分类： 赛事资讯

By Davin Faris, age 15, home-school, Frederick, Md.

The final book by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver, “Devotions,” is nothing short of an abridged life’s work. Its contents span more than half a century, chosen by Oliver herself from 27 of her collections. Yet that scope is easy to forget; one poem follows the next with such completeness that they hardly feel separate at all, each one simply drawing focus to a different corner of the profound natural world that Oliver inhabits.

“Devotions” centers on the idea of finding answers in ordinary things, the everyday miracles that society has conditioned us to overlook. In truth, nothing Oliver writes about — from the sweetgrass to the wild geese to the dog in the snow — is insignificant. Rather, she renders it meaningful by finding such importance there. The greatest strength of Oliver’s poetry, though, is that she brings the reader into it as well. She doesn’t just recount experiences vividly; she beckons us to walk and wonder beside her. Then she asks of the reader in return, writing: “Did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything? And have you finally figured out what beauty is for? And have you changed your life?”

Oliver’s book is founded on such questions, almost accusations, that defy dismissal — after all, not answering is an answer in itself. Each pointed remark is a call for us to simply pay attention. God (or gods) may be invisible, Oliver contends, “but holiness is visible, entirely,” if only we seek it out. While the delicate imagery and starkly accurate metaphors of this collection make it a pleasure to read, it has far more substance to it. “Devotions” is a set of lessons on how to attend to the world, how to “keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.” Its pages escort us through “the willows and the honey locust, […] the beech, the oaks and the pines,” past the thrush singing at twilight and to water that wakes our bones. It rejects all notions of separateness, superiority or rigidity. It encounters the divine in innumerable unlikely places, marked not by grandeur but by simplicity.

While her poems occasionally strain under their own whimsy and specificity, following the formula of her other works but lacking the same depth, “Devotions” remains, at its heart, a poignant meditation on experiencing “mysteries too marvelous to be understood.” By coupling the unanswerable with an astounding existential Gnosticism, Oliver reveals how the bare acts of living and noticing can embody prayers more powerfully than words. She urges us, with each verse, to mend the rift between ourselves and everything greater: “Love yourself,” she writes. “Then forget it. Then, love the world.”

By Siyang Lian, age 17, The Hotchkiss School, Lakeville, Conn.

Butter bubbles over medium-low heat, the flames gently kissing the bottom of the pan. “Add water to help with the emulsification.” Jewels of fat swirl around two Maine lobster tails. Just as they turn a delicate red, I plate them with orzo cooked with lobster sauce and a generous piece of Parmesan tuile. Bon appétit.

As someone who previously cooked only eggs and instant ramen, I never imagined that I’d be recreating Michelin-style dishes at home. But Thomas Keller’s comprehensive MasterClass course allowed me to go from kitchen Neanderthal to gourmet home chef in six weeks. His class not only taught me how to cook iconic dishes from his famed restaurant The French Laundry, but also changed the way I think about food, community and life.

The beauty of Thomas Keller’s teaching approach is that he breaks down complex recipes into manageable steps, making this a perfect course for beginners and experts alike. Beginners will appreciate his emphasis on kitchen setup, knife skills and cookware, and ingredient sourcing, while experts can skip ahead to more convoluted dishes like the Salt-Baked Branzino With Fennel and Red Pepper.

The course is broken down into three series, beginning with the fundamentals of vegetables, pasta and eggs; before moving on to meats, stocks and sauces; and ending with the more advanced seafood, sous vide and desserts. Each series builds upon skills learned in the previous one: to make the butter-poached lobster featured in series three, you need the pasta-cooking technique from series one, as well as the poaching technique and chicken stock preparation taught in series two. Keller may be a Michelin-level chef, but his meticulous and patient approach to teaching fundamentals, including both a video demonstration and written recipe, give beginners like me the confidence to try intimidating dishes.

Keller’s course goes beyond traditional cooking — it fundamentally changes how you approach food and community. As Keller explains, the things that make food taste good — freshness, sustainability, and organic and locally-grown ingredients — go hand in hand with caring for the environment. Keller teaches us that cooking isn’t just about following a recipe; it’s about paying attention to where ingredients come from and how to best combine and cook those ingredients in a way that can bring us and our loved ones joy and deliciousness.

This past year, I’ve cooked food more complex and delicious than I previously thought myself capable of. More important, though, I’ve learned to approach food — and life — in a more deliberate and conscientious way, making sure I build a solid foundation before moving on to tackle intricate, dazzling dishes. Thomas Keller’s MasterClass has something to teach each of us on how to cook, eat and live.

By Samantha Liu, age 16, Ridge High School, Basking Ridge, N.J.

