All posts tagged: assured

Mutually Assured Energy Destruction – The Atlantic

Mutually Assured Energy Destruction – The Atlantic

Published by Daniella Wilson

A few years ago in Dhahran, the Saudi state oil company, Aramco, gave me a tour of its headquarters, a facility so sparkling and orderly that one could forget that its whole purpose was to extract from the ground one of the filthiest substances on Earth. The most impressive stop on the tour was the Aramco emergency command center, which I imagine is paying its workers a lot of overtime right now. It looked like the control room for a mission to Alpha Centauri. Men and women sat at their stations. The walls were aglow with constellations of green lights—each one, my host said, representing a functioning object in the Aramco galaxy of pipelines, valves, ships, buses, heat exchangers, and drill bits. If a light flashed red, it meant one of these objects was broken, and the people at those stations would vault into action to support the crew restoring it. One major question in the current war is why Iran has so far failed, or perhaps declined, to make life miserable for the people …

“Shrinking” returns with a more assured and legitimately therapeutic second season

“Shrinking” returns with a more assured and legitimately therapeutic second season

Published by Sam Flores

Therapy rarely begins smoothly. Initial sessions tend to be colored by weeping, hesitancy and half-truths as the clinician and client get a feel for each other. You could say the same of many TV shows, but since we’re talking about “Shrinking,” surely you see parallels. Season 1 was all awkward introductions, with Jason Segel’s Jimmy Laird sticking his hand out for a nice-to-meet-you shake, with standard-issue TV wounded healer listed on his Hello My Name Is tag. Jimmy, our psychologist, is barely making it through talk therapy sessions because he’s not quite holding it together. We’re dropped into Jimmy’s life not long after his wife died, leaving him and their teen daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell) to make sense of the unthinkable. At work, his mentor Paul (Harrison Ford) acts more like a father figure toward Jimmy, and his colleague Gaby (Jessica Williams), who was also Tia’s best friend, ends up sleeping with him. All this spins around Jimmy’s wild prescriptions to his most unstable patients, including Sean (Luke Tennie), a veteran whose tour in Afghanistan left him …