• The HBO show manages to be more like the comic book than the movie ever was, even though — or rather exactly because — it is nothing like the original while the movie was for the most part a literal shot-for-shot translation of the comic and therefore missed two things that made the comic great: 1. amplifying the anxiety of the day to intolerable levels, and 2. deconstructing its own medium.
• Re: no 1, the original was all over the place time-wise but mostly set in the 80s and the perceived threat was nuclear holocaust. The movie came out in the mid-2000s, during the time of war against terror and existential angst, but was still set in the 80s and the threat again was nuclear holocaust — two beats already missed. The HBO series is all over the place time-wise but is for the most part set in 2019, and the perceived threat is white supremacy. Note the "perceived" and note that it takes some time for the real villains to be revealed.
• Re: no 2, I'll pick just one example although there are many. The original featured a comic book within the comic book. Of course, in a world in which super heroes are real, escapist media wouldn't be doing its job just by featuring even more super heroes. So what kids get instead are pirates, and what you as a reader get are panels featuring ships at sea, pirate raids, and the like, interspersed with the "real" story, to great effect. The movie had… breaks in which it showed panels from that same pirate-themed comic book, with the same story line. Only because you're not mixing two comic books but instead are interrupting a movie to show some drawings, it doesn't work at all. The HBO series, brilliantly, has a TV show within a TV show, which is, again brilliantly, not pirate-themed. As to what it is, well, that's one knock I'd have against the show because it's trying to be cute and funny, and yes a parody docu-drama about super hero origins in the style of American Crime Story is cute and funny, but it's not in the spirit of the original.
• Another knock against the HBO series is that it coddles the audience, almost as if HBO got complaints about a few of its other shows being too obtuse. A dialogue line was foreshadowed 10 minutes ago in a different dialogue? Cut to the foreshadowing. Characters recognize a clue in something that occurred two episodes ago? Cut to that scene to remind you what happened. A character breaks an egg? Cut to them holding a different egg in a scene from the same episode. Why?
• Yes, it's petty criticism, but the show is so masterful in so many other ways that the tiny imperfections stick out. Also, it's also easier for me to list the few things I didn't like because everything else (Regina King! Jeremy Irons! Jean Smart! The kid actors! The two skinny white guys who I hope will team up for Season 2! The self-conscious wokeness. That soundtrack!) is pitch perfect.
• A half-sequitur: everything I liked about Lost was put in there by Damon Lindelof, and everything bad about it came from JJ Abrams. I didn't realize that at the time, but their work post-Lost speaks for itself.
• It ties with Westworld Season 1 as the second-best season of the decade, but The Leftovers Season 2 is still my number 1.

Directed by Various, 2019

EconTalk with Russ Roberts is the best interview podcast I’ve listened to, period. Unlike Tyler Cowen Roberts focuses on an issue or two, not the personality being interviewed. He gives fewer if any passes. The effect is that I feel like I’m actually learning about the thing in question, not just getting acquainted with Cowen’s personality du jour. Whether any learning actually takes place at my advanced age is another matter.

My top 5 episodes:

• Keith Smith on free market health care
• Venkatesh Rao on Waldenponding
• Adam Cifu on the case for being a medical conservative
• Patrick Collison on innovation and scientific progress
• Andrew McAfee on more from less

Honorable mentions: Cowen, Holiday, Hossenfelder, Bertaud

Conversations with Tyler are as good as ever. This year’s favorites:

• Mark Zuckerberg and Patrick Collison
• Margaret Atwood
• Masha Gessen
• Emily Wilson
• Ezekiel Emanuel

(Note that the majority are episodes with women - Cowen has Roberts easily beaten here)

Breaking Smart with Venkatesh Rao I would recommend to anyone who’s enjoyed the above-linked interview Russ Roberts did with Rao on one of the better Breaking Smart essays. It’s 15-20 minutes of Rao performing mental stretching excercises, solo.

Plenary Session with Vinay Prasad is another podcast that shines with the solo performances, but the interviews aren’t half-bad either. That isn’t a surprise, since this year Prasad has talked to David Steensma, Frank Harrell, Adam Cifu, H. Gilbert Welch, and Clifford Hudis, among others. Sadly, the podcast still doesn’t have a proper website, so I can’t link to any of these episodes directly.

• A brief overview of the past, present, and future of capitalism by a Serbian-born and formerly World Bank-employed CUNY professor Branko Milanović, who specializes in income inequality.
• Some parts hit closer to home than others, most of all the idea that you can have a welfare state, and you can have open borders, but that mixing the two is ill-advised. I am also well-acquainted with America’s indirect and informal immigrant tax, a version of which Milanović proposes as one of the solutions to the welfare/immigration dilemma. I am not a fan.
• His big insight before this book was the elephant chart. Capitalism, Alone’s big idea is that communism may not have been the pinnacle of society that Marx and Engels had predicted, but rather a good way of transforming feudal agrarian societies into modern economies. Centralized planning and broad-stroke changes work well up to a point, but the production chains soon get too complex for communism, at which point the invisible hand steps in.
• Second big insight: corruption is hard-wired into how a particular type of capitalism (which he calls “political”, in contrast to the Western “liberal meritocratic”) operates. This is supported by many a “liberal meritocratic capitalism” city and state, their financial services and real estate markets being dependent on the “political capitalism’s” dark money.
• It was an easy read for this non-economist. Recommended.

