Clayton Dolién Jun 8, 2010
You’re The One (The Messiah)
I Want to be a Girl
yxkalle Oct 20, 2024 Not the Messiah (He’s a Very Naughty Boy) is a comedic oratorio based on Monty Python’s Life of Brian. It was written by former Monty Python cast member Eric Idle and collaborator John Du Prez, and commissioned by the Luminato festival. Copyright 2007 Stage 6 Films and Python (Monty) Pictures
President’s drug-prices boast shows the math isn’t mathing
- By Marc Sandalow | Special to The Examiner
- 16 hrs ago (SFExaminer.com)
Here’s something for “reckless, feckless and defeatist” haters of President Donald Trump to ponder now that algebra is back in San Francisco’s middle schools.
Trump repeatedly boasts of reducing drug prices by 600%, sometimes as much as 1,500% — a seeming mathematical impossibility. Last week his health secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr., came to his defense twice, once in testimony before Congress and once before reporters in the Oval Office, insisting that Trump’s claim is one of “two ways of calculating” percentages.
Those who understand basic arithmetic ridicule the assertion as “MAGA math.” It conjures up the twisted reality portrayed in George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” in which fear arises that Big Brother will declare that two plus two is five.
But what if the critics could be proven wrong? With apologies to those who understand mathematics on a much higher level than I do, here’s one explanation supporting Big Brother’s calculation.
Let’s start with something everyone can agree on: 0 = 0.
And you don’t need algebra to know that any number subtracted from itself is zero. Which means, in algebraic terms, x – x = 0. Or, x – x = x – x.
Furthermore, any number multiplied by zero equals zero. So, it is also true that 4(x – x) = 5(x – x) is a mathematically sound equation.
Now comes the more complicated calculation, which will soon be introduced to San Francisco eighth graders. In algebra, one way to simplify an equation is by dividing each side by an identical number.
So, divide both sides by x – x and you end up with 4 = 5. And if 4 equals five, then 2 + 2 = 5.
Perhaps Big Brother, Trump and Kennedy are right!
Kennedy, who holds degrees from Harvard and the University of Virginia and attended the London School of Economics, insisted that his boss’s math was accurate.
“If a drug was $100 and its price rose to $600, that would be a 600% increase” Kennedy said last week (that’s actually a 500% increase, but who’s counting?). “If it drops from $600 to $100, that would be a 600% savings.”
“Right,” the president proclaimed.
Actually, that’s wrong, as most eighth-graders could tell them. You can’t divide by zero. And prices can’t fall by more than 100%.
Say a 300-pound man balloons up to 600 pounds. That’s a 100% increase. But if drops back to 300 pounds, he hasn’t lost 100% of his weight. If he had, he’d be gone.
Though it might be confusing to some — including Trump and Kennedy — going from 300 to 600 is a 100% increase. Falling from 600 to 300 is a 50% decrease.
Of course, haggling over numbers is only important if you are concerned about reality. And reality, as comedian Stephen Colbert once observed, “has a well-known liberal bias.”
Were Trump or Kennedy making an honest mistake, they would correct themselves. But assertions such as “the U.S. has already won the war in Iran,” or that prices have plummeted since Joe Biden was president, or that the U.S. economy is the hottest in the world are not meant to fact-checked.
“This is the problem with the media,” Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, said after the 2016 election. “You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally. The American people didn’t. They understood it.”
And the White House is counting on Americans not understanding algebra.
In the final season of the HBO comedy series “Veep,” the buffoonish Jonah Ryan insists he has more delegates than the math shows in his quixotic run for the presidency. He then learns that algebra was developed by Muslims in the 9th century.
“How do you explain that when I add up my delegates — with Christian math — the number is quite different?” he says, vowing to end the teaching of “Sharia math” in schools.
Americans have grown accustomed to MAGA math. It explains how Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in 2024 by a margin of 1.5 percentage points was a “historic landslide,” how Washington, D.C., no longer has crime, or how such an unpopular president can have a “100% approval rating.”
And if bringing algebra back to eighth grade doesn’t make believers out of them, perhaps the White House can find alternate facts that will.
