Plutonic Rainbows

MPU101 is the artist, MPU107 the album, and the seventh of these to arrive with an alias where the name should be. Five years of records on Ilian Tape and the Munich label has never put a face to them. What it does supply is a credits block, and on this one the credits block is unusually talkative.

Recorded in 2025 across eleven US states, from California up through Oregon and Washington and back across Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and Arizona, plus London, with additional sessions at Wiggle World in Altadena and Terraform in Los Angeles. Edited afterwards in Chiemgau, Bavaria. Mixed by Tobias Neumann in Berlin, mastered by Tangible Air in Munich. That is an itinerary, and the track titles read like the same trip logged twice: Montana Interface, InterstateXX, headlight section, Campsite Sequence.

So the only way in is the paratext, and I think that is deliberate rather than coy. Withhold the biography and the packaging becomes the argument. Ten tracks, a little under fifty-six minutes, a purple eight-point star stamped over the centre of 180g vinyl, and four of the tracks trimmed shorter for the record than for the download, which is the sort of detail a project with a persona would never bother to publish.

Horizons Music is selling it as glass-eyed ambient, sad synth for loners, dystopian downtempo. That is positioning rather than verdict, and I am not going to pretend to a verdict of my own on a record that came out last month. What the previous six earned is the benefit of the doubt, which puts this one on the shelf with everything else I keep finding that is uninterested in being loud.

Janet Maslin opened her New York Times review on 22 May 1993 by observing that Sharon Stone practising her golf putts was "one of many good reasons this film was kept under wraps until it opened yesterday". Variety filed Sliver as "a cold, inaccessible yarn about murder and voyeurism" and suggested Stone "might be well advised to move on to a different genre". The Los Angeles Times put its verdict in a subheading: a film about voyeurism that doesn't provide much to watch. Read together, the pans have a shape. Almost all of them reviewed the sex and the star, measuring what Stone did here against what she had done the year before in Basic Instinct, and almost none of them reviewed the idea the film was built on.

Paramount's one-sheet had already made the promise the picture couldn't keep. Black field, three names in serif capitals, and down the centre a single vertical strip of blue eye above an orange open mouth, sliced narrow like the building. "You like to watch, don't you." Richard Schickel, in TIME, was the one critic who took the taunt at face value. A cinema screen, he wrote, is "among other things, a big lighted window", and we in the dark are voyeurs hoping to see forbidden sights, which makes Carly Norris a projection of our watching selves: we are invited to watch a watcher learn to like watching. Then he dismissed it as carelessness dressed up as irony. He was right about the film and wrong about the idea. A picture doesn't have to earn its premise for the premise to be the thing worth keeping.

Audiences were not the obstacle. Sliver took $12.1 million across 2,093 theatres, beat Hot Shots! Part Deux to number one, and finished on $36.3 million at home and $123.9 million worldwide against a $40 million budget. The tagline worked exactly as a tagline should. Whatever went wrong here, nobody refused the invitation.

What they bought a ticket to wasn't quite a film. Phillip Noyce has said he made 110 edits to escape an NC-17, and the ending was rewritten and reshot after previews went badly, which meant changing who the killer was. Set that against Malice, five months later, whose plot also collapses when you push on it: Nicole Kidman's malpractice fraud requires a surgeon who was secretly her doctor in Boston under another name, and nobody has ever explained how he ran two identities. That hole is load-bearing. It is the film committing to its own excess. Sliver's holes were cut into it afterwards by people trying to save it, and the finished picture has the distinctive flatness of a story whose secret was swapped out in post.

The surveillance is the part that has aged into furniture. In 1999 a Dutch production company put strangers in a wired house and sold the footage as Big Brother, and what William Baldwin's Zeke Hawkins does from his console became a format, then a genre, then a doorbell people buy for themselves. Watching a bank of tenant feeds now looks less like a psychopathology than a job. The line that has actually curdled is the romance: a woman finds out a man has filmed her in her own flat, and the film treats this as the moment she warms to him. In 1993 that was bad sexual politics inside a thriller. Now it's the only genuinely implausible thing left in it.

Castle Rock had been sitting on Malice since the company was founded in 1987, back when it was called Damages. When the studio wanted a fresh script it went to William Goldman, who was busy and proposed a young writer he was mentoring instead. That is how Aaron Sorkin came to the picture, delivering two drafts before breaking off to adapt A Few Good Men and returning for the rewrites that got Alec Baldwin to sign. Scott Frank was on the job by November 1991, and much of the finished film's thriller machinery is credited to him.

