All posts tagged: Short

Run-A-Muck Pushes Into Short Stories With Sights Set on Adaptation

Run-A-Muck Pushes Into Short Stories With Sights Set on Adaptation

Published by Daniella Wilson

Media startup Run-A-Muck is going all in on short stories.   The company, co-founded by Condé Nast alum Pamela Drucker Mann, is set to launch short stories on its ad-supported culture and fashion Substack, Drafting, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.   The move comes along with the company’s bet that the material could be the next major source of intellectual property for film, television, podcasts and other multimedia projects. They plan to adapt successful works across multiple platforms.   “Rather than starting with a medium and searching for an audience, we start with the story we want to tell and then determine the format that best serves that story,” Drucker Mann told WSJ.   Several notable writers have already signed up to publish on the platform. Among them are Cody Behan — writer of short story “The Decorator,” which is set to be adapted for Netflix — and Abbott Elementary writer and director Brittani Nichols.  Adaptation is not the entire goal of the push into shorter fiction, however. Some stories posted on the platform will simply remain in that form. “Not everything we create is destined to become a television series or feature film,” Drucker Mann added.   Drafting, Run-A-Muck’s seven-month-old Substack publication, attracts more than 50,000 monthly readers. Hermès, Moncler and eBay are reportedly among the publication’s advertisers — former Wondery and Google sales …

A Short History of the Psychoanalytic Hospital

A Short History of the Psychoanalytic Hospital

Published by Jenni Sidey

When most people think of psychoanalysis, they probably imagine a patient lying on a couch in a private office. Yet for much of the twentieth century, some of the most influential psychoanalytic work occurred not in outpatient practice but within psychiatric hospitals. These institutions attempted something that now seems almost unimaginable: the treatment of severe mental illness through long-term psychotherapy, human relationships, and carefully constructed therapeutic communities. Although psychoanalytic hospitals varied considerably in their approaches, they shared a common conviction that symptoms have meaning and that understanding the person behind the diagnosis is essential to treatment. At their best, these institutions became world-leading centers for the study of psychopathology and training grounds for generations of psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and psychoanalysts. The rise of psychoanalytic hospitals reflected the broader influence of psychoanalytic thinking in American psychiatry during the mid-twentieth century. As biological psychiatry and managed care came to dominate the field in the latter decades of the century, many of these institutions either closed, transformed themselves, or abandoned their original missions. Yet their legacy continues to influence …

Camila McConaughey’s super short hair transformation sends fans wild – see photo

Camila McConaughey’s super short hair transformation sends fans wild – see photo

Published by Daniella Wilson

Camila McConaughey may now be synonymous with her long, luscious raven locks, but there was a time when she embraced an edgy pixie cut that completely transformed her look. The 43-year-old took to Instagram on June 3 to share a throwback photograph of her daring hairstyle. The snap captured Camila during her time hosting the television show Shear Genius. She wore a silver mini dress featuring a sleeveless design and an embellished bodice, which she layered over a pair of black leather pants with a sleek, contoured silhouette. Completing the look was an ultra-short bob with full bangs. “Hoo my…showed up on my camera memories! Hosting the TV Show Shear Genius I took on the challenge!! something I never thought I could do! With my English at the time…reading teleprompters were a challenge too! I did it ! pixie hair and everything! and man I learned so much and had so much fun! So many hair styles… I will try to find more!” she penned in the caption. © InstagramCamila McConaughey with a bob cut …

“The Value Didn’t Arrive”: Bain Finds Cost-Savings From AI Are Falling Far Short Of Projections

“The Value Didn’t Arrive”: Bain Finds Cost-Savings From AI Are Falling Far Short Of Projections

Published by Jenni Sidey

Now that attention within the AI revolution has one again firmly turned toward the cost-benefit equation (i..e., ROI) of tokens (see “From Singularity To Tokenomics: The AI Narrative Just Hit A Serious Snag”) in particular, and the trillions behind the AI spending rollout in general, and we say once again because every few months we get some iteration of the following report from Goldman published almost two years ago today… … we have more bad news: according to a global survey by Bain, cost savings from automation are broadly falling short of projections. Which means that those expecting big savings from their investments in artificial intelligence, which is most companies, will be disappointed.  The missed targets “should be making executives uncomfortable,” since many of them are approving increased spending for artificial intelligence on the basis of expected savings, the consulting firm said in a report shared exclusively with Bloomberg News. The problem is there are little actual savings to speak of.  The survey, completed in April, was based on responses from executives at 951 companies with more …