Attracting chicks
Why Critical Thinking is Sexy
by Calvin Harris H.W., M
One of the things that I find more and more important to me and what I enjoy in my long-term love language with friends, family, or imitate partners is Critical Thinking.
Critical Thinkers are essential!
So, what is a Critical Thinker?
Well, that is not the person who is quick to consider or say everybody is wrong about everything. That person only thinks they are a critic.
Rather a Critical Thinker is a person who has judgement. Who thinks carefully about all the different possible solutions to a problem before coming to a reasoned conclusion or solution, now that to me, is more in line with a critic, and applying the thinking of a Critical Thinker.
Getting into a state of Critical Thinker, takes conscious work. First step is to stop or not try to be right all the time, (Now I can tell you that is hard.),
Because what is beneath that action is that you do not want to be wrong. To let go of that response is to stop acquiring knowledge as a competition tool, where being right means you win.
That is not what Critical Thinking is about or how it works.
Critical Thinking requires you first to be open-minded and open-ear-ed. You need to be willing to be curious and listen to people. That may require you to ask the question, who, what, where, when, why, and/or how. of them to better understand their position in their conversation with you.
This is different from being in an echo chamber of your own mind. You cannot dwell in an echo loop of thinking. You must be willing to get out from under the safety blankets of your own thinking, to talk and listen to people, who you might not normally be disposed of to listen to.
I like the analogy of very young children. They are inquisitive, they ask questions all the time and they are open to hearing all sorts of answers, we call that being open-minded.
So if you want to get better at Critical Thinking, think more like a child gathering information.
Next consider yourself like a computer, analyzing data, then systematically cleaning, transforming, and modeling data to discover useful information, draw conclusions, and support decision-making. It involves defining objectives, gathering data, cleaning out opinions, prejudice and ignorance to gain accuracy in your conclusions (what we call unlearning), by applying tools and techniques that bring about unpredictable good, as a result.
That takes a lot more mental activity than giving people the first thing that comes to your mind. But it allows you to be in a Conscious state of giving and receiving.
What a loving moment for two or more people to be in that state of Consciousness.
Calvin
May: The Moving Function
(oldnewmethod.com)
May
The Moving Function
Of our three bodies, the physical body seems, at first glance, the easiest to observe. Its movements and postures are physical, and therefore, traceable. If I take a step forward, it is my physical body that coordinates this action; if I move an object from one place to another, it is my physical body that accomplishes this task. But along with this capacity for movement, there are many subtle nuances also rooted in our physical body that deeply influence our psychology and will be the focus of our May and June labors.
When we presented the physical body in February, we mentioned that its function was movement. However, to observe its more subtle nuances, we must further divide the manifestations of our physical body into two: a moving function and an instinctive function. The first is responsible for the body’s capacity for movement, the second for maintaining its well-being. Neither of these two functions is exclusively physical; they influence our entire psychology. The labor of May will span the moving function; that of June, the instinctive function.
The moving function in the physical body enables us to walk, type, dance, play sports, and perform a wide range of external motions. It also grants us the ability to imitate and automate complex actions, such as riding a bicycle or driving a car, which at first require our concentrated attention, but through repetition become automatic. This ability of automation calls for deeper examination, because it permeates the other functions and enables their fluidity. For example, the moving function enables the intellectual function to connect words and meaning seamlessly and master the ability to speak. It enables the emotional function to match reactions to stimuli and gives it the ability to respond with ease to social customs and expectations. In effect, our moving function operates like a rolling wheel that enables fluidity not only for itself, but also for the other functions.
