Flagship

Reclusive cartoon legend opens up

Bill Watterson, the rarely heard-from creator of Calvin & Hobbes, opened up with a remarkably frank description of the creative challenges over his latest work. Watterson stopped illustrating the much loved comic of the troublemaking six-year-old and his real-imagined toy tiger in 1995, and The Mysteries, a graphic novel about a medieval kingdom, is his first published work since. But to complete it, he decided to work with John Kascht, a caricaturist — resulting in a roller-coaster collaboration. Watterson’s improvisational style clashed with Kascht’s more methodical approach, a process Watterson described as “appallingly inefficient and wasteful.” Their collaboration only improved when they gave up on what they were trying and started over. In Kascht’s words: “Things clicked when we gave up.”

Napoleon: Not very short

Napoleon, the upcoming Ridley Scott biopic starring Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby, will have a four-hour director’s cut released on Apple TV+. The film follows Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power in the wake of the French revolution, and his relationship with his wife Joséphine. Scott’s original directors’ cut was 4 and a half hours, but all artists must kill their darlings, and he managed to cut it down by an entire 20 minutes. The theatrical release — like the historical Napoleon, contrary to popular belief — is itself not especially short, at 2hr 37. Scott, who told Total Film that shooting was completed in just 62 days, will then finish his Gladiator 2, the director’s cut of which may or may not outlast the Roman Republic.

India-Pakistan friendships

India meets Pakistan in the men’s Cricket World Cup on Saturday. The two countries’ rivalry is fierce, both inside and outside of sport — but their cricketers have a surprisingly warm relationship, the BBC reported. Former Indian captain Virat Kohli has expressed admiration for Pakistan’s Babar Azam, and the Pakistani fast bowler Shaheen Afridi presented his Indian counterpart Jaspreet Bumrah a gift for his newborn baby at last month’s Asia Cup. The women’s teams have similar mutual respect: The Indian team huddled around the new baby of Pakistan captain Bismah Maroof last year. The fond ties go back to 1947, when Fazal Mahmood — newly a Pakistani citizen, following partition — was rescued from unrest by India’s C.K. Nayudu.

Latam cooking on the web

After Sandra A. Gutierrez scheduled hundreds of interviews with Latin American chefs across 23 countries to research her fifth cookbook, she met with an obstacle: The COVID-19 pandemic. She was forced to move all of them online, along with 40 cooking lessons: A Panamanian chef taught her how to cook sancocho de Domingo over the internet. Her new book, Latinísimo: Home Recipes From the 21 Countries of Latin America, is meant to showcase home cooking from across the continent, especially those countries less known to U.S. citizens. “There are recipes that are endangered everywhere that need to be saved,” she told The New York Times.

Guinness tops Europe

The Guinness Storehouse in Dublin beat out iconic landmarks such as the Acropolis in Athens and Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia to be named Europe’s best tourist attraction. The World Travel Awards crowned the 19th-century converted brewery — now a museum and temple to all things stout — for offering visitors a window into the “history, heart, and soul of Ireland’s most iconic beer.” It’s not clear if the museum’s managers insist on only allowing the Storehouse to fill to three-quarters capacity before waiting and then allowing more visitors in.

Each weekend, we’ll tell you what a great independent bookstore suggests you read.

Sara Soju at the Kinokuniya bookstore in Tokyo recommends 水都眩光, which roughly means “The Dazzling Light of the Water City.” It’s an anthology of nine fantasy stories, published last month. Each of the nine authors interpreted what is meant by “fantasy” in their own way, creating an eclectic mix of styles. Her favorite are Eri Takahara’s “The Lasandoha Manuscript” and Mayi Ishizawa’s “Mirror Image of Margit K” — Ishizawa in particular is an author she recommends. Buy it from Kinokuniya Books.

People who are religious have, overall, higher reported levels of wellbeing than people who are not. That’s the result of analysis of Gallup World Poll data from 2012-2022. The figures differ at the country level, because countries that are categorized as less religious are typically wealthier, so residents do better on wellbeing assessments overall, but the research showed that those who said religion was important to them also reported greater benefit from social and civic connections, and were more likely to volunteer their time and assistance to others.

The time in minutes that it took Louis, a nine-year-old British boy, to run 5 km (3.1 miles), a world record for his age group. He ran it in his local Parkrun, a free organized run held every Saturday in thousands of parks around the U.K. and, increasingly, the world. It began in London in 2004, and is now in 22 countries including the U.S., Namibia, and Malaysia. Three million people have run at least one. The fastest time, 13:45, would have beaten several of the men at the 2020 Olympics, while one 101-year-old completed it in 38 minutes. Louis, who as an under-11 had to run with an adult, beat the previous record by 13 seconds: He said he was “on top of the world.”

• A high-profile memestock CEO sent sexually explicit images and messages in a weeks-long text exchange with a woman who tried to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from him using fake identities.
• OpenAI has quietly changed its “core values.” The AI startup now says its singular goal is to build “safe, beneficial” artificial general intelligence, noting that anything else is “out of scope.”
• In the era of the “buff business leader,” some tech workers have turned to a broad class of oral and injectable drugs, treatments, and supplements to improve their health and appearance.