The filmmaker behind "One Battle After Another" specializes in stories about people who are cut off, adrift, desperately seeking connection. His films are studies of American loneliness. The director plunges us into the physical realization of experience with a thoroughness that can be unsettling. What is the sound of a needle entering fabric? Something more significant, it seems, than the sound of one hand clapping. You hear a tiny pop followed by the rustle of violated muslin--a shudder in the silence of the universe. Scrupulous directors make sure that the sound of their movies is grossly efficient, so that the dramatic meaning of a scene is apparent even in the worst theatre or home system in the country. They also layer in, for those who care about such things, a secondary level of sound--think of the swishing skirts in Martin Scorsese's adaptation of Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence." In " Phantom Thread " (2017)--the needle-and-fabric movie--the director, Paul Thomas Anderson, uses such details to build an exquisitely perceptible epic of minute events.

Asabaseline for DCLM, we conduct extensive experiments and find that model-based filtering is key to assembling a high-quality training set.

'She Has a Presence': The Superfans Who Turned Up for Opening Weekend WIRED attended two documentary screening parties--one on each coast--for the First Lady's film. For decades now, people have been wondering: Who is Melania Trump? The First Lady opens her 2024 memoir with a story about leaving her family in Slovenia to immigrate to America as a 26-year-old model. Ten years later, she became an American citizen. "It was not an easy process," she writes. "And my personal experience dealing with the trials of the immigration process opened my eyes to the difficulties faced by all who wish to become US citizens." OK, but what does that mean, exactly? Her husband, in both his terms as president, put harshly enforcing immigration policy at the center of his domestic agenda. This is all to say that I was authentically excited to see, the documentary that Amazon paid $40 million to acquire and $35 million to market. The director, Brett Ratner, previously accused of sexual misconduct by six different women, is currently in the news thanks to his appearance in a photo included in the most recent dump of Epstein files. What is Melania like behind closed doors?

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Rare, deep-sea encounter: California scientists observe'extraordinary' seven-arm octopus On November 6, 2025, MBARI Senior Scientist Steven Haddock and researchers in MBARI's Biodiversity and Biooptics Team observed a seven-arm octopus (Haliphron atlanticus) during an expedition in Monterey Bay with MBARI's remotely operated vehicle at a depth of approximately 700 meters. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . California scientists captured rare footage of a seven-arm octopus eating a jellyfish.

Our obsession with deadly game shows--from "The Running Man" and "Squid Game" to MrBeast's real-life reënactments--reflects a shift in the national mood to something increasingly zero-sum. It seems we can't get enough of game shows in which the losers die. "The Hunger Games" became a multibillion-dollar media franchise over the past decade, with audiences returning to the theatre, time and time again, to watch adolescents try to kill one another in an enormous arena--a contest devised by the leaders of a society rife with inequality. Netflix's " Squid Game " followed four hundred and fifty-six desperate individuals into an underworld where they play lethal versions of children's games in the hope of winning a life-changing amount of money. Four weeks after its release, the show had become Netflix's most-watched series ever; to date, the first season has been viewed more than two hundred and sixty-five million times.

Things to Do in L.A. A shadowy L.A. crime ring is hijacking the IDs of foreign scholars, fraud expert says This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . An identity theft ring believed to be based in the Burbank area is stealing Social Security Numbers of former foreign scholars. Private fraud investigators suspect the operation is connected to Armenian organized crime groups known for sophisticated financial crimes. Using apartments in the San Fernando Valley and Glendale area, a shadowy group of identity thieves has been quietly exploiting a new kind of victim -- foreign scholars who left the U.S. years ago but whose Social Security numbers still linger in American databases, according to a cybercrime expert.

Statistical topic modeling is widely used in political science to study text. Researchers examine documents of varying lengths, from tweets to speeches. There is ongoing debate on how document length affects the interpretability of topic models. We investigate the effects of aggregating short documents into larger ones based on natural units that partition the corpus. In our study, we analyze one million tweets by U.S. state legislators from April 2016 to September 2020. We find that for documents aggregated at the account level, topics are more associated with individual states than when using individual tweets. This finding is replicated with Wikipedia pages aggregated by birth cities, showing how document definitions can impact topic modeling results.

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) technology uses satellite radar to detect surface deformation patterns and monitor earthquake impacts on buildings. While vital for emergency response planning, extracting multi-class building damage classifications from InSAR data faces challenges: overlapping damage signatures with environmental noise, computational complexity in multi-class scenarios, and the need for rapid regional-scale processing. Our novel multi-class variational causal Bayesian inference framework with quadratic variational bounds provides rigorous approximations while ensuring efficiency. By integrating InSAR observations with USGS ground failure models and building fragility functions, our approach separates building damage signals while maintaining computational efficiency through strategic pruning. Evaluation across five major earthquakes (Haiti 2021, Puerto Rico 2020, Zagreb 2020, Italy 2016, Ridgecrest 2019) shows improved damage classification accuracy (AUC: 0.94-0.96), achieving up to 35.7% improvement over existing methods. Our approach maintains high accuracy (AUC > 0.93) across all damage categories while reducing computational overhead by over 40% without requiring extensive ground truth data.

Crop field boundaries are foundational datasets for agricultural monitoring and assessments but are expensive to collect manually. Machine learning (ML) methods for automatically extracting field boundaries from remotely sensed images could help realize the demand for these datasets at a global scale. However, current ML methods for field instance segmentation lack sufficient geographic coverage, accuracy, and generalization capabilities. Further, research on improving ML methods is restricted by the lack of labeled datasets representing the diversity of global agricultural fields. We present Fields of The World (FTW) -- a novel ML benchmark dataset for agricultural field instance segmentation spanning 24 countries on four continents (Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America). FTW is an order of magnitude larger than previous datasets with 70,462 samples, each containing instance and semantic segmentation masks paired with multi-date, multi-spectral Sentinel-2 satellite images. We provide results from baseline models for the new FTW benchmark, show that models trained on FTW have better zero-shot and fine-tuning performance in held-out countries than models that aren't pre-trained with diverse datasets, and show positive qualitative zero-shot results of FTW models in a real-world scenario -- running on Sentinel-2 scenes over Ethiopia.