This rotational nature correlates our moving function with time, because time is also rotational; it is determined by the rotation of physical orbs—the rotation of the earth around its own axis marking a day, the waxing and waning of the moon marking a month, the earth’s orbit around the sun marking a year. In fact, it can be said that our moving center is under the law of time, although the full implications of this claim may require a more lengthy explanation. Our moving function is influenced by physical time the way a tiny cog is forced into rotation by adjacent, massive mechanical wheels. It cannot resist time; it ‘believes’ time and correlates time with progression and accomplishment. The task at hand is always a means to an end, a ‘now’ pointing to a ‘later’. But being relegated to perpetual rotation, when ‘later’ eventually comes around, our moving function cannot but perceive it as a new ‘now’ to be sacrificed for an even later ‘later’. As a result, through the influence of our moving function over our psychology, we are prone to falling into repetitive mechanical momentums: continually daydreaming random scenarios, continually replaying interactions with others, continually humming randomly recalled tunes, and many more such repetitive sequences that color our internal landscape against our will.
That these automations are powered by momentum, rather than our own will, is simple to verify, provided we are sincere with ourselves: they do not stop when we want them to. It follows that any conscious effort to jam the wheels of our psychological automations will help us observe our moving function.
An effective area in which to apply this is our habitual usage of the cell phone. When the fluidity of our moving center is impeded—as happens, for example, when we are forced to wait in line, in traffic, or in an elevator—our moving function seeks alternative ways to perpetuate movement, and will often revert to checking our phone unnecessarily. Therefore, a good exercise for interrupting automation is the discipline of checking our phone only when seated. Any time we must use our phone, we find the nearest place to sit down , and only then pull it out.
This type of exercise reveals the influence of our moving function over our psychology. It also represents a meaningful step towards establishing inner government. In spreading automation indiscriminately, our moving function tyrannizes, as it were, the other functions into subordination. By restricting its influence over the other functions, we force it back to its rightful place.
The farmer who labors in this way has begun clearing the land from the invasive weed of unnecessary movement and has fulfilled the obligations for May.
About the Founder
Asaf Braverman is the founder of the Old New Method, a worldwide community of people dedicated to self-development.
Violence Shaped Charlize Theron. It Doesn’t Define Her.
The Interview
- Published April 18, 2026 Updated April 21, 2026 (NYTimes.com)
I’ve never had an interview quite like this one with Charlize Theron. I came in wanting to talk about her storied acting career, which began after she moved on her own to New York to be a ballet dancer, quit because of an injury and was discovered barely out of her teens at a bank in Los Angeles. By her late 20s she had produced, starred in and won an Oscar for the film “Monster,” in which she completely transformed herself to play the serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Since then, she’s been in dark comedies like “Tully” and big-budget fantasies like “Snow White and the Huntsman,” but I was most interested in her latest turn as an action star in films like “Mad Max: Fury Road,” the “Old Guard” franchise and her newest film, “Apex,” in which, at age 50, she kicks butt again, this time while being chased through the Australian wilderness.
But while we did talk about her roles past and present, our conversation almost immediately took a revealing turn. Theron has spoken publicly about the fact that her mother killed her father in self-defense when she was a teenager. But when we talked about it, and the repercussions she’s lived with ever since, memories of her childhood flooded in with a vividness that surprised us both.
Charlize Theron sits down with “The Interview” co-host, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, to talk about how she overcame her dark family past.
I was watching your acceptance speech when you won your Oscar for “Monster” in 2004. You’re standing onstage, tearing up. Your mom is sitting in the audience and you thank her for all her sacrifices. When you look back now, what do you think about that young woman? The first thing that came to mind was just, This is not something that happens to girls in South Africa. I remember looking at a map and I was like, God, we’re all the way down here, what’s going on up there? My greatest dream would have been to be able to support myself as an actor and not have a second job. That was literally what I was aiming for. I just wanted to be able to not depend on my mom or a guy. But the thing with my mom is she did sacrifice a lot.
Yeah, and we’re going to talk about that. I’m a mom now, and I don’t have to sacrifice the things she did. I know what she did, and I’m very grateful.
Since we’re already talking about your family and where you came from — you grew up in South Africa on a small farm. What do you remember about growing up there and what your life was like? I remember very vividly moving to that farm. I was 4 years old. I remember it feeling so vast when I was that age. There was this big tree that greeted you as you were driving in. I have very vivid memories of this tree and climbing it recklessly, barefoot, and just feeling a sense of freedom. I loved adventure. I liked getting into trouble. I liked to do things that I knew I wasn’t allowed to do, but I was allowed to do so much. I could take my BMX and go to the closest little town to rent movies.
