Author: easyfilo

Enlarge / Helly R. awakes as an “innie.”

Severance, which recently completed its first-season run on Apple TV+, explores a world in which people can really separate their work and personal lives. Thanks to a new procedure developed by Lumon Industries, people can bifurcate themselves into “innies” (work selves) and “outies” (personal selves)—with no sharing of memories. This appeals to people like Mark, who lost his wife in a car crash and has struggled to work through the grief. Why not forget all that pain for eight hours a day?

Mark works on the “severed floor” at Lumon, a place that makes your own office—no matter how bad it is—look like Disney World. But Mark likes it. Or thinks he likes it. Meanwhile, we as viewers have a few concerns. What, for instance, is he actually doing all day for Lumon? What’s with the creepy cult-like vibe everywhere? What happened to his buddy Petey? And why are people so excited about waffle parties?

If you think this sounds like the setup for a corporate sci-fi dystopia, you’re not wrong. Severance makes terrific TV out of its premise. Directed by Ben Stiller, the show is funny, absurd, depressing, mysterious, visually distinct, and ultimately propulsive. Each episode gathers speed, from the slow start to the rip-roarin’ finale, making this one of the best things we’ve seen so far in 2022. Here’s why.

Enlarge (credit: Wide Right Games)

At Ars Technica, we’re fans of the Jackbox Party Pack series, which gathers friends around a TV to play social, joke-filled minigames that revolve around cracking jokes and voting on the group’s favorite gags. Really, any game that turns the trading of jokes into a group contest is up our alley.

For my money, at least, I am fine with cutting out the filler in these games and getting to the heart of what they often remind me of: creating my own Mystery Science Theater 3000 experience, where my friends and I mine humor out of the mundane. Turns out, there are already a few games that drill down to this exact premise, though the most recent one includes a substantial branding edge.

This week’s Rifftrax: The Game is pretty much what it sounds like, and it’s as close as you’ll get to playing along with that series’ founders (who themselves have deep ties to MST3K‘s legacy). While this $10 game on PC and all major console families isn’t the first of its kind, it clearly understands what’s fun about the concept—and errs on the side of simplicity, which mostly pays off.

Enlarge (credit: De Agostini Picture Library | Getty Images)

Lake Whillans is a strange body of water, starting with the fact that there is liquid to fill it at all. Though buried under more than 2,000 feet of Antarctic ice, its temperatures climb to just shy of 0° Celsius, thanks to a combination of geothermal warmth, intense friction from ice scraping rock, and that thick glacial blanket protecting it from the polar air. Given the immense pressure down there, that’s just balmy enough to keep the lake’s water watery. Stranger still, Lake Whillans is also teeming with life. One survey a decade ago found thousands of varieties of microscopic critters, thought to be feeding on nutrients left by seawater that sloshed into the basin several millennia ago, when the glaciers last pulled back.

More recently, Chloe Gustafson, a geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, arrived on the remote stretch of ice above Lake Whillans with a different mystery in mind: What’s happening underneath that lake? Antarctic researchers had long suspected the plumbing below the glacier went much deeper than they could see. Any groundwater beneath the lake would have implications for how the ice up above moves oceanward, and thus for how quickly it might contribute to rising seas. But they couldn’t definitively prove what groundwater was there. It was too deep, too ice-covered to map with the traditional tools of glaciology, like bouncing radar signals off the ice or setting off explosives and listening to the shockwaves.

Enlarge / Oscar Isaac is a tormented man with multiple personalities who becomes the avatar of the Egyptian moon god Khonshu in Moon Knight. (credit: YouTube/Marvel Studios)

Can anything good ever come of gods interfering in the affairs of men? That’s the underlying conundrum posed in Moon Knight, the latest spinoff series in the MCU’s Phase Four, and in the case of the series, the answer is a resounding yes. Starring Oscar Isaac as a tormented man with dissociative identity disorder (DID), the series has more in common with the Netflix Defenders series than with recent Marvel fare like WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki. But instead of taking place in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, it’s telling a unique superhero origin story rich in symbolism drawn from Egyptian mythology.

(Some spoilers below for the comics and the TV series. Any major reveals are at the very end, and we’ll give you a heads-up when we get there.)

As I’ve written previously, in the comics, Marc Spector (aka Moon Knight) is the son of a rabbi, marked at a young age by the Egyptian moon-god Khonshu to be the god’s avatar on Earth. But Khonshu is a supernatural entity with many aspects to his nature—and also exists out of phase with normal time and space—so forging a psychic connection with the human Marc harms the man’s mental health.

Enlarge / Signage outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, on Saturday, March 14, 2020. (credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now investigating 109 cases of unexplained liver inflammation—hepatitis—in young children from 25 states over the past seven months. Of the 109 affected children, five have died, and 15 (14 percent) required liver transplants. The children were all under the age of 10, and 90 percent were hospitalized.

The CDC’s announcement Friday marks a dramatic uptick in the US’s reported cases, which was limited to nine confirmed cases in Alabama just three weeks ago. The cases also add to a mounting global tally, which reached upward of 300 cases from more than two dozen countries.

But, despite the boom in cases, CDC and international health investigators are still puzzled about the cause of the illnesses. Severe hepatitis is rare in young children, and unexplained cases of severe hepatitis are rarer.