It’s nine on Sunday morning, and Eileen is going to mass with Simon. They’ve known each other for a very long time — since they were teenagers. They’ve shared a romantic interlude in Paris, only to part for years after. They’ve woken up in bed together this morning. It’s both a notable and unexciting event, the sort that Eileen, nearing 30, clings to. The moment happens in her head more than in reality, in her heart. She watches this man she’s loved for some time now sing his praises to someone he’s never met, joined by the chorus of believers. She watches him pray. He kisses her on the cheek, and they say goodbye. In an email to her friend Alice, Eileen wonders, “Do I resent him for liking the concept of God more than he likes me?” Alice is far from her friends in Dublin. She’s chosen to rent a house in the Irish countryside after a stint in a psychiatric hospital. She’s not working. She’s not writing a new novel, which is what she usually does in these private spaces far from the world. She has plenty of money, no car, no interest in resuming her old life in the city. Soon she meets a man named Felix and brings him along on a publicity tour in Rome for her last novel. They sleep in separate bedrooms for the first few nights. In an email to Eileen, Alice asks, “But what would it be like to form a relationship with no preordained shape of any kind? Just to pour the water out and let it fall. I suppose it would take no shape, and run off in all directions.” “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” the third novel by acclaimed Irish author Sally Rooney, is not “Normal People.” For Alice and Eileen, years have passed since the clarity and confusion of youthful romance. They believe themselves to be passed that stage of thrilling uncertainty. They’re in their late 20s; life should be happening by now, settled in some way, meaningful in some way. It’s not. Is the meaning still to come, or has the moment passed? That touch of adolescent excitement, which Rooney played to perfection in “Normal People,” is used sparingly in “Beautiful World.” Alice and Eileen debate whether they should be thrilled by their lives, but they don’t often feel thrilled. In their email correspondence, which runs through the spine of the novel, they discuss looming topics in distant regard to themselves — the bleak hum of capitalism; the tepid reality of one’s career; the goes- both-ways struggle of friendship and love. These are not new topics for Rooney, but they’re renewed, reworked for characters settling into the dire prospect that life lasts longer than 20 or so years. But the spirit of Rooney’s unintrusive narration is as stunning as ever: “Driving back that night, the crescent moon lopsided and golden like a lifted saucer of champagne, the top buttons of her blouse were undone, she put her hand inside, touching her breastbone, they were talking about children, she had never wanted any before, but lately she wondered…” It doesn’t matter which character this is — you know them at once. You know where they are, what they want, what they think they want. Rooney is unmatched in her style, in the immersive draw of her prose. She doesn’t use quotation marks. She doesn’t stunt a lucid clause by binding it to a full sentence. In “Normal People,” this feeling of presence sometimes became a grotesque thing, a stunning intensity. How many conflicts could have been resolved if Marianne and Connell chose to speak their minds? But in “Beautiful World,” we are less often challenged to criticize than to concord in silence. These lives are not so simple, so young, so defined by the question of whether to speak or not to speak. Simon and Eileen’s connection is not new, it’s known: “And their phone calls, the messages they wrote to one another, their jealousies, the years of looks, suppressed smiles, their dictionary of little touches … This much was in their eyes and passed between them.” And here we are with another story about knowing someone, being known by someone. We find ourselves once more treading in that deep water, only now we’re further from the shore: “I just want everything to be like it was, Eileen said. And for us to be young again and live near each other, and nothing to be different. Alice was smiling sadly. But if things are different, can we still be friends? she asked … Crescent moon hanging low over the dark water. Tide returning now with a faint repeating rush over the sand. Another place, another time.” Readers will be initially disappointed to hear that Rooney hasn’t written another “Normal People.” She’s written something better: an honest account of the motion of life, the march forward, the dissolution of pride and self-assurance. The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com Arts Wednesday, September 8, 2021 — 5 Sandra Oh in a frumpy coat with her wonderfully curly hair puffed up is Hollywood catnip. I don’t know why Oh can never have a well-fitted trench, but she’s legally prohibited. The more functional and disheveled the coat, the better. The industry trend holds true as Sandra Oh dons a lovely Lands’ End toggle wool jacket in “The Chair,” a comedy-drama set at a fictional Ivy League school. Debilitatingly funny and touching, “The Chair” essentializes higher education: overworked teacher’s assistants, anxious students, professors in crisis, the politics of tenure. The show lovingly documents the current state of academia through the story of one recently promoted department chair. Ji-Yoon (Sandra Oh, “Grey’s Anatomy”) enters as the English department is in decline. Enrollment is down, and the department’s aging professors can’t relate to or retain students. Gifted a desk plate that is endearingly inscribed with “fucker in charge