Did that make you independent? I was super independent. My friends grew up that way, too, but my independence also had to come from an emotional place. My house wasn’t always stable. And so I felt very responsible to make sure that I was taken care of. By the time I moved out of the house, I knew how to take care of myself on many levels.
Before we get to what was going on inside the house, outside the house there was also a lot of instability. The mid-1980s were a time of violent uprisings against apartheid that led to a state of emergency in your hometown, Benoni. There was a lot of state repression, resistance. You were a very young kid, but do you remember any of that? You couldn’t avoid it. Violence and turmoil was something that was everyday life in South Africa. I saw things that I shouldn’t have seen at a very young age.
Do you remember anything in particular? It’s tough stuff to talk about. I saw a man burn inside a car on the side of the road. I also later saw what H.I.V. and AIDS was doing. I remember people being wheelbarrowed into our house because they knew my mom would take them to a clinic.
Listen to the Conversation With Charlize Theron
The Oscar-winning actress reflects on pain, healing and becoming an action hero.
You’ve spoken about the turbulence inside your family. Your father was an alcoholic. As someone myself who has dealt with alcohol abuse in our family, it is an incredibly difficult thing, especially for a child. When did you realize that your own home life was different from your friends’? Pretty young, I would say. I have memories from when I was really young, seeing really drunk people, and it scared me. Like, people crawling on the floor drunk. But that became so consistent that it was every Friday, Saturday, maybe even every Wednesday. My dad had built this big bar inside the house. That wasn’t unusual. A lot of South Africans create a space in their house where they can drink. But it became where he lived. He was a full-blown functioning drunk, but he had moments where he would go missing, we wouldn’t know where he was, and he would usually return in a state that was pretty severe. It would get messy and loud, and my mom’s not a wallflower either. She wasn’t just sitting and taking it. She made it known that she wasn’t happy about his lifestyle. So it really caused a lot of verbal abuse. Personally, for me, the worst thing was they would ice each other. There would be a big fight, and then they wouldn’t talk for three weeks. I didn’t have siblings, and that house just went silent.
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Was he violent toward you? He was scary. He didn’t hit me, he didn’t throw me against a wall, but he would do things like drive drunk. There was a lot of verbal abuse, a lot of threatening language that just became normal. When I was around 12 or 13, I remember my mom using the word “divorce” for the first time. We didn’t know people who were divorced. My parents weren’t religious, but it was culturally one of those things you didn’t do. They had been married for 25 years. So when she said, “I think the best thing for us is for me to separate from him,” it was scary because I didn’t know what that would look like. I was almost talking her back into staying, because the alternative felt so foreign to me. But I think she knew and she was trying to figure out ways to get me out of the house. She sent me to a boarding school specifically because she wanted me to get out of the house. She was very aware of what it was doing to me.
It’s so strange — all the memories are there. And it’s not that I don’t try and think about it, but going in such a linear manner, it becomes almost more clear when you talk about it this way. Because people tend to just isolate it and want to talk about one thing. But it helps to explain that these things build, and they build, and it takes years for things to go as wrong as it did in my house.
The reason I wanted to go linear is because you have mentioned in other interviews how everyone focuses on what we’re about to talk about. But that everything that came before was actually where the real trauma lay. We better talk about some fun things after this!
We are going to. I didn’t mean to start here. No, no, not at all. I was 15 years old. My mom and I had gone to see a movie, and my dad had taken the key to the front steel door. Every room in our house had a steel door. So if you got into the front door, the kitchen had a steel door that you had to unlock, because that’s the kind of violence that we were living in. Our country was on the brink of civil war. So my mom couldn’t get into the first lock. We always knew where my dad was. His brother lived a couple of streets away, and if he wasn’t home, he was there drinking. Nothing out of the usual. We went over, they were pretty loaded, and I had to pee really badly. So I ran into the house to get to the toilet, and he took that as me being rude, because I didn’t stop and say hello to everybody. Big thing in South Africa, the kind of respect that you have to have for elders. And he was in a state where he just spiraled. Like: “Why didn’t you stop? Who do you think you are?”
