The story has come to an end for NaNoWriMo. In a message to its community, the 501(c)(3) organization announced that it was “begin[ning] the process of shutting down” after “six years of struggling to sustain itself financially.” Founded in 2006, the nonprofit grew out of the popular “National Novel Writing Month” online event, which began in 1999 and challenged participants to complete a 50,000-word rough draft within the month of November.
In its email, as well as an attached, nearly 30-minute-long video, the organization cited “the funding woes that have threatened so many nonprofits” as a major factor behind its decision. That isn’t the only controversy the organization has faced in recent years, however. In 2024, it managed to piss off a large swath of the literary community by suggesting that condemnation of AI tools in writing circles had “classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions about privilege” in a since-deleted blog post. The organization attempted several times to amend and clarify its original statement, but the damage had been done. Prominent authors like Roxane Gay, Erin Morgenstern, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia condemned the stance on social media, while writers like Maureen Johnson and Daniel José Older resigned from the nonprofit’s board in protest. Around the same time, the organization also faced scrutiny over the moderation of its forums, which caused some concern for the safety of minors participating in the annual challenge as well as the community at large.
Of course, this doesn’t mean aspiring writers can’t challenge themselves to finish a novel in November or support each other through other community platforms—they’ll just have to do it without the assistance of NaNoWriMo’s word tracking software. “This is not the ending that anybody wanted or planned. And—believe us—if we could hit the delete button and rewrite this last chapter, we would,” the organization wrote in its email. “But we do have hope for the epilogue.” Maybe this one will be written without the help of AI.
If you ask someone to recommend some anime—or, bless you, you’re doing the recommending—chances are that Cowboy Bebop will be mentioned. The beloved 1998 series, helmed by Shinichirō Watanabe and from the studio Sunrise, will also likely be on the minds of those who watch that director’s latest creation, Lazarus. Animated by artists at MAPPA studio (known for Chainsaw Man and Jujutsu Kaisen), it cultivates a similar vibe from its very opening sequence, which was directed by Watanabe himself. The jazzy score from Kamasi Washington, choices of color, and the silhouetted images of one of its lead characters doing some roundhouse kicks feels very deliberately designed to make you think of the chaos and cool of Bebop.
But if anyone has earned the right toplay the hits, it’s Watanabe. To this point the director has never really rested on his creative laurels, following up Bebop with different but equally stylish works like Samurai Champloo, a samurai series soundtracked by hip-hop. Then came shows such as Space Dandy (co-directed with Shingo Watanabe) and Kids On The Slope, Terror In Resonance, and Carole & Tuesday (co-directed with Motonobu Hori). Even as these shows contained references to past work, they always felt like they were looking forward. And that extends to Lazarus, which has many more things to say beyond “remember how cool ‘‘Tank!‘ was?”
The show concerns a race against the clock, with the first episode noting that there are “29 days left.” It’s set in 2055, a future which feels just slightly out of reach but close enough. An enigmatic scientist named Dr. Skinner created a miracle drug named Hapna, which both dulled pain and cured a range of illnesses and even acted as a bit of a high. It makes everyone happy, and there’s relative peace and stability. Skinner vanishes for three years before re-emerging and announcing to the world that the drug will kill everyone who has taken it in 30 days. In response, a clandestine group, Lazarus, puts together a secret team of ex-convicts with the skills to find and catch Skinner in time, operating under the promise of commuted sentences. (It’s funny that this arrives on Adult Swim barely a couple of weeks after the end of Common Side Effects, which also concerns a conspiracy around a cure-all drug.)
In the five (of 13) episodes provided to critics, Lazarus hasn’t yet dived super deep into the psychology driving these characters. But there is something that steers this new group of social outcasts away from their Bebop counterparts. The restlessness and daredevil attitude of Axel (voiced by Jack Stansbury in the English dub) comes from time spent homeless and in prison. (He’s a young punk rather than the heartbroken gangster Spike used to be.) Doug (Jovan Jackson), in a conversation with a trans woman leading a tent city for homeless people, mentions that he had a ceiling put on his career simply for being Black. In one of the monologues that opens each episode, Elena (Annie Wild) speaks equally frankly about her depression and how it led her to take Hapna, but she received it at artificially inflated prices. They’re all charming too. The tech wizard Leland (Bryson Baugus) is amusingly out of his depth with spycraft, while, so far, Chris (Luci Christian) is a playful spin on the femme-fatale archetypes that Watanabe has used in the past. Through them all, the show makes a point that even this miraculous cure-all drug couldn’t automatically fix everything, not while the old systems are still in place and resisting change.
The drug and the chase for its cure are mostly a jumping-off points to hold a magnifying glass up to a world shaped by human capital. The Hapna crisis is already an analogue for the opioid one, and Watanabe was partly inspired to create the show because his favorite musicians were dying from overdoses. Skinner’s announcement of his drug being lethal is motivated by misanthropic despair. Even in this futuristic setting, prejudice thrives. Companies still have their fingers in their ears over climate change. The wealth gap is bigger than ever, evident in the series’ smart and incisive art direction, which places the beautiful, twisting white spires and webs of futuristic transport directly alongside run-down slums and tent cities.
