The culling of minks in Denmark prompts a political crisis. with the minister of agriculture forced to step down and the government in danger of collapse. ........... Denmark is home to some of the world’s largest mink farms, with an estimated population of more than 15 million. .......... “The mink farms are a reservoir where the coronavirus is thriving”
The Pandemic in Six-Word Memoirs “The world has never felt smaller.” ........... Avoiding death, but certainly not living. — Sydney Reimann ......... Cleaned Lysol container with Lysol wipe. — Alex Wasser ........... Hallway hike, bathtub swim, Pandora concert. — Susan Evind
Giuliani Got a Bad Batch of ‘Just for Henchmen’ Hair Dye, Colbert Says “Remind me, is it a good sign when your lawyer starts melting?” Stephen Colbert joked after Rudy Giuliani appeared to sweat hair dye during a news conference.
Douglas Stuart Wins Booker Prize for ‘Shuggie Bain’ The autobiographical novel, about the lonely gay son of an alcoholic mother in 1980s Scotland, was one of four debut books in this year’s shortlist.
When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy Understanding the structure of global cabal theories can shed light on their allure — and their inherent falsehood.
David Fincher’s Impossible Eye With ‘Mank,’ America’s most famously exacting director tackles the movie he’s been waiting his entire career to make. .................. If you want to build worlds as engrossing as those he seeks to construct, then you need actors to push their performances into zones of fecund uncertainty, to shed all traces of what he calls “presentation.” And then you need them to give you options, all while hitting the exact same marks (which goes for the camera operators too) to ensure there will be no continuity errors when you cut the scene together. Getting all these stars to align before, say, Take No. 9 is possible but unlikely. ................. For one, he reveres “Citizen Kane.” “I don’t think it’s the greatest American movie ever made,” he said, “but it’s in the top three — and they made it in 1941.” (“The Godfather Part II” and “maybe ‘Chinatown’” round out his podium.) .............. his father “never understood Hollywood’s inherent cynicism — he didn’t understand the magnetic pull for the sociopath that Hollywood has.” ......... His shots come to represent the gliding, unmediated gaze of some impossible — and faintly malevolent — eye: “I want it to feel omniscient,” Fincher said. .......... The fundamental formal pleasure of watching a Fincher film is that every last micron of the experience has been considered, and then reconsidered, with an abundance of love, skill and precision. .......... his camera typically moves only when an actor does — and at the same speed .......... (Fincher described playing his favorite video game, Madden NFL, as “the only time I’m not thinking about movies.”) ............ “David had a laser pointer out, and he was circling this one section of a wall in the upper part of the frame, saying, ‘That’s a quarter of a stop too bright.’ I had to leave the room. I had to go outside and take some deep breaths, because I thought, Oh, my God — to see like that? All the time? Everywhere? I wouldn’t be able to do it.” ................. “I think because people are blinded by his outsize visual dexterity, he doesn’t get enough credit for his understanding of story.” ........... “If David wanted to take the time, he could write his movies himself.” ............... “strategically deployed silence can be just as breathtaking.” ........... He once stole baby dolls from her room, packed them with “hamburger and ketchup,” as he recalled in an article in Interview, and then “threw them onto the freeway,” treating motorists to the spectacle of infants exploding on the asphalt. ................. an experience of productive demystification: The people behind “Star Wars” were not deities but fellow Bay dudes figuring things out through trial and error. ................ “when he started out, Dave was so arrogant it was unreal. He still has very little patience for people who are not as smart as he is, which is a lot of people.” ................. compared Fincher’s repeated takes to working in theater, where an actor discovered new things in the same material night in, night out ................. He’s a taskmaster to a fault, and he’ll argue to the death with you. He’s a prosecutor — he makes me so uncomfortable. ‘Why would you write that? Why would you think that makes sense?’ ............... Fincher’s way of dealing with people can rankle, Roth added, “but he’s as loyal as the day is long, he’ll support you and he knows what he wants — in Hollywood, that’s an incredible thing.” .......... Fincher’s sets can get tense. He has acknowledged that on “Panic Room” — a film whose every last shot he designed using previsualization software before ever stepping on to the set — ............. Jake Gyllenhaal, a star of “Zodiac,” told this paper in 2007 that Fincher “paints with people” and called it “tough to be a color.” ............... When I asked Fincher what happened with Gyllenhaal on that film, he described an “extremely simple” situation: “Jake was in the unenviable position of being very young and having a lot of people vie for his attention, while working for someone who does not allow you to take a day off. I believe you have to have everything out of your peripheral vision.” But “I think Jake’s philosophy was informed by — look, he’d made a bunch of movies, even as a child, but I don’t think he’d ever been asked to concentrate on minutiae, and I think he was very distracted. He had a lot of people whispering that ‘Jarhead’” — a 2005 war movie starring Gyllenhaal — “was going to be this massive movie and put him in this other league, and every weekend he was being pulled to go to the Santa Barbara film festival and the Palm Springs film festival and the [expletive] Catalina film festival. And when he’d show up for work, he was very scattered.” He had “his managers and his silly agents who were all coming to his trailer at lunch to talk to him about the cover of GQ and this and that,” Fincher said, adding, “He was being nibbled to death by ducks, and not particularly smart ducks. They got in his vision, and it was hard for him to hit the fastball.” ................ But. It’s: Four. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. A day. And we might not get a chance to come back and do it again.” ................. “Once you get here, the only thing I care about is, Did we tell the story?” ................ “Mank” raises difficult questions about the ultimate ability of art to change society: Hearst effectively crushed Welles’s movie upon release, and even though “Kane” became legendary for its unflattering depiction of Hearst, it never posed a real threat to his power. ................ how advancements in technology had allowed him to tell more ambitious stories ................ “I had the horsepower to now think in terms of ‘What do you want to do,’ as opposed to ‘What are you capable of?’”
How My Pet Snake Taught Me to Really See Childhood has a way of alchemizing disparate information into wonder ........... The snake is as much symbol as animal, and this oversaturation of meaning prevents us from seeing the snake clearly. In reality, they are gentle, healthful to the environment, “more scared of you than you are of it,” a sort of tragic hero of the ecosystem that is, when gazed upon without malice, beautiful.
No One Loves Arby’s Like I Do One look at the Colonel, and you could see the price of war. He was paralyzed from the waist down. ............ For years I made my dad give me crew cuts so I could look like the Colonel. Until third grade I would tell people that I wanted to be an Army Ranger when I grew up. .......... As I grew up, I learned that war was not my childhood fantasy of toy soldiers and brass trinkets; it was grim, relentlessly destructive and often pointless. .............. I didn’t choose to be Mormon, or to grow up in the South, but those conservative structures did give me comfort — they provided an uncomplicated worldview, one with easy answers. ......... The only thing we would agree on now is roast beef. But at least it’s something.
