First sentence, sure, not the others: understanding is academic, quasi-scientific—in criticism, faux-objective. Criticism is also literary, subjective, prophetic, political, contentious; self-questioning is part of it, but the impersonal "maybe" is as reductive as thumbs up/down.

⚡️ Mayor Zohran Mamdani's NYPD is poised to sign a three-year, $750,500 no-bid contract with Israeli surveillance firm Cognyte for FalcoNet, an AI-driven device that mimics a cell tower to track phones and can be mounted on police cars and drones or hidden in a backpack, the New York Daily News reported. Cognyte won a tender to sell intercept spyware to Myanmar's state telecom weeks before the 2021 military coup, Reuters previously reported. Meta banned the firm the same year, saying its customers used fake accounts to target journalists and politicians in Kenya, Mexico and Indonesia. The firm is part of an Israeli surveillance industry that grew big as a result of the military's monitoring of Palestinians, whose phone calls Israel's Unit 8200 has intercepted and stored by the millions, including to carry out genocide in Gaza and enforce a brutal illegal occupation in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

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i have so much more to say but here's my general thesis

I loved “You Can See Everything.” But it left a sour taste: why would it be unethical for Holmes and Evans to get paid?? This is not a straight documentary. Fielder is shaping a performance amongst the 3 of them. So the conventional journalistic prohibition on paying sources doesn’t clearly apply. Framing A24’s financial interest as the neutral business of making a movie, while Evans’s as a moral failing feels flawed.  And then the part that gets sour is turning that negotiation into material. Which is quintessential Nathan Fielder, but AGAIN makes any appeal to conventional documentary ethics even less convincing.

She was fit, healthy and just 43 years old, when a morning run left Kaley Kopper clinically dead for several minutes. Kaley survived a sudden cardiac arrest, thanks to quick-thinking strangers and a device that just happened to be close by.