Avatar: The Way of Water is a 192-minute film about a family of blue aliens who enjoy riding dragons and are taught to ride fish and befriend whale aliens--whaliens, if you will--by another tribe of aliens, who are teal. Together, they must resist the nature-hating marines who ride around in robots and, in a shocking betrayal of the correct order of things, have cloned a squadron of themselves into blue alien bodies. The film's director, James Cameron, has shot the whole thing in 3D, and much of it, especially the action scenes, is also displayed at a special high frame rate, which looks like Cameron has personally switched on an obscure setting in your brain. To see a James Cameron movie is to remember that in rare cases it does not matter whether a film is good so long as the film is fucking awesome, and those are the cases on which Cameron has built his filmography. That some of his movies are also good--the Terminator films, Aliens, The Abyss--is more a matter of coincidence.

It goes by many names, this thing that we yearn for and that rules us: opium, money, power. William S. Burroughs, the American cult author, likened them all – in his 1959 novel "Naked Lunch" – to the flesh of a gargantuan centipede that lurks in the depths and has an irresistible taste, and whose addicts gorge on it until they lose consciousness. To get a piece of it one must undergo endless ordeals, wandering about in kitchens, sleeping cubicles, wobbly balconies and basements. That's also the sort of route one must follow in order to experience the products of an algorithm that was unveiled in May in Silicon Valley. Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, aka GPT-3, is a "language model": a machine learning system that's capable of automatically and dynamically generating texts in human-like language. Since its emergence, thousands have wished to touch it, use it, breathe in something of the words it spews out. But only a few have been vouchsafed that privilege.

The most prolific musical artists manage to release one, maybe two, studio albums in a year. Rappers can sometimes put out three or four mixtapes during that same time. However, Auxuman plans to put out a new full-length album, featuring hot up-and-coming artists like Yona, Mony, Gemini, Hexe, and Zoya, every single month. Before this goes any further, don't worry: You're not hopelessly out of touch with today's pop music. Well, at least not in the sense that you could meet them and shake their hands.

Here's what you need to know as you start your day ... Red-state Dems worried Trump impeachment push will kill hopes of retaking Senate in 2020 Some red-state Senate Democrats are fretting that the ongoing House impeachment inquiry could expand uncontrollably and become a "kitchen sink" of complaints about President Trump and hurt chances of regaining the Senate majority in 2020, Fox News has learned. Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana specifically expressed concerns and have told Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., that leadership cannot allow liberal Democrats to push for the inquiry to include allegations about Trump illegally using his office to enrich himself or relitigate findings from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe of Russian election meddling in 2016. In other developments: Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani said Tuesday he's considering individual lawsuits against House Democrats for allegedly violating the constitutional and civil rights of the president and members of his administration amid new congressional inquiries and subpoenas resulting from a whistleblower's complaint. Eliot Engel, Adam Schiff and Elijah Cummings, the Democratic chairmen of three House committees, informed the State Department in a letter late Tuesday that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appears to have a "conflict of interest" and might now be a "fact witness" in their ongoing impeachment inquiry, after Pompeo accused Dems of trying to "bully" foreign service officers into testifying. Eric Holder says Barr is'paying a price' by spearheading a probe of the Russia investigation Former Attorney General Eric Holder told Fox News on Tuesday that current Attorney General William Barr "is paying a price" and sacrificing his credibility by spearheading U.S. Attorney John Durham's ongoing probe into possible misconduct by the intelligence community at the outset of the Russia investigation.

Language," the Beat writer William S. Burroughs supposedly once exclaimed, "is a virus from outer space." Burroughs was making a metaphorical extrapolation about the ways in which words, phrases, idioms, sentences, lines, and narratives can seemingly rewire our brains; how literature has the power to reprogram a mind just as a virus can alter the DNA of its host. Such a concept holds that more than just a simple means of expressing and communicating ideas, language is its own potent agent, a force that actually has the ability to shape the world, often in ways that we're unconscious of and with an almost autonomous sense of itself. As with something biological, language is capable of infecting, of propagating and spreading, of indelibly marking its host. In Burroughs' characteristically experimental 1962 novel The Ticket that Exploded, he writes that "Word is an organism… a parasitic organism that invades and damages."

There's not much to do in Virginia. I'm sitting in a diner watching as a waitress drops the bill on the table and my FBI partner gets up to leave. I pick up the bill, then – jump! I'm standing outside a house watching as a man opens the door and my partner holds up her badge. I hold up my own, then – jump!

Bob Greifeld works in an industry where fractions of a second matter. Still, that hasn't stopped the longtime CEO of Nasdaq from taking a workman-like approach to his job. Dan DeFrancesco talks to Greifeld about his journey to Nasdaq, and what he's learned along the way. Bob Greifeld fits the traditional profile of a capital markets CEO. He's well spoken, intelligent and quick-witted.

NEWS ANALYSIS: The sadly embarrassing end to Microsoft's public experiment with a chatbot that would mirror millennial attitudes provides some critical lessons about designing machine learning systems. Imagine if you will that Edgar Rice Burroughs had taught his famous character Tarzan how to type and then dropped him into a room with nothing but a computer attached to Twitter. That computer would be the young Tarzan's only window to the outside world. You'll remember that Burroughs' fictional Tarzan (the character in the book, not the movie Tarzan who yodeled among jungle greenery) was a very fast learner who had limited context with which to judge humanity. If you think of Microsoft's Tay machine learning project as being roughly equivalent to Tarzan, it makes it easier to understand what happened when Microsoft had to take its teenaged chatbot off the Internet after the Web's creepier denizen's taught it to spew anti-Semitic rants.