of you fucking fucks,” Ji-Yoon is tasked with whipping the department into shape. However, Ji-Yoon is first and foremost an educator, and not equipped to spar with administration politically. When upper management demands she get three older professors to resign, Ji-Yoon scrambles to modernize the professors’ syllabi. But her efforts lead to more confusion and unhappy peers. At home, Ji-Yoon lives alone with her adopted daughter Juju (Everly Carganilla, “Yes Day”). Scenes with Juju anchor the series and provide a much-needed relief from wood-paneled offices. But the domestic scenes do more than contrast the elite, academic setting. Instead, home scenes substantiate the show’s ultimate thesis about being overwhelmed. Through interweaving the personal and the professional, “The Chair” understands Ji-Yoon as a multifaceted individual: a busy mother, a daughter, an employee and a friend. Ji-Yoon often has to drop her daughter off at her elderly Korean father’s house. The interplay between Juju, Ji-Yoon and her grandfather Habi (Ji-Yong Lee, “Righteous Ties”) is absolutely fantastic and wholesome. Some of the funniest and most touching moments feature Juju, hilarious and frighteningly self-composed, contrasted with Habi and his constant bewilderment. Habi easily makes the list of top five television grandparents. Characters like Juju and Habi justify The Atlantic heralding “The Chair” as “Netflix’s best drama in years.” But in the end, overcommitted and spread too thin, Ji-Yoon finds herself constantly unprepared to show up in a satisfactory way for the people she cares about. And that’s the show. “The Chair” is about professional disappointment: negotiating wins and losses, taking responsibility for thoughtlessness. But unlike other workplace TV shows that glorify the grind and hard work, “The Chair” presents a startlingly simple solution to the impossible Gordian knot of professional obligation and personal responsibility: quit. No one person has all the hours in the day to be a leader, an attentive mother, a good friend and a teacher. Throughout the series, no matter how much harder Ji-Yoon tries, and despite her brilliance and her willingness to compromise, the reality is that Ji-Yoon is unhappy trying to fulfill her obligations. The show’s thesis is bolstered by its lucid understanding of academia’s contradictions. One might adore the cold snap of winter and trekking across a quad immersed in literature, but no gamely exploration of Chaucer with a passionate professor can paste over students’ keen awareness of how wrong and broken the world is. The show resists the urge to make ivory tower politics seem absurd or the result of “snowflake undergrads” in need of “reality checks.” How relevant is an English degree when the California state forests are burning? How can college campuses serve as both a vanguard of liberalism and theoretical thought while simultaneously being capitalist institutions that invest in Big Oil? The conflicts Ji-Yoon faces are all outgrowths of the turbulent present and higher education’s contradictions. “The Chair” doesn’t reconcile or directly respond to these questions, but instead validates them as queries. In a true collegiate fashion, the show says: “Great question, does anyone else have thoughts?” “He’s All That” is a meta-exploration of what it means to be and stay famous. Though the film is almost an exact replica of the ’90s classic “She’s All That,” it fails to romanticize the teen experience in the same way. The modern update of the film stars TikTok personality Addison Rae (“Spy Cat”) as Padgett Sawyer, this century’s Zack Siler (Freddie Prinze Jr., “Scooby- Doo”). She’s a Southern California- based teen influencer whose social status is in peril when she loses her cool on Instagram Live after walking in on her cheating boyfriend. She loses her sponsorship, watches her follower count plummet and decides that the only logical solution is to bet that she can make a certified “dork” named Cameron Kweller (Tanner Buchanan, “Chance”), the next prom king. It’s a classic story with a classic solution and, inevitably, Padgett and Cameron develop feelings for each other. The antics that bring Padgett and her pet project together are sweet — they scoop poop together, reveal inane secrets (like how Padgett’s mom is a nurse or that Cameron likes to take pictures) and do all the things teens do when falling in love in an hour and a half on our computer screens. While “He’s All That” is not a story for the ages, Rae is a surprisingly good actress, offering a level of sincerity and emotion that we don’t often see in the TikTok videos the star is famous for. Predictably, this film is interesting only to the extent that it can be compared to the original. For instance, the fact that a social media landscape even exists in “He’s All That” drastically changes the dynamics of the plot. The stakes are arguably higher for Padgett than they were for Zack. While Zack’s reputation as cool guy du jour in the original is under the watchful eye of maybe three thousand people, four if we’re being generous, Padgett’s fall from glory is seen by between eight hundred thousand and nine hundred thousand people and a critical corporate representative. “The bet,” for Zack, is a way to get his mind off the blonde who broke his heart. For Padgett, it’s the difference between securing her college tuition or drowning in student debt. No matter how funny it is that they made Cameron a horse-boy instead of a falafel-slinger, Netflix can’t just let a movie be a movie. The streaming company’s favorite thing to do is make sure its characters have a moral awakening — “He’s All That” is no different. The issue here, however, is that there is simply no way