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The shattered fairytale romance of Priscilla Beaulieu and Elvis Presley becomes fodder for Sofia Coppola and her patient pearl-seeking eye in Priscilla (2023). For Sofia fans, Priscilla presents as a foiled minor work, primly safe and simplistic, that confirms accusations of emptiness leveled by her detractors. The realm of American royalty and the 1960s backdrop, ripe in fashion and music, seems like ideal material for the filmmaker who deals in appearances, thoughtfully curated richness.

I recently watched Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla on a plane and have spent the last few days reading any and all coverage I can find. And now I’m writing about it as a way to understand why it has so firmly wedged itself into my imagination. Sofia Coppola tends to be a polarizing figure and I understand why. Nepotism, a prioritization of privileged, white narratives, and Coppola’s continued interest in a very specific type of girlhood are all very good reasons to critique her work.

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It’s time to plunge deeper into NFL history than the QB Top Five series has plunged thus far. In primordial football, the sport played at colleges after the introduction of the forward pass in 1906 and in the nascent NFL of the 1920s, the “quarterback” was just the guy who lined up one-quarter of the way into the backfield. He sometimes, but not always, took the snap, usually before lateraling to a teammate.

LifeStance Health (NASDAQ: LFST — $2.29 billion) is on a mission “to help people lead healthier, more fulfilling lives by improving access to trusted, affordable, and personalized mental health care.” The company is “one of the nation’s largest outpatient mental health platforms” with over 5,000 therapists operating across 33 states serving over 6 million virtual and in-person visits in the last twelve months. The private equity-backed company has grown rapidly by acquiring smaller therapy clinics and investors view the company as a perfect play on our growing mental health crisis.

In episode 119 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Michael Sipser. Professor Sipser is the Donner Professor of Mathematics and member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1980 and joined the MIT faculty that same year. He was Chairman of Applied Mathematics from 1998 to 2000 and served as Head of the Mathematics Department 2004-2014. He served as interim Dean of Science 2013-2014 and then as Dean of Science 2014-2020.

The big news this week is that Representative Gaetz is strongly signaling that he will formally try to depose Speaker McCarthy this week in the House. Whether he will succeed is a complicated political question with a lot of unknowns and a pretty big game tree. What we can confidently say is what the procedural dynamics are going to look like, and where the key political choices will be made. I’ll go through the procedural steps below, and then offer some tentative thoughts about the politics below.

Dear friends, In this letter I talk about the wonders of using red and polarization filters. If you’ve ever asked yourself: “How can I use polarization filters in film photography?” I gotchu, we’re going crazy niche today. Remember when I teamed up with Fotohandel Delfshaven and Amsterdam Camera Repairs to give away a Hasselblad 500C? My assistant Taylor grabbed some iPhone footage of the day and paired it with scans of winner Fede’s first medium format shots.

I have always been fascinated by the notion of skepticism, in all its forms. From the scientific skepticism movement that valiantly counters pseudoscientific claims to the classic “what if an evil demon were to try to deceive me?” skepticism of René Descartes. I must admit, though, that one kind of skepticism that leaves me very… ncG1vNJzZmiemZzAqrrWoqWtnaJjwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89op6unlp65pr%2BMoqVmq5uavbW1wqKqpmWgrr%2BztM4%3D