Inside its Milan store at 10 Corso Como, Gentle Monster introduces a new centerpiece that shifts the energy of the space. The GIANT HEAD KINETIC OBJECT reflects the brand’s ongoing focus on perception, awareness, and emotional response.
Developed by the Gentle Monster Robotics Lab, the sculpture consists of three distinct heads. At the center, a face slowly closes its eyes and tilts as if lost in thought. A smaller and a larger head move around it in a continuous rhythm. Eyelids blink. Pupils shift. The entire structure responds like a nervous system.
Other sculptural elements, shaped like stars, are placed throughout the store. They speak to inner movements, to invisible but constant processes of the mind.
This is not decoration. It is a study in motion, mood, and atmosphere. Gentle Monster continues to build spaces that speak without words. The result is physical and emotional. Every detail counts.
For those of us who have regularly traveled through airports, the process of checking in—and checking bags—always seems undergirded by latent anxiety. What if a suitcase gets routed onto the wrong plane or never arrives? What if it falls open or gets searched? For filmmaker Lucy Davidson, it’s not so much about the luggage as it is about what we stuff inside.
As a recent student of Aardman Academy, which is operated by its Academy Award-winning namesake animation studio, Davidson tapped into not only the universal experiences of travel but a playful exploration of the multiple meanings of “baggage.” In her stop-animation short, aptly titled “Baggage,” we follow a trio of women, who are incidentally also suitcases, heading on a trip.
Davidson’s charming black-and-white narrative leads us on a brief yet powerful voyage through human emotions, especially the spectrum of feelings we associate with self-confidence, past experiences, and relationships. “Three girlfriends check in their baggage at the airport, but one is carrying a little more than the others,” the film’s tagline goes. “As they travel along the conveyor belt to security, can she hide what’s inside?”
This year, Davidson’s animation was an official selection at the SXSW Film & TV Festival and a finalist at the Sydney Film Festival. See more on the film’s website, and discover more of the filmmaker’s work on her site, Vimeo, and Instagram.
Whether you feel good, bad, or indifferent about the widespread commercialization of Pride Month, it’s a phenomenon that’s definitely here to stay. Though there’s a sea of polyester junk to sift through every June, there are plenty of brands out there making elevated, high-quality pride merch that you’ll want to use the whole year through. And some of it’s not even rainbow!
What are you up to this weekend? We’re doing the link list a day early because the boys and I are heading to Cornwall tonight to visit my aunts, dad, brother, cousins, and cousins’ kids, and eat our weight in Cornish pasties. Hope you have a good one, and here are some links from around the web…
Celine Song, the director-writer of Materialists and Past Lives, actually worked as a matchmaker years ago. “Everybody’s very honest with the matchmaker in a way that I think they’re probably not as honest with their therapists. Of course, that’s something that I talk about in the film. It’s like, well, a therapist, it’s about the soul. It’s about what you’re going through. It’s about a psychological crisis. But when it comes to a matchmaker, you’re saying like, ‘Oh, I would like to acquire a boyfriend and I want the asset that I’m acquiring to have these specs.’”
This brush has been great now that I’m air drying my hair.
Says Anonymous on a very low-key summer checklist: “1. Ice cream once a week, min. 2. A fruit crumble; agnostic to fruit type. 3. Just bought my first bikini in 15 years and gonna wear it at the pool! Under a UPF rash guard because I’m not a maniac but still! THE BIKINI WILL KNOW SHE’S THERE.”
Says Sequoia on a very low-key summer checklist: “Every summer my son and I master something. So far, we’ve had summers of pancakes ’21, lemonade ’22, ice cream ’23, last year was the summer of the terrible job, and this summer we’re back with the summer of pizza.”
Lots of love, and we’ll still be publishing Big Salad while we’re traveling, if you’d like to sign up. Have a good one. xoxo
(Photo by Vradiy Art/Stocksy.)
Note: If you buy something through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission or have a sponsored relationship with the brand, at no cost to you. We recommend only products we genuinely like. Thank you so much.
Times have drastically changed in the two decades since Danny Boyle and Alex Garland delivered the most gripping apocalyptic horror thriller ever made, and changed the zombie genre forever. When 28 Days Later was released, the zombies had only ever been slow, camcorders were the cutting edge of technology, and the idea of a global pandemic that brought the world’s nations to a halt seemed like something out of science fiction. Now, that science fiction has become reality.
