Paul Levinson

News broke yesterday that ByteDance rejected Microsoft's offer to buy TikTok, and instead will "partner" with Oracle to run TikTok in the United States.

I thought the 4th and 5th episodes of Raised by Wolves were really good, especially the 5th, because it gave us a nice big origin story about Mother -- how she was created, and endowed/programmed with her mission. Her maker tells her she's humanity's last hope, a nod to Star Wars mythology.

I often say to my students, when we talk about which is the most powerful, predominating medium in our political world, that you shouldn't count older media out. Trump made Twitter his medium, because he had a talent for the short, vehement missive, and it allowed him to communicate directly to his followers, without the intervention of the press (Hitler loved radio and its affordance of direct broadcasts from him for the same reason).

Tobias Cabral picked a good time to send me his 2018 novel New Eyes for review. Mars is in the air. Actually, it's always been in the air, or at least, at the top of the air, in the sky. But NASA's Perseverance is on its way to Mars, with a landing date in February of next year. Elon Musk wants to colonize the Red Planet (I'm 100% on board, here's a talk I gave at the 19th Annual International Mars Society Convention at The Catholic University in Washington, DC on 23 September 2016):

Life after death stories -- the departed coming back to help, haunt, or otherwise interact with the living -- are a dime a dozen. Amazing Stories' (2020) second episode, "The Heat," manages to visit this well-trodden path with a story that is at least somewhat original, even if that originality relies upon yet another very well-worn gambit in fiction.

Doing a narrative of a younger version of a famed older character is a tricky business. Without going into which ones worked and which ones did not, and why, let's just say that some of them, maybe even most of them, did not.