Celebrities

He plays the most lethal sniper in American military history

Anyone who has seen the Hangover movies knows Bradley Cooper was already in great shape. But in order to play the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history in American Sniper, he needed to add 40 pounds of muscle.

“He was eating about every 55 minutes or something like that, and I want to say it was about 8,000 calories a day,” the film’s writer-producer Jason Hall recently told People. The actor also worked out four hours a day for several months and trained with a Navy SEAL sniper to learn to shoot.

American Sniper follows the real-life story of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who completed four tours in Iraq and earned the nickname “Legend” before being killed by a fellow vet in 2013. It’s directed by Clint Eastwood and hits theaters on Christmas Day.

[People]

Taylor Swift and Malala Yousafzai are great role models. They've also set an impossible standard for success.

Taylor Swift is on the cover of TIME magazine this week as the new queen of the music industry. She’s been in the business for more than 11 years, but at 24, she’d still have trouble renting a car.

It should be inspiring for young people to see someone so young achieve such phenomenal success. “Other women who are killing it should motivate you, thrill you, challenge you and inspire you rather than threaten you and make you feel like you’re immediately being compared to them,” she told my colleague Jack Dickey. “The only thing I compare myself to is me, two years ago, or me one year ago.”

But despite her best efforts to set a positive example, Swift also represents a generation of super-youth to which normal young people are inevitably compared. “You see someone so young, your age or even younger, being so wildly successful, and you can think ‘they just have it, they have something I don’t have,’” says Dr. Carol Dweck, a professor of Psychology at Stanford University and author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. “You think, ‘I’m so young and already I’m doomed.’”

Forget Forbes’s 30-under-30 list: when it comes to “freshness,” 30 is the new 40. At her age, Taylor Swift isn’t even considered precociously successful– she’s just regular successful. In fact, it’s been a banner year for wunderkind, and not just in entertainment (which has always been fixated on the young and beautiful.) 18-year old Saira Blair just became the youngest American lawmaker when she was elected to the West Virginia Legislature. 18-year old fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson took up a second career—as a Broadway star—as her magazine Rookie rakes in 3.5 million hits a month. 17-year old Malala Yousafzai became the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize.

As most millennials are moving sluggishly through their twenties, the hyper-visible hotshots are getting younger and younger, whittling away at the maximum age limit at which someone can get their “big break.”

For every young cultural force like Lena Dunham or genius app-creator like Evan Spiegel, there are thousands of other twenty-somethings sitting in their parents’ basements wondering why they haven’t invented an app or started a fashion line. According to a Pew survey, young people today have more debt and less income than their parents and grandparents did at their age, which means we’re the least financially stable generation in recent memory. We’re are making life decisions later than ever, delaying marriage and babies longer than previous generations did (partly because of the cash flow problems), and taking much longer to settle into a career. Yet, thanks to platforms like Youtube and Kickstarter that remove the traditional gatekeepers, there’s a pervasive expectation that young people should be achieving more, faster, younger.

“There’s a lot of attention paid to people who have success very young, like Taylor Swift and Mark Zuckerberg, but the average young person is not coming into their career until later these days,” says Dr. Jean Twenge, author of Generation Me. “Across the board, what you can see is much higher expectations among millennials compared to Boomers and Gen Xers, but a reality which is if anything more difficult than it was for those previous generations when they were young.”

Middle-aged sourpusses have long complained about America’s cultural fixation on youth and to be fair, the Beatles weren’t much older than Taylor Swift. Bill Maher even devoted a whole segment of last Friday’s “Real Time” to ageism, calling it “the last acceptable prejudice in America.” But today, the world is dominated by tech, and tech is dominated by young people. “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a speech to a Y Combinator startup at Stanford in 2007. “Younger people are just smarter.”

But even for those of us who happen to be young, a youth-obsessed culture is a pretty raw deal. Because the perception that young people are “smarter” implies they should be getting successful more quickly, and often, they’re not. “In the internet age, the idea that fame is just out of reach has become more common,” says Dr. Twenge, noting that technological advances like YouTube helped launch careers of stars like Justin Bieber. “I think there’s an impression that it’s easier to become famous now, or easier to be discovered… There’s a perception that it’s easier, but that may not be entirely true.”

That expectation that it’s easy to get rich and famous may also contribute to some of the negative stereotypes about millennials, especially the reputation for laziness or entitlement. In other words, next to Lorde, the rest of us look like schlubs.

“I don’t think they’re comparing themselves to those wunderkind necessarily, but maybe their elders are, who are so critical of them,” says Dr. Jeffrey Arnett, who coined the phrase “emerging adult” and says he’s found little evidence to support the claim that millennials are lazy. “I wonder if that’s partly related to the fact that you have these amazingly successful young people, and people are saying ‘well, if Mark Zuckerberg can do this, why can’t you?’”

Of course, none of these comparisons are Taylor Swift’s fault, and she does everything in her power to nix that competitive instinct, especially among other women. But the fact that young superstars seem to have been born fully formed implies that growth and learning aren’t part of the recipe for success. “It not only tells them they don’t have time to grow, it saps them of the motivation to grow,” Dr. Dweck says.