Goldman's lesson to Sorkin, in Sorkin's own telling on the BBC, was to always have a secret in your back pocket, something the audience doesn't learn about your lead until late. Malice follows that instruction until the pocket is empty. Bill Pullman's college dean rents his attic to Baldwin's surgeon; Kidman's wife goes in with abdominal pain and comes out missing the healthy ovary as well as the diseased one; the malpractice suit that follows is a fraud she is running with the surgeon, who was also her doctor in Boston under another name. Ebert asked the only question that matters: who was the doctor in Boston, and how did he keep two identities going? Nobody has answered it in thirty-three years.

Columbia's one-sheet sold exactly this. Two half-faces in Gordon Willis shadow, a list reading deception, betrayal, murder, and beneath it the flat promise that some things you never see coming. Where Harold Becker's name should be is the line "from the director of Sea of Love", which tells you the studio knew what it was selling and it wasn't a director.

Vincent Canby, in the New York Times, filed the minority report, enjoying the cheat, calling the film deviously entertaining and noting that "no matter how wild the plot reversals, there's always a slightly madder one to come". Everyone else described the same fault in different words. Ebert called it "one of the busiest movies I've ever seen", noted that an entire serial-killer subplot is "thrown in simply for atmosphere", and warned that reconstructing the twists afterwards leaves you in "really deep molasses". Peter Travers, in Rolling Stone, granted the suspense and withheld the rest: Sorkin "could run a red-herring factory", and the film has "suspense but no staying power". Variety's Tim Gray held both positions at once, calling it "immaculately crafted" and "a virtual scrapbook of elements borrowed from other suspense pix". It sits now at 54 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 52 on Metacritic.

None of which hurt it. Malice opened at number one on $9.2 million, finished at $61.6 million worldwide against a $20 million budget, took a B+ CinemaScore and became one of the twenty most-rented films in America in 1994. It was a hit twice, in cinemas and then on tape, and that is where the story of its popularity stops.

What actually survived is one scene, and it isn't a twist. Baldwin, in a deposition, asked whether he has a God complex: "I have an M.D. from Harvard. I am board certified in cardiothoracic medicine and trauma surgery... and I am never, ever sick at sea." Then the landing: if you want God, he was in operating room number two on November 17th, and he doesn't like to be second-guessed. The rest is trivia. Gwyneth Paltrow is in the abandoned subplot, pre-fame and barely there. Willis's photography went unremarked until a Kino Lorber Blu-ray decades later gave people a reason to look. Gray reached for Dead Calm to explain what Kidman was doing here, a comparison his review doesn't seem to notice is unkind.

The machinery rotted and the digression lasted, which I think settles the authorship question the credits leave open. The trapdoors every reviewer hung on Sorkin were substantially Frank's. The speech nobody can stop quoting is a man stating precisely what he is, out loud, on the record, with nothing in his back pocket at all. Sorkin left this film to adapt A Few Good Men, which ends with a confession argued out of a witness in open court rather than sprung on the audience. He has since explained his fondness for courtrooms by pointing out that a jury is a stand-in for the audience, twelve people who know as little as they do. That is the exact opposite instinct to a secret in a back pocket, and it is the one he kept.

The last date anyone attached to this was this week. On 6 August a leaker named a release candidate and claimed Astra was days away. It's the 15th, nothing shipped, and next week rests on the same grade of sourcing.

OpenAI named Astra its next major model on 1 August, in a post about mathematics. Whether it ships as GPT-6, GPT-5.7 or something else is undecided, which is why the markets disagree with themselves. Polymarket gives Astra 14% by month's end, while the GPT-6 contract for 21 August has fallen to 2%, from 14% eleven days ago. One prices a release, the other a name.

Anthropic's half isn't a separate coin flip. The Chinese outlet 36kr reported in late July that Fable 5.1 has finished internal testing, that staff already use it, and that Anthropic will ship within hours of GPT-6. One report, unconfirmed. If it's roughly right, both releases share a single trigger.

Anthropic could do it on no notice: Fable 5 on 9 June, Sonnet 5 on 30 June, Opus 5 on 24 July, each live the day it was named. That's capability rather than intent, and neither lab wants to launch inside the other's news cycle. A conditional release makes that 2% a ceiling, not a starting point, with the hold story still to be true underneath.

