The Ringer

A stunner of an ode to Serena, who came into the game on the heels of her older sister, but leaves it having changed it irrevocably. An exacting portrait of an unprecedented competitor.

Part of Serena’s genius—competitively, personally—is that she never can quite be anything but herself when she’s desperate. And she’s desperate every time she steps foot on a court. But another more conscious part of her genius is that she showed no shame in this, or any other segment of her being that she could not control. She sidestepped the trap, the one that predates her, Dr. Johnson, tennis itself. The American dilemma. Serena’s refusal to couch herself, to fit what the game was in order to be what the game is, recalls all the ancestors—breathing and not—who eyed down worlds meant to twist them and derived freedom from the revelation that there were places they could not be bent.

When the popularity of colored jelly bracelets led to a bizarre moral panic, it demonstrated more about adults than the kids wearing them.

By the spring, a Fox News segment cautioned that “kids today may be trading sex acts like we traded baseball cards.” On Good Morning America, Diane Sawyer cautioned parents to ask their children to leave the room before she delivered her report. School bans spread and spread.

If you’ve seen any of the recent movies coming out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you might have noticed something’s up — or, rather, down. That something is the quality of the visual effects: sometimes overdone, other times bordering on amateur. Don’t blame the artists, though; as Daniel Chin points out in this Ringer piece, Marvel has been squeezing its workforce for some time. And now the CGI chickens are coming home to roost.

These issues of extreme workloads and a culture of crunch are reminiscent of those that developers have long faced in the video game industry, where a labor movement is currently underway to improve work conditions. And between Waititi’s comments, the article by The Gamer, and Govil’s tweets, Marvel’s VFX issue is starting to become too big for the studio to ignore. According to Govil, at least, this isn’t a new issue. But it’s one that has likely become even more prominent in recent years as the studio’s success has grown and as its increased output on both the big and small screens has made its appetite for footage more acute.

Did the Pixar film Up make you cry? At The Ringer, director Pete Docter and codirector Bob Peterson talk about the nuances of craft that created a deeply emotional response to the characters in the film.

But these early scenes reveal that Up isn’t only about Carl—it’s also about his relationship with his wife, Ellie. They’re kids when she bursts into his life with a shock of red hair and a passion for exploration, and the interaction leads to a deeply felt, lifelong connection. In a flash, Up snaps into a montage of their life together: the two pals fall in love, get married, buy what was once Ellie’s hideaway and turn it into a home of their own.

Thanks to season four of Stranger Things, Kate Bush’s song, “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” has topped the charts, 37 years after its release. Nate Rogers takes a look at how this happened, and what it means for the music industry, and especially older, legacy acts.

Drenched in gated reverb and woozy synths, the song is also an ideal track to sonically fit into the retro sound that the show has so carefully curated. “It’s working on all of these levels of reference, both internally to the episode, to the larger series, to our sort of collective nostalgia of what the 1980s feel like,” says Harding.

A haunting journey into one of the most forgotten places in America:

Listen to locals long enough and you’ll come to find that the Dismal shifts in the eye of the beholder. The land’s kaleidoscopic history is much the same. For one of Eric’s distant relatives, a lumberman named Moses Grandy, the swamp was at once the site of his bondage and the nexus of his freedom. Grandy toiled in the cavernous morass for decades as an enslaved laborer before stashing away enough coin to purchase himself outright. He was one in a colony of workers who lived in camps in the bog. Out of porous peat soil they cut and glued canals, lugged cypress and white cedar trunks, and crafted millions of shingles. Most inhabitants were enslaved, but some harnessed the swamp to other ends. Some sought refuge in it.

From the late 17th century to the end of the Civil War, thousands of maroons — runaways who obtained their freedom by occupying remote and uninhabited regions — lived in relative secrecy throughout the 750-square-mile wilderness. No one is sure exactly how many people escaped enslavement within its confines, but this much is clear: The Great Dismal Swamp, an area regarded by colonial settlers as so utterly inhospitable that its very air was once said to be toxic, was over multiple centuries home to the largest maroon community in the United States.

Ringer writer Jonathan Tjarks veers from his usual NBA beat to unpack his cancer diagnosis and the shadow it casts over his experience as a son and a father. Unblinking and plainspoken, he somehow manages to strip the emotion out of his writing — but not the emotional impact.

I was 12. That’s the age when your parents go from authority figures to actual people. That never happened for me and my dad. We never got to know each other. What did he like doing? What were his experiences growing up? What were his goals in life?

And there’s the simpler stuff too. How do you tie a tie? Or grill a burger? Or fix a car?

I had to figure it all out on my own. Now it looks like my son might have to do the same. It was the one thing that I never wanted for him.

“When their heads are right, the best passers are the good-vibes guys of the league. Joy curators. Misters Congeniality. They make you happy. They let you touch the ball. They trust you. They think you’re good enough. They think you can help. Some combination of stunt-person, illusionist, actor, detective, and circus performer. They raise the energy on the bench and in the stands, give the air that crackle. You want to be in their orbit. Things are brighter there.”

“Unlike the sobering effect it has on Neo as he discovers the sockets in his flesh, this pill tends to have the same effect as going too deep into any research hole on the internet without proper barriers. It is much more likely to create further distress, alienation, or just outright absurdity than it does clarity.”

“It’s hard to imagine now that the franchise has been spilling gallons of fake blood for a quarter-century—Paramount Home Entertainment recently released a remastered anniversary edition on 4K Ultra HD, and the fifth installment of the franchise will hit theaters in January—but there was a time when no one wanted to direct Scream. At first, even Wes Craven passed. Several times. The man behind horror classics like A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Last House on the Left was tired of being confined to the genre that he’d mastered. Yet the pull of Williamson’s script eventually turned out to be too much to resist, and with its elements at his fingertips, Craven reinvented big-screen horror.”