To say the COVID-19 pandemic played a huge part in getting Boyle and Garland back to make the long-awaited sequel 28 Years Later is not an exaggeration. “Obviously one of the things we thought about was about the way that COVID, when it first hit us all and we kind of panicked into the behavior we were told to do… lead us to think [how] we began to get accustomed [to that life],” Boyle tells Inverse.
“Our behavior relaxed and changed,” he continues. “And that made us think of 28 Years.”
“With 28 Years, you would just begin to take more risks, because humans do.”
But never one to rest on his laurels, Boyle wasn’t interested in making a movie like all the other zombie movies that had become so prolific in Hollywood. Boyle is intensely aware of how oversaturated the pop culture landscape has become with zombie movies and shows since 28 Days Later came out, and that inspired him and Garland to take 28 Years Later in a different direction than the previous sequel had set them up for. Instead of spreading to continental Europe, the Rage Virus has been contained to the U.K. mainland, which has remained under quarantine. Survivors have been left to fend for themselves. The world outside has moved on. Boyle was more interested in exploring what an apocalyptic world contained on the British mainland would look like. “Nature finds a way to survive. That felt like a really useful ingredient,” Boyle says.
Influenced by other other movies and TV series where a zombie epidemic spread across the globe, Boyle felt “what we should do is contract back.” This lead to a smaller apocalypse story contained to mainland Britain.
Sony Pictures
That’s what sets 28 Years Later apart from the many other zombie franchises — from The Last of Us to Zombieland to Train to Busan — that have recently captured public imagination: the smaller, contained premise, and the return of the Boyle-Garland dream team. “It’s Garland. Danny Boyle,” star Aaron Taylor-Johnson tells Inverse. Adds co-star Jodie Comer, “It’s the same crew.”
With 28 Years Later Boyle reunites not only with Garland, but with longtime collaborators like cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle. And with a trusted crew backing him up, Boyle was given the support to make some major swings, both in the creative and technical senses. “Of course with 28 Years, you would just begin to take more risks, because humans do. You just begin to nudge,” Boyle says.
One of the biggest risks that 28 Years Later takes is obvious: the film is shot exclusively on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, an homage to the original film, which was shot on a Canon XL1 digital video camera — a camcorder that was ubiquitous at the time that 28 Days Later was released.
“Camcorders were everywhere, really,” Boyle says. So in deference to the first film’s groundbreaking use of digital photography, he had to use today’s most ubiquitous technology: smartphones. “Now we’re in an age where everyone has this phone in their side pocket,” Comer says. “And so, it was a kind of nice mirroring of how the world’s progressed technically.”
Boyle took advantage of the lightweight cameras to depict a countryside untouched by humans.
Sony Pictures
But Boyle didn’t limit himself to iPhones. The production used “many other lightweight cameras,” from GoPros to drones. “It felt like it gave us the opportunity to move very lightly into the countryside,” Boyle says. That was imperative to Boyle: to reach parts of Northeast England, an area called Northumbria, that has been relatively unchanged for a thousand years.
“It really looked like an area where man has not disturbed. And for our purposes, that’s an area that hasn’t been disturbed for 28 years. So it was lovely to be able to go into that area with lightweight cameras so you don’t create a big heavy footprint,” Boyle says.
“Danny’s just such a bold filmmaker.”
On the other side of things, Boyle and Mantle also constructed elaborate new rigs to shoot the action in ways it’s never been shot before. One rig, which lined up a whopping 20 cameras in a semi-circle, already made headlines in the lead-up to the film. And it provided star Taylor-Johnson with an experience unlike any one he’s had on any other set.
“You think of something of this scale, a big production like this, that it might be shot on film or these certain cameras. But then it’s just Danny going, ‘Yeah, and I’ve got an idea. And it’s going to be iPhones. And sometimes we’re going to put 20 of them on a rig.’ And you’re like, ‘I’m sorry, did I just miss… Did you say it’s going to be a phone?’” Taylor-Johnson says.
The 20-camera rig that Boyle and his crew constructed for the film.
Sony Pictures
The film’s unique mode of filmmaking gave Taylor-Johnson and other cast members a role they’d never had before: camera operator. “There’s a great shot of Aaron Taylor-Johnson running at the end of the film,” Boyle says. “He’s got a camera in his left hand as he’s running at full power. You can’t do that with conventional cameras at all, because the actor has to slow down a bit to let the equipment keep pace with him.”
