Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost Break Down the Making of Shaun of the Dead, 20 Years Later

Shaun of the Dead was a British movie that launched a new genre: zombie romantic comedy. It also launched the Hollywood careers of director Edgar Wright and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. In this endearing interview, the three look back on the film fondly.

Nick Frost: I saw a picture of us at the [Shaun of the Dead] premiere the other day, and it struck me that I’m now the age Bill Nighy was at the premiere.

Edgar Wright: No way.

Frost: Yeah, really. What was Bill? 50-odd? 54, 52? We’re in that ballpark now. And it’s funny, I’m doing a job with kids who’re in their 20s, and it’s like, I am their— I’m not Bill Nighy at all, but age-wise, I’m their Bill Nighy.

Simon Pegg: We used to sit around in Bill’s trailer, just listening to him tell us stories about his wilder days. He was just like the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the shoot. It’s crazy to think that we’re that age now.

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The Toxic Culture at Tesla

Colleagues using the N-word frequently and openly. Spray-painted swastikas in the parking lot. White-power graffiti in the bathroom. Inappropriate touching and catcalling. On-the-job injuries. A lack of training. The list goes on. Bryce Covert’s cover story for The Nation is a deep dive into the rampant and blatant racism, sexual harassment, and discrimination that Black and female employees face at Tesla, and its factory in Fremont, California, in particular.

After Jermaine Keys’s twins were born, he needed more than the $15 an hour he was earning at a construction company. So in September 2019, Keys got a job at Tesla’s Fremont factory, which paid about $23 an hour. “It was a big difference,” he told me. At first, Keys enjoyed the job. But a few months in, his supervisor started calling him “boy.” Keys heard white coworkers use the N-word and call people “monkey.” There was a swastika drawn with a black marker near where he clocked in to work every day. Black workers, he said, were made to do things like clean up the work area when the assembly line was slow; white ones weren’t. “It was just hurtful,” Keys said. When he said something to a supervisor, he was told to put his head down so he wouldn’t get fired.

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Silicon Savanna: The Workers Taking on Africa’s Digital Sweatshops

You may have read about the trauma afflicting American workers who do content moderation for tech companies. But these days, moderation work—and, thus, the aforementioned trauma—is increasingly being outsourced. In fact, it’s being sold as a way to help people climb out of poverty:

For companies like Sama, the conditions here were ripe for investment by 2015, when the firm established a business presence in Nairobi. Headquartered in San Francisco, the self-described “ethical AI” company aims to “provide individuals from marginalized communities with training and connections to dignified digital work.” In Nairobi, it has drawn its labor from residents of the city’s informal settlements, including 500 workers from Kibera, one of the largest slums in Africa. In an email, a Sama spokesperson confirmed moderators in Kenya made between $1.46 and $3.74 per hour after taxes.

Grace Mutung’u, a Nairobi-based digital rights researcher at Open Society Foundations, put this into local context for me. On the surface, working for a place like Sama seemed like a huge step up for young people from the slums, many of whom had family roots in factory work. It was less physically demanding and more lucrative. Compared to manual labor, content moderation “looked very dignified,” Mutung’u said. She recalled speaking with newly hired moderators at an informal settlement near the company’s headquarters. Unlike their parents, many of them were high school graduates, thanks to a government initiative in the mid-2000s to get more kids in school.

“These kids were just telling me how being hired by Sama was the dream come true,” Mutung’u told me. “We are getting proper jobs, our education matters.” These younger workers, Mutung’u continued, “thought: ‘We made it in life.’” They thought they had left behind the poverty and grinding jobs that wore down their parents’ bodies. Until, she added, “the mental health issues started eating them up.” 

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She Had a Severe Brain Injury—So Her Husband Turned to an Unprecedented Therapy

Can psychedelics help to restore consciousness in a patient whose awareness is impaired or seemingly gone? Can these powerful drugs give the brain a chance to reorganize and rewire itself? After David’s wife, Sarah, was hit by a car, she suffered severe brain damage; she became unresponsive and remained in a coma, and David explored many treatments with no success. Working with a neuroscientist in Belgium, whose research involves using psilocybin and ketamine in patients with “disorders of consciousness,” he decided to give a dose of distilled liquid psilocybin high enough to induce a psychedelic experience. In this fascinating read, Jonathan Moens recounts the experiment and the science behind it, and poses important ethical questions surrounding consent.