to make a movie starring influencers without inadvertently insulting the very thing that got them the part in the first place. Early in their friendship, Cameron criticizes Padgett’s need to document everything in her life, allowing Netflix to eventually drive home the tired message that what we see on social media is not the full picture. While this lesson is positive enough, it’s marred by the fact that Addison Rae is an influencer herself and on a much larger scale than her character. She has no credits to her name beyond “A-list TikToker” and “Kourtney Kardashian’s friend.” She boasts 83.5 million followers on TikTok and close to 40 million on Instagram. What’s more, Rae was at the center of a social media cheating scandal with YouTuber Bryce Hall that had people taking sides and making catchy hashtags in the same way they did for Padgett after her messy public breakup. But though these similarities make it hard to take Netflix’s high-minded scheming seriously, Addison Rae is a different story. As one of her first forays into a more “traditional” Hollywood career, “He’s All That” establishes the TikToker as a viable option for other films in the future, bringing with her a stable following for which studio executives will probably salivate. So, while I doubt many of us have plans to watch this film as religiously as the original, I also won’t be surprised if Addison Rae becomes a Netflix cast staple. I was obsessed with the true and false binary for a very brief period in the summer of 2019. These binary statements meant everything when coding my research on a computer-generated analysis of Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics (I know that’s a little too theatre kid, but bear with me). Knowing how to categorize words in a productive way felt impossible without using something so strict as a true-and- false parameter. Coding is not easy, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence. In a world of tech secrecy, using a binary doesn’t cut it. Binaries don’t work on complex modern problems. There is a spectrum of solutions needed to give AI the chance to shine. With restrictive AI practices, there is a world of gray that is hard to clear out. However, “Stephanie Dinkins: On Love and Data” is anything but just gray. It’s neon yellow, deep violet and a spectrum of what AI is here and now. At the School of Art & Design Stamps Gallery downtown, “Stephanie Dinkins: On Love and Data,” curated by Gallery Director Srimoyee Mitra, celebrates Dinkins’s manifesto of “Afro-now-ism”: an active statement for what art and tech should be against systemic oppression. Mitra pulls from Dinkins’s most recent works to create a place where visitors can experience AI that fosters community and generational storytelling. One of the most technically complex exhibits comes in the form of a dialogue. “Conversations with Bina48: Fragments 7, 6, 5, 2” is the recorded in-person, face-to-face interaction between Stephanie Dinkins and advanced social robot Bina48 (short for “Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture”). The four clips of conversations last about a minute each — yet, as you listen, you can hear the repetitive nature of AI emulating personal thought. They touch on love, life and Bina herself, who is perhaps the only robot who is a Black woman. Bina speaks with complex, long sets of statements. She circles around a point, shading it into existence rather than painting it all at once. If not for the stark image of Dinkins and Bina’s faces inches from touching, I might not have felt the intimate nature of their connection. Their proximity was magnetic, seeing the subtlety of Dinkins compared to the more simulated nature of Bina’s delivery. This piece, like most in the exhibit, is in that exciting space of ongoing: not quite final, ever- changing. The nature of AI makes projects hard to complete — how can they be finished, when AI is evolving every second? Changing, adapting and radicalizing new ways to dismantle and connect; if anything, this constant growth gives the collection a sense of unity. Everything’s in action. Sensors, speakers and AI harmonize to create a holistic image of technology that electrifies. “Secret Garden” is the culmination of this action. An immersive installation of projectors and speakers illustrates three generations of Black women’s power and their stories. The use of space and projection breathes life into the space. A woman is seen ducking to the sides of a corner, and the projected background is composed of flora that highlights the space the women hold together. It perfectly embodies the women’s stories — stories of resilience and power in the face of generational inequality. Binaries are stupid. When it comes time to create content, whether coded or not, I shouldn’t depend on something so limited. It’s time to think about how tech can bring power to communities that have often been hurt by coding practices. “Stephanie Dinkins: On Love and Data” shows how and what AI should be. Open at the Stamps Gallery until Oct. 23, it is worth seeing Dinkins in a league of her own. Sandra Oh is the “fucker in charge” in Netflix’s ‘The Chair’ Addison Rae is the latest victim of the rom-com genre’s gambling addiction in ‘He’s All That’ Sally Rooney’s ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You’ is required reading ‘Stephanie Dinkins: On Love and Data’ shows AI as it should be This image is from the official trailer for “The Chair,” produced by Netflix. ELIZABETH YOON Managing Arts Editor EMMA CHANG Daily Arts Writer JULIAN WRAY Daily Arts Writer MATTHEW EGGERS Daily Arts Writer This image is from the official trailer for “He’s All That,” distributed by Netflix. Design by Madison Grosvenor