Attribute Substitution & De-aging

Featured Articles

How to feel bad and be wrong

Experimental History • 21 Jan 2025 • ~3800 words

Adam Mastroianni on the concept of attribute substitution, how it can lead us astray, and how sometimes embracing confusion and uncertainty can be better.

A foolproof way to stop yourself from making stupid judgments is to avoid judgment altogether. When someone asks you how the economy is doing, just go “Gosh, I haven’t the faintest.”

Growing Pains: Hollywood’s Digital De-aging

MUBI • 21 Jan 2025 • ~4050 words

What complexities arise when technology is used to artificially “youthen” ever-longer-lasting studio stars?

De-aging, as an increasingly accepted practical tool within the armory of Hollywood VFX, provides a heavily computerized representation of resurgence and authority for an aging boomer market used to seeing the stars of their youth march headlong toward the twilight of their careers. The scope of digital touch-ups and restorative “youthening” procedures now available in this reflexive process of de-aging perhaps marks the inevitable culmination of a cinema and its stars: with nowhere else to go now but back. The rise of so-called “geri-action” cinema, for example—action-oriented features that hinge on the violent spectacle of aged masculinity—seemed to mark Hollywood’s final concession to the cultural loss of youth felt by its lucrative boomer audience.

Recommended Articles

At a Deluxe Dining Room on the 100th Floor, a Chef Toils in Obscurity

New York Times • 22 Jan 2025 • ~2700 words • Archive Link

In New York, private restaurants in luxury towers are a popular amenity. The public cannot eat there, and residents only drop in occasionally.

The towers that have sprouted along Billionaires’ Row and elsewhere in New York are in competition for buyers among the top slice of the wealthiest 1 percent. Each building tries to outdo the others with spas, cold plunge pools, infinity pools, fleets of Pilates Reformer machines, steam rooms and other amenities tacked onto the cost of apartments that already are in the tens of millions of dollars. A five-bedroom, full-floor unit on the 113th floor of Central Park Tower, for instance, lined by walls of glass and custom millwork and featuring imported stone countertops and dueling showers in the master bath, starts at $59.5 million. In these buildings, offering a private restaurant where residents can pick from menus developed by Michelin-starred chefs is becoming de rigueur.

A Gallery of Severed Hands and Whatnot

MUBI • 21 Jan 2025 • ~3250 words

Reflections on the adolescent drive to seek out graphic imagery, from early-’00s shock sites to the films of the New French Extremity.

I can’t remember how I first came across a recording of the former Pennsylvania Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer taking his own life on television in 1987, but I do remember with surprising clarity exactly how I felt in the immediate aftermath of watching him, in the middle of a live press conference, put a bullet through his brain. I felt that something irreversible had happened: that there had been a moment in which I was still a person who had never watched a man die, and then, bam, another moment in the wake of it in which I had become somebody else.

Why are the Dutch So Famous for Waterworks?

Practical Engineering • 21 Jan 2025 • ~3400 words

Discover the motivations behind the Netherlands becoming a leader in flood protection and water management and why these projects are crucial for the future.

In the United States, most flood control projects are designed to protect up to the 1-in-100 probability storm. In other words, in a given year, there’s a 99% chance that a storm of that magnitude doesn’t happen. In the Netherlands, those levels of protection are much higher. River structures go from the 1-in-250 all the way to 1-in-1,250 and flood protection from the North Sea goes up to 1 in 10,000-year event. It only makes sense because practically the entire country is a floodplain; massive investment in protection from flooding is the only way to exist.

The Death of an Asylum Seeker and the Shelter Crisis in Peel

The Local • 14 Jan 2025 • ~4750 words

The number of asylum seekers and refugees needing shelter has surged in recent years, leaving officials in suburban municipalities like Peel scrambling to respond.

The Region wasn’t prepared for the number of people who arrived; no city was. Historically, asylum seekers and refugees did not remain in shelters for prolonged periods, transitioning quickly to permanent housing. But a crippling housing unaffordability crisis and lacklustre settlement supports have led to a huge increase in the number of homeless refugees in a shelter system not designed to help them. According to a report by the Association of Municipalities of Ontario released this month, between 2021 and 2024 the number of chronically homeless asylum seekers and refugees rose nearly sixfold, from 1,834 to 10,552.