'Heartless, tone-deaf and a shameless grab for attention'

'Validate accusations by extremists'

'Just the opposite, total opposite of what’s actually happening'

'made him unfit to continue in his role as pastor'

'Welcome to the UK, Donald'

Losing Charlie Kirk to the hatred of the left hurts

'Charlie King'

'Pay attention. Get off the iPad.'

Two minerals, known almost exclusively to be linked with microbial metabolism, have been found in a recent drill sample by the Perseverance rover. They sparked a flurry of excitement, and NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy was quick to point out that gold-standard science will need to be performed on what he called “the closest we […] The post ‘Groundbreaking’ NASA Discovery Is ‘Closest We Have Ever Come’ to Finding Life on Mars appeared first on Good News Network.

Featured Essays grief Live Until Life Runs Out: Two Recent SF Films That Embrace Joy in the Face of Death For Caroline. By Zack Budryk | Published on September 17, 2025 Credit: Amazon MGM Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Amazon MGM Studios I think I’ll remember the date June 21, 2016 for the rest of my life. In the early afternoon, I learned my friend Caroline had died at the age of 25. I’ve often referred to Caroline as my best friend, but that’s not quite accurate—she was my dearest friend, the kind of person whose love was both given to hundreds of people and priceless. Several of our mutual friends and I left work early, retreating to one of their apartments. We huddled together for want of anything else to for the rest of the day while the rain poured down outside. Some time before that, I had a text exchange with Caroline—I can’t remember the exact date, which is unlike me, and I can’t seem to track the texts down. Caroline told me she’d been diagnosed with the inherited heart condition that would eventually take her life, and that she was “fucking petrified.” I of course never imagined it would kill her, but it was remarkable to hear her speak of fear, simply because she was the bravest, most confident and ebullient person I’d ever known, and likely ever will. I know none of that equates to lack of fear, of course, but it made me wonder if it would affect those qualities and, at least in my presence, it never did for a second. Caroline remained an infectious beam of light the rest of the time I knew her; I have photos I treasure of her holding court in a literal crown on the evening of her 25th birthday. I knew Caroline for a little under three years, and sometimes it seems like a mathematical impossibility that I’ve been deprived of her for more than three times that. In the weeks after she died, I remember a flickering, intrusive thought that it would have been easier to never have known her. And maybe that’s true. But it’s the opposite of how she approached life, and that approach was part of why we loved her so much. As I approached the anniversary this year, two recent movies captured that same embrace of what we know won’t last and reminded me of how lucky I was to know her. In Megan Parks’ 2024 film My Old Ass, 18-year-old Elliott (Maisy Stella), after taking mushrooms, encounters herself 20 years hence (Aubrey Plaza). The older Elliott is largely straightforward, but urges her younger self to avoid Chad (Percy Hynes White), a summer fling with whom she’s becoming increasingly infatuated. The younger Elliott spends much of the film confused as to why Chad seems like the perfect boy if, as her older self implied, he’s fated to break her heart somehow. Finally, after she presses her during another across-time encounter, the older Elliott drops the bomb: Chad dies young, under undisclosed but unavoidable circumstances, and she’s determined to spare herself the heartbreak.  The younger Elliott declines the reprieve, telling her older self “I’m going to love him so hard, for however long we have.” “You say that because you’re young and dumb,” her older, heartbroken self replies. Elliott doesn’t dispute this, but instead argues that without being young and dumb, “you’d never fucking be brave enough to do anything. If you knew how shitty and unfair life would be, you’d never leave home. You’d never enjoy time with anyone because all you’d be thinking about is how we’re all gonna die someday.” Only by being too young and dumb to think about these things, she argues, can anyone take the leaps of faith that allow you to fall in love or live a full life.  Credit: Neon Mike Flanagan’s 2025 film The Life of Chuck, an adaptation of Stephen King’s novella, makes a similar point. Told out of sequential order, it begins with a segment depicting a slow-motion apocalypse eventually revealed to be the internal “universe” of one man, unassuming 39-year-old accountant Chuck Krantz (Tom Hiddleston), as he succumbs to brain cancer. In its third and final segment, we see Chuck’s childhood as an orphan raised by his grandparents, in a house with a cupola his grandfather (Mark Hamill) forbids him to enter. In its final scene, a teenage Chuck finally enters it and sees a vision of himself on his deathbed. Chuck acknowledges this and resolves to live his life to the fullest anyway, saying, in a sentiment remarkably close to Elliott’s, “I will live my life until my life runs out.”  It gives new context to the film’s middle segment, which is devoted entirely to Chuck, with less than a year to live, spontaneously breaking into a joyous dance to a street drummer’s beat with a young woman he’s never met. Nick Offerman’s omniscient narrator tells us that on his deathbed, even as Chuck loses memories and motor functions and “enter[s] a land of pain so great he will wonder why God made the world,” he will continue to remember “how he stopped and dropped his briefcase and began to move his hips to the beat of the drums. And he will think, that is why God made the world. Just that.” There are times I’ve felt foolish for feeling like I gained “new” insight on someone who’s been dead for nearly a decade from fiction by people who never knew she existed. It can seem like a childish attempt to synthesize emotional resonance I could have gotten from making more memories with Caroline while she was alive. But at the same time, realizing new aspects of what made her so singular from unexpected sources feels like its own kind of new memory. “‘Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch,” Rabbi Chaim Stern wrote. “For your life has lived in me, your laugh once lifted me, your word was gift to me. To remember this brings painful joy.” At the end of the day—and as the 10th anniversary draws nearer—I believe I would make the same decision as Elliott and choose to know Caroline all over again, not just because she was worth it, but because she would have done the same for everyone she loved, and more of that bravery is what the world needs.[end-mark] The post Live Until Life Runs Out: Two Recent SF Films That Embrace Joy in the Face of Death appeared first on Reactor.