It’s about that time where Disney plunders a richer past for newly mediocre content, and, as of late, “Mulan” is the unlucky victim. To market Disney+ in mainland China, director Niki Caro struggled to bring maturity to a cheeky original. Gone are shirtless Li-Shang scenes, wisecracking Mushu, infectiously upbeat songs; in their place, wuxia themes and sweeping landscapes. But underneath the diversity points for the all-Asian cast and the grandeur of a $200 million budget lies an empty story: forgettable at best, problematic at worst, satisfying nobody.

Though the remake’s omissions from the original imply somberness, its jolts of absurdity found me balking. In the climactic battle scene, Mulan flings aside her protective armor — flamboyant, maybe, but a bit too ludicrous for an adult film. The juvenility doesn’t end there: There’s a witch who transforms into a million bats (and still manages to die from an arrow); the sets resemble dollhouses under oversaturated skies; and the gaudy costuming feels plucked from a princess movie counterpart.

Caro’s slapdash historical references fare no better. As an addition to the original, a fortuneteller describes chi, the Asian medicinal force, except it’s degraded into a super juice of which Mulan drinks too much. Now, already jedi-like and chi-supercharged, she is literally incapable of doubting herself. I found myself searching for the stumbling, determined teenager of “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” and received instead a Spiderman without Peter Parker. Without the 1998 protagonist’s endearing blunders, Mulan becomes as wooden as the staffs with which she trains.

But if the film seems childish for a heavy historical drama, it still fails to spark joy as a family movie. Thanks to “authentic cultural representation,” which is to say, a Google Translate take on Chinese, all of the characters are austere and distant, poor caricatures of Oriental values. The soldiers, devoid of camaraderie, crack two jokes before being abandoned by Mulan altogether (in the original version, she taught the hypermasculine bunch to cross-dress to save the emperor), while the repeated ad nauseam slogan “loyal, brave and true” casts doubt on Disney’s mastery of the show-not-tell principle. Most of all, it was cringe-inducing to watch Mulan’s parents parrot honor over happiness, so stiffly and stereotypically Asian that they cannot embrace their own daughter. In her attempt to create traditional legitimacy, Caro succumbs to the impersonal, Western notions about Asia. The result is a movie without heart, laughter or warmth — a movie without Disney’s trademark.

In 1998, the young Hua Mulan gazed introspectively into her mirror and sang, “Who is that girl I see / Staring straight back at me?” If she were glimpsing herself 22 years into the future, doomed by future Disney’s obsession with garbled live-actions, she would be asking the same question.

By Yiyun Hu, age 16, Shanghai Qibao Dwight High School, Shanghai

Explosions in art often represent fear and destructiveness; however, in Cai Guo-Qiang’s hands, they become the embodiment of mystery and beauty. In Guo-Qiang’s latest exhibition, “Odyssey and Homecoming,” which features hundreds of works that use gunpowder to recreate old masters of Western art, he shows us the shamanic power of gunpowder as an artistic medium that bridges nature and canvas in ancient and contemporary worlds.

In Guo-Qiang’s work, the ancient weapon is artistically transformed into a modern visual language. In “Painting Rubens’s Diana and Satyrs,” for example, Guo-Qiang uses speckled traces left by the explosion to create a psychedelic smoke fog over the forest, reproducing the intense atmosphere in a different way. Compared to oil paintings with classical and elegant styles, Guo-Qiang’s “Diana and Satyrs” uses randomness brought by the explosions to create graffiti and neon effects, which is more in line with the visual aesthetics of modern urbanites. Those traces of gunpowder explosions silently record the dialogue between old masters and the contemporary artist.

Traveling through time and space, Guo-Qiang first takes Chinese audiences on a journey through the Western classical period and contemporary art. Next, it’s time to go home. His virtual reality work, “Sleepwalking in the Forbidden City,” echoes “Homecoming” in the title of the exhibition. “It’s a daydream dedicated to the grand history of the Forbidden City,” Guo-Qiang said. He takes Shanghai audiences on a visit to a legacy thousands of miles away; he invited professional craftsmen to build a miniature version of the white marble palace and used V.R. technology to record the stunning fireworks above the palace. Cue the multicolored fireworks, and the Forbidden City, which has been sleeping for 600 years, gradually becomes filled with color and glows brilliantly again. The crackling sound of fireworks awakens the ancient relics of Guo-Qiang’s motherland.

Gunpowder is an ancient weapon that had been given the meaning of destruction and killing thousands of years ago. Now, Guo-Qiang has redefined it as a medium for connecting the past and the future. Using gunpowder as his language, Guo-Qiang speaks to the souls of the past masters; color is his vocabulary, texture is his syntax and fireworks are his voice. He is not restricted by identity, race or gender, nor does he make a specific group the target of his creations. Instead, he creates for all mankind as one human being. In an era when travel bans are still in effect, Guo-Qiang’s art takes audiences on a fantastic journey across time, place and Western art history.