Rather than feel pressured by the job of operating the camera while acting, Taylor-Johnson was only energized by this new filmmaking mode. “Danny’s just such a bold filmmaker,” he says. “And it laid the sort of groundwork for the fact that this was going to be very experimental and just new. It kept us on our toes in a really refreshing way.”
“[The smartphones] gave us an opportunity to record some of the brutality, some of the violence very graphically, and hopefully startlingly.”
When I ask Boyle about the experience of making 28 Years Later with iPhones, it’s the most animated that the director gets during the interview. Yes, that 20-camera rig was just one of many “unusual rigs” he and his crew manufactured — some would have eight cameras, some 10, though 20 was the limit. And all of these smartphone cameras offered the highest quality, thanks to them coming built in with the ability to shoot in 4K resolution and 60 frames per second. “So you can shoot for a cinema screen without any loss of resolution or satisfaction in watching a widescreen format,” Boyle describes enthusiastically.
The result onscreen is nothing short of breathtaking. The action is more visceral and real than any other recent horror movie has been able to achieve; the bloodshed is so shocking that you can practically feel the arrows ripping through flesh. “[The smartphones] gave us an opportunity to record some of the brutality, some of the violence very graphically, and hopefully startlingly,” Boyle says. There’s no doubt about it: Boyle has handily achieved that goal.
The brand’s distinctive asset is “binds”, strips of their bespoke typeface distorted to appear like ropes or leather, adding a subtly erotic edge to the campaign without nudity. The ability to suggest and entice is key in WMH&I’s arsenal of text based playfulness. “The ‘binds’ are a visual representation of Jane Grey’s psychological control,” says Mark. “Always taut, the binds emanate directly from Jane when present in the scene or act as her omnipresent control when she’s just off camera.” Aiming to disarm an audience of willing “subs”, this text-based experimentation dabbles in the dark arts of mind tricks and manipulation.
WMH&I investigated the interests of sexually submissive men when figuring out the brand identity for Jane Grey. Thanks to extensive psychological research into the minds of submissive males and the practitioners of BDSM, WMH&I could confidently traverse their desires, wishes and lust in order to create a brand identity that spoke to them rather than merely advertising sadomasochism. “Finding the tension in their attitudes led us to our audience’s insight; the Jane Grey sub seeks submission not as humiliation, but as self actualisation,” says Daisy. “They are worthy and confident enough to explore their truest desires, they just need a little nudge from someone like Jane.” The typeface itself carries an air of confidence with sharp edges and sleek line work, but more importantly – the typography intimately interacts with their campaign’s professionally photographed scenes of shibari, wax play and branding (literally, through the use of tattoos).
“In terms of advantage, all of our work is audience centric, if we were just creating beautiful designs we would be a team of artists not creatives,” says Daisy. Through the art of brand identities, WMH&I offer audiences not just a place of belonging, but introspection and character-building – using “taboo” subjects and shattering preconceived notions. After all, in today’s landscape of erotic media making a comeback, there may be no better time to flirt with the possibilities of raunchy typeface.
Black people in Galveston met the news Order No. 3 brought with celebrations in the streets, but emancipation was not a gift from white Americans. Black Americans had fought and died for the United States. They had worked as soldiers, as nurses, and as day laborers in the Union army. Those who could had demonstrated their hatred of enslavement and the Confederacy by leaving their homes for the northern lines, sometimes delivering valuable information or matériel to the Union, while those unable to leave had hidden wounded U.S. soldiers and helped them get back to Union lines.
But white former Confederates in Texas were demoralized and angered by the changes in their circumstances. “It looked like everything worth living for was gone,” Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight later recalled.
Marcia Bjornerud is the Walter Schober Professor of Environmental Studies at Lawrence University and a fellow of the Geological Society of America. Her most recent book is “Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks.”
I didn’t expect to meet any garnets in Suffolk.
As a geologist, I feel that I haven’t truly arrived in a place without understanding its rocky substrate. So I’d looked into the geology of the area along the River Deben and learned that there aren’t really any proper rocks there at all — just glacial gravels and soft marine clays under wind-rippled grasslands and welly-sucking salt marshes. The boundaries between land and water are diffuse. Where the river meets the sea and forms a wide estuary, its main channel and capillary-like tributaries pulse in and out twice a day with the tides.
My kids and I had come to this liminal landscape from London for their school’s week-long late-summer retreat in an old manor house by the sea. By the time we left the outer London suburbs and the clutter of the city had given way to villages and open meadows, I was anticipating an adventure. The children would be kept busy with activities during the day, and I would have a week to ramble around the Suffolk countryside.
