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| | | Listening to podcasts on headphones increases 'perceived intimacy' with host, research finds | | by Adrienne Matei Mar 2, 2022 | | Experiments found a voice coming from ‘inside our heads’ can be twice as persuasive as one coming from a speaker As podcast listenership rose over the pandemic, reports emerged of people developing a kind of parasocial intimacy with podcast hosts – feeling, in some cases, like they were friends. Now, new research has revealed that how we chose to listen to podcasts could actually be enhancing our perceived intimacy with their hosts. Researchers from UC San Diego’s Rady School, UCLA, and UC Berkeley have found that when people listen to auditory messages – like podcasts, audiobooks, and radio news – via headphones, they feel more empathic and persuadable than when listening to those same messages through speakers. Continue reading... | | | | | Zeros and Ones review – Abel Ferrara's dream-like thriller struggles to make sense | | by Peter Bradshaw Mar 2, 2022 | | Abel Ferrara’s confused, guerrilla-filmed actioner stars Ethan Hawke as a soldier and his hostage twin brother Maybe there is always something in Abel Ferrara ’s work that always has to be indulged; his recent work anyway. I was initially unsure what on earth to make of this new film: it’s an experimental moodscape, murky and grainy, apparently made under lockdown conditions in his adopted city of Rome (a fever-dream of lockdown perhaps) shooting largely at night in what looks like a covert guerrilla-style way. The film is topped and tailed with weird “prologue” and “epilogue” pieces to camera by its star Ethan Hawke, appearing ambiguously and semi-fictionally as himself, discussing the film, the director and whether to feel optimistic or pessimistic about life. On paper, this could be a conventional thriller, but it’s more like the confused dream you might have after watching a conventional thriller. Hawke plays an American special forces soldier, or possibly an expatriate American mercenary, operating in Rome as part of some anti-terrorist unit. He also plays his own twin brother, a radical leftist revolutionary held captive somewhere, who rails against his oppressors, quoting Woody Guthrie: “This machine kills fascists!” The soldier is also mixed up with some sinister cabal of Russian oligarchs who have a hold over him (a glimpse of a magazine photograph hints that both brothers were acquainted with them in days gone by) and a truly strange sequence shows him being forced to have sex with one of the women so she can have a baby. The terrorists themselves succeed in blowing up various Rome monuments, the occasion for some bargain-basement CGI work. There are Christian metaphors and a quotation from St Francis: “The world is the hiding place of God.” Continue reading... | | | | | |
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