Alain Wertheimer wanted something new to wear. That is the origin Chanel's own chairman gave for the fragrance his house quietly put into its boutiques in 1987, and it accounts for nearly everything strange about how Bois Noir was sold. No department stores. No gift-with-purchase, a mechanic Wertheimer loathed. No campaign worth the name. Speaking to Women's Wear Daily that November, he was unusually direct about why houses so rarely bothered with anything difficult: "People want success too quickly. From a fragrance point of view, people like what their memory tells them is good. Memory tells you it's good if it relates to something else you like. When a fragrance is completely different, they're lost."

Jacques Polge had been working toward a masculine scent organised around a single material, sandalwood, since the middle of the decade. The reference point was in the house already: Bois des Îles, Ernest Beaux's sandalwood for women from 1926. Bois Noir was conceived as its masculine counterpart, and the listed ingredients make the ambition plain enough. Mandarin, lavender, rose, coriander, Bourbon vanilla, sandalwood, rosewood, ambrette seed. Rose and vanilla, sold to men, in a market whose commercial leaders at the turn of the decade were Polo, Aramis, Drakkar Noir and Obsession for Men. Nothing about that formula was calculated to move volume, and the distribution model confirms that nobody at Chanel expected it to.

The packaging carried the same refusal. A stopper cut from real wood rather than moulded to imitate it, on a black box with a fine white edge, at a moment when men's fragrance was reaching for lacquer and chrome.

There is almost nothing to weigh as reception, and this is the part the collector literature skips. No contemporaneous criticism, no sales figures anyone has published, no period reviews to set against each other. A perfume sold through a handful of shops, unadvertised, over a run the sources cannot agree the length of, does not generate reception in any useful sense. What gets reported as the reception of Bois Noir is almost entirely retrospective, assembled from the 2000s onward by people writing about decants poured from bottles bought twenty years earlier. That is not worthless, but it is testimony about a heavily aged liquid, gathered from a self-selecting group who had already decided the thing was worth hunting.

Nobody can fix the dates either, and the disagreement is more telling than any single date would be. Now Smell This says the launch was discreet and the fragrance was taken out of production quickly. Raiders of the Lost Scent puts the circulation at 1987 to 1989. Perfume Intelligence records it as discontinued in 1990, on the rebrand, and files it under the flat verdict "not a commercial success." A Fragrantica feature dates the Paris boutique sale to March 1986 and so disagrees with everyone about the beginning as well. Four accounts of a Chanel product from within living memory, and they cannot fix either end of its life. That is what withdrawal without announcement looks like in the record: a scent can be sold by one of the most documented houses in fashion and still leave a gap where its dates should be.

What followed is well documented, because Chanel chose to document it. In April 1990 the fragrance returned as Égoïste, the name bought from Nicole Wisniak's photography magazine because the marketing department found Bois Noir insufficiently provocative for a global launch. Paris was papered with posters carrying the single word JE before anyone knew what was being advertised. Jean-Paul Goude directed the commercial, which used no male models at all and took the Golden Lion at Cannes. It was the largest campaign the house had ever mounted for a men's fragrance, and it went into department stores, which is to say it inverted every decision made about Bois Noir three years earlier.

Then Égoïste's sales dropped rapidly, and Chanel's explanation to the trade press was that it had proved too sophisticated for the American market. That line deserves the same scepticism as anything the collectors say. It flatters the house, blames the buyer, and arrives with no figure attached in any account I can find. Whatever the cause, the house acted on a different diagnosis: by 1993 the name was on Égoïste Platinum, a clean citrus-herbal developed with consumer test groups, which Chanel had not used before. Platinum became by some distance the better known of the two, and still is. Wertheimer had said in 1987 that people like what their memory tells them is good, and six years later his own house was convening test groups to find out what that was.

The myth now runs in the opposite direction to the evidence. Bois Noir is treated as a lost masterpiece, prices have gone somewhere absurd, and fakes circulate freely, usually slightly evaporated Égoïste decanted into a vial. Yet the most careful comparison anyone has published came back the other way. Kevin at Now Smell This gathered samples from two separate original bottles, plus a third from a trusted vendor as a control against a bad decant, and reported that Bois Noir is not that different from Égoïste: richer and denser, and recognisably the same fragrance that is still in production today. I quoted that review here years ago.