The first day, I walked as far as I could along the muddy coast and was thrilled to come across a pebble beach. I love beach stones and the fragmented stories they tell. Perhaps these wave-rounded cobbles could share insights into the deeper geologic origins of this land. And they did, obligingly, but every one of them said the same thing: They were nodules of chert, also called flint, weathered out of Cretaceous chalk further inland.
Interesting, thank you, I said to them, but then muttered to myself: rather monotonous. Shingle beaches with chert cobbles are common along the eastern and southern coasts of England. Chert can be knapped to a sharp edge and was prized by early human communities for making knife blades, hand axes, arrowheads and spearpoints. Archaeologists speculate that working chert into tools was essential to the evolutionary development of the human brain. There is an archaeological site in Suffolk that provides evidence of humans making hand tools from chert almost 700,000 years ago. And since medieval times, resourceful English masons who lacked better building stones have used the literally flinty, resistant cherts as cladding, typically cracking them in half and setting the fractured side outward. The exterior of Southwark Cathedral in London is a famous example.
“I admit to a predilection for rocks that speak vividly of magmatic drama and tectonic transformation, rocks that are portals into the heart of a living planet.”
I mused about these connections between human and natural history but couldn’t help thinking a bit wistfully about the spectacular variety of igneous and metamorphic rocks on Lake Superior beaches back home in Wisconsin. Those beaches, where Pleistocene glaciers left rocky souvenirs gathered from vast stretches of the ancient Canadian Shield, have memories spanning more than two billion years, recounting the epic saga of how an entire continent was constructed. If the cobbles on a Lake Superior beach are akin to an aged volume of significant literature, a collection of Cretaceous chert is like shreds of a local newspaper.
Two confessions. First, yes, I talk to rocks, privately and unabashedly. And second, I have favorites — but I do feel bad about that.
To be clear, I respect all rock types; each has a role to play in the governance of the world. But I’m a structural geologist — I study how mountains form. I admit to a predilection for rocks that speak vividly of magmatic drama and tectonic transformation, rocks that are portals into the heart of a living planet.
Aldo Leopold, the pioneering ecologist, confessed to loving pine trees above all others; he admired their ability to subsist in sandy soils and outlive many deciduous varieties. But he acknowledged that other species with different attributes are essential to natural ecosystems, and so it is too with minerals. All have virtues, and some perform crucial planetary duties.
For example, calcite [CaCO3], the main mineral in limestone, serves as a long-term repository for carbon dioxide exhaled by volcanoes. I do not love calcite, but I hold it in high esteem for preventing the Earth (so far) from becoming a runaway greenhouse planet. Or consider apatite [Ca5(PO4)3(OH)], a minor constituent of granite and the ultimate supplier of the element phosphorus, which is essential for all living things, a key ingredient in DNA, RNA and the teeth and bones of vertebrates, and in ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which transports energy within cells. Feldspars, a large family of silicate minerals that are the primary components of igneous rocks, allow themselves to be partly disassembled by rainwater and transformed into clay minerals, the basis for soil and thus critical to life on land.
The most notable attribute of chert, which consists of pure silica (SiO2), is simply exceptional durability against physical abrasion and chemical weathering. The sand on most beaches is made of quartz (also pure silica) not because quartz is the most common mineral but because it is the toughest among the common minerals and survives in the greatest volume. Unfortunately, despite their longevity, chert and quartz don’t have good memories. The chemical simplicity that makes them tough also prevents them from recording their biographies in detail.
“Garnets are the true fruit of the underworld.”
By the third day in Suffolk, I had explored much of area around the manor house. I crossed the wide mouth of the Deben in a rowboat ferry, which prospective passengers flag down from the dock on the opposite side by waving a large white paddle. It was a charmingly low-tech mode of telecommunication compared to the history of this site. British technologists had covertly developed modern radar at the manor in the early days of World War II, and a transmitter built on the banks of the river in 1937 was crucial to the success of the Battle of Britain. To explain the exceptional performance of British pilots who had the advantage of the secret new technology, the intelligence service spread a rumor that eating carrots gave them especially sharp eyesight — a bit of quasi-misinformation that survives, like a chert cobble, as a durable truism.
