Month: September 2020

It may not look like much, but Building 320 housed the 38 members of Michoud's ride out team during Hurricane Katrina. (credit: Nathan Mattise)

Update, Sept. 7, 2020: It's Labor Day Weekend in the US, and even though most of us now also call home "the office," Ars staff is taking a long weekend to rest and relax. The end of August marked 15 years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, the federal levees failed, and the city of New Orleans changed forever. We planned on resurfacing a few pieces from the archives to keep the lights on over this holiday, so we're resurfacing this look at how NASA managed to weather the impact of Katrina at its Michoud Assembly Facility just outside New Orleans. This story originally ran in August 2015 and it appears unchanged below.

MICHOUD, La.—On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina came, the federal levees failed, and chaos ensued in the New Orleans metro area.

By now the damage is well documented. So many people were displaced that New Orleans still only sits at approximately 80 percent of its pre-storm population a decade later. More than 1,200 people died—the most for a US storm since 1928. And 80 percent of the city flooded, causing property damage since estimated at $108 billion by the National Hurricane Center. Almost regardless of metric, Katrina stands as the most devastating Atlantic storm to ever hit the US.

Lost in all the hype around the release of two surefire blockbusters with very different approaches to the current state of cinema, this weekend Netflix quietly debuted the first Charlie Kaufman film in five years: I'm Thinking of Ending Things. Kaufman's enigmatic and absurd worlds—from Adaptation to Being John Malkovich to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—often hinge on big concepts and even bigger ideas. So while the director's work may not have the same audience potential as Tenet or Mulan, it can really stick with you (Eternal Sunshine made Ars' list of the best sci-fi ever, for instance). To a subset of film fans, this is definitely the most anticipated film of Labor Day weekend 2020.

The fact that Kaufman finally opted to partner with a major streaming service means I'm Thinking of Ending Things theoretically has the potential to help the filmmaker find his biggest audience, too. But, well... while I'm Thinking of Ending Things was always going to be somewhat bizarre, the most perplexing thing about it may be calling it a "Netflix film." Prepare to hit play on the platform's oddest release to date.

Home on the range

Quantum physics student Lucy (Jessie Buckley) and her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons) set out for rural Oklahoma farmland so she can meet his parents for the first time. The two haven't been dating very long, but Lucy's inner thoughts already suggest they won't be dating much longer. "I should be excited, looking towards the first of many—but I'm not," Lucy narrates early in their claustrophobic car ride. When they finally arrive? "Everything has to die, that’s the truth... it’s a uniquely human fantasy that things will get better, born, perhaps, out of a uniquely human understanding that they will not.”