We left, but you could just tell something was different. When we got home, I sat down with my mom and said: “I think you’re right. I think you should separate from him.” I had never imagined that those words would come out of my mouth. Leaving that house, I knew something was just different. She knew it, too. I knew he was mad at me. So I said to her, “When he eventually decides to come home, please tell him I’m asleep.” I went into my room, I turned my lights off, and I was scared. My window faced the driveway, and I could tell the level of anger, frustration or unhappiness by the way he drove in. The way that he drove into that property that night, I can’t explain it to you. I just knew something bad was going to happen.
To get to the point: He finally broke into the house. He shot through the steel doors to get in, making it very clear that he was going to kill us. His brother was with him as well. We knew it was serious, and so by the time he broke into the first gate, my mom ran to the safe to get her gun. She came into my bedroom. The two of us were holding the door with our bodies because there wasn’t a lock on it. And he just stepped back and started shooting through the door. And this is the crazy thing: Not one bullet hit us. It’s insane when you think about it that way. But the messaging was very clear. I’m going to kill you tonight. You think I can’t come into this door? Watch me. I’m going to go to the safe. I’m going to get the shotgun. Encouragement from the brother. He walked to the safe, and my mom pulled the door open while the brother was still standing there. The brother ran down the hallway, and she shot one bullet down the hallway that ricocheted seven times and shot him in the hand. It’s stuff you can’t explain. And then she followed my father, who was by then opening the safe to get more weapons out, and she shot him.
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated story. These things are prevalent in a lot of homes. Women really get a very, very unfair shake, even in this country. Nobody takes it seriously, the situation that they’re in. And I don’t think anybody took my mom seriously.
In advance of this, you mean? Yeah, how bad it was. When you’re dealing with a charming drunk, who was always looking for buddies to come join the party, and a culture that just accepted it — that was part of being South African. Men drink. I remember my little nephew, when people asked, “What are you going to do when you grow up?” saying, “I’m going to drink.” That’s when you become a man.
I just want to say, I wasn’t going to start here —— I think these things should be talked about because it makes other people not feel alone. I never knew about a story like that. When this happened to us, I thought we were the only people. I’m not haunted by this stuff anymore.
In fact, you’ve become a campaigner to prevent gender-based violence and have been very clear that that trauma does not define you. It does, though, bind you and your mother. How would you say it changed your relationship to her? It’s a very good question because it really did change our relationship. We were always very close. We felt like a team. But that night changed it because in retrospect, once I got out of the shock of it, I realized that she saved my life. Which is a big thing.
It’s the ultimate sacrifice a mother can make. And then she picked right up. The next morning she sent me to school. She was just like, We’re going to move on. Not necessarily the healthiest thing, but it worked for us. She wanted me to forget about it. She didn’t want me to sit in it. We didn’t have therapists around, so in her head the best therapy was, We’ve got to move on.
And did you? Did you lock it away? I did. There was a lot of shame surrounding it because everybody knew. I felt like kids had this attitude towards me.
You felt like they judged you? Yes. There was only one time I became violent, and it was a girl who had taunted me with it. She was walking around telling everybody how she had seen my dad drunk. This was something that was super sensitive to me because he would show up at school events really drunk and it was embarrassing. I always felt like I had to make excuses for him, to tell some story to soften the edges a little bit. I also tried to sweep it under the rug because I hated people feeling sorry for me. I hated it. I almost feel like that was the worst thing, that now, for the rest of my life, people are going to feel sorry for me. So for the first couple of years, for as long as I could, I told this story that he died in a car accident. I couldn’t tell it to my school friends, but by the time I left South Africa, that’s the story I told. Because I just didn’t want pity. It made me so uncomfortable.
So you end up leaving South Africa. And you’re young. I had just turned 16.
You go to model initially in Italy. What was it like to be that person at 16 with everything that had happened? It was amazing because it was escape. The only thing that was hard for me was leaving my mom behind. But she was the one that said: “Go and make a life for yourself. There’s nothing for you here right now.”
