James Frey's Blog, page 27
October 22, 2023
Good.
An upbringing filled with anxiety has Gen Z sharing their location via apps
ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN STAUFFERTeenagers have long balked at telling parents where they are. Now, they’re asking their parents to track them.
Every generation experiences its set of traumas, but social media and real-time news—with vivid images about the pandemic, war and other disasters—have heightened these anxieties among young people. And lots of them are closer to their parents than previous generations have been.
Members of Gen Z, ages 11 to 26, say they use family location-sharing apps to bolster a sense of security. Downloads of Life360 doubled in the U.S. since 2021. The app now has more than 33 million monthly active users in the U.S. and another 20 million internationally. Even more teens share their location using Apple’s Find My, Google’s Family Link,
Snapchat’s Snap Map and GPS-equipped smartwatches.
Gen Z respondents to a recent survey from Life360 said they share their location when they drive, when they go on dates and when they attend concerts and other large gatherings. Many keep location sharing on at all times.
October 21, 2023
Chief Broom and Flower Moon
My father-in-law and my late husband, both accomplished actors, wished for a time when Hollywood would make movies about real Native Americans. Now my daughter is living it.
Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon. (Courtesy Apple TV+)It’s 1985, and I am 24—a few years removed from smoking cigarettes in front of the Baskin-Robbins in Brooklyn Heights.
I’m in Georgetown, South Carolina, and I jump off the back of the production van and directly into the path of two men wearing Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots. I recognize the older one, his silver hair braided with red ribbon, as the actor Will Sampson, who played Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He is with his son Tim, with whom I will fall in love.
We are filming a PBS miniseries, Roanoak, and Will again plays the role of chief. At six feet, seven inches, he is a commanding presence.
Before becoming an actor, Will, a full-blood Muscogee, or Creek, had been a rodeo rider, a lineman, and an artist. The Cuckoo’s Nest producers had heard about a “big Indian” and tracked him down. After a few days on set of hurry-up-and-wait, Will had gotten back in his pickup and driven away—fuck this noise. But he’d been cajoled back and made history. (The movie remains one of only three to have won the Big Five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay.)
October 12, 2023
Banksy?
Ellie Henman | Morgan Johnson
The artwork is understood to have popped up overnight in Edgware Road, near to Paddington Train StationA NEW suspected Banksy has appeared in the middle of London – but fans are baffled over its meaning.
The artwork, which is believed to be the latest hit by world-famous Banksy, popped up overnight in Edgware Road, near to Paddington Train Station.
The graffiti-style piece says “Another world is possible”.
The writing appears to be spray-painted by a factory machine which is being ripped away by three people – all of whom look to be different ages.
While many are speculating that it is Banksy, it has not been confirmed.
Banksy normally uploads pictures of his latest work – wherever that may be – to his Instagram account claiming it.
But he hasn’t done that with this piece.
October 11, 2023
AI Tackling Alzheimer’s
New AI tools could diagnose the disease with visual scans
By Vipal Monga
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY WSJ, GETTY IMAGES PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY WSJ, GETTY IMAGESGetting tested for Alzheimer’s disease could one day be as easy as checking your eyesight.
RetiSpec has developed an artificial-intelligence algorithm that it says can analyze results from an eye scanner and detect signs of Alzheimer’s 20 years before symptoms develop. The tool is part of broader work by startups and researchers to harness AI to unlock the mysteries of a disease that afflicts more than seven million Americans.
For years, people have studied individual hallmarks of Alzheimer’s, including brain inflammation and neurodegeneration, but the exact causes of the disease remain elusive. AI, researchers say, could open a new era in the diagnosis of a neurological disease that remains difficult to identify, let alone treat.
October 10, 2023
The Age of Madonna
For forty years, her quest for freedom through reinvention has resembled our own.
In 1982, Madonna did one of her first P.R. photo sessions, in New York City. She brought her own clothes and did her own makeup. Photographs by Peter Cunninghamt was a more physical world, though we thought it quite advanced. There seemed nothing “terrestrial” about twisting a radio knob to some eccentric decimal point, dialling static into song. In the summer of 1985, we all knew someone, usually an older sibling, who owned a portable, cassette-playing stereo. The rest of us remained stuck catching Top Forty countdowns on AM radio, or playing, on our parents’ imperial turntables, the one or two LPs in our possession. Increasingly, we listened to music by watching it on TV, our dance parties often overseen by a strutting, tattered sprite who wore bangles like opera gloves and held the camera’s gaze with her entire being, as though locked in a dare she was not going to lose.
