In "Terminator: Dark Fate," SkyNet Is History But U.S. Customs and Border Protection Remains

Gabriel Luna as the latest model Terminator, the Rev-9. (Kerry Brown/Paramount)

No amount of Terminator scholarship is too much if you're me. So just as the new Terminator: Dark Fate (which bombed over the weekend, but you people keep buying tickets for those The Fast & The Furious movies, so there's no accounting for taste) is a follow-up to 2015's Terminator: Genisys (sic) that's really a sequel to Terminator 2: Judgment Day,...

...the piece that I published on Slate tonight is a sequel to my Terminator: Dark Fate review from last week that's really a sequel to a longish T2 essay I wrote five summers ago for The Dissolve, may it rest in power. When I observed in my review of Dark Fate that the series finally got some of its old zeitgeist-surfing mojo back, this is what I meant.

Vibranium v Unobtanium: A Slate Investigation

Hey, what's my costume made out of again? (Disney/Marvel)

Most of Black Panther is set in the imaginary African nation of Wakanda, a technological utopia whose monarchs have for centuries observed a strict policy of isolationism, keeping would-be colonizers at bay by hiding their nation’s wealth and scientific advancement from the outside world. We’re told in the movie’s very first minute that Wakanda’s prosperity derives from its abundance of Vibranium, and that this bounty was delivered via meteorite long before humans walked the Earth.

And for a resource they're trying to keep secret, the Wakandans sure talk about it a lot. 

Even more than the characters in Avatar (Remember Avatar? Nominated for nine Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director for my boy James Cameron? Still the highest-grossing movie in the history of movies?) speak the much-derided name of that movie's extraterrestrial miracle metal, Unobtanium.

A lot more.

For this Slate piece, I did the transcription. And the math.

Field Notes. I should've let my mom teach me shorthand like she wanted.

Dealer's Choice: The Trump Card, reviewed.

Mike Daisey performs The Last Cargo Cult at Woolly Mammoth in 2010 (Stan Barouh).

This took a few days longer to appear than it should've, for boring reasons only partly within my control. Anyway, last Friday I attended a workshop of a new monologue by Mike Daisey — an artist I've written a lot over the last six or seven years. I didn't find room in the piece to mention that the monologue was directed by Isaac Butler, who has been doing some terrific writing on the theatre for Slate. The oral history of Angels and America that he and my sometimes-editor Dan Kois posted this week is marvelous piece of historical journalism. Anyway, my Washington City Paper review of the still-developing The Trump Card is (finally) here.

What Gravity Should've Learned from ALIENS

Sigourney Weaver and Carrie Henn in ALIENS. 

Sandra Bullock in Gravity. 

Admittedly, ALIENS is a film I've loved unconditionally since I was a kid. I need very little prompting to think about it, and only a little more prompting than that to write about it. But a deleted scene from that 27-year-old movie highlights what is, to me, the sole flaw in Alfonso Curaon's still-fantastic new space movie Gravity, and how audience expectations have changed in the generation since ALIENS. This is the subject of my first piece for Slate, which you can read here.