn’t know is that the rest of her family has their own version of a “devil’s hand” too.

In Tsou’s charming solo directorial debut, I-Jing, her teenage sister and their mother have just moved back to Taipei after years away in the countryside. Their mother Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai), opens a noodle stand in the capital’s famous night markets in an attempt to start a new life for her family. But a fresh start is rarely an easy one. Day after day, Shu-Fen toils to keep her food stall and family afloat — trying to pay the stall’s rent while juggling the debt she accumulated from her ex-husband’s funeral, and taking care of her daughters, who couldn’t be more different. The youngest, I-Jing, is steeped in an innocent earnestness, while her older sister, I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma), carries the fierce determination of an angsty teen intent on proving she can support the family better than anyone else.

Tsou and longtime collaborator Sean Baker co-wrote and produced the project, and Baker edited. Their distinct style is abundant throughout Left-Handed Girl, which strikes a delicate balance between intimacy and playfulness in a story that centers those historically on the margins. The two have worked side-by-side since co-directing Take Out in 2004, with Tsou’s influence woven through films that launched Baker into the spotlight, from Tangerine to The Florida Project to Red Rocket. Shot entirely on iPhones, like 2015’s Tangerine, the film uses the city of Taipei as its canvas and shows its landscape through the lens of each of its characters. It’s a treat being immersed in the brightly-colored, and often overwhelming night market from the point of view of I-Jing, who interacts with each stall like it’s her personal playground before dashing off to the next one.

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Nina Ye as I-Jing and Shih-Yuan Ma as I-Ann in Left-Handed Girl.

Nina Ye as I-Jing and Shih-Yuan Ma as I-Ann in Left-Handed Girl.

Left-Handed Girl Film Production Co./Netflix


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Shih-Yuan Ma as I-Ann, Nina Ye as I-Jing and Janel Tsai as Shu-Fen in Left-Handed Girl.

Shih-Yuan Ma as I-Ann, Nina Ye as I-Jing and Janel Tsai as Shu-Fen in Left-Handed Girl.

Left-Handed Girl Film Production Co./Netflix


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Left-Handed Girl Film Production Co./Netflix

While Left-Handed Girl initially appears to center I-Jing and her cursed hand, the film pays equal attention to its female protagonists. Spanning multiple generations, Tsou offers the viewer a window into each character’s struggle between duty and desire, as they navigate a society where the personal largely remains private. Shu-Fen might be the caretaker of her three-unit family, but she remains the black sheep within her own. “A married daughter’s like water poured out,” her mother says to her after refusing to lend her daughter money, perpetuating a traditional belief that daughters are worthless once they are married. And during a family outing, Shu-Fen reluctantly opens up, only to have her sisters loudly bicker over her decisions as if they were their own.

Meanwhile, I-Ann spends most of her days at the betel nut stall, where she oscillates between flirting with older men for money, making snarky comments at the attractive young woman who just started working there, and sleeping with her sleazy boss. I-Ann’s stonewalled expression and high-pony attitude gives off the impression she doesn’t care about the job, and much less, her boss. But in moments of vulnerability, like after I-Ann attends a party with a former classmate who, unlike her, is attending college, cracks begin to appear in an otherwise tightly-wound facade. I-Ann’s commitment to and reluctance toward fulfilling her responsibilities are felt simultaneously in scenes of transit, as she whizzes through the streets and highways of Taipei on her scooter, en route to pick up her little sister, keep a watchful eye over the noodle stand, or sneak in her own small rebellions. I-Ann might scoff, but at the end of the day, she always shows up.

How much can a family bear before it begins to burst? Left-Handed Girl seeks to ask, as each character’s internal tensions bleed into broader family dynamics, culminating in more of an explosion than a slow unraveling. But perhaps the ultimate test of strength occurs when the dam breaks, Tsou seems to argue — when the water begins to flood, washing away old traditions and instead, creating something surprising and new.

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Jewelry Among the Exhibits at a Daniel Brush Retrospective

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Jewelry Among the Exhibits at a Daniel Brush Retrospective

Nearly four years after his death, a retrospective of the multidisciplinary work by the self-taught American artist Daniel Brush — encompassing sculpture, paintings and jewelry in materials as diverse as steel, Bakelite and gold — is scheduled to open June 8 at the Paris location of L’Ecole, School of Jewelry Arts.

“Daniel Brush: The Art of Line and Light” will be the fifth time that L’Ecole has exhibited the artist’s work. But its president, Lise Macdonald, said she believed Mr. Brush’s legacy warranted repeated consideration: “He is a very niche artist, but he is excellent — really one of the greatest artists of the 20th and 21st century.”

The diversity of his creations has been part of his appeal, she said. “We don’t really consider him as purely a jeweler but more a protean artist where jewelry was part of his approach.”

