Shirley Li

Los Angeles, New York

Staff Writer at The Atlantic

@TheAtlantic staff writer. Zach Woods EGOT campaign manager. Messy tweeter. @EW alum. [email protected]

Articles

‘Warfare’ Re-Created One of the Worst Days of Its Co-Director’s Life

1 week ago | theatlantic.com | Shirley Li

This article includes spoilers for the film Warfare. Since 2012, Ray Mendoza has been building a hefty Hollywood résumé: performing stunts, choreographing gunfights, and teaching movie stars how to act like soldiers in films such as Act of Valor and Lone Survivor. He also helped design the battle sequences in last year’s Civil War, the writer-director Alex Garland’s speculative thriller imagining America as an endless combat zone. These projects have been a particularly good fit for him.
The Catharsis in Re-Creating One of the Worst Days of Your Life

1 week ago | yahoo.com | Shirley Li

This article includes spoilers for the film Warfare. Since 2012, Ray Mendoza has been building a hefty Hollywood résumé: performing stunts, choreographing gunfights, and teaching movie stars how to act like soldiers in films such as Act of Valor and Lone Survivor. He also helped design the battle sequences in last year’s Civil War, the writer-director Alex Garland’s speculative thriller imagining America as an endless combat zone. These projects have been a particularly good fit for him.
‘The Rehearsal’: Nathan Fielder Is His Own Worst Enemy

1 week ago | theatlantic.com | Shirley Li

Predicting how an episode of the HBO show The Rehearsal will end is nearly impossible. The pseudo-docuseries, in which the comedian Nathan Fielder stages elaborate exercises to help—or rather, “help”—ordinary people prepare for challenging interactions, tends to go down rabbit holes dictated by Fielder’s fixations. A Season 1 installment found him supporting a man who wanted practice having a difficult conversation only for the focus to shift to Fielder rehearsing his own confessions.
‘The Last of Us’ and the Big Twist That Could Have Been

3 weeks ago | theatlantic.com | Shirley Li

This article contains spoilers through the second episode of The Last of Us Season 2. Players of the game on which HBO’s postapocalyptic drama The Last of Us is based knew it was coming—“it” being the death of the show’s protagonist, Joel (played by Pedro Pascal).
‘Hacks’ Conjures a Cruel Fantasy

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Shirley Li

Hacks paints a deflating picture of what it’s like to reach the top of your field. At the end of the Season 4 premiere of Hacks, Deborah (Jean Smart) and Ava (Hannah Einbinder) pose for the cover of a prestigious magazine. Glamorously dressed and impeccably lit, they look ecstatic, beaming in every shot. And why shouldn’t they be thrilled?
When Your Dream Job Is a Lie

1 month ago | flipboard.com | Shirley Li

8 hours agoWhat's fresh on Netflix, Max, Disney+, Prime Video, and more? Looking for something great to watch at home? Streaming subscribers are spoiled for choice between Hulu, Netflix, Max, Disney+, Apple TV+, Prime Video, Shudder, Paramount+, Peacock, and more. And that's before you even look at the vast …
DeepSeek-R1: Advancing LLM Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning

1 month ago | medium.com | Shirley Li

Shirley Li·FollowPublished inData Science Collective·13 min read·--Image created by author using ChatGPT. This is the seventh article in our DeepSeek series [1], where we will break down how DeepSeek-R1 is trained by exploring large-scale Reinforcement Learning. This marks one of the major paradigm shifts in LLM training to improve reasoning ability, and also shows great potential to improve smaller LLMs through distillation.
What ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ Understands About Its Hero

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Shirley Li

Listen1.0x0:007:02Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (Noa) using AI narration. Listen to more stories on the Noa app. This article contains spoilers through Episode 6 of Daredevil: Born Again. For a character whose flagship show ended seven years ago, the blind lawyer Matt Murdock—better known as the vigilante Daredevil—has maintained a steady presence on Marvel’s roster. In the film Spider-Man: No Way Home, he impressed Peter Parker (Tom Holland) with his reflexes.
The Lesson ‘Snow White’ Should Teach Disney

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Shirley Li

Judging by some of the online comments aimed at Rachel Zegler, the star of Disney’s live-action version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, you’d think that she had done something unforgivable—set Cinderella Castle on fire, perhaps, or told Mickey Mouse he couldn’t wish upon a star. But Zegler had merely stated her opinion of the original 1937 film: that she finds it “extremely dated” and that, to her, the prince “literally stalks” Snow White.
$320 Million Couldn’t Buy ‘The Electric State’ Relevance

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Shirley Li

Joe and Anthony Russo, better known as the Russo brothers, have enjoyed two of the most lucrative careers in Hollywood. The bulk of their success comes from the features they’ve co-directed for Marvel: Three of those projects, in which they helped turn comic-book characters into icons and “cinematic universes” into a standard practice, are among the 50 highest-grossing movies of all time. Two of them—Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame—made more than $2 billion at the box office globally.