3+ day, 20+ hour ago (506+ words) Fill "er up next to highland cows and a giant soda bottle Punny shirts are a big seller at Barack Obama Plaza EddieWorld is on the busy route between Los Angeles and Las Vegas If you see a giant ice cream sundae covered in sprinkles and topped with a cherry, you"re in the right place. This 70-foot sculpture (it"s built on top of a water tank) greets visitors to EddieWorld, the largest gas station in California. Its market and food area is also massive, filled with rows of candies, chocolates, nuts and dried food and stations where you can order fresh pizza, sushi, burgers, sandwiches, coffee, homemade popcorn and jerky. Take your treat to eat on the road, or stay awhile and dine on the patio (be sure to check out the Los Angeles Lakers memorabilia on display…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago (487+ words) New book argues that the algorithm has killed creative originality Music is blending into an algorithm-generated playlist, cinema is dominated by blockbuster movies from decades-old franchises, and the rest of the cultural scene is as flat and bland as a pancake. "Omnivorism" is "one of the primary culprits" that Marx identifies. When "country, R&B, hip-hop and classic rock become interchangeable bits to sample, rather than distinct musical styles", then "nothing stands out". He thinks "the understandable desire to cross musical boundaries in once-unthinkable ways has turned into a slurry of stagnation". Marx's "key point about the bland sameness" of today's art "will resonate with anybody who has a hard time remembering when a new song made them perk up, pay attention and realise they have never heard anything like that before". This century "looks likely to go down in…...

4+ day, 13+ hour ago (581+ words) Imagining " and fearing " the future continues to give us compelling and thoughtful television A generation ago, sci-fi aficionados were lucky if there were one or two remotely watchable shows released a year. Today, the streaming economy serves up a reliable supply of lavishly produced, inventive science fiction. It includes many shows, like the tremendous new Apple TV+ release "Pluribus," that carry on the tradition of great speculative storytelling. The crew's encounters with the terrifying hive mind race the Borg were among the best. That's why "almost anyone would appreciate the smart, original storytelling" of the show's seven seasons, said Phelim O'Neill at The Guardian. It was a "less violent, more cerebral show, with a cast of rare chemistry and ability." (Paramount+) The third season was a particularly incisive commentary on the U.S. invasion of Iraq. A "thrifty U.S./UK co-production peppered with…...

3+ week, 4+ day ago (443+ words) A personal, scholarly wander through a singular cuisine Telling your personal narrative through food is a common cookbook trope. Taking an anthropological wander through a peoples" " or country"s " food culture is another prevailing cookbook methodology. Less ubiquitous is an author who merges the two, swiveling a mirror to look at both themself and their ancestral background. Niloufer Ichaporia King"s 2007 masterpiece, "My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking," might be the exemplar of this double-vision. Across the book"s 300-plus pages, King tells the story of the Parsis, a group of Persians who practiced Zoroastrianism thousands of years ago and were persecuted after the Arab-Islamic conquest of Persia. As the persecuted often do, the Parsis fled. Many landed on the western coast of what is now India. This meant, for King"s family, establishing themselves in Bombay,…...

2+ week, 2+ day ago (335+ words) A greedy gull, the fall of AI, and more Tourists feed black-headed gulls at the Haigeng Dam in Kunming, China Stargazers gather to watch the Southern Lights illuminating the night sky at Gerroa Headland in Kiama, Australia Protesters clash with security forces in an attempt to storm the COP30 headquarters in Belem, Brazil A Buddhist prays at the Bongeunsa Temple as students sit for the annual college entrance exam in Seoul, South Korea A southern lapwing stands next to the race track during the qualifying session of the Formula One Grand Prix in S'o Paulo, Brazil The first Russian anthropomorphic robot 'AIDOL' falls on stage during the presentation in Moscow, Russia A boy inspects burnt copies of the Quran inside a mosque that was torched and defaced by Israeli settlers in the West Bank An aerial view of graffiti protesting the…...

2+ week, 3+ day ago (471+ words) This month's new releases include "Wicked: For Good,' "Die My Love' and "Train Dreams' November movies oscillate in size. There are big budgets and complex musical numbers alongside small, quiet and contemplative tales. One aspect this month's new releases have in common: They all feature someone battling something, whether it be the loss of their way of life, their own hormone-addled brain or a fantastical despot. Jennifer Lawrence stepped away from the limelight for several years, with the brief exception of the 2023 sex comedy "No Hard Feelings," to focus on her marriage and life as a new mother. It is apt, then, that her return is marked by "Die My Love," a film about a young woman named Grace who begins to experience postpartum psychosis. It has often been said that the hardest part of a veteran's life is the…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago (638+ words) From workplace satire to family dysfunction, nothing is sacred for these renowned, boundary-pushing comedies The better-known American remake toned down this caustic British original, which ran for just two seasons and a two-part "Christmas special" denouement. Ricky Gervais plays David Brent, the office manager of a middling paper company in Slough whose crippling insecurity manifests as constant, cringey manipulation of his exasperated employees. The 8 best dark comedies of the 21st century Tim Robinson falls out of a chair, chefs compete for Michelin stars and Martin Scorsese gets the documentary treatment in October TV The best comedy series to stream right now But because Dory barely knew Chantal, it's clear that the "search" is really a stand-in for the hollowness at the core of these characters. The "pitch-black" show's ultimate target is the "tendency to confuse the ego-stroking virtual busywork of the…...

2+ week, 1+ day ago (412+ words) This year's festive offering is full of 1990s nostalgia " but are hedonistic raves really the spirit of Christmas? Over the past 18 years, the launch of the John Lewis Christmas advert has established itself as a key point in the UK's festive calendar, said Ed Davies in the FT. The ads are, of course, designed to be miniature weepies " to create a warm fuzzy feeling towards Britain's favourite department store; but for many fathers of teenage boys (and some mothers too), this year's has hit especially hard. So yes, it's a shameless tearjerker, but it also taps into an urgent national conversation about the crisis in boyhood, sparked in part by the TV drama "Adolescence. The masculinity crisis is not a very festive theme, said Jan Moir in the Daily Mail. And the whole ad is weirdly disturbing, said Simon Mills in…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago (582+ words) True stories, social commentary and pure escapism highlight these great robbery movies Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) are the glamorous outlaws based on the true story of the bank-robbing, kidnapping duo that terrorized the Dust Bowl between 1932 and 1934. Bonnie is a waitress who falls in with small-time criminal Clyde, as they set off a multi-state crime spree that was front-page national news. Thieves nab French crown jewels from Louvre From Da Vinci to a golden toilet: a history of museum heists Frauds: "fantastically stylish" heist caper is "damn good fun" Director Kathryn Bigelow (whose new nuclear thriller "A House of Dynamite" is currently streaming on Netflix) delivers a "celebration not only of the spectacular pleasures of surfing and skydiving and chasing bank robbers" but also of the "remarkably visceral extremes that violence itself can achieve when…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago (692+ words) Sluggish growth and rising unemployment are ringing alarm bells for economists The UK's unemployment rate hit 5% last week, the highest since the Covid-19 pandemic and higher than most analysts had predicted. The Office for National Statistics figures, although in some dispute because of concerns over the quality of the data, indicate a weakening jobs market and slowing wage growth. Taking out the "skewed levels" of the pandemic years, the current unemployment rate is "the highest seen since August 2016", said the BBC. Two days after the unemployment numbers, it was revealed that GDP grew by only 0.1% in the third quarter of this year. The sluggish growth and rising unemployment rate are ringing alarm bells for economists about the risk that the UK will soon be entering a recession. And last week's unemployment stats "caught most economists on the hop" " they "weren't…...