Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively were delightful lobbing one-liners back and forth in the 2018 noir comedy-thriller A Simple Favor. Director Paul Feig’s sequel is substantially less sharp, but fans will enjoy watching the two stars run it back as a pair of suburban moms and fake friends occupying different tax brackets. This time, Lively’s manipulative character, who ended the first movie behind bars, has roped Kendrick’s Stephanie into joining her on the island of Capri as she weds a handsome Italian with ties to organized crime. Thursday, May 1, Prime.

by Vauhini Vara

Though there’s a growing pile of books that critique today’s Big Tech overlords, “Searches stands out for emphasizing how they’ve also shaped our private psychological terrain,” said Matteo Wong in The Atlantic. Author Vauhini Vara, a former Wall Street Journal tech reporter who has become a Pulitzer Prize–nominated novelist, came of age as the internet was just beginning to creep into everyday life, and she has woven together her life story and the history of the web as a way of underscoring how integral that technology has become to the very construction of self. “Vara, like many of her readers, is both enchanted by the web and disgusted with the companies that control it.” At the same time, she “exposes the fragility of the technology,” demonstrating that even AI is still just a parasite of humanity.

“She is equipped to take on these issues to an almost uncanny degree,” said Hannah Bae in the San Francisco Chronicle. Four years ago, Vara’s essay “Ghosts,” in which she used GPT-3, a precursor to ChatGPT, to write about her sister’s death from cancer, went viral. The essay is reprinted here, and it remains riveting to see how AI helped Vara share her painful memories, sometimes hitting on felicitous turns of phrases even as it invented facts and made countless other mistakes. She enlists the technology in similar experiments here, including by having ChatGPT provide commentary after many passages, starting with her account of navigating an Oklahoma middle school as the daughter of Indian immigrants. “Initially, I found these conversations painful to read,” because I fear writers could be replaced by AI. Fortunately, “AI is still a terrible writer,” and Vara proves again and again that “nothing can make language sing like a gifted human mind.”

At times, though, Vara’s book “slides into tedium and banality,” said Meena Venkataramanan in The Washington Post. At one point, she shares a list of her Google searches across a 10-year span—how to warm up pork chop, how to orgasm, who is cardi b—and that five-page run “feels endless.” Searches also raises ethical questions about AI that are left unanswered. Mostly, though, Vara’s account of her life- long engagement with tech is “at once genre-defying and gripping,” and it offers “a glimmer of quixotic hope” that the internet could one day be owned by the people, not a handful of corporations. How? Vara gives examples of nonprofits that operate search engines, message services, and the like. But she also grants herself the right to do what AI does: make things up. “To call a proposed invention impossible,” she writes, “is as nonsensical as calling a declaration impossible, or a fiction, or a joke.”

The humble pope who preached social justice

Pope Francis was a pontiff of firsts. Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio to a family of modest means in Argentina, he was the first pope from the Americas and the first non-European in more than 1,200 years. Chosen in 2013, he was the first Jesuit pope and the first to take the name Francis, in honor of St. Francis of Assisi, the 13th-century saint known for his devotion to the downtrodden. The name was a sign of the ministry to follow. Declaring his desire for “a church that is poor and for the poor,” Francis wore $20 plastic watches, placed his own phone calls, traveled Rome in a Ford Focus instead of a bulletproof limo, and spurned quarters in the Apostolic Palace for a two-room Vatican guesthouse. Politically outspoken, he urged compassion for migrants, beseeched wealthy nations to battle climate change and social inequality, and called capitalist greed the “dung of the devil.” Widely beloved for his warmth and lack of pretense, Francis also drew the ire of conservatives who disapproved of his liberal moves, such as appointing many women to senior Vatican roles and allowing priests to bless same-sex couples and to absolve women for abortions. The Catholic Church should be “a place of God’s mercy and hope, where all feel welcomed, loved, forgiven, and encouraged,” he said in 2013. It must have “doors wide open so that all may enter.”

