Category: Recommended

The paintings begin life in Photoshop. Wiley sends initial shots of models to a graphic designer, along with decorative motifs and detailed instructions for creating a backdrop. After the mockup earns his approval, assistants trace it onto the canvas, then begin their painstaking work on the fashion, the flora, and the filigree. Individuals focus on particular works, but also serve as floating detail specialists. The bird painter was brought on for her knowledge of Japanese landscape painting; the clothing expert, who has worked at the studio for seventeen years, doubles as a quality-control inspector, insuring that every Wiley looks like a Wiley. The process has become intuitive, she told me: “I’m his hand, almost like a human printer.”

On Nov. 10, during a week of frequent meetings on changes at the company, Ms. Solomon tweeted: “we will be scheduling multiple all-hands every day until morale improves.”

On a bleak day, the signs are everywhere. Books are chiefly useful insofar as they generate source material for podcasts or streaming shows. Those streaming shows are most successful when they generate gifs and memes for social media.

My first run ended in starvation and rock-bottom morale (“hissy fits” in common wiki language) because farming, butchering, and other procurements aren’t covered in the tutorial. I shut down my second run early after picking a sandy area with an aquifer as a starting zone, thinking it would make glasswork and irrigation easier and being quickly disappointed with this strategy. I was proud on my third run to have started brewing and dispensing drinks (essential to dwarves’ contentment), but I dug too close to a nearby river, and I abandoned that soggy fort as yet another lesson learned.

You just give, like, the H.R. department a document called resume.doc. And when they print it the printer’s firmware is updated silently and undetectably: it scans all future documents for Social Security numbers, and credit-card numbers, and sends them to him. It opens a reverse shell to his computer, through the corporate firewall, and then it scans all the computers on your lan for known vulnerabilities and takes them over. It was just a little proof of concept; he never released it.

Then a rider waiting for the next race walked up, confirmed that I was a reporter, and angrily told me to leave. When I asked him who he was, he said, “My name is Fuck You, Bro.”

In 1981, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez were living in Oxnard, Calif., working as janitors to fund the trips they took down the 101 to see punk bands like Black Flag in Los Angeles, and their work on a comic book series they called “Love and Rockets.”

The purpose of Ernaux’s writing, she believes, is not merely to record things that have happened but to “make things exist.” This is strong, but it is hardly the strongest thing she has to say about her work. “I am a medium,” she told me. “I feel that I’m someone who can transmit things.”