François Ozon's adaptation of The Stranger, while visually stunning, reveals the limitations of cinema in depicting the complex inner states of consciousness that Camus masterfully crafted in his text.
What concerned me most was the lack of acknowledgment of how this trend overlaps with the rise in coercive control. One of the first warning signs of an abusive partner is encouraging someone to isolate from family and friends. How confusing must it be for people to see that behaviour supported in online messaging. Isolation is a major red flag for domestic abuse, and we should be helping young people to recognise that.
In contemporary publishing, female characters are often portrayed as hyper-independent: self-possessed, boundary-savvy, and well-contained. Emotional unavailability, especially in men, is still packaged as independence, mystery, even depth. Meanwhile, real-world romance is dominated by swipe culture, avoidance, and chronic ambiguity. "Keeping it casual" is a default stance, and ghosting is treated as a communication style. Meg Nolan's novel Acts of Desperation offers an unflinching portrait of attachment wounds, longing, and self-betrayal, without rescue fantasies and without a tidy resolution.
When I lost my best friend from college to a slow drift, I spent months analyzing what went wrong. Had I said something offensive? Not been supportive enough? The truth was simpler and more painful: I'd been so focused on fitting into my new work environment that I'd stopped showing up authentically in our friendship. This constant performance of trying to belong is utterly draining.
We meet him as a Gumby-like figure, asleep on a dirt floor, with only a jug of water and a toy horse. He has no idea how he got there. When he's around seventeen years old, Kaspar meets his captor, rendered in the book as a shadowy, hatch-marked father: "The Man in Black." The man teaches him to write his name; he teaches him to take a few fumbling goose steps outside.
My father froze. He looked at my mom, then at me. For a few seconds, nobody moved. My mom whispered, "Don't open it." But he did. Maybe it was pride. Maybe it was fear. Maybe he thought cooperating would make it all OK. The people at the door said it would be quick, just a few questions. They said he'd be back soon. They said a lot of things that didn't turn out to be true.
Peter is a weird guy and a bit younger than Agnes, but he's polite and willing to keep her company, to drink her wine and smoke some crack. (He won't snort powder cocaine, though: that stuff is bad for you, he explains.) And then he wakes up with a bug bite. When Agnes can't see a bug that he points at, frantically, he urges her to look closer. She does-and maybe she sees something.
32-year-old Anthony Duncan first used ChatGPT to help with the business side of his career as a content creation. But he soon ended up talking to the OpenAI chatbot like a friend on a daily basis. What started as a harmless way to vent soon drove Duncan to blow up his personal relationships as he became afflicted with troubling delusions, he recalled in a TikTok video detailing his experience - upending his mental health and causing a sprawling breakdown.
Anyone traveling to outer space should be aware of the risks. Currently, staying alive means staying cocooned inside the spacecraft, spacesuit, or settlement. While planetary-scale engineering or genetic engineering may yet happen, Earth-like environments that are habitable for humans are a long way from either. Scientists investigate psychological responses to long-term experiences of lack of natural light, spatial confinement, ambient noise, living and working with the same small group of people, and mental adjustments to the physical and cognitive changes induced by spaceflight.
Our friend just opened a new solo show, KOM INTE OCH KNACKA PÅ (Don't Come and Knock) at Galleri Thomassen in Gothenburg, Sweden. The show consists of many new works on paper "Isolation and fear were recurring thoughts during the work. I often get stuck on a single word or sentence, this should not be mistaken for a theme or an explanation. Rather, the process itself should lead the works in the direction they wish." - Daniel Götesson 2025
When we can't fully express ourselves to our friends and family, some of us decide to find a therapist. Therapists can hold up the mirror to show us the maladaptive patterns we're repeating over and over. The brave therapists risk our anger and resentment as they professionally and respectfully challenge us to consider the mistakes we're making. They help us overcome our shame and teach us that our depression, our anxiety, and our hate all find no purchase on the steep slope of emotional support,
Pantozzi's premise remains intriguing throughout, even if we're not exactly rooting for Tim in any capacity. He's not always likable or charitable, and the way he treats his mother will put some viewers off. Still, Pantozzi builds the tension nicely and knows how to slowly reveal the nuts and bolts of the mystery at hand. Robertson is especially good as his poor mother, who only has the best intentions for her son and cannot wrap her head around his depression.
"Train Dreams" is a beautiful movie, but I can't say that I entirely trust its beauty. The director, Clint Bentley, and the cinematographer, Adolpho Veloso, have composed a studiedly rapturous hymn to the American wilderness-to the scenic glories of babbling brooks, wispy cloud formations, and trees soaring majestically heavenward. It's an exaltation of the natural world, rendered with an almost supernatural intensity of light and color, and with a score, by Bryce Dessner, whose rippling chords seem to evoke the sounds of cascading water.
Grainier, an orphan sent to Idaho by train at the age of 6 or 7 with a destination pinned to his coat, is an ordinary person-a laborer who makes a living building railroads, joining seasonal logging crews, and, as an older man, hauling freight with a wagon. "He'd had one lover-his wife, Gladys-owned one acre of property, two horses, and a wagon," Johnson sums up Grainier's life, near the end of the novella, in a catalog of experience that neatly pins him as a creature of his time, class, and place:
I believe this sentence captures a paradox of the world we live in today. Many of us crave a sense of connection and purpose. We want to belong to something meaningful, to give back, and to make a difference in the places where we live. However, despite being constantly plugged in, the kind of community that nourishes us can still feel distant and hard to reach.
The titular summer people are the Allisons from New York, who rent the same off-grid country cottage each year. This time, instead of heading back to the city, they decide to extend their holiday for a month longer something that seems to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that nobody has ever stayed at the lake beyond Labor Day.
It's mostly just a shame that we don't connect anymore. I went through my big rough patch and barely made it to the other side. I know why I hesitate to reach out, but I'm still disappointed when my old friends are still silent. I'm just a lame three lagged dog who can't play the same games or something. Life
With only the lazy Joshua trees and hovering buzzards out here to bear witness, this isolated expanse of high-desert plain could well be among the quietest places on the planet. By day, the summer heat hammers hard and the dull whistle of the wind is the only discernible noise. Come nightfall, the eerie silence is often pierced by the woeful bleat of a wandering burro.
"All of a sudden I started realising that, when interesting things happened to me, I was excited to tell her about them. That's when she stopped being an it and became a her."
