PFBNOW ADVENTURES!

    Musk's record $56bn pay deal rejected for second time. Tesla chief executive Elon Musk's record-breaking $56bn (£47bn) pay award will not be reinstated, a judge has ruled. The decision in the Delaware court comes after months of legal wrangling and despite it being approved by shareholders and directors in the summer. Judge Kathaleen McCormick upheld her previous decision from January, in which she argued that board members were too heavily influenced by Mr Musk. Reacting to the ruling, Mr Musk wrote on X: "[S]hareholders should control company votes, not judges."

 

  The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him, it’s a term of great respect, meaning a performer who’s highly skilled, versatile, creative, smart—qualities especially important for Leigh’s actors, who create his films with him, from plot to dialogue. “Hard Truths” is Leigh’s first new film in six years. It’s a return to Leigh’s classic form: a contemporary, intimate ensemble drama exploring regular people’s lives. His famously rigorous and collaborative writing process, often drawing on a trusted cadre of recurring actor-collaborators, involves conversation, improvisation, and extensive preparation and rehearsal, from which a script of sorts is memorized by the cast but never written down. “On many films, umpteen takes happen, because the actors aren’t grounded. They can’t remember their lines, or there’s been no rehearsal, or they’re still looking for the character. But on ours that virtually never happens,” h...

  Andrew Tarlow is known for Brooklyn spots with low lighting, tattooed servers, and hunks of meat. Now, across the East River for the first time, he shifts the vibe toward stately elegance at the restaurant Borgo. The menu is very grown up—fundamentally Italian, as much of the cooking in the Tarlow universe is, and built around a live-fire oven that crackles in the open kitchen, which fills the front section of one of the restaurant’s two rooms, Helen Rosner writes. The recitation-as-gimmick, too, is echoed at Borgo in an elaborate tableside preparation of the Martini No. 2, whose impeccably artisanal components arrive via wheeled cart and are jiggered and poured into something smooth and Vesper-like, with hints of tomato and a little zing from the skewered garnish of pickled aji dulce peppers. The kitchen’s wood-burning oven is used to cook, among other things, the “focaccia Borgo,” an unassuming disk of bronze-blistered flatbread that, like an Italian quesadilla, hides a layer o...

 

 

  Donald Trump has promised to exact revenge on elected officials and political opponents, along with members of the so-called deep state. He has chosen Kash Patel, a close ally who has talked about going after Trump’s enemies, to lead the F.B.I. This has caused people at the White House to wonder whether pardons are the only way to protect potential targets, who include the former chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci and the former F.B.I. deputy director Andrew McCabe. Members of the Biden Administration are considering offering pardons to a number of current and former members of the government who may find themselves unfairly prosecuted by the incoming President. To analyze the benefits and drawbacks of pardoning people in Trump’s crosshairs, Isaac Chotiner recently spoke with Rachel Barkow, a professor at the N.Y.U. School of Law and an expert on criminal law and mass incarceration. During their conversation, they discussed the practical difficulties of trying to protect people ...

  “Translation is something of the runt of the literary litter, more often perceived as grunt work than art work,” Max Norman writes. “Its practitioners have rarely received attention for anything other than screwing up.” But what do translators do? newyorker.com What Does a Translator Do? Damion Searls, who has translated a Nobel laureate, believes his craft isn’t about transforming or reflecting a text. It’s about conjuring one’s experience of it.

  “Looking at people had become too stressful, too painful. War, greed, abject idiocy—I was sick of them. And it seemed to me that I wasn’t the only one experiencing this malaise,” Naomi Fry writes. “We needed animals to distract us, even save us.” newyorker.com The Animals That Made It All Worth It This year, it was hard to feel good about humans. Moo Deng, Crumbs, and Pilaf kept us sane.

  “Can the C.E.O. class drop its indifference to the suffering and death of ordinary people? Is it possible to do so while achieving record quarterly profits for your stakeholders, in perpetuity?” Jia Tolentino writes about Brian Thompson’s murder, and the reaction to it.

  “A true friend sticks with you through thick and thin. But is any of that really possible or fair?” Weike Wang considers the challenges of friendship, and how they change over the years. newyorker.com The Trouble with Friends The wonder and the curse of friendship is choice.

  “There is no one better than Dafydd [Jones] at capturing the moments of privileged pretension,” Tina Brown writes. See more of the photographer’s images of England in the 1980s. Quote - All men UK. Avid. newyorker.com The Photographer Who Captured England’s Last Hurrah On the eve of the coronation, a look at the photographs of Dafydd Jones, whose party shots of Britain’s Bright Young Things are the pictorial equivalents of Evelyn Waugh’s sentences.

  The backstory of the couple who created Curious George—fleeing Paris as the Nazis invaded—casts the dream logic of the stories in a new light.

  Rereading Joan Didion, “you find her astringency relentless, undimmed by age,” Zadie Smith writes. “Maybe this is why it remains easier to look at pictures of Didion than to read her. The look is undoubtedly a vibe. But the reading is a dissection.” newyorker.com Joan Didion and the Opposite of Magical Thinking You didn’t have to agree with her, but you had to submit to her sentences.