Malcolm Gladwell: Is Free The Future?

An Azerbaijani airliner with 67 people onboard crashed Wednesday near the Kazakhstani city of Aktau, leaving at least 32 survivors, according to officials. More than 30 people may be dead. The plane was en route from the Azerbaijani capital of Baku to the Russian city of Grozny in the North Caucasus. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Kazakhstan’s Emergency Ministry said in a Telegram statement that those on board included five crew.

Toward the end of A Complete Unknown, the new film chronicling Bob Dylan’s early career, Pete Seeger and the young Dylan have a quiet but tense encounter. Anticipating Dylan “going electric” at the 1965 Newport festival, Seeger offers Dylan an extended metaphor about people working together for social justice, each person bringing a spoonful of sand to outweigh the force of injustice.

The first time boxer Claressa Shields watched The Fire Inside, a cinematic rendering of her life story which releases in theaters on Dec. 25, she tried to remove herself from the equation. She pretended the story was about some other athlete from Flint, Mich. growing up in poverty and chasing an Olympic dream.

A Complete Unknown, out in theaters on Dec. 25, stars Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in a highly-anticipated biopic that traces the singer’s rise in the New York City folk music scene of the 1960s. Focusing on the period between 1961 and 1965—when Dylan first became a big star—the story is told chronologically, and looks at the people who helped him along the way, both musicians like Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and love interests, like Suze Russo (Elle Fanning) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro).

Touching in our optimism, we often call age 50 midlife, but who are we kidding? While it’s true that a not inconsiderable number of people make it to age 100, most of us are likely to poop out before then. But that doesn’t mean we should slouch dejectedly through our final two, three, or four decades.

The Bob Dylan of James Mangold’s extraordinary anti-biopic A Complete Unknown—who may or may not be an accurate version of the real Bob Dylan—is a jerk. He blows into New York in 1961, at age 19, having hitched a ride in a station wagon with just a rucksack and guitar in tow.