So the collector economy has spent three decades grading a working version. A draft can beat the finished piece, and I've no quarrel with the people who prefer this one. But the premium is being paid for rarity, and rarity here was manufactured by a distribution decision rather than earned by the liquid. Compare it with Kouros, launched six years earlier and written off in a newspaper headline ten days after its launch party, which then sold continuously for forty-five years while the oakmoss and civet it was built on were regulated out from under it. Collectors chasing a 1981 bottle are chasing materials that genuinely are not in the current formula. Bois Noir was tweaked and renamed rather than gutted by regulation. Richer and denser is a real difference, and I can't tell you whether it comes from the formula or from thirty-nine years in glass, and neither can the market, because almost every comparison being made is a 1987 bottle against a current one, where age and formula move together. That ambiguity is the whole trade. What age does to a fragrance is doing at least some of the work connoisseurship claims for itself, and a 1987 sandalwood that has sat in glass this long will read deeper and stranger than a current production bottle whatever was in it to begin with.

"Acid nostalgia" is Lawrence English's term for the version of memory that got repurposed over the past decade, the one that flattens the past into a single clean image and uses it to cancel whatever might have come next. He sets it out in the liner notes to The Rest Is My Ghost, released on his own Room40 label on 7 August. This nostalgia, he writes, "seeks only singular recollection", and has become "a methodology at best, and a weapon at worst, used to erode the past and project forward a collapsed and unimaginably sanitised version" of what came before. The record closes a loose trilogy begun with Wilderness of Mirrors in 2014.

Which means it arrived pre-argued. Uncut traces the concept back to Mark Fisher and Adam Curtis, The Skinny calls the album a sonic essay on memory, and Simon Kirk's Sun 13 review spends its opening on the societal weight of nostalgia before it reaches a note. I came to it the same way, through the writing around it, so this describes a reception as much as a release. A thesis travels faster than a drone, and English has handed everyone a very good thesis.

The track titles are better evidence than the liner notes. "Sodium Vapour Halo", "Metabolic City", "Aerial Cable", "One Line Sky": infrastructure, and the sliver of sky between towers. Sodium is the sharpest of the four, because that light is being switched off. Councils have been swapping the orange for white LED since 2016, the best part of half a billion pounds of it, so the haze is becoming a colour people remember rather than see, warm, uniform, flattering to nothing. Exactly the sanitised single image English says the weapon is built out of. The sleeve makes the same argument in a picture, that collapsing grey canyon, two cities tipping toward each other across a pale jagged seam, printed like a bad photocopy.

On paper the cast is comically stacked: Chris Abrahams and Tony Buck from The Necks, Norman Westberg from Swans, Thor Harris, Chuck Johnson's pedal steel, Mats Gustafsson, The Australian Voices, Madeleine Cocolas. Reviewers hunting for them come back with very little. Backseat Mafia's John Parry gets Westberg's guitar twisting in the swell of "Acid Nostalgia", and not a great deal else. English buries his collaborators the way a city buries its older streets.

The disagreement is at the end. Kirk hears English climbing out of the void onto new land. The Skinny hears "not despair, but certainly not resolution", and Backseat Mafia hears the closing bell of "GhostType" as either decline or restoration and declines to choose. One reading of recovery against two of irresolution is not much of a split until you notice what the album is about. A record arguing against singular recollection has produced criticism that cannot settle on a single memory of it.

Design or luck, and I would guess design, because the same refusal runs through the sequencing. No climaxes, no release, pieces rolling into one another so the thing has to be taken whole. The weapon English names works by making the past small and certain, and he has built fifty minutes that will do neither.

From London this evening the Moon covers 91.3% of the Sun, with the partial phase running 18:17 to 20:06 and maximum at 19:13 BST. That sounds like most of an eclipse. It isn't. The last sliver of photosphere keeps the sky blue and the shadows sharp, and without a forecast telling you to look, you might miss it entirely. Cardiff and Belfast reach 93%, Dublin 94%, and not one of them sees the corona.

Madrid and Barcelona make the point harder. Both fall a fraction outside the path and settle for 99%, and the corona stays inside the path. Totality lands on Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain, plus a corner of Portugal, and the longest anyone gets is 2 minutes 18 seconds, 45 km off the Icelandic coast. Spain gets it low and gold just before sunset, which is either the best version of the thing or a good way to let one hill ruin your evening.