Raised in Buenos Aires, Bergoglio was the eldest of five children born to Italian immigrants, said The Wall Street Journal. Bookish and diligent in high school, he studied chemistry while working the door at nightclubs, “where he was known as a proficient tango dancer.” While his mother wanted him to become a doctor, his life took a turn at 16, when “he felt an urge to enter a church and confess his sins.” There he was seized by a pull that “changed my life,” he later wrote. He entered the diocesan seminary, but later moved to the Jesuit order, drawn by its focus on social justice. After suffering pneumonia that led to a partial lung removal, he was ordained a priest in 1969, at 32. From there, “his rise within the ranks was steady,” said the Los Angeles Times. Within four years, he was named leader of Argentina’s Jesuits. By 1998, he was archbishop of Buenos Aires; by 2001, a cardinal.
His habits during those years “foreshadowed the revolutionary changes in style” that would mark his papacy, said The Washington Post. Bergoglio lived not in the archbishop’s palace but in a modest home, and he rode the bus and cooked his own meals. He “spent long days ministering in the sprawling slums” of the city, and “washed the feet of AIDS patients, drug dealers, and prostitutes.” After Argentina suffered an economic collapse in 2001, he built relief operations tending to the swelling ranks of the needy and lobbied the government to address their plight. These works “began to be noticed by his fellow cardinals,” said CNN.com. With strong liberal backing, he was considered as a successor after John Paul II died in 2005, but the conservative Benedict XVI was named instead. When Benedict shocked the Catholic world by stepping down in 2013, the 76-year-old Bergoglio “was no longer seen as a front-runner.” Yet after “an electrifying speech warning that a church which turns inward becomes sick and narcissistic,” he became the surprise choice as the 266th pope.

“Francis inherited a deeply divided church,” said Reuters. Rocked by the scandal around priestly sexual abuse, it faced falling attendance, a shortage of priests, and growing demands for a greater role for women and for ethnic diversity in leadership. From the start, he “broke with tradition,” said NPR.org. Rejecting “the monarchical trappings of the papacy,” he set about overhauling the Vatican bureaucracy and financial management, and building bridges with the Islamic world. He made his first papal trip to the southern Italian island of Lampedusa, a way station for migrants fleeing war and poverty in Africa. There he denounced the “globalization of indifference” toward refugees and cast a wreath into the sea where many had drowned. Weeks later, speaking to reporters on a plane, he “uttered a phrase that would define his papacy.” Asked about a priest said to be gay, he responded, “Who am I to judge?” Headlines ricocheted around the globe.

That insistence on shaking up the status quo earned him no shortage of enemies, said The New York Times. “His avuncular charm and easy smile” belied his steely reputation within the Vatican, and he “clashed bitterly with traditionalists” over his demotions of conservative officials and his “push for a more inclusive” church, including a refusal to back the denial of communion to Catholic politicians supporting abortion rights. Catholic conservatives in the U.S. bitterly opposed him, especially once he began criticizing then-candidate Donald Trump’s plan to build a border wall; Francis called such a sentiment “not Christian.” Yet even as he enraged conservatives, he “also disappointed many liberals” who hoped he’d go further with progressive reform. Though he called for acceptance of homosexuality and “nontraditional relationships,” he rejected same-sex marriage; he also maintained support for priestly celibacy, opposed women priests, and used a derogatory word in a discussion of admitting gays to the priesthood.

Francis faced his biggest challenge over the church’s sexual abuse scandals, said Bloomberg. Amid demands for reform and accountability for the decades of widespread abuses by clergy, he “struggled to live up to expectations.” Pledging to rid the church of “this evil,” he convened a 2019 summit, appointed a commission to address the problem, and issued an edict requiring priests and nuns to report abuse. But in 2018 he faced a crisis when he discredited abuse victims in Chile and backed a bishop there who was accused of covering up for abusive priests. U.S. Catholics, meanwhile, said Francis had ignored their warnings about an American cardinal, Theodore McCarrick, later removed for abuse of minors. And despite his efforts, in the end he “largely failed to satisfy victims’ demands for accountability.”

For his “compassion and humanity,” though, Francis was beloved by “millions around the world,” said The Guardian. Thronged by the faithful on his many travels, he cast aside security concerns to wade into crowds, kissing babies and laying hands on the sick. But as his health failed, his public life slowed. He suffered recurring respiratory infections, underwent colon and abdominal surgery, and developed mobility problems that put him in a wheelchair. Frail after a prolonged bout with pneumonia this year, he was unable to lead Holy Week services but managed an Easter blessing from the balcony at St. Peter’s Basilica; the next morning, he died. In his will he requested his tombstone say only “Franciscus.” The tomb, he said, “must be in the earth; simple, without particular decoration.”