I liked her best in motion: the jut of her chin as she spun to a stop, the drag of her foot through a grapevine step. Something important seemed bound up in this vision, beaconlike but elusive, forever disappearing around a corner up ahead. I prized the “Like a Virgin” LP I received for my birthday, the adults involved having apparently thought little of giving the record to a Catholic girl who was, if anything, overfamiliar with talk of virgins and of being like at least one of them. In regular living-room sessions, I twirled and stretched before the hi-fi altar, arching toward God knew what, flashing on how doing my best Madonna might resemble discovering a radical style of my own, the curious fission of moving in time.
October 9, 2023
Spooky Tree
BY JESS THOMSON
Tree rings of a buried subfossil tree in the Drouzet River. Radiocarbon spikes found in these rings revealed that the most powerful solar storm found yet occurred around 14,300 years ago. CÉCILE MIRAMONTEvidence of the most powerful solar storm in history has been uncovered in an unlikely place: within the rings of a tree.
This immensely powerful solar storm is thought to have been at least 10 times as powerful as the Carrington Event of 1859, which caused chaos in the rudimentary telegraph system of the time.
New research has now found that a radiocarbon spike found within ancient tree rings in the French Alps reveals the full extent of the sun’s power and the potential danger it poses to us if a storm of this scale occurs today, according to a study published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences.
October 8, 2023
Howloween In New Canaan
The inaugural “Howloween Dog Parade” is set to take place during New Canaan’s Halloween Block Party in October.
by RJ Scofield
The inaugural “Howloween Dog Parade” is set to take place during New Canaan’s Halloween Block Party on Oct. 29. (Shutterstock)NEW CANAAN, CT — The inaugural “Howloween Dog Parade” is set to take place during New Canaan’s Halloween Block Party next month.
New for 2023, the dog parade offers an opportunity for residents’ furry friends to get involved. Set to take place between 1:30 p.m. and 1:50 p.m., pet pantry prizes will be offered for costumed dogs.
Guest judges include Kristen Schilo, the “Dog Whisperer” from New Canaan Dogs, Michael Konstantaras, owner of Bark Busters and renowned author James Frey. “Spooktators” are also highly encouraged.
October 7, 2023
FRIGHT KREWE and Scooby-Doo
As he expands his horror work to more family-friendly territory with Fright Krewe, Eli Roth explains how Scooby-Doo and Goosebumps inspired the show. Co-created by the genre vet and I Am Number Four author James Frey, the animated show centers on a group of New Orleans teens who inadvertently awaken an ancient demon and must use the special abilities granted to them by the mystical Loa to stop him. Produced by DreamWorks Animation, Fright Krewe marks a rare dual release across Hulu and Peacock in time for the Halloween season.
In anticipation of the show’s premiere, Screen Rant spoke exclusively with Roth to discuss Fright Krewe. When asked about the initial concept for the show, the co-creator explained how he and Frey looked back on their love of watching Scooby-Doo as kids and felt there was “nothing scary for our kids” currently on the air, thus wanting to create a gateway into the genre for older viewers and their kids.
October 6, 2023
Habibi Funk
BY ARMANI SYED
In London’s Jazz Cafe, the sound of Egyptian legend Umm Kulthum’s song Alf Leila Wleila is reverberating around an atmosphere of anticipation. Fragments of light are reflecting off the Camden venue’s rotating disco ball—lighting up the faces of an intimate crowd who are waiting, drinks in hand, for Berlin record label Habibi Funk’s first live music show to start.
It’s late August and this diverse group of music lovers doesn’t seem entirely sure what they’re in for. But when Lebanese musician Charif Megarbane and his band takes the stage, the crowd loosens up. Tall and floppy-haired, Megarbane delights audience members with multi-instrumental songs from his new album Marzipan, which was released in July by Habibi Funk. “Hopefully you appreciate it all and thank you again for coming,” Megarbane says, to cheers, as he warms up the crowd.
In recent years, global interest in Arabic music has surged. TikTok and Instagram have helped a new wave of Arab talent such as Saint Levant, Issam Alnajjar, and Wegz reach tens of millions of people. Parties such as Beirut Groove Collective, Laylit, and DJ Nooriyah’s Middle of Nowhere frequently sell out in London, New York, and other Western metropolises. All of this has even prompted the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the global body for recorded music, to launch in November the first ever regional MENA music chart.
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