On August 25, 2023, exactly 336 days following Sarah’s tragic accident, David, who is based in Colorado where psychedelic mushrooms are decriminalized, obtained a tincture of distilled liquid psilocybin. He had already given Sarah low and moderate doses of the drug over the course of several months and it had a “remarkable” affect in her bodily movements.

This time, however, he would go all in, using the equivalent of 2.5 grams—a dose high enough to provoke a powerful psychedelic experience and which is often used in clinical trials for therapeutic purposes. At this dose, both Gosseries and Carhart-Harris said an awakening was theoretically possible.

The legalities of what David was about to do were unclear. Colorado’s decriminalization of certain psychedelics in 2022 means that psilocybin is easy to access and magic mushrooms can be grown and consumed. But whether David was crossing a line by giving Sarah the drug, when she could not consent, was not obvious.

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Right-Wing Media and the Death of an Alabama Pastor: An American Tragedy

Bubba Copeland was the heart and soul of his community—mayor, businessman. When a right-wing website called 1819 News exposed his deepest secrets, his life wasn’t the only thing that was destroyed:

When the story hit the next morning, Bubba’s son Carter, a junior at Auburn, was still asleep. He woke up to a text from his best friend that read, “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do.”

“I had no idea what she was talking about,” Carter says. “I called her, and she told me what had happened. Immediately, I looked up my dad’s name online and saw it everywhere. It was early in the morning, and every news outlet I’d never heard of had already jumped on it, like piranhas. I watched the whole world tear him down almost instantaneously.”

Carter and his father were extremely close. Over the years, each had confided in the other about their innermost struggles—in high school, Carter had come out to his father, and Bubba had shared his secrets with his son. Carter was shocked at the meanness of the story and was overcome with a visceral fear that he had never known before. In a panic, he called his dad.

“He picked up and said, ‘Good morning, buddy.’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about, Good morning?!’ Trying to calm me down, he again slowly said, ‘Good morning, buddy.’ And I said, ‘Okay, good morning.’ And then I said, ‘Dad, we have to talk.’ And he said, ‘No, we don’t. I need to get into a meeting. I have people I need to take care of. We’ll talk later.’ ”

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Love and Murder in South Africa

At age 20, while beginning to form her worldview and her politics, Eula Biss read the book, “My Traitor’s Heart” by Rian Milan, a young white Afrikaner who “told the story of his country through a series of murders.” Twenty years later, Biss traveled to South Africa for the first time. At first, she’s surprised by all she did not understand about Black living conditions under Apartheid, realizing that her only guide up until that point—the author Milan—was hopelessly myopic as a member of the ruling whites.

The young Rian Malan opposed apartheid, but not in any way that he would later consider meaningful. “We believed that apartheid was stupid and vicious,” he wrote of himself and his teenage friends, “but we also believed that growing our hair long undermined it.” He and his friends spray-painted SAY IT LOUD, I’M BLACK & I’M PROUD in six-foot letters on an embankment in their suburb, and Malan showed a photo to his family’s black maid. Her response: “Ah, suka.” Get lost. Malan had never heard the James Brown song, but he’d read about it in Time. He knew more about American culture than he knew about the culture of the people who lived in his backyard, in shacks. “The strangest thing about my African childhood,” he wrote, “is that it wasn’t really African at all.” Malan was more Western than he was African—because he was, more than anything, a product of apartheid.

At twenty, I recognized myself in the young Malan. I saw my own undeveloped politics, my own failings and my own frustrations, my own crisis of conscience. I saw the deficiencies in my education, which was, in many ways, an apartheid education. I had been fed mostly platitudes about race in America and I was hungry for real talk, so I was drawn to Malan’s impatience with empty gestures and his intolerance of pious pronouncements.

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Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

As Gary Shteyngart is quick to remind you, he’s far from the first writer to chronicle a cruise ship voyage. He may, however, be the first to do so while wearing a daddy’s little meatball t-shirt. And for more than 9,000 words, he adds a worthy entry to the participatory subgenre. It helps that he punches up (and in) more than down, though the result is the same: making you savor terra firma.

The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say icon inaugural ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: warning! may start talking about cruising. Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “husband and wife Cruising Partners for life we may not have it All Together but together we have it all.” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.

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