On my fourth morning, I set out further afield toward Sutton Hoo, the renowned site of a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon ship burial excavated in 1939. It was only 10 miles away, so I started walking in that direction with a vague hope that someone might offer me a lift. After about an hour, I passed a house with an assortment of old bicycles arrayed on the grass next to a hand-printed “For Sale” sign. No one seemed to be around. All the bikes were rusted and rickety, but I spotted a green three-speed that had good tires and one working brake. I knocked on the door but got no answer. I hesitated for a moment, then wedged a 20-pound note into the frame of the front door, hoping it was a reasonable price for a broken-down bike, and pedaled off.
I quickly discovered that the bike had only one functional gear. It was hard work against a headwind that swept unimpeded across the flat landscape, but an hour later, I reached Sutton Hoo with wild, wind-whipped hair. Entering the well-groomed National Trust property with some embarrassment, I paid the admission fee to a startled attendant and entered into the presence of objects with vivid memories of another version of this place, when Suffolk was the kingdom of East Anglia.
The wooden ship and whoever was buried in it had long ago crumbled to dust, but the more durable metal and mineral artifacts sent on to the next world survived, exempt from mortality. There were elegant silver spoons, elaborate gold buckles, an exquisite bronze bowl, an antler comb embellished with iron — and of course the iconic helmet with copper and tin ornamentation. The original had been whisked away to the British Museum, but that did not diminish the helmet’s power. It is a thing of mystery and beauty. Dark eye openings compel one’s attention. Their mesmerizing effect emanates from the arched eyebrows, which, in a brilliant visual double entendre, are also the outstretched wings of a dragon flying toward the crest of the head.
Peering closer, I saw that the inner crescents of the imposing brows — the lower edges of the dragon’s wings — were rimmed with fiery crimson garnets, blood-red crystals that were key to the helmet’s penetrating gaze. In this low-lying salt-marsh terrain, the presence of garnet — a metamorphic mineral forged in the interior of mountain belts — matched the improbability of finding a ship buried in a grassy plain.
Those crystals had come from far away. I riffled through my knowledge of European geology; the nearest occurrences of garnet would be in Scotland, Norway and the Alps, any of which would imply long-distance trade networks. But the sign next to the display case indicated that there is compelling evidence that the garnets came from Sri Lanka, thousands of miles away. This windswept corner of England must have been connected to a vast network of international commerce and the Silk Road. How extraordinary it would be if those garnets could speak of the chain of events that carried them from the medieval kingdom of Anuradhapura in the Indian Ocean to East Anglia on the shores of the North Sea. Who were the people who collected and traded them? How many times had they changed hands? What was their route to this place?
“Pyrope garnet is arguably the most important mineral on Earth — it is the motor of the planet’s signature tectonic habit of subduction, which is the secret to Earth’s long-term habitability.”
On the ride back, exhilarated at the sensation of having traveled in time, and propelled now by a tailwind, it occurred to me that the extraordinary journey of those garnets was simply a continuation of their earlier geological itinerations — which, paradoxically, could be reconstructed in far more detail.
Garnet is one of the mineral kingdom’s most meticulous record keepers. It has an appetite for a wide range of elements. The formula for garnet is often written as X3Y2(SiO4)3, where X may be calcium, magnesium, iron, manganese — in any combination of varying ratios — and Y is aluminum, iron and/or chromium. This makes for a huge spectrum of possible compositions, and the specific mix of ingredients bears clues to the origins of any particular crystal. And because all garnets share the same crystal form — a 12- or 24-sided shape akin to a faceted soccer ball — one compositional type can even grow as a rim on another if the chemical or physical environment changes.
This compact crystal form — a marvel of spatial economy, with atoms nested together for maximum efficiency — makes garnets dense and durable. Not merely pretty ornaments, they perform hard work in sandpaper, industrial abrasives, skid-resistant paints and water-jet cutting. During slow tectonic deformation, when other minerals break or flow, garnets rarely fail. Shattered garnets are the record of high transient stresses in ancient earthquakes.
Most garnets are deep red; in fact, the name garnet is derived from the Latin word for pomegranate (granatus), whose ruby seeds look like gemstones. In the Greek myth explaining the seasons, Persephone, goddess of spring and daughter of Zeus and Demeter, is abducted by Hades and taken into his subterranean realm, where she is tricked into eating the food of the underworld: a handful of pomegranate seeds. Her punishment for being kidnapped and accepting meager nourishment (in the misogynistic logic of antiquity) was to be forced to return underground for the three months of winter each year.