Crumbl Cookies is more marketing phenomenon than cookie. As a culinary experience, it’s a manufactured sugar rush that borrows much from the playbook of Krispy Kreme’s early 2000s stampedes. It offers a Disney-esque round-the-block queue that draws cookie pilgrims into a small pink and white Easy-Bake-Oven-inspired open-concept kitchen. Eggs crack, frosting is piped, and everything smells of sugar and butter — even through an N95 mask. The cookie-baking experience, as much as the nearly 700-calorie cookies themselves, is what’s for sale.

Yet unlike Crumbl’s glazed doughnut predecessor, the main event happens online after customers leave the store to post their Crumbl Reviews. It is a cookie engineered for the influencer age. Actually eating cookies takes a back seat to food photography and online ranking. Patrons snap staged photos of their four to 12 selected cookies, rating each 1 to 10. The company celebrates the “totally Instagrammable!” cuteness of its product, a claim more or less confirmed by the 8.6 million views of #CrumblCookieReview and the 287.3 million views of #CrumblReview on TikTok.

Entering Crumbl feels like a distinctly Apple-store experience of minimalistic white with the addition of millennial pink accents. A contactless iPad ordering counter completes the aesthetic. After 20 minutes in line, in a haze of cookie dough aroma, I approached the tablet with my long-considered order: two Churros, a Double Trouble, a Turtle, an Orange Roll and a Milk Chocolate Chip (their only nonrotating selection). Then more waiting, this time in a roped-off area for observing a performance that combines cookie-spewing modern baking machines with a meticulous assembly-line of frosting and boxing. Every Monday, five new flavors drop. Cookies are almost never repeated, and Crumbl boasts over 170 recipes. Saturday at midnight is particularly busy, offering one final chance to sample limited-edition selections before they disappear, possibly forever.

Yet beneath all of this ingenious manufactured hype, I couldn’t quite look past one glaring contradiction. While my six cookies were indeed a contrast of crisp exterior and gooey interior, they were also easily divisible and revealed no signs of crumbling. Bert might even approve of Ernie eating them in bed. One outcome of this doughy underbake is that beneath each cookie lay a grease ring, grease which clung to my hands and my lips, as well. My #CrumblReview? The only cookie I fully consumed was the satisfyingly melty Milk Chocolate Chip. I’d give it an 8. The Churros’ sugar was overpowering (5), Double Trouble was basically a chocolaty-er chocolate chip (8), Turtle suffered from NutraSweet-like artificiality (3), and Orange Roll was overwhelmed by a sweet cream cheese frosting more Safeway cake than cookie (2).

While these too-big caloric Mack Trucks may refuse to crumble themselves, it is only a matter of time before the online novelty that fuels their flavor-of-the-week mania does.

Almost no one could have dreamed up a world where Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez would be working together. But, place the unlikely trio in the thick of a New York-set murder mystery, and their palpably wholesome chemistry will unfold as the laughs roll in. The Hulu original comedy series follows three neighbors podcasting their own investigation of the death of a resident in their apartment. Rooted in its twisty plot and playful humor, “Only Murders in the Building” strikes comic relief gold.

At first glance, the murder mystery comedy feels “Knives Out”-ish with its premise and sleek visuals. We quickly learn, though, that the series is in a lane of its own, revamping the tried and true whodunit for the age of the podcast. Keeping me at the edge of my seat until the very end, the trio leads viewers through a miscellaneous group of murder suspects, one of whom is Police frontman Sting?

For consumers of true crime content like myself, the amateur sleuths’ adventures deliver the same nail-biting twists, but with a humorous dose of the less climatic. Capturing the ill-timed sponsor breaks and pesky voice-over retakes, viewers get the behind-the-scenes reel of a murder mystery podcast. We are even granted access to co-hosts Oliver and Charles’s recording sessions from a cramped closet where the “acoustics are better.” Completely merging comedy and the murder mystery is an endeavor most writers wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole, but the series manages to find its voice without losing sensibility.

“Only Murders in the Building” also makes a point of zeroing in on the muddled ethics of true crime entertainment. We are forced to examine the exploitation of it all when we see Oliver focused on producing riveting content instead of finding the killer. “I’m looking for motive; I’m looking for means; but most of all, I’m looking for moxie,” he says in an overview of the suspects, epitomizing the issue of sensationalism in the genre. The series pushes viewers to consider their place in true crime media’s moral gray area.

While its star-studded leading cast may have been the show’s greatest attraction, we get an intimate look at other characters’ perspectives too. “The Boy From 6B,” an entirely nonverbal episode — save for the final line — centers on a deaf resident, Theo Dimas. Well-executed and narratively effective, viewers are put in his point of view for 30 minutes in this standout installment of the series.

Hulu’s most watched original comedy “Only Murders in the Building” establishes itself not just as an innovator of the murder mystery, but of the modern television show, distinguishing its title on the list of must-see TV.