L’Ecole Paris, which operates in an 18th-century mansion in the Ninth Arrondissement and is supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, has prepared programming to complement the show, from conversations with experts on Mr. Brush’s work (to be held on site and streamed online) to jewelry-making workshops for children. Details of the free exhibition and the events are on the school’s website; the show is scheduled to end Oct. 4.

The exhibition is to include more than 75 pieces, which span much of Mr. Brush’s five-decade career. They have been selected by Olivia Brush, his wife and collaborator, and by Vivienne Becker, a jewelry historian and author who said she first met the couple more than 30 years ago. Some exhibits, they said, have never been seen by the public before.

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Ms. Becker, who wrote the 2019 monograph “Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture,” said the artist had possessed vast knowledge of the history of jewelry and shared her belief that jewels “answer a very important, very basic human impulse to adorn — that it’s essential to customs, beliefs, and ceremonies around the world.” She also has written a book documenting the L’Ecole exhibition — and with the same title — that examines the artist’s preoccupation with the themes of light and line.

“He loved the idea of making a real, intransigent, opaque metal into something that was almost translucent, or transparent,” said Ms. Becker, citing as an example a trio of bangles made in 2009 to 2010 that are called the “Rings of Infinity.” The lines that he engraved on the aluminum pieces functioned, she explained, to “elevate the jewel from a trinket to a great, great work of art.”

A series of engraved steel panels titled “Thinking About Monet” used the interplay of line and light to achieve a different effect, she said. Mr. Brush made individual strokes in tight formation on the panels, producing gently rippling surfaces whose color changes with shifting light conditions.

The effect “is really hard to understand. I couldn’t,” Ms. Becker said. “So many people ask, ‘Are they tinted? Are they colored?’ It’s absolutely nothing. It’s just the breaking of the light.”

Though Mr. Brush was a widely acknowledged master of skills such as granulation, the application of tiny gold balls to a metal surface, both Ms. Brush and Ms. Becker said the exhibition’s goal was not to highlight his virtuosity — nor, Ms. Becker said, was that ever a concern of Mr. Brush’s. “He didn’t want to talk about the technique at all,” she said. “Technique has to just be a means to an end. He just wanted people to be amazed, to have a sense of wonder again.”

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The works selected for the L’Ecole exhibition reflect his range, which veered from diamond-set Bakelite brooches inspired by animal crackers to a steel and gold orb meant to be an object of contemplation. “He didn’t want to have boundaries,” Ms. Brush said. “He wanted to do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.”

The couple met as students at what is now called Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and her 1967 wedding ring was the first jewel that Mr. Brush made.

All of Mr. Brush’s works were one-of-a-kind creations, completed from start to finish by him in the New York City loft that served as a workshop as well as a family home. Photographs of the space, which contained a library with titles on the eclectic subjects that preoccupied him — Chinese history, Byzantine art, Impressionist painting — and the antique machinery that inspired him and that he used to make his tools, are featured in the exhibition and reproduced in Ms. Becker’s book.

Ms. Brush is a fiber artist in her own right, but Mr. Brush also frequently credited her as an equal participant on pieces bearing his name. “I did not physically make the work,” she explained, “but the work would not have evolved or happened the way it did if it were not for the way we lived our lives,” she said.

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Thanks to ‘Mormon Wives,’ Dirty Soda Is a National Obsession

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Thanks to ‘Mormon Wives,’ Dirty Soda Is a National Obsession

The first time Pop’s Social, a catering company in South Orange, N.J., that specializes in dirty soda, served an alcoholic drink at an event, something strange happened.

At the event in December, its nonalcoholic offering, a spiced pear-cider seltzer with vanilla and peach syrups, cream, lemon and cold foam, was a hit. The Prosecco-spiked version? Not so much.

“People were more interested in the mocktail than the cocktail,” Ali Greenberg, an owner of the business, said in an interview.

Dirty soda — a customizable blend of soda, flavored syrup, creamer and sometimes fruit, served over pebble ice — has been crossing into the mainstream for years, especially after the cast of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the hit reality show that premiered in 2024, frequented Swig, the Utah chain that started it all.

But its reach has gone far beyond the Mormon corridor, and its rise in popularity has dovetailed with an overall decline in U.S. alcohol consumption. “There’s not a lot of Mormon people in our neighborhood,” said Greenberg. “But there are a lot of people who are sober-curious or not drinking.”

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The reality show, which follows a group of Mormon influencers in Utah, helped popularize dirty soda beyond the Mountain States and inspired a wave of TikTok videos on the subject. Swig rapidly expanded — growing from 33 locations in Utah and Arizona in 2021 to now more than 150 locations in 16 states — along with other Utah chains, and spawned copycats nationwide.

Dirty soda has joined other Mormon cultural exports, like tradwife influencers, a “Real Housewives” franchise in Salt Lake City and Taylor Frankie Paul, the Bachelorette who wasn’t, that have captivated America.

