Flagship

English cast for Ghibli finale

Christian Bale, Florence Pugh, Mark Hamill, Robert Pattinson, Dave Bautista, and Willem Dafoe are among the voice actors in the English dub of Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and the Heron. The film, expected to be the last by Ghibli’s legendary founding director Hayao Miyazaki, premiered on Wednesday in Los Angeles ahead of its cinematic release on Nov. 22. Ghibli’s films often have stellar English-language casts, Gizmodo noted — Bale voiced the eponymous hero in Howl’s Moving Castle, while fellow ex-Batman Michael Keaton starred in Porco Rosso. Liam Neeson played Ponyo’s father in Ponyo. For those who prefer reading, The Boy and the Heron will also be released in Japanese with subtitles.

Art detective given six stolen paintings

A Dutch art detective who found a stolen Van Gogh in an Ikea bag recovered six more missing paintings. Arthur Brand met an unnamed contact in Amsterdam in early September, who gave him an old pillowcase containing The Parsonage garden at Nuenen in Spring, stolen from a museum in 2020. Brand was then sitting at home when the doorbell rang: A man told him he had “the paintings of Medemblik,” six historically important artworks stolen from a Dutch town hall last month, in his van. Brand, who has recovered more than 200 artworks, said that when thieves realize the difficulty of passing on stolen art, “You either burn it … or dump it at my doorstep.”

My soul was crushed: Britney

Britney Spears’s love for music was crushed by the 13-year “conservatorship” in which her life was strictly governed by her father, she said in a new biography. Spears was involuntarily hospitalized twice in 2008 and James Spears was put in charge of her affairs. “My music was my life,” she wrote, “and the conservatorship was deadly for that; it crushed my soul.” She has no plans to release more. The memoir details the control she lived under — “Too sick to choose my own boyfriend and yet somehow healthy enough to appear on sitcoms and morning shows” — and the pressures of being a teenage star, including having an abortion after becoming pregnant by Justin Timberlake.

Australia’s missing golf-course sharks

Six bull sharks that spent at least 17 years in a water hazard on an Australian golf course have disappeared. In the 1990s, a Queensland river flooded and merged with a lake on the Carbrook course’s 14th hole, and the bull sharks, which can survive in fresh water, swam across. Unconfirmed sightings were reported for years as a Loch Ness Monster-ish local rumor until they were filmed in 2010. One was killed by illegal fishing and one died of natural causes, but in recent years, CNN reported, sightings dwindled: Perhaps they swam out in later floods, or perhaps they died. Carbrook, which adopted a bull shark as its logo, is distraught: The course manager still walks by the lake, hoping to “catch a glimpse of a fin breaking the water.”

Mamajuana, the Dominican Viagra

The Dominican Republic’s national drink is both beverage and medicine. Mamajuana, an infusion of tree barks, spices and wood chips — among many other things — in rum, wine, and honey, was developed in post-colonial times by African slaves using botanicals known to the indigenous Taínos of Hispaniola. Each family has its own recipe, with some including cats’ claws or shellfish. It claims medical benefits: One early modern European doctor reported the “almost miraculous” effects of one ingredient, guayacán bark, on a widespread sickness of the time. It has other apparent benefits, too: “Mostly,” one Dominican told Punch, “people use it like a Viagra.” And in fact, some people even use the real thing as an ingredient.

The Global State of Wellbeing: A Semafor Summit
October 24 | Washington D.C.

New Gallup research finds that fewer than 1 in 10 U.S. workers have holistic wellbeing. It’s distressing, and it’s driving renewed urgency to thoughtfully examine barriers to our wellbeing. This Tuesday, Semafor’s editors, guided by exclusive Gallup research, will convene industry leaders for the definitive conversation on the global state of wellbeing.

We’ll dive into what data is telling us about the workplace and community wellbeing, loneliness, anxiety, depression, physical wellbeing and the role of social connections.

RSVP to join us in the room.

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

London’s Daunt Books recommends Ian Fleming: The Complete Man. Nicholas Shakespeare’s new biography offers “unprecedented access to the Fleming family papers,” resulting in “a fresh and eye-opening picture of a man whose life was overshadowed by his famous creation.” Buy it from Daunt Books, or from your local bookshop.

A fifth of young U.S. adults plan to do half of their holiday shopping directly on social media platforms which now allow users to directly buy products from their platforms. And much of that holiday shopping is happening early in the autumn, according to a Shopify-Gallup survey. Over 40% of shoppers have already started buying gifts or plan to do so by the end of October. The data shows how comfortable American consumers have become with e-commerce, with 93% of holiday shoppers saying they would buy at least some gifts online. Social media shopping is the latest trend, with TikTok fully rolling out shopping capabilities in the U.S. this year. The feature had already become a global hit; Bloomberg called it a “real e-commerce threat.”

The number of Nintendo Switch consoles sold since its release in 2017. Amid rumors that a successor will be released next year, The Verge took a look at what might be one of the last big releases on the existing platform. Super Mario Bros. Wonder, released yesterday and the first big Mario release since 2017’s Odyssey, is a “bona fide platforming classic,” and a return to the series’ side-scrolling roots, wrote Andrew Webster. It harks back to the classics while “firmly updating the formula with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of wild new ideas.” The Switch’s time as Nintendo’s flagship machine might be coming to an end, but “Nintendo isn’t content to let the device go out with a whimper — in fact, 2023 has been one of the Switch’s strongest years to date.”

• The newest batch of well-monied think tanks trying to influence policy in D.C. has made preventing an AI apocalypse one of its top priorities.
• A crackdown on greenwashing is coming. Top officials in both the U.K. and Australia separately told Semafor that they were readying new legal frameworks and punishments for companies found guilty.
• A fake fight over Gaza refugees shows how the Republican Party has changed since 2016.