Plus, Lazarus makes a satirical farce out of how we might react to end times, which so far appears to be business as usual. When a late-night talk-show host needles a pop star about no one being alive next month to listen to her new album, she fires back that people will also no longer have to suffer his terrible jokes. The press camps out on Skinner’s lawn to interview his gardener, resorting to tabloid sensationalism in trying to pick apart his social life rather than put their resources towards actually finding him. Lazarus uses these comedic asides to paint a picture of why the philanthropic Skinner might be so disillusioned as to simply end everything.
The show doesn’t just have morose reflections on the medical industry and environmental crisis. As the concept of Lazarus began from Watanabe’s musical interests, that fondness for international artistry is present in every moment of the series, which boasts a soundtrack by Kamasi Washington, Floating Points, and Bonobo. Each distinct sound is exciting to hear in the context of the show, whether it’s Washington or Floating Points propelling an action sequence or Bonobo’s more atmospheric leanings underlining each episode’s reflective opening narration.
The first episode, “Goodbye Cruel World,” is a little lighter on those themes than the ones that follow. Instead, it’s a fast-paced and action-focused introduction to the Lazarus team as it pursues Axel to become a member. After being offered a fresh start through his recruitment, Axel reveals he’s renowned for breaking out of prison and promptly escapes, leading his future teammates on a merry chase through Babylonia City. It’s electrifying and sets the tone for the show’s winking humor and impactful action sequences, which were handled by John Wick director Chad Stahelski,
The gun-fu and grappling style Stahelski honed on the John Wick films feels right at home with Watanabe’s kind of action, which has always emphasized a realistic sense of weight. Even with the gravity-defying theatrics of Axel’s fighting, there’s a real consideration of how momentum plays into these moves. The first episode might be the most sustained showcase of action, but the fourth installment, “Don’t Stop The Dance,” is also a standout. Written by Cowboy Bebop‘s Dai Sato and storyboarded by Akihiko Yamashita, it’s handily the most personable episode as most of the team is taken outside of their comfort zone, forced to get close to a sleazy tech billionaire through his club. When the fighting inevitably starts, Yamashita and director Kazuo Miyakelet loose, showing some fun chemistry between the team as these characters work in tandem—and, in some cases, literally dance together through the battle.
This is all to say that Lazarus doesn’t coast on its credentials, either of Watanabe’s past work or those of the show’s starry collaborators. And in the episodes made available, it feels like there is plenty of room to grow and complicate this story as the bigger picture is still pretty unclear. But luckily, what hasn’t changed from Cowboy Bebop is Watanabe’s sense of style and interest in using animation to depict and empower people who have fallen through the cracks.
In a truly inspiring display of speaking tiny, baby-voiced mewls to power, the White House Correspondents Association has announced that it’s dumping previously announced comedian Amber Ruffin from its upcoming White House Correspondents Dinner. Although the letter announcing the decision, from WHCA President Eugene Daniels, put a lot of emphasis on wanting “to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division,” these are not especially hard lines to read between: This is a pretty clear case of trying to court Donald Trump, who hates the Dinner, will never attend it, and also hates everything it represents—both journalistic freedom as a wider principle, and the more specific idea that it’s occasionally useful to have someone funny stand up on the national stage and tell some jokes about all the ways the people who run the country suck shit. Seems like a weird person to throw away a core part of your event’s identity to try to placate, but hey, what do we know?
For years, the WHCD has been one of the premiere political comedy gigs in America, a chance for the national spleen to get vented (and for sitting presidents to at least give lip service to the idea of having a sense of humor about themselves). Trump blew that precedent up during his first term in office, avoiding the event all four years of his original term, before Joe Biden resumed the tradition. Now, though, the WHCA is apparently in the mood to preemptively capitulate, announcing that it’s not only dumping Ruffin—whose political comedy knives got sharpened during a long tenure as a writer and frequent performer on Late Night With Seth Meyers, before helming The Amber Ruffin Show from 2020 to 2022—but the whole idea of having a comedian at the dinner at all. Instead, the focus will be “entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work and providing scholarship and mentorship to the next generation of journalists,” i.e., those bits you idly checked your phone during while watching previous dinners on C-SPAN.
Per Deadline, there was no chance in hell that Trump was going to attend the Dinner anyway, with rumors circulating that some of his supporters are organizing a competing event that we’re sure will be an absolute laugh riot. Which brings us back to a question we keep asking every time some supposedly firm institution goes all pudding-spined in response to Trump’s second term: If you don’t even get anything for rolling over for him, what’s the point of kneeling at all? The White House Correspondents Dinner spent years building its reputation as a place where one of America’s key freedoms was lionized; now it’s just the place where bored journalists eat chicken and give each other awards while looking over their shoulders nervously to make sure Daddy’s not too mad.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Staff at the Federal Trade Commission have been instructed to no longer refer to the agency as "independent" in complaints, according to an email obtained by The Verge.
Split keyboards are the best, but no company offered one that satisfied me completely. This lead me down the path of DIY electronics, and I've never been the same since.
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