All posts tagged: narrative

Tesla pushes back on Autopilot narrative after fatal Texas crash

Tesla pushes back on Autopilot narrative after fatal Texas crash

Published by skeptic

A fatal crash in which a Tesla plowed through a brick home in Katy, Texas, killing a 76-year-old woman, set off alarms about the company’s driver-assistance technology. By Monday afternoon, Tesla was fighting back against the framing. The crash occurred Friday night when a Tesla Model 3, driven by Michael Butler, left the road and slammed into the home of Martha Avila, who was airlifted to a hospital and later pronounced dead. Butler told Harris County sheriff’s deputies that the vehicle was on Autopilot at the time. That detail spread quickly, and by the weekend the story had become the centerpiece of long-running debate over Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (Supervised) driver-assistance systems. But Tesla, a company that famously dismantled its PR department years ago, broke from its usual silence Monday to push back. Ashok Elluswamy, vice president of AI software at Tesla and the first engineer hired for the Autopilot team back in 2014, took to X to offer a very different account of what the data showed. “In this case, the driver manually …

How to Locate Your Own Hero’s Journey Narrative

How to Locate Your Own Hero’s Journey Narrative

Published by Jenni Sidey

From epic poets onward, storytellers have understood their art’s clarifying function as boiling events down to their essence and underscoring what’s most vital. Narratives “connect certain elements. They go, ‘That thing I did five years ago led me to who I am today,’” says Boston College management professor Benjamin Rogers. “That’s the power of the way we tell our stories.” Tracing our own personal narratives, Rogers has found, not only adds meaning to our lives — it helps us align our day-to-day choices with clear guiding principles when life gets tough. Rogers has spent years studying the role life narratives play in helping people understand not just what matters to them, but how their guiding focus came to be. He’s discovered that the “hero’s journey” story structure is especially good at revealing the central themes that animate people’s lives. Sometimes known as a “monomyth,” a hero’s journey story features a character who sets out on an adventure, triumphs over obstacles along the way, and comes back transformed, bringing something valuable back to the community. Classic …

At London Gallery Weekend, Dealers Fight Narrative of City’s Decline

At London Gallery Weekend, Dealers Fight Narrative of City’s Decline

Published by Jenni Sidey

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday. Last Thursday, in a basement at No. 9 Cork Street in Mayfair, mega-dealer Thaddaeus Ropac was on hand to launch the 2026 edition of London Gallery Weekend (LGW). The occasion was a panel discussion with Pale Horse Gallery cofounder Emma Hodgson and Kate MacGarry, who runs an eponymous space in Shoreditch. The on-the-nose title: “How is London’s contemporary commercial gallery scene thriving in times of flux?” Related Articles The flux is real. Over the weekend, news that Pace Gallery—which operates eight locations worldwide—had cut 50 staff members and dropped 50 artists was ringing in everyone’s ears. Today, the Financial Times reported that the mega-gallery is also planning to downsize its London operation. A decade on from the Brexit vote, and two years since the Labour Party retook power under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the UK economy remains shaky. New tax rules instituted last year have led many of the ultra-wealthy to leave London; many top …

Evil in Narrative Fiction | Blog of the APA

Evil in Narrative Fiction | Blog of the APA

Published by Jenni Sidey

Imagine you read Kant. You may disagree with him, you may be bored by his style, but you will persevere, for after all, he has important things to say. Now imagine any narrative fiction: You read a novel, watch a movie or TV series, or read a comic. It has something important to say, yet if you’re bored, you will probably close the book or switch off whatever device you’re using. This makes narrative fiction different from other texts. It is not that narrative fiction is not interested in truth. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum will tell you that novels explore complex ethical situations better than philosophical treatises. But they will not do so at the expense of their first aim, which is keeping readers engaged. Evil is constitutive of the kind of ethical situations Nussbaum considers, and, like narrative, it keeps us hooked. We’re fascinated by evil, and so evil is perfect for narrative fiction and engagement. In narrative, evil comes in all shapes: the evil of Elizabeth’s younger sister in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice …

The Work of Feeling | Raven Leilani

The Work of Feeling | Raven Leilani

Published by Jenni Sidey

In Love, two women fight until they understand their fighting as a pretense to touch. The fighting is a kind of intimacy, an annual rite of slapping, biting, and hair-pulling that eventually gives way to a “realization that the fights did nothing other than allow them to hold each other.” The epiphany that they are longing to hold each other is eclipsed by a more creative violence. In lieu of brawling, there are stolen rings and invocations of traumatic history that divert them away from the need to be held. For decades they live and age alongside each other in this way, hurting each other more inventively, unable to transcend the poor contact of fighting in favor of real, tender contact until the last pages, when they are allowed the full epiphany of an embrace. As Toni Morrison put it in an interview about this novel, an epiphany amounts to a happy ending for her characters because “they’re not stupid anymore.” It’s funny, but also a generous conception of closure, and also of narrative, which …