Written by Branko Milanović, 2019

• The only reason I bought and read this book was the excerpt published in the Atlantic which noted some parallels between 1990s' Balkans and 2010s', well, the world, which I was already mulling in my head. Turns out that's the best part of the book.
• The rest is uneven. Holbrooke was a slime ball of a human and his accomplishments were nil, yet Packer still manages to make the book into a hagiography. Which I guess is an accomplishment.
• Did Holbrooke truly think that his memos would change the world? In the Gervais Principle hierarchy, he was a clueless posing as a sociopath.
• Packer’s account of the Dayton negotiations confirms that the only reason a deal was made was that Milošević wanted it at any cost. The agreement was for Holbrooke to mess up, and he almost did, multiple times.
• There is mention of HBO buying rights to make a show out of Holbrooke's account of the Bosnian was. I haven't read "To End a War", but I like the idea of the Dayton negotiations being the centerpiece of a mini-series, with flash backs to each individual warlord's (and Dick's) messy history. Someone please give the idea to Damon Lindelof after he's done with Watchmen.

Written by George Packer, 2019

I started the decade childless and am ending it with three, so I have missed most of the 2010s’ pop culture. This includes the entire Transformers franchise and most of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (so, not much missed then?)

• Film: “Get Out”
• Blockbuster/action film: “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”
• Album: “Hamilton”
• Single: “Rolling in the Deep”
• TV Show: “Veep”
• Single Season: “The Leftovers” season 2
• Book Fiction: “The Dark Forest” (or “Death’s End” if you count the publication of the first Chinese edition, but TDF is superior)
• Book Non Fiction: “Antifragile”
• Athlete of the Decade: The Đoković-Federer-Nadal trio, but if I had to pick one then obviously Đoković.

Movies and music were better in the 2000s, but oh what time to watch TV and follow tennis. It’s too early to judge the books (though it’s telling that my favorite was originally written in 2008).

1. Malcolm Gladwell tries to explain the death of Sandra Bland by the way of the Hitler-Chamberlain meetings, Cuban double-agents, college student alcohol culture, an episode of Friends, and Sylvia Plath’s suicide by gas oven. Huh?
2. The pieces actually fit, and — a few abrupt interludes aside — the story flows nicely. His previous books were also stories and not scientific review articles, which people tend to forget, but this one more so than others. Which is good, since people tend to misunderstood him for a Pinkeresque academic with pop culture pretensions rather than a journalist having fun.
3. A single point of disagreement: his portrayal of Ferguson, MO police as misapplies of hot spot policing rather than racketeers rang false to my layman ears.
4. Gladwell has become a podcaster, and it shows in how the book is structured: it reads like a podcast script. I haven’t listened to the audio version, but this may be the one case of a non-fiction book that is better listened than read.
5. But if you don’t have the actual book, you won’t get to read the extensive notes, on of which directly refutes a whole chapter of Blink. Another is an excellent parallel between indiscriminate police searches and cancer screening tests. Too bad he didn’t use actual footnotes (but then people would also complain, see no.2).

Written by Malcolm Gladwell, 2019

Things I found to be scarier than this movie:

• “Cabin in the Woods”
• “Coraline”
• “Toy Story 3”
• My father upgrading his Windows PC
• My 2-year-old’s diaper
• The thought that I have spent almost two hours watching this drek

That this was co-written and produced by Guillermo del Toro and directed by the same person who did The Autopsy of Jane Doe is not exactly mind-boggling, but certainly disappointing. I wonder what went wrong.

Directed by André Øvredal, 2019

A collection of essays from the man who wrote Infinite Jest, also known as the 20th century’s best 21st century book. Each one is near-to-completely brilliant and worthy of more thought than a one-line in an inconsequential blog post, but that won’t stop me:

• Big red son is the one where he attends the AVN awards as a magazine correspondent. The more absurd things become, the more encyclopedic he gets. Yes it’s funny, but also existentialist and sad as only pornography can be.
• Certainly the end of something or other, one would have to thing is long title to a short-ish review of a supposedly science fiction book by John Updike. He didn’t like it.

• Some remarks on Kafka’s funnies from which probably not enough has been removed is exactly what it says it is. Having only high-school literature class-level acquaintance with Kafka, I can’t comment.

• Authority and American usage is a review of a dictionary but also the 20th century’s (written in 1999) best 21st century essay, covering issues of political correctness, identity politics, race, alienation, and a brief history of the battle between prescriptivism and descriptivism for the hearts and minds of I don’t know who exactly, but what an exciting battle it is.

• The view from Mrs. Thompson’s is about where he was on 9/11 (spoiler alert: he was at Mrs. Thompson’s).

• How Tracey Austin broke my heart is the reason I’m even sadder than I should be about DFW not still being around, because an essay about the Federer-Đoković-Nadal tennis trio in general and the mental gymnastics going on in Novak Đoković’s head in particular would have been spectacular to read (although there has been a fairly successful attempt). Oh, and it’s also a review of a reasonably bad autobiography of the titular Ms. Austin, who is also a tennis player.
• Up, Simba is DFW following McCaine’s failed 2000 attempt in the Republican primaries, wherein he shows just how walled away from the “real” world candidates were back then, how big of a gatekeeper the media world, and just why Twitter could have made all the difference.
• Consider the lobster is where a travel essay for a cooking magazine from a food festival in Maine turns into an existential crisis and a call for veganism. It’s good
• Host is so messed up by its formatting of footnotes (fortunately there is now a web version which more than makes up for it, and the original article published in The Atlantic was also easier to read, apparently, say people who were able to find it, and yes this should also have been a footnote) that it’s hard at first to appreciate how good of a story interspersed with thoughts on infotainment and talk radio it really is, and even though it was written more than a decade ago you can sort of see what it’s protagonist will eventually become in these troubling times.

Written by David Foster Wallace, 2007