Garnets, however, are the true fruit of the underworld. They occur in a variety of colors, not just red, and all of them have colorful properties and histories. Calcium-aluminum garnet is called grossular, from the Latin name for gooseberry, a reference to its translucent pink to pale green hue. Calcium-chromium garnet is a rare grass-green variety named uvarovite, after Count Sergey Uvarov (1786-1855), who, when not busy with his duties as a statesman under Russian Emperor Nicholas I, spent his time collecting unusual minerals. These calcium-rich varieties of garnet are most commonly found in marbles and “skarns” — rocks formed by the metamorphism of limestones interbedded with shale and sandstone.
Iron-aluminum garnets, whose red shades toward purple, are called almandine, a reference to Alabanda, an ancient city in Turkey. (I prefer almandine to an older term, “carbuncle,” used by the Roman natural philosopher Pliny the Elder, whose geologic curiosity led to his death in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79.) Almandine garnets are the most common type in schists — the metamorphic equivalent of shales, clay-rich sedimentary rocks. If such sediments find themselves crumpled inside a growing mountain range, under unaccustomed heat and pressure, the aluminum, iron and silica atoms from the original clay and quartz will reorganize themselves into new crystal forms. Often, however, a garnet growing in a clay-rich sediment will not need all the “nutrients” from the original rock. Bits of those minerals will survive as vestigial “inclusion trails” locked into the garnet in their original positions, even if the rest of the rock experiences subsequent alteration, like a city’s street plan persisting even as buildings come and go.
“Garnet is omnivorous and adventurous, a diarist and archivist bearing chronicles of bygone worlds and subterranean realms. It keeps this ancient planet churning and gives us humans a glimpse of immortality.”
The transformation of lowly gray mudstones into shiny mica schists studded with raspberry-like almandines seems to me a miraculous kind of geological alchemy. Equally astonishing is their subsequent return to the surface over the long arc of a tectonic season, in an echo of Persephone’s trip to and from the underworld. Perhaps most remarkable of all is their capacity to recount the journey there and back again.
The most intensely red garnet is composed of magnesium and aluminum and is known as pyrope. The highest-pressure variety of garnet, pyrope forms in the stygian depths of the Earth’s mantle. Although it is rare at the surface, pyrope is arguably the most important mineral on Earth — it is the motor of the planet’s signature tectonic habit of subduction. Subduction, the process by which ocean crust is recycled into the mantle, is the secret to Earth’s long-term habitability. Among other important services, it rejuvenates landscapes by putting continents on collision courses, and it recharges the mantle with water, where it is stored for future release by volcanoes.
The subduction of basaltic ocean crust keeps the interior and exterior of Earth in communication. Ocean basalt is formed by mantle-melting and volcanism at submarine mid-ocean ridges (which peek above sea level in only a few places, like Iceland). After its fiery birth, the basaltic seafloor is steadily pushed away from its natal ridge as new generations of magma erupt, then slowly cools and contracts until, at an age of about 150 million years, it is dense enough to start to founder into the mantle from which it came. But cold basalt is not dense enough to sink into the deeper parts of the mantle. Deep subduction of ocean crust is possible only because ocean basalt undergoes a metamorphic transformation, at depths of about 30 miles, into a far denser rock called eclogite. And eclogite owes its high density in large part to pyrope garnet. The name pyrope means, evocatively, “fire eye.”
Back in the manor house after my adventure, I recalled that Sri Lanka, like the garnets that found their way to Sutton Hoo, has itself made improbable pilgrimages. The island was once adjacent to Madagascar and Antarctica but broke away, together with India, about 120 million years ago. It docked with Asia 70 million years later. The bedrock of Sri Lanka represents the core of the ancient southern supercontinent called Gondwanaland. The rocks were originally marine sediments, abducted into the underworld in a tectonic collision when Gondwanaland was still being assembled 600 million years ago. In the heart of a long-vanished mountain belt, they experienced extreme conditions — depths of more than 15 miles and temperatures nearly 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit — according to almandine garnets that began to form under those conditions.
Around 500 million years later, erosion finally unearthed these far-traveled rocks, exposing them, at long last, to the open air. At the surface, they became vulnerable to Sri Lanka’s ruthless rivers, whose waters pried crystals from the rocks and swept them into the current. Lesser minerals broke into ever-smaller pieces as they tumbled downstream, but the durable garnets survived unscathed. As the rivers approached the coast, they lost momentum. Unable to carry garnets any further, they jettisoned them onto the shore. Over time, this process created some of the only garnet-sand beaches in the world, well known to medieval treasure hunters, who sent the garnets on new adventures along the Silk Road.