Out in the world at 16, did you feel equipped? I was so equipped. I knew how to take care of myself. That’s just something my mom instilled in me, my lifestyle instilled me, my country did. You know how to cook, how to sew. I knew more than my kids will ever know as adults about taking care of myself. So I knew I would be able to survive. And I also had this real drive. I was so determined to do this on my own and not to fail, because I didn’t want to go back.
This brings me to your new movie, because you’ve been doing a lot of tough roles lately and you are what I consider to be our modern-day action hero. Do you consider yourself to be an action hero? I don’t know about the hero part?
My words. I’m making a kind of obvious assumption, considering where we’ve started, but I’ve heard you just say words like “independent,” wanting to do things your own way, and to me, there’s just a very clear through line to this part of your career. Why was it something you were attracted to? I had had little moments in movies where I had to do an action scene. I made the connection pretty quickly to my dance career, and I had missed telling stories through my body.
OK, you said you wanted to get to the fun stuff. In a recent interview, you said, “I have surgery after every movie.” I looked into it and went down a rabbit hole. Oh, boy.
After this new movie, “Apex,” you got elbow surgery. Two elbow surgeries.
You also fractured a toe. While making “The Old Guard,” you filmed through injuries and got three surgeries on your left arm afterward. Yes.
Making “Atomic Blonde,” you cracked two teeth and got root canals. Yeah, two in the back they had to remove. They were so crushed.
You spent five days in the hospital after laughing too hard watching “Borat”? I didn’t quite understand that one. Was it a hernia? [Laughs] I had herniated a disk in my neck making a movie, “Aeon Flux.” I landed on my neck and it was a really severe injury. I was moments away from being paralyzed. They had to shut the movie down. I was on bed rest and doing P.T., and they didn’t want to do surgery. I think it was a big mistake because I suffered for eight years and had chronic pain. That disk sat so close to all of my nerves that if I did anything wrong with it, it would just sit on nerves and I would be locked for weeks. I lived my life like that for eight years. The “Borat” thing is funny because I laughed so hard that I locked that disk into the nerves. It was actually really bad.
That’s not a funny story! That’s a horrible story. It’s a funny story now! We still laugh about it, but I had to get flown on a private plane that night and came back to L.A. When I had my first baby, I said to the doctor, “I want to have the surgery because I don’t want to live in this place where I have a child and I can’t pick her up because my neck is out.” It was the best thing I ever did.
I know a lot of people who’ve lived with chronic pain, and it’s really debilitating and hard to think about anything else. What was it like for you? It was horrible. There’s this constant fear of I don’t know if I should do that. And I’m in the prime of my life! I was so worn down by the end of the eight years that if they weren’t going to do the surgery, I was going to go to another country and get it done. I was that desperate. Also, I was on a lot of opioids, and with my dad, the worry of addiction — thank God I didn’t become addicted, but I think back now and I just go, That was so irresponsible.
If that were my reality, I probably would not want to throw myself into becoming an action star. I would want to protect myself from injury. Why do you think you went in the opposite direction? I wasn’t going to let anything take away from my life. I think some of it has to do with the fact that I experienced so much death early on. I’m very aware that time runs out really quickly. Time can run out as soon as I walk out of this building. I can cross the street and it’s done. I didn’t want to live a safe life because of that. I mean, I’m not a reckless person. I get scared. But if I get to be on my deathbed one day, I want to say I did everything that I really wanted to do.
I can see you getting teary. No, I’m not! [Laughs] I don’t know what you’re talking about.
What made you emotional? Because life is so valuable, and life is so beautiful. [Tearing up more] Stop it! No, this is not in the interview. You are not putting this in the interview. It’s so sappy and stupid.
It’s not. It’s so stupid. It’s really stupid.
I feel like I’m getting the real you, which is a person who still doesn’t want to be in touch with her emotions. It’s funny because people think I’m a tough bitch. A lot of people think I am very cold because I come across as self-affirmed, like I can take care of myself. I’m sometimes a little brash, and people take that as, She’s so tough. And it’s the complete opposite. My kids are so embarrassed by me because I will cry at the drop of a hat. I think that’s why I’m OK at acting. I can go to those places very easily. I have an ability to really feel deeply sometimes.
