🍿 The Thin Man (1934) was fun to watch, even with the wooden acting from everyone but the lead characters. Nick and Nora inspired so many other murder mysteries and action comedies that a reboot is only a matter of time, and indeed Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt’s production companies were considering it. I imagine their functional alcoholism will play differently these days.

• Ernie Smith for Tedium: Self-Hosting: Still Worth It?. For some this will be a costly read — and yet still worth it.
• Chris Arnade: Japan: America’s Best Ally? Yelling “Takaichi!” while holding up both thumbs will be my go-to way for getting out of uncomfortable conversations.
• Aishwarya Khanduja and Stuart Buck: The Economy of Knowing: Why Metascience Needs Micro and Macro. At what point does it stop being metascience and becomes applied economics? When you start calling it “macro”, says I.
• Andrew Gelman: Why and how to do Bayes for clinical trials: Our comments on the recent FDA draft guidance, and reactions to two comments by others. People are flabbergasted that the FDA came out with a sensible proposal.
• Anna Moore: Marriage over, €100,000 down the drain: the AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion. Ben Thompson was the proverbial canary for LLM delusions and Microsoft did him a favor when they nerfed Sydney.
• The Back Focus channel on YouTube: Jim Downey, the Character Actor? | Acting Breakdown. The title is, of course, a play on “Jeff Epstein, the New York financier”, the viewing of which may be the best 2 minutes 16 seconds you will spend today.

🍿 21 Jump Street (2012) was fun, but its main effect was to make me want to rewatch Hot Fuzz.

🍿 The End of the Tour (2015) made David Foster Wallace less handsome — with apologies to Jason Segel — but also less neurotic and more comfortable to watch. For comparison, here is an interview with the real DFW done around the same time the movie portrays, which I dare you to watch without cringing. DFW was an introspection machine, to our benefit and his own detriment, the self-destructed proof that the unexamined life is more viable.

🍿 Project Hail Mary (2026) was the perfect family movie that pushed all the right buttons.

• Message: good things are good, bad things are bad, knowledge is power.
• Tone: earnest friendship and collaboration over cynicism and bickering.
• Visuals: Dune-level cinematography with many practical effects and no CGI-generated characters in sight.
• Sound: I don’t know which I enjoyed more, the soundtrack or the score.

Yes, you should go see it, even if you haven’t read the book. And do bring the kids.

Browsing the 2025 National Portrait Gallery Honorees I was saddened but not surprised to see this laudatory description of one Jamie Dimon

Jamie Dimon has long been a leader in the financial services industry, where his skill in assessing and managing risk has proven to be a defining feature of his career. As chairman of the board and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., Dimon has employed a “fortress balance sheet” strategy in which financial strength and resilience are achieved through high liquidity, deep capital reserves, and low debt. The stability gained from this approach enabled Dimon’s firm to successfully weather the 2008 global financial crisis.

Whether JPMorgan Chase’s success in 2008 was due to Dimon’s “fortress balance sheet” strategy or a $25 billion bailout is for someone with more financial sophistication to say.

Look, I don’t mind that Dimon is there. There is also a bust of John D. Rockefeller a floor above and by all accounts he was an infinitely more sinister character. Not to mention the parade of narcissists — honorable exceptions like 1 and 16 notwithstanding — at the American Presidents exhibit. But note the brazenness of portraying a champion of financialization in a positive light in the context of the 2008 financial crisis. Is it a they-know-that-we-know-that-they-know situation or are people writing the text truly that clueless?

Which now makes me doubt every each and every one of those captions. Next thing you know they’ll commission Steven Spielberg’s wife Kate Capshaw to do his NPG portrait without mentioning in the text that they have been married for 30-plus years!

• Scott Sumner: Paid subscriptions. His blog, “The Pursuit of Happiness”, will be mostly behind a paywall moving forward. Unfortunate but completely expected: the Monetize button on all these platforms is a Chekhov gun waiting to go off. Remember, that is why friends don’t let friends write on substack.
• Harry Crane: Prediction Markets: Real Financial Assets or just Sports Betting? Clearly the latter, although Crane makes a valiant effort to portray them in a more positive light. Of course, the sole purpose of these markets is for various figures on the periphery of America’s current, shameful administration to convert some of that shame into more fungible assets.
• Paolo Benanti: American heresy: should Peter Thiel be burned at the stake? An AI-generated translation from the original French essay about the consequences of Thiel’s project to “monetize mimetic desire on a planetary scale”. Separately, for all the bones I have to pick with South Park, I enjoyed their Peter Thiel storyline a bit too much.
• And as a palate-cleanser, Doomscroll 41: David Wengrow, in which Joshua Citarella talks to the co-author of The Dawn of Everything.

Just shy of 100 small-format pages, On Skibidi was a pamphlet more than a book, and a worthwhile read for this geriatric millennial who somehow managed to raise a handful of generation alpha children without once resorting to Skibidi Toilet.

Walker built his meme-explainer career on Skibidi so of course he would read all sorts of things into it: any time he mentioned dialectics or some other high-falutin’ sociology term my eyes rolled so far back into my head I would catch a glimpse of my own retinas. But there is an undeniable attraction to the screen-within-a-screen format; I remember being confounded, as a six-year-old, by the movie theater scene from Annie. How on Earth did they film actors watching other actors, and was anybody filming us watching those actors who watch the actors… which I guess was my first introduction to mise en abyme even though I only found out about the term from Walker. Coupled with quick cuts and catchy music, it seemed infinitely more appealing than the umpteenth ASMR unboxing video.

But of course now it is me overexplaining things. As with Joe Rogan, and Taylor Swift, and any other winner in the winner-takes-all extremistan world of content creation and consumption, the most likely reason why Skibidi Toilet became so popular was simply because it was popular. And to learn more about that, Fooled by Randomness would be a better bet than On Skibidi.