With the recent rollouts of dirty soda at McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ — behold the Dunkin’ Dirty Soda: Pepsi, coffee milk and cold foam — and the appearance on grocery shelves of Dirty Mountain Dew and a coconut-lime Coffee Mate creamer for homemade dirty sodas, we may have reached peak dirty.

The idea for dirty soda came out of a desire for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has millions of followers in Utah and surrounding states, to have more options for social drinking, as the church prohibits the consumption of alcohol, hot coffee and hot caffeinated tea.

When Swig introduced dirty soda in 2010, it filled a need, providing a pick-me-up for car-pooling moms and an after-school treat for their kids. It was quickly adopted by many in the community.

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“In other cultures, parents go, they pick up their coffee in the morning, and for me and for a lot of my other friends’ parents, it was, ‘Let’s go pick up our dirty soda,’” Whitney Leavitt, a breakout star of “Mormon Wives,” said in an interview.

Leavitt was surprised when her dirty soda order became a recurring question from reporters in recent years. “They were so excited to hear all of the different syrups and creamers that we add to our drinks to make whatever your go-to dirty soda is,” Leavitt said. (Hers is sparkling water with sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach and sugar-free vanilla syrups, raspberry purée, a squeeze of lime, and fresh mint if she’s “feeling really fancy.”)

In April, Leavitt became the chief creative and brand officer at Cool Sips, a beverage chain based in New York that sells dirty sodas.

“Mormon Wives” inspired Kaitlyn Sturm, a 26-year-old mother of three from Jackson, Miss., to post recipes for dirty sodas on her TikTok. The one she makes the most contains Coke or Dr Pepper, homemade cherry syrup, a glug of coconut creamer and a packet of True Lime crystallized lime powder, which she combines in a pasta-sauce jar filled with pebble ice. “It kind of has become like a ritual, where I make one for my husband as well, and we have it most evenings,” Sturm said in an interview.

The trend has also hit fast-food menus. The new “crafted soda” menu at McDonald’s is riddled with dirty soda DNA. The Dirty Dr Pepper, with vanilla flavoring and a cold-foam topper, is the chain’s version of what has shaped up to be the universal dirty soda flavor. Since 2024, Sonic, beloved for its porous, soda-absorbing pebble ice, has offered “dirty” drinks — your choice of soda plus coconut syrup, sweet cream and lime.

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These drinks might feel new, but there are antecedents in the Italian sodas of the ’90s (fizzy water and a pump of Torani syrup); the Shirley Temple (ginger ale or lemon-lime soda with grenadine and maraschino cherries); and the egg cream, a tonic of seltzer, chocolate syrup and milk. And what is a dirty Dr Pepper with cold foam if not a descendant of the root beer float? “It’s just a soda fountain from 125 years ago,” Kara Nielsen, a food and beverage trend forecaster, said in an interview.

Though Leavitt moved to New York City with her family in December, her dirty soda ritual has remained consistent, with one key difference. “In Utah, we don’t get to walk to dirty soda shops,” Leavitt said. “We have to drive there.”

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Chaos Gardening: A Laid-Back Way to Garden

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Chaos Gardening: A Laid-Back Way to Garden

Annuals include flowers like marigolds and nasturtiums. They grow fast but won’t come back the next spring (though they will drop seeds and possibly propagate). Perennials like lavender and sage will return year after year, but they may take longer to grow. Wildflower and pollinator packets often contain both annual and perennial seeds but are frowned upon by some serious gardeners, because the selection can be haphazard and ill-suited to the area.

It’s a good idea to exercise a little situational awareness. How much rain can you expect? How much sunlight? Dig the earth and feel it between your fingers — is it sandy? Loamy? These are things to keep in mind as you prepare for your journey into horticultural chaos.

“You want to prepare your soil, your site, at least a little bit,” said Deryn Davidson, a sustainable landscape expert at Colorado State University Extension in Longmont, Colo. “Try to get rid of weeds. Make sure the soil is ready to receive seeds.”

Davidson, who has written about chaos gardening, strongly advised covering the seeds with a layer of soil, lest they become bird food. As for watering, that depends on where you live, she added. On the whole, though, the formula is straightforward: “Soil, sun and water is what these seeds need,” Davidson said.

Not everyone is a fan of the trend, or at least the way it has been portrayed on social media. “Nature is not chaos — nature is pattern,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and the author of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which recommends imbuing modern life with Indigenous wisdom.

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“It seems unrealistic,” Kimmerer said of the chaos gardening videos she has watched. The feeling of effortlessness they convey — a common social media effect, almost always the result of deft editing — seems to elide the work that goes into a garden, whether chaotic or not, she suggested.

“I want my garden to be natural and biodiverse,” she said. “That’s a good impulse. I don’t think this technique is going to get you there, but that’s an important impulse.”

Boitnott, the maker of the viral video, offered a simple reason for why chaos gardening has become popular: “It just makes you happy.”

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