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OK, we keep going in a different direction, but I want to talk about the new movie. You play a mountain climber who ends up being chased through the Australian jungle. Rock climber. Do your research.
[Laughs] Thank you. What are the mental challenges of doing movies like that? Because it’s not just a physical game, it’s mental. Dance is probably one of the hardest things I ever did. Dancers are superheroes. What they put their bodies through in complete silence.
Sorry, Timothée Chalamet. Oh, boy, I hope I run into him one day. That was a very reckless comment on an art form, two art forms, that we need to lift up constantly because, yes, they do have a hard time. But in 10 years, A.I. is going to be able to do Timothée’s job, but it will not be able to replace a person on a stage dancing live. And we shouldn’t [expletive] on other art forms. Dance taught me discipline. It taught structure. It taught hard work. It taught me to be tough. It’s borderline abusive. There were several times that I had blood infections from blisters that just never healed. And you don’t get a day off. I’m literally talking about bleeding through your shoes. And that’s something that you have to practice every single day, the mind-set of just, you don’t give up, there’s no other option, you keep going.
In “Apex,” the tension doesn’t only come from the thrills and physical extremes. It also comes through you as a woman feeling threatened by the circumstances around you. Do you think female action heroes get dramatic tension from other sources than men? For sure. It’s hard for some men to understand that when we go down into a parking garage, it’s one of the most frightening things. I’m constantly looking over my shoulder and trying to get into my car as quickly as possible. I don’t know how many men think about that. We just have a different mind-set. We have to. I think that makes us interesting action stars or action subjects. We attack action differently. We can’t fight like men, but that doesn’t mean we can’t fight. I don’t ever aspire to go into these movies trying to outdo the male counterpart.
Can you fight in real life? Could you take someone down? I feel like I’m scrappy. I’m scrappy and I’m a survivor. Sometimes that’s the thing that sets you apart from actual skill. There are people that would probably take somebody down way better than I can, but if my life depended on it, I’m going to bet on me.
This interview has been edited and condensed. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio or Amazon Music. Follow us on Instagram and TikTok.
Director of photography (video): Timothy Shin
(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)
Charles Darwin on the confidence of the ignorant
Charles Darwin. Photography © Natural History Museum, London / Bridgeman Images.
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
― Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor is now generally accepted and considered a fundamental scientific concept. Wikipedia
Born February 12, 1809, The Mount House, Shrewsbury, United Kingdom
Died April 19, 1882 (age 73 years), Home of Charles Darwin – Down House, Downe, United Kingdom
Engels, Darwin and Descartes, Oh My
(Image from Thriftbooks.com)
“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.”
― Frederich Engels (1884)
In his 1871 Descent of Man, [Darwin] offered that “at some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”
In 1649 Descartes wrote in a letter to the mathematician Marin Mersenne, “I don’t explain the feeling of pain without reference to the soul.”
For animals, as well as plants, there have never been individuals. This new paradigm for biology asks new questions and seeks new relationships among the different living entities on Earth. We are all lichens. (Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp and Alfred I. Tauber, “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” Quarterly Review of Biology 87, no. 4 (2012)
–quotes from Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice by Rupa Marya & Raj Patel
The Book That Taught Me to Stop “Helping”
Apr 22, 2026 (wisdomschool.com)
There are books you read and enjoy and set down, and there are books that break something open in you permanently. Rupert Ross’s Dancing with a Ghost, published in 1992, is the second kind. I’ve read a lot of books in my life. This is one of a handful I’d say genuinely changed the way I move through the world.
Ross was a Crown Attorney, a Canadian prosecutor, assigned to remote Indigenous communities in northwestern Ontario. He went in, as he freely admits, with the full set of Western assumptions about law, justice, healing, and the proper relationship between people.
He came out a changed person. The book is his attempt to describe what happened to him, and to understand the radically different worldview he encountered, and it is one of the most honest, generous acts of intellectual humility I’ve ever read from anyone working inside a government institution.
