“Today’s Galileos fight over one or two vaccine doses in teenagers, whether the risk of vaccine-induced myocarditis is 1/1000 or 1/10, 000. Nothing encapsulates our pettiness more completely than our probability wars.”
Echoes of Chris Hitchens here.
The 1984 version showed that making a good movie out of a 700-page tome is a complex problem that can’t be solved in 2 hours 17 minutes on a $40M budget. It took 20 minutes and $50M more than that for Denis Villeneuve to cover just half of what Lynch attempted, but the end result is so much better. The story is what it is — between the book, the movie, the TV show, and the game I now know it by heart — but the casting, the pace, cinematography, score, the movieness of it, are all pitch perfect. A cross between Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars, noted our perceptive nine-year-old somewhere around the 30-minute mark. Yes, and more like this, please!
Viewing notes: we saw it on a 120" screen with a 5.1 surround system. If you have anything less at home I’d strongly recommend going to a movie theater. Yes, it’s nice that it is available for streaming on day 1, but you would be doing a disservice both to the movie and to yourself seeing it on a postage stamp. </privilege>
A Disney+ TV show that WoG followers would like. Villains are IYI vegans who live in modernist buildings and make children live by absurd and contradictory rules that only give an appearance of freedom (“You are free to go wherever you like, as long as you stay on the path”, to paraphrase one). Our heroes, both children and adults, are messy but resourceful, at home in both a Georgian mansion and the wilderness of (I assume, though it’s never specified) the Pacific Northwest.
It starts in a picturesque costal town right off of Townscaper. By the third episodes the children are stuck in a nightmareish brutalist school that is all acute angles and ’70s orange-white plastic furniture — not nearly as pretty to look at, but the puzzle-of-the-day aspect makes every episode worthwhile. It ends with most of the loose ends tied up but with promises of more to come. And Tony Hale is in almost evey scene. What’s not to love?
Someone else’s, to be clear. ↩︎
A few notches below Little Miss Sunshine, a movie of a similar sensibilities. Some changes might have improved it — e.g. why does Ruby end up at high-school choir practice because of a boy, and not because of her love of singing? — but none of it can correct the one huge flaw, which is that conflict between Ruby’s supporting her family by providing free ASL interpreter services and Ruby’s becoming a strong independent young woman is a zero-sum game which will end up in either financial hardship or broken dreams.
But, you know, the music was nice.
Mare of Easttown is the best dead-girl-in-a-sad-town TV show to come out of the US since Twin Peaks. To be clear, the 30-some years that separate them still have many good shows of the genre, but none were American. When they weren’t busy churning out the millionth iteration of CSI, Americans could only muster pale copies of what came out of Britain and Scandinavia, with characters and plots lifted wholesale and Northern European sentiments crammed oddly into New England toponyms.
The Mare takes its setting more seriously, and not just with flannel shirts, odd accents, and dozens of bottles of Yuengling and Rolling Rock drunk per episode. You quickly learn that the town is not all that bad: it has decent homes, an upscale college and high school, and a pretty good sense of community. It’s the people who are sad, each in their own way and for their own reasons, with the titular Marianne the saddest of them all, and the show mostly dedicated to exploring how and why this happened.
There is also a murder or two, some kidnappings, and an action scene that brought back some of the best moments of The Silence of the Lambs. A few of the cliffhangers were the murder mystery equivalent of a jump scare, but that can be forgotten because the show manages to pull off a successful double-twist ending that is both reasonable and unexpected.
Ultimately, if a show is good enough for Kate Winslet to be in, it’s more than good enough for me to watch.
Two parts lifestyle porn one part sociologic study of intergenerational struggle, with a smidgen of mystery to whet your appetite and make you think there is more there there than it actually is, though what is there is still pretty good if not exactly a Knives Out caliber of crime comedy. And it is here that I realize I never wrote about Knives Out, which would have been the movie of the year had it not come out in 2019, a good year for movies in an otherwise mediocre decade. So here is my review: it is outstanding, go see it (👍).
But oh my that soundtrack.
It is easier than ever to organize and attend a meeting, which should scare the living daylights out of anyone who doesn’t organize or attend meetings for a living. It used to be that only middle management had to deal with a series of 90-minute meetings all 15 minutes apart in which they had no specific role, which had no effect on their task list, and which left them no better off than they’d be if they had just read the minutes.
We are all middle management now.
My own experience with middle management was during chief residency and I learned quickly that the more administrative aspects of it just weren’t for me. But I also learned a few coping strategies, modified below for the video conferencing age.
If you liked this, you may also enjoy my lukewarm take on handling email.
I, for one, am glad that blogs are making a comeback. Here are a few I’ve been reading for at least a few months, many of them for years, some for decades.
The only true philosophers of our time.
People without major academic credentials who have interesting ideas about science.
People with major academic credentials and interesting ideas, something to teach, or both.
People against modernity of one sort or another.
Unclassifiable but exhilarating.
Some tips, a few tricks, many opinions.
Economists and investors, for the most part.
Former or current journalists who now earn some or all of their living by writing newsletters via Substack, which is slowly reinventing blogs (in the sense of reinventing the wheel, not actually making them better and in fact in many was making them much worse).
For when I really want to know when the next update is coming.
It was the middle of another heat dome week, but the morning was cool enough to require long sleeves. The grass — freshly cut, of course — was covered in dew. In less than 20 minutes one could see sitting on the front porch: several hummingbirds battling around a feeder, two deer grazing just off the gravel driveway, a wild turkey, a rabbit, several blue jays and cardinals; I half-expected Snow White to skip down the forest path and burst into song.
The Broadband internet in West Virginia is not great, but it’s not terrible either. Why are there only 2 million people in this state?