Fifteen million people will stand inside the path; another 283 million get 90% or better. The second group isn't having a smaller version of the first group's evening, which is the whole reason anyone books a flight to Bilbao for two minutes of dark. Europe's last mainland totality was 1999, and Britain's next is 2090.

Chloé Bakalar left OpenAI in July, about eleven months after joining from Meta, where she had been chief ethicist since 2019. The Financial Times reported it this week, and by that account she was the company's only dedicated ethicist, with no replacement named.

OpenAI's response is the part worth keeping. Asked to confirm there is now no ethicist on staff, a spokesperson said AI ethics "doesn't live with one owner or team" and that ethical considerations are "deeply embedded into the model building process driven by a number of teams across research." As a principle that's fine, and probably right; a lab where ethics is one person's job has already lost. As a description of who actually does what, it can't be audited from outside. The principle also arrived only once the owner had gone, and the job itself was created in August 2025.

The exodus framing built up around this deserves less confidence than it's getting. The FT piece is single-sourced, neither Bakalar nor the company has given a reason, and her LinkedIn still lists the role, so even the shape of the exit is thinner than the coverage around it. Reading a departure as a warning shot, when nobody involved has said anything, produces a story that writes itself and then gets cited as though someone reported it.

What needs no motive is the shape of the org. Superalignment stopped existing as a standalone team in 2024, Mission Alignment was disbanded earlier this year, and its former head Josh Achiam left in July, the same week as Safety Systems head Johannes Heidecke. Each of those sat outside the teams shipping the models. Chief Research Officer Mark Chen told Wired the goal now is safety work integrated with frontier-model development, earlier and closer to launch decisions.

That might genuinely be the better design, and the distinction worth holding onto is between responsibility and authority. Spreading responsibility across every team is good practice. Authority to stop a launch is a different thing, and it has to sit somewhere a deadline can't reach it. The behaviour that needs catching is rarely the behaviour anyone asked for, which is why whoever raises it needs a job that survives the raising. A reviewer inside the build shares the shipping deadline; a dedicated one doesn't, and that's most of the point of having one.

Anthropic will start marking what Claude produces. Text gets an imperceptible watermark woven into the words themselves, and supported files (.svg, .png, .jpg) get signed C2PA provenance metadata. Models launched in the EU on or after 2 August 2026 carry it from launch, older models are being retrofitted during the grace period the law allows, and the marking is applied at the model level worldwide, across the API, Claude Code, Cowork and the cloud partners. None of it is optional and none of it is visible.

The driver is Article 50 of the EU AI Act, in force since 2 August, which requires machine-readable marking of synthetic content that is "effective, interoperable, robust and reliable as far as technically feasible". Anthropic signed the accompanying code of practice, and the code is voluntary while Article 50 is not. Marking obligations are arriving through other doors too. California bundled watermarking guidance into its procurement rules back in March.

The C2PA half is close to decorative. The manifest comes off with a re-save, a format conversion, a screenshot, or an upload to a platform that rewrites metadata on the way in, and The Verge notes it is sometimes stripped by accident. Marks written into the pixels themselves hold up far better. OpenAI's checker was solid enough that people used it two days ago to identify an anonymous model on Arena. Metadata riding alongside a file has never managed that.

The text watermark is the consequential half, and it is the one with nothing published behind it. Anthropic doesn't name the scheme, hasn't released technical documentation, and hasn't shipped the detection tool it says it is working on. The properties it does claim are that the mark rides inside the text, so copy-paste carries it, while heavy editing, paraphrase or translation can leave nothing detectable, as can a passage that is simply short.

Those two properties invert who gets caught. C2PA fails indiscriminately, coming off for anyone who re-saves the file. The text mark is selective, and selective in the wrong direction: someone pushing Claude's output through a second model to pass it off as their own clears it without trying, while someone who pasted Claude's tidy-up of a paragraph they wrote themselves keeps it. The careful user stays marked.

Anthropic is straight about the limits. A detection means content may have been processed by Claude, not that Claude wrote it, and no detection proves a human did. That is the sentence that matters, and it sits in a help-centre article. Detection tools are promised rather than delivered, so nothing has gone wrong yet. Once they arrive, the result will be read out in misconduct hearings and HR meetings by people who never opened the caveat, treated as a test result rather than a hint, the same way plagiarism-checker percentages got treated. Marking the output is the right call. Shipping the marks a long way ahead of any means of interpreting them is not.