What amazed me, and what has stayed with me ever since, was his account of the principle of non-interference.
In the communities where Ross worked, non-interference wasn’t a passive thing, a reluctance to get involved, the way we sometimes use the word. It was a deeply held, actively practiced value grounded in a fundamental respect for every person’s right to walk their own path and make their own choices.
You did not tell other people what to do. You did not offer unsolicited opinions about how someone else was living. You did not intervene in another person’s journey, because doing so would be a profound violation of their dignity and their sovereignty as a human being.
Ross describes how this principle operated across every domain of life, from child-rearing to community decision-making to the response to personal crisis.
The example that stopped my breathing was the story of a woman who had watched her son die by suicide without physically intervening.
To Western eyes, including Ross’s initial reaction, this was incomprehensible, even monstrous. Every instinct in the Western tradition, legal, medical, moral, and parental, says you intervene. You grab the rope. You call for help. You do something. The woman’s stillness looked, from outside, like failure or indifference.
But Ross spent time sitting with the community’s understanding of what had happened, and what he came to see was something far more complicated and, in its own way, far more serious than indifference. The woman had understood, within the framework her culture had given her, that her son was on a journey that was his to make. That her body stepping between him and his choice would have been, in the deepest sense available to her, a violation of who he was.
Ross doesn’t ask us to agree with this. He instead asks us to understand it well enough to stop assuming our framework is the only serious one. He writes about the encounter with that belief system as something that shook him to his core and never fully let him go.
I’ve sat with that story for years. I’m not going to pretend I’ve fully resolved the moral tension in it, and I’m not sure it can be fully resolved.
There are situations where I believe intervention is the only human response. But the principle underneath that story, stripped of its most extreme application, is something I’ve come to believe is among the wisest things one culture has ever offered another.
We do not have the right to impose our vision of the “correct life” on other people. Not even on the people we love most.
Since reading Ross’s book, I’ve tried to stop giving unsolicited advice to my children. That has not been easy. The parental instinct to correct, to guide, to share the lesson you learned the hard way so they won’t have to, is almost physical in its urgency.
When you love someone and you can see what you believe is a mistake forming in front of you, the impulse to step in feels like the most natural thing in the world. But Ross helped me see that what feels natural to me was constructed by my top-down culture, that my certainty about what would be good for another person is almost always at least partly a projection of my own preferences and fears.
My children are adults. They have their own relationships with reality, built from experiences I wasn’t present for and perspectives I don’t share. When I offer advice they didn’t ask for, what I’m communicating, beneath whatever loving intention I bring to it, is that I don’t fully trust their judgment. That I think I can see their life more clearly than they can. That my discomfort with watching them navigate something hard is more important than their right to navigate it.
Since reading Ross’ book, I’ve extended this to everyone. If someone doesn’t ask me what I think, I’ve been trying, with uneven but genuine effort, to not tell them. This is harder than it sounds in a culture that frames unsolicited advice as caring, as engagement, as proof that you’re paying attention.
We’ve turned the offering of opinions into a social currency. Withholding them can feel, to the person withholding, like coldness or distance. But I think Ross would say that’s our discomfort talking, not wisdom.
What he found in those northern Ontario communities was a social fabric built on a different kind of trust. A trust that people know things about their own lives that you cannot know from the outside. That growth often requires difficulty, and removing someone’s difficulty for them is often not the gift it appears to be. That presence, real presence — being with someone without an agenda for them — is often the most profound form of love available.
I think about the Japanese concept of ma, the meaningful pause, the space between things that gives them their shape. Ross’s non-interference principle operates like that. The space you leave around another person isn’t emptiness. It’s respect made visible.
Dancing with a Ghost is out of print and harder to find than it should be. If you can locate a copy, I’d encourage you to read it slowly and let it argue with your assumptions. Ross is a careful, humble writer, and he earns every conclusion he reaches. The book didn’t just change how I think about Indigenous justice systems, which it did, thoroughly. It changed how I think about what it means to love someone.
Loving someone, I’ve since come to believe, means trusting them with their own life.