Even Taylor recognizes that her darling days are numbered. “I just struggle to find a woman in music who hasn’t been completely picked apart by the media, or scrutinized and criticized for aging, or criticized for fighting aging,” she said. “It just seems to be much more difficult to be a woman in music and to grow older.”

When politicians proclaim that “young people are the future,” they mean we’ll inherit mountains debt and a destroyed environment. But when young people think about our own futures, we should look at the way middle-aged and older people are treated—because like it or not, that’s going to be us one day. If young people were really so smart, we wouldn’t forget that.

The plane landed safely

She mooned everyone

After debuting in her sex tape, periodically gracing her Instagram and making a brief appearance in GQ, Kim Kardashian’s butt’s latest showing is the cover of Paper magazine. She’s going full-moon, above the headline “Break the Internet: Kim Kardashian”

The photos were shot by famed French photographer Jean-Paul Goude, who also used Kardashian’s recognizable derriere to recreate his iconic “Champagne Incident” image for another safe-for-work version of the cover.

She posted the original image on her Instagram here.

Of course, whenever Kim Kardashian or her butt do anything, it creates a massive Internet controversy. Glee actress Naya Rivera allegedly commented on Kardashian’s Instagram, “I normally don’t… but you’re someone’s mother.”

MORE: This Photo of Kim Kardashian Shows Why Women Can’t Have It All

MORE: How Kim Kardashian Is Changing the Fashion Industry

But Kim herself tweeted about her champagne balancing act:

Just when everyone thought they’d already seen Kim Kardashian’s butt a million times, oops, there it is.

Read more: Kim Kardashian Is Publishing a Book of Selfies

Read next: Kim Kardashian’s Butt Is an Empty Promise

Because awwww

Taylor Smith wasn’t always the svelte, 5-foot-10 24-year-old she is today, and that’s part of her charm. We’ve watched her grow like fond parents who indulge in memories of of her early years, as a curly-haired newbie and a guitar-slinging warbler.

In 2002, when Swift was a wee 12-year-old, she sang the national anthem at a Detroit Pistons game in her home state of Pennsylvania. Though her singing does sound expectedly thin in a pubescent kind of way, she clearly had the makings of a great voice.

This is what Taylor Swift singing The Star-Spangled banner at age 12 sounds like.

"Manhattan has become a borough for the rich... So she’s probably the perfect representative"

Sex and the City’s Mr. Big, actor Chris Noth, is a bit confused why people think Taylor Swift isn’t the right pick for New York City’s Global Welcome Ambassador.

“Manhattan has become a borough for the rich. I’ve said it and I’m not afraid to say it again,” Noth told the New York Daily News. “So she’s probably the perfect representative.”

The singer’s appointment had angered those who thought the Pennsylvania native and lavishly wealthy star wasn’t appropriate to represent a city noted for its socioeconomic diversity, according to the New York Daily News. And that wasn’t the least of the heat Swift faced: critics also bashed her song “Welcome to New York” for its “lifeless” portrayal of the metropolis, and fans were confused when the NYC tourism ambassador’s 1989 world tour didn’t even include New York.

Noth said that he’s among the critics who believe Swift’s appointment shadows New York’s “rainbow coalition of class and ethnicity.” But instead of complaining, The Good Wife star told others to start getting used to it.

“It’s become a boutique borough, and that’s why young people are having a hard time finding a way to live here, and the middle class and the blue-collar workers,” said Noth. “I’ve always had a beef about that. But people are sick of hearing me say it. So she’s our representative, and if that’s the image you’re talking about, it’s probably a correct one.”

[New York Daily News]

"Chris and I work as a sort of breathless, constant sprint because we are just trying to keep up with our own ideas"

Answer by Hans Zimmer, Interstellar composer, on Quora.

I think one of the things that is really great about working with Chris is that he doesn’t, in any way, get in the way of my imagination. In fact, he works very hard at not having me confined by the mechanics of filmmaking. So, our process is usually starting long conversations just riffing on ideas. Then slowly I start writing and experimenting, coming up with sounds, etc., all the while keeping in constant conversation with Chris.

In Interstellar, for instance, there’re so many themes, so many pieces, which always got to a certain point during the writing process but never had an ending, because Chris and I would get to a certain point with an idea and then abandon it because we got excited about the next idea. You have to think of how Chris and I work as a sort of breathless, constant sprint because we are just trying to keep up with our own ideas. The ideas are so plentiful when Chris and I get together, but the execution always takes more time and it can be so frustrating. It’s sometimes very frustrating for him as well because he’s trying to make a movie and he’s waiting on the music.

When it comes to the music for Interstellar, I can honestly say that in one way or another, the music is our music, not just my music. It’s entirely our music, and that’s a testament to how much I let Chris into my world. The great thing is that as a composer, you can only write from the heart and from your innermost place. So, you have to trust your director. And that’s the thing — there’s a great sense of trust and a great sense of balance that Chris brings to the composing process. Because Chris cuts his movies in his garage, (giving his films a sort of a homemade quality), he never makes me feel that I have the enormous weight of the canvas on my shoulders. His editing process is really helpful for my composing process. The work and the story is always brought back to the personal and the intimate, and that’s perfect for how I work.

This question originally appeared on Quora: What is it like working with Christopher Nolan?