Jump a little higher: As a white ethnic from the Delaware Valley, I was raised on Phillies baseball, sandwiches on long rolls, and classic rock radio—which is to say, Bruce Springsteen. I quit baseball after getting beaned in the head and moved to a city without a decent sandwich, but I could never shake my genetic predisposition to East Coast noir with saxophone solos. Naturally, I jumped at the option to see it on film.
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere makes one big titular promise and does not follow through. Set at the tail end of Springsteen’s wanderjahre, the film presents the singer on the cusp of international recognition. Self-exiled in New Jersey, Springsteen records his eerie masterpiece Nebraska in his bedroom and faces up to his impending success and personal failure. Drawing on this ambiance of frustration, isolation, and regret, the film provides nothing but a mood board for a worn-out rock star in small-town hell, circa 1981. There is no greater story, no greater arc, no greater point besides existential torpor.
Tired in New York, peeved and lonely in New Jersey, aimless in Los Angeles, the film opens with Springsteen stumbling into a dark night of the soul and ends with Springsteen more or less stumbling out. A more apt title might as well be Springsteen is Depressed. Well-acted and well-shot, the film falls victim to its irrelevance. Springsteen the hero will inevitably triumph. Deliver Me From Nowhere is just a pretty blip in the saga.
Brady Santoro, senior editor
Chalamet’s con: Despite knowing nothing about ping-pong, Timothée Chalamet’s passionate publicity campaign for Marty Supreme—involving blimps, the Sphere, and several hundred buckets of orange paint—successfully conned me into watching a film about it. A movie solely about ping-pong is not enough to fill theaters. Contra the belief that Chalamet’s titular character, Marty Mauser, has in its potential, table tennis never took off in the United States. Yet, this fact makes Marty’s dedication all the more special. Viewers can understand sacrifices made for baseball or football, since success in those sports guarantees fame and wealth. But in Marty’s America, sacrifices made to become the best table tennis player in the world can’t even guarantee respect. Undissuaded, he remains completely, authentically, devoted to his craft—no matter how ridiculous some might think it is.
Marty’s unabashedness is an antithesis to the prevailing attitude today. Our modern lives are marked by being under constant observation. Whether it’s by social media or Ring cameras, we are always watched. To protect from being perceived, we’ve adopted the armor of nonchalance. It isn’t cool to care; it isn’t cool to be dedicated. Fittingly, Chalamet has led the charge against this trend, with his touchingly authentic declaration, upon winning the Screen Actors Guild Award for best actor this year, that he is “really in pursuit of greatness.” Chalamet shares this quality with Marty, turning Marty Supreme into a movie about being chalant, unapologetically passionate about whatever gives your life meaning. That’s a lesson so valuable it’s worth watching 150 minutes of ping-pong to get it.
Deniz Kurdi, assistant editor
Kayeka and Eve: Growing up in Catholic school, I was drip fed stories of the Bible but suspected deception. The most profound mysteries of the faith must’ve been hidden from me. How else could religion be so boring? Seeking revelation at the age of twelve, I found my double in Eve eating from the tree of knowledge and have been disturbed ever since. Medicine for madness, Quanta Magazine’s overview of the year’s biggest mathematical breakthroughs always soothes me. This was the first time I had any prior understanding of a problem discussed: in particular, the Kakeya conjecture. This proposition concerns the size of shapes that contain a unit line segment in every direction. I struggled both to understand and to care when presented with the century-old proof for the theorem in two dimensions. After the proof for three dimensions was announced to great fanfare in February, my friend took a graduate course working through its details this fall. He urged that I join him in dissecting one of the great mathematical advances of our time. I declined.
In Quanta’s accompanying “Year in Mathematics” retrospective, math editor Jordana Cepelewicz writes, “Like painters, musicians or writers, mathematicians create and explore new worlds. They test, and then push past, the limits of their imagination.” Mathematics, in this view, promises endless intellectual entertainment. It is this hope of infinite thought that led to my interest in becoming a mathematician, a journey still closer to its departure than its arrival. There are myriad warnings that the path ahead is difficult (dwindling funds, collapsing universities) and, more troublingly, that it might not be so exciting (the aforementioned irksome Kakeya conjecture). The forthcoming uses of artificial intelligence for proofs suggests that mathematical progress is largely algorithmic, deterministic in nature. Beautiful mathematics is not the norm. It is a miracle. But, as the video attests, it is a miracle that sometimes happens.
Liam Eifert, production editor
Image: Unknown, God as Architect, illumination on parchment, circa 1220-30 (Austrian National Library, Vienna).