In learning this, I realize that the eyebrows in the Sutton Hoo helmet probably came from a shoreline just as “monotonous” as the chert beach I had snidely disparaged. I am chastened; the Suffolk cherts, like the Sri Lankan garnets — and the Sutton Hoo artefacts — are all that remain of worlds that have otherwise weathered away, stubborn survivors that have defied time and tide. I said a silent apology to chert.
And yet (hoping I am out of earshot of other minerals) I can’t completely set aside my special fondness for garnet. It invents itself from humble beginnings, putting to use whatever resources are at hand. Garnet is beautiful but not too vain to do hard labor, whether sandblasting or moving tectonic plates. It’s distinctive, but not so rare as to engender warfare; there are blood-red garnets but no “blood garnets.” It’s omnivorous and adventurous, a diarist and archivist bearing chronicles of bygone worlds and subterranean realms. Garnet keeps this ancient planet churning and gives us humans a glimpse of immortality, a feeling for what it might be like to gaze across time with fiery eyes, to remember when the kingdom of East Anglia shimmered in the distant future.
India is betting on Chinese technology to keep its electric-vehicle transition on track.
At a time when the U.S. is erecting trade barriers to keep Chinese EV giants at bay, India has taken a different course.
“Without Chinese tech, India would face supply shortages, delayed rollouts, and reduced product diversity,” Pragathi Darapaneni, senior battery materials scientist and former researcher at Argonne National Laboratory, told Rest of World.
India’s own EV makers are struggling as the government revamps its subsidies to drive local innovation and investment. The country is relying on Chinese tech to bridge the gap until the domestic players are more robust.
The shift is happening with no fanfare. Since deadly border clashes with China in 2020, India banned apps like TikTok and Shein, and blocked Chinese automakers like BYDiBYDBYD Auto is a Chinese carmaker that became the world’s leading EV manufacturer in 2023, competing with Tesla for market share and global attention.READ MORE from setting up a local factory, citing national security concerns. Yet, Chinese technology remains central to India’s EV ambitions. In late March, India cut tariffs on over 35 EV components, most of which still come from China, making the tech exchange between the two countries even easier.
Big Indian EV makers, such as “Tata Motors, Mahindra & Mahindra, Ola Electric, etc., still rely on Chinese suppliers for [lithium-ion] cells and power electronics components, even if final assembly is done in India locally,” Shubham Munde, a senior analyst covering tech at research and intelligence firm Market Research Future, told Rest of World.
“The aim is to build a resilient domestic ecosystem, not to isolate it, unlike the more aggressive decoupling seen in the U.S. with China,” Munde said.
Indian firms opt for joint ventures with global players — mostly Chinese — to gain both capital and shortcuts for R&D timelines. These partnerships help them “leapfrog development stages by accessing tested EV platforms, battery modules, and manufacturing playbooks,” Leon Huang, CEO of RapidDirect, a global precision manufacturing company that supports EV supply chains, told Rest of World.
Chinese firms “also help local partners [in India] build supply chain reliability and achieve faster localization by starting with preexisting part libraries and manufacturing standards,” Huang said.
Such collaborations have shaken up the Indian market. Tata Motors, the country’s leading EV maker, has seen its lead shrink as MG Motor — a joint venture between Indian conglomerate JSW and China’s state-owned automaker SAIC — doubled its market share within a year. The MG Windsor, now India’s best-selling electric car, came out of that collaboration.
For the past few years, India has offered generous incentives to carmakers to make EVs affordable, especially scooters and three-wheeled vehicles that dominate its roads. Yet, only 7.6% of new vehicles sold in India were electric in 2024, a slow pace for a country aiming for 30% electrification by 2030.
The government’s new eligibility rules for subsidies require companies to fully assemble EVs within India while allowing the import of components that are not yet produced domestically. Purchase incentives for consumers are also shrinking.
The overhaul has laid bare the fragility of India’s EV sector, with consumer funding down 37% from $934 million in 2022 to $586 million in 2024, and EV sales starting to slump. Tata Motors’ EV fleet orders fell from 26,000 in 2023 to just 2,000 vehicles in 2024.
Hero Electric, India’s first e-scooter manufacturer, is facing bankruptcy proceedings and being probed for not meeting the government’s subsidy requirements; BluSmart, an EV-focused ride-hailing Indian startup, has shut down; and the country’s largest EV maker Ola Electric is losing ground.
Bernstein Research estimates that four legacy automakers control 80% of India’s electric mobility market, while most of the country’s 150 EV startups are “grappling with losses.”