Sending short messages back in time may not break the laws of physics

Sending short messages back in time may not break the laws of physics

Published by Jenni Sidey

A message from the future sounds like science fiction, until someone starts asking how many bits it could actually carry. That is the question three physicists have now answered, using a setup inspired by Interstellar, where a father stranded near a black hole reaches back to his daughter across time. In the film, the scene plays as emotion and spectacle. In the new work, it becomes a communication problem with a hard limit, a noisy channel, and a precise mathematical answer. Kaiyuan Ji of Cornell University worked on the analysis with collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, asks what happens if information does not move forward in time as it normally does, but backward, through what physicists call a retrocausal channel. The twist is that the channel is not assumed to be perfect. It can lose information, scramble it, or distort it, just as real communication channels do. Enclosing a bipartite channel T𝐸𝐵→𝐹𝐴 with a noisy P-CTC represented by a channel N𝐴→𝐵 (Fig. 1a) is equivalent to …

Three or One or None? A Short History of the “Soul”

Three or One or None? A Short History of the “Soul”

Published by Jenni Sidey

For Aristotle (384-322 BCE), all living things had a vegetative or nutritive soul; animals also had a sensitive soul; and humans, on top of that, had a rational soul. As a result, medieval theologians and philosophers debated whether humans had a plurality of souls. To pluralists such as Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Kilwardby (c. 1215-1279), the vegetative, sensitive, and rational souls were distinct entities stacked within the human body. For Kilwardby, this served to explain how Christ’s body remained holy in the tomb after his human soul had departed. The pluralists were fiercely opposed by unitists such as St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who argued that a person with multiple souls would be no more than a bundle of parts, rather than a single, unified substance. For a short time after his death, Aquinas’s single soul “heresy” was banned in Paris and Oxford. Following centuries of debate, the unitist view, of course, came to prevail. Descartes’s Daughter The philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) completely changed the conversation. To uphold his dualism of mind and body and defend …

8 Of The Best Short Books To Read On Holiday

8 Of The Best Short Books To Read On Holiday

Published by Sam Flores

I really do mean to finish the books I take on holiday. But if I ever get accused of “performative” non-reading, I won’t have a good defence: I usually read half a page, get annoyed by the sun’s glare, and put it back down. And that’s when I can be bothered to bring my reading material with me to begin with. Bigger, bulkier books won’t realistically take priority in that jam-packed beach bag, and it’s not like my sun-addled brain is really craving massive tomes. In fact, I think knowing I probably won’t see the end of the story before I’m back in the airport puts me off a bit. So, we thought we’d round up eight short, small books under 250 pages you might actually finish on holiday (with two bonuses): 1) The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett Described as an “audacious lèse majesté” by The Guardian, this one-sitting book imagines a Queen who reads voraciously, asks her subjects “what are you reading?” instead of “how did you get here?” (a move hilariously accused …

Is the tenure of a leader becoming ‘nasty, brutish and short’?

Is the tenure of a leader becoming ‘nasty, brutish and short’?

Published by Sam Flores

When Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham announced that they intend to challenge Keir Starmer as prime minister, it felt like the start of a depressingly familiar loop. A leader who had made many great-sounding promises failed to deliver and lost the trust of the public. The public demands he quit, and he may soon be replaced by another leader who also makes impressive pledges. During the past decade the UK has seen this loop many times. There have been five leaders of the UK government – an average of one leader every two years. It is tempting to think that the rapid turnover is a quirk of the British system. It is not. People have become increasingly impatient with leaders in all walks of life – from coaches of professional sports teams to CEOs of large businesses to the leaders of political parties. In our book, The Art of Less, Mats Alvesson and I argue that an important step is giving up on some of the fantasies of leadership. For example, there are often unrealistically …

How Long (or Short) Should Your Shorts Be in 2026?

How Long (or Short) Should Your Shorts Be in 2026?

Published by Jenni Sidey

Call it the Great Shorts Divide: For the past few summers, men’s shorts have somehow been getting both shorter and longer. On one end, there’s the unmissable thigh-baring hemlines favored by Paul Mescal, Pharrell, and truly too many other famous guys to list here. On the other side, you have the slouchier, below-the-knee joints as seen on Justin Bieber, Lemaire’s runways, and the hippest dudes on the Lower East Side. Now, as temperatures crank up, the perennial menswear question returns: What’s shaping up to be the signature shorts length for summer 2026? “It’s anything goes this summer,” says Nick Wooster, the menswear power player with a weapons-grade shorts collection. That said, he believes a sweet-spot length—neither too short nor too long—is the safest bet for most guys. “Right around the knee is an easy place. It’s flattering on everyone. A seven- to nine-inch inseam is probably a length that most anyone could get on board with.” GQ contributor and fashion writer Jake Woolf echoes this advice—lately, he’s noticed himself gravitating toward a wider, longer silhouette. …