THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (July 16, 2023) – In this week’s cover story, Greta Gerwig takes us deep inside her vision for the “Barbie” movie. Plus, the former World Cup-winner with the hardest job in soccer, the war for semiconductor chips and Robert Downey Jr. on his post-Marvel career.

Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ Dream Job

Mattel wanted a summer blockbuster to kick off its new wave of brand-extension movies. She wanted it to be a work of art.

The moment Greta Gerwig knew for certain that she could make a movie about Barbie, the most famous and controversial doll in history, she was thinking about death. She had been reading about Ruth Handler, the brash Jewish businesswoman who created the doll — and who, decades later, had two mastectomies. Handler birthed this toy with its infamous breasts, the figurine who became an enduring avatar of plastic perfection, while being stuck, like all of us, in a fragile and failing human body. 

‘An Act of War’: Inside America’s Silicon Blockade Against China

The Biden administration thinks it can preserve America’s technological primacy by cutting China off from advanced computer chips. Could the plan backfire?

Last October, the United States Bureau of Industry and Security issued a document that — underneath its 139 pages of dense bureaucratic jargon and minute technical detail — amounted to a declaration of economic war on China. The magnitude of the act was made all the more remarkable by the relative obscurity of its source. One of 13 bureaus within the Department of Commerce, the smallest federal department by funding, B.I.S. is tiny: Its budget for 2022 was just over $140 million, about one-eighth the cost of a single Patriot air-defense missile battery. 

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