India’s EV market is projected to grow from 480,000 units in 2025 to over 3 million units by 2035, according to a forecast by London-based data analytics firm GlobalData.
The expansion requires a robust EV supply chain, Vivek Kumar, an automotive project manager at GlobalData, told Rest of World. “India still faces significant challenges. A shortage of technical expertise and an underdeveloped charging infrastructure continue to hinder progress,” Kumar said.
EV-related imports are among the key contributors to India’s growing trade deficit with China, data from India’s Commerce Ministry shows. Experts warn overdependence on China could undermine India’s goal of developing its own EV technology.
“India should be careful that such partnerships do not lead to Chinese players dominating the market, as this could reduce incentives for developing domestic companies and technologies. There needs to be a balance,” Jason Altshuler, owner of My Electric Home, a Colorado-based provider of innovative electrical solutions including EV chargers, told Rest of World.
Opening market access to China poses both a strategic and security risk for India. Chinese firms face intense scrutiny in India due to geopolitical rivalry. But New Delhi has avoided the U.S.-style curbs on Chinese technology.
Tu Le, founder and managing director of Detroit-based mobility intelligence and advisory firm Sino Auto Insights, sees U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff war on Chinese EV components — particularly batteries — as an obstacle to America’s EV growth. Le told Rest of World the U.S. has lost the EV momentum built over the years, and Trump’s EV policy “guarantees the U.S. won’t go any further on continued EV sales.”
India is choosing soft protectionism, aiming to “integrate with — not isolate from — Chinese supply chains until substitutes mature,” Munde said.
To play down or minimise the damage JK Rowling has done through her rhetoric on X is to dismiss and disregard the feelings and rights of thousands of trans individuals across the world.
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After recently coming to the defence of co-star Tom Felton, it’s unsurprising that former Harry Potter star Jason Isaacs is doubling down on his rather weak stance regarding JK Rowling’s public tirade against the trans community.
In a lengthy feature for Vulture, Isaacs, who recently was lauded by critics and fans for his performance in season three of The White Lotus, was asked by the interviewer: “I’m curious if you have thoughts about J.K. Rowling and what seems to be her fixation on trans women, specifically her belief that trans women’s rights erode biological women’s rights.”
The actor’s immediate response was “You’re asking me to be Jo’s spokesperson and unpack what’s going on in Jo’s head?” Not an ounce of defensiveness detected there of course…
Prompted once more by the interviewer about his thoughts on the matter, Isaacs delivered a schpiel about the fact that he’s only met Rowling once, “for about two minutes,” before launching into a rather self-serving statement:
“People want me to talk about J.K Rowling’s attitude to trans people all the time. And initially, I went, ‘I don’t know her well enough, and I’m a straight white man in late middle age, and it’s not for me to opine on feminist and trans issues.’ But then I championed this fabulous trans comedian, Jordan Gray, and wrote about her, and I suddenly became a poster boy for trans rights.”
The actor continued: “It was interpreted as me putting the knife into Jo, and it wasn’t. I don’t understand who she is on Twitter. But then that’s true of almost anybody online. It’s a place where people scream abuse at each other. And I’ve heard her arguments when she explained herself in that seven-part podcast, The Witch Trials of J.K Rowling, which I listened to. She says something like, ‘I may be on the wrong side of history, but this is what I feel very strongly.’ It’s not my argument or discussion to have. But if there’s a vote, I know which side I’ll be voting.”
While it is not Isaac’s responsibility to speak on Rowling’s behalf, saying that he doesn’t “understand” who she is on Twitter feels like a cop out. She’s transphobic. See? Easy.
To play down or minimise the damage Rowling has done through her rhetoric on X is to dismiss and disregard the feelings and rights of thousands of trans individuals across the world. It wasn’t hard to understand what the author meant when she rather gleefully declared that “there are no trans kids” on X back in December 2024.
There are no trans kids. No child is ‘born in the wrong body’. There are only adults like you, prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that will end up wreaking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined. pic.twitter.com/yyc4MxgfOk
Also, nothing is ever isolated to social media these days. Indeed, Rowling played a massive role in a political crusade that ultimately resulted in the unanimous passing of “a ruling that limited the definition of a woman to be based on ‘biological sex’ under Britain’s Equality Act, excluding trans women from being protected from discrimination.”
So, Isaac’s rather blasé comments are not only unhelpful, they’re harmful. Right now, the former Harry Potter cast seems to be diving towards that sinking ship.