Milken-adjacent Power100 aims to reclaim the finance DEI narrative

Milken-adjacent Power100 aims to reclaim the finance DEI narrative

Published by Sam Flores

CEO Jacob Walthour, Kourtney Gibson and The 49th Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris onstage at the 2026 Power100 Honoree Dinner at Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel on May 3, 2026 in Beverly Hills, California. Arnold Turner | Getty Images The Power100 gathering on the sidelines of the Milken Institute Global Conference took on a different tone this year as its diverse leaders in finance attendees fight to reclaim the narrative about people of color and women. “We are trying to show the world what success looks like,” said Jacob Walthour, co-founder of Power100 and founder and CEO of Blueprint Capital. “And over the course of the last year, what success looks like has been redefined in a way that has not been respectful and not truthful about the contributions of women and people of color.” President Donald Trump, who campaigned on and speaks often about rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion measures in both the federal government and the private sector, was not mentioned at the conference, but the impact of …

Archie Rand on Painting, Narrative, and the Influence of Philip Guston

Archie Rand on Painting, Narrative, and the Influence of Philip Guston

Published by José Betancourt

How do you know when a painting is finished? It’s a question asked of so many painters, many of whom struggle to come up with an answer. When I posed it to Archie Rand during a conversation in his Brooklyn studio, he stood up from his lounge chair and walked toward an easel on which sat a half-finished work. In it, a dapper street vendor sells ceramics from a wooden board balanced on his head. Two children watch him from behind while, in one sliver of the background on the top left side of the picture, a blazing red sunset overruns the sky. “You know what the most important part of this painting is?” he asked. “This, right here.” He pointed to the top of left of the picture, where the building that serves as the painting’s background meets the crimson sky.  Related Articles A recently finished painting in Archie Rand’s studio. Photo by Christopher Garcia Vale/ARTnews. Why? “Because I want to go around here and find out what’s around the corner. Where are these …

The deconstruction narrative has a rage problem. Taylor Tomlinson has the antidote.

The deconstruction narrative has a rage problem. Taylor Tomlinson has the antidote.

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — In 2006, the Reverend Barbara Brown Taylor published “Leaving Church,” a memoir of such quiet, luminous precision that it felt less like a departure than a deeper conversion into the world. It was a mid-life reckoning with a vocation, written by a woman who had stayed in the room long enough to earn the right to turn out the lights. Two decades later, the leaving-church narrative has been downgraded from a high-stakes spiritual crisis to a mandatory merit badge for red-state kids who self-sort into blue metro areas and dream of being writers. New York publishing still handsomely rewards the best versions of this genre. But the sheer volume of lesser entries has created the fantasy that rage pays. It rarely does for long. If you listen to the current crop of “deconstruction” memoirists — many of whom are barely out of their twenties — you would think that a sexually conservative household is a crime scene rather than a typical American Christian upbringing. It’s a trope that validates a certain brand of progressive politics …

Namwali Serpell on Toni Morrison, Criticism, and Narrative Empathy | Namwali Serpell, Jarrett Earnest

Namwali Serpell on Toni Morrison, Criticism, and Narrative Empathy | Namwali Serpell, Jarrett Earnest

Published by Jenni Sidey

In this episode of Private Life, the writer and New York Review contributor Namwali Serpell joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss her new book, On Morrison, a collection of essays about Toni Morrison and her work.  Click the “Subscribe” link in the player above to follow this podcast on your favorite listening platform. Their conversation covers Morrison’s life as a literary eminence and public intellectual, but the focus is Serpell’s close-readings of her most famous novels—including Jazz (1992), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved(1987), and Tar Baby (1981)—as well as her poetry, criticism, and later books. Earnest also asks Serpell about her essay “The Banality of Empathy,” about the concept of narrative empathy, which was published in the Review’s March 2, 2019, issue.   Namwali Serpell is a professor of English at Harvard University. In addition to On Morrison, she is the author of the novels The Old Drift (2019) and The Furrows (2022) and the essay collection Stranger Faces (2020). She has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 2017, when she wrote “Kenya in Another Tongue,” about a new edition of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 1980 novel Devil on a Cross. Serpell is also a …