Americans don’t like being lied to about the complexities of our own history. The real audience for historical whitewashing is men in power.
Ada Palmer – Writing helps us think. So many students are saying they turn to LLMs because they don’t know what to say, and need to hear that not knowing is normal as one starts to write.
Lauren O’Neal – Someone recently told me her daughter, a college freshman who’s always been a good student, read a book in class that kind of stumped her, so she used AI to brainstorm what themes to write about in her paper. Everyone in the class magically wrote about the exact same themes and had to do it over. Even if you compose the actual writing yourself, using AI to “brainstorm,” “organize,” etc. cuts off your own thoughts before they can even happen and turns you into a slop amanuensis.
(https://bsky.app/profile/laurenoneal.bsky.social/post/3mywtikjdas2b)
An amanuensis (/əˌmænjuˈɛnsɪs/ ə-MAN-yoo-EN-sis) (pl. amanuenses /əˌmænjuˈɛnsiːz/ ə-MAN-yoo-EN-seez) or scribe is a person employed to write or type what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.
You Can See Everything
Things that I think are true about this movie, and what happens in it:
- Elizabeth Holmes is playing a role for Nathan throughout their time together in the house. Her nonspecific “neuro-atypical” front seems to be specifically tailored to the kind of person that Nathan would find sympathetic, based on his interactions with other people throughout Nathan For You and The Rehearsal.
- Liz and Billy’s marriage seems to be purely mercenary, and the controlling/abusive dynamic seems engineered to garner sympathy towards her among viewers.
- Even so, it can also be true that Billy is controlling and emotionally abusive, and I think he is. Two things can be true at the same time.
- Power of attorney!?!
- Elizabeth’s completely full of shit when she says she doesn’t understand “Who’s on first?” Given what we know about how intelligent she is, the moments when she presents herself as some kind of autistic naïf are among the least convincing parts of her performance.
- She does a better job of muddying the water as to what she believed was true, re: Theranos, but the complexity and precision of her evasive language also make it clear that she fully understands what she is and isn’t saying, and the deflections and “this is a miscommunication”s just don’t hold up.
- It’s entirely possible that she wants to believe the lies that she’s telling about her business. She’s mostly an enigma, internally, but she does seem to want to be able to see herself as a good guy somehow. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t understand that she’s lying and manipulating.
- I don’t buy that Liz and Billy were unaware of Nathan’s earlier work. They seem to be prepared not just with a persona designed to ingratiate him, but with practiced conversational evasive maneuvers around his methods of questioning. There are plenty of moments where everyone involved is clearly aware of what kind of standoff they are in.
- Billy is not as good of an actor as Liz.
- Nathan may have been somewhat taken in by the persona that she played for him while they were living together. He seems to harbor some attachment to the Liz that presented herself as some kind of kindred soul to him, but he’s also playing “Nathan” while at the house. If there’s any genuine ambivalence by the end, it looks more like self-doubt and not wanting to have been fooled, even as his TV persona.
- Re: the above, the last major conversation between Nathan and Amanda (intercut with the re-enactment of the prison visit) feels engineered to present that ambivalence in a way that makes the viewer have to think about it. Note that I’m not calling it dishonest, the Amanda segments up to that point are presented with the clear intent of calling out the artifice inherent in the form they’re working with, and making you think about that as well.
- The part where she claims to never have lied as an adult, ever… “Liz, what?!”
Good pieces about the movie:
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