I’m 12 and the family is taking a summer vacation in sunny Pomorie, Bulgaria. It’s on the Black Sea. The ~400-mile drive in my father’s VW Golf (Mk2) takes close to 12 hours, border check and an interlude in Sophia included. It feels longer: it’s a 3-door hatchback and I’m sharing the back seat with my brother and a suitcase. There are enough groceries in the trunk to last us a week.

We arrive in the early morning and look for a place to stay. Airbnb is 16 years away, but there are vacancy signs posted on private residences all around town. We find one that’s half-built: gray building blocks still visible on the outside and concrete stairs with no railings, but the rooms are actually quite nice and the apartment is self-contained. The owner-slash-proprietor is financing the finishing touches by renting it out. My father approves.

The weather is nice and the beach is crowded. I have a perpetual sunburn. We visit Burgas and Nessebar. Dad almost gets scammed out of all of our German marks by a street money changer. I get a photo taken with a yellow-white python around my neck. We eat at home and take evening strolls up and down what goes for a boardwalk in Pomorie. We ocasionally catch a glimpse of live music from accross a hedge. A few people climb a hillock to watch the concert. I try it once and climb right back down: do I want to spend the evening listening to a Boney M. tribute band?

The drive back through Bulgaria feels faster, but that’s because Dad is speeding. We get caught and the policeman pencils something in on a lemon-yellow card. The next time we stop for gas Dad tries to erase it. He succeeds but the card is now a paler yellow where the marking used to be. They notice this at the border and we stay an extra few hours until they let us through. But then we’re in Serbia and close to home and soon I’ll get back to playing Civilization II and Duke Nukem 3D and Quest for Glory IV so who cares what happened and how we got out of it?

It’s 2019 and I’m the Dad. The family is taking an early summer vacation in sunny Wailea. It’s on Maui. My wife and I take two new credit cards to get enough points to get three tickets for the four of us. A week before the trip we realize I can’t have a 35-pound toddler on me for two 5-hour flights and we buy the fourth ticket. The airline charges for food, so we stock up on snacks to bring on board; I have a Costco membership card in my wallet.

We are in a one-bedrom two-bathroom condo that is bigger than my family home in Serbia. A decorative bowl full of glass balls greets us in the hallway; a large ceramic vase is next to our bed. My wife glances at our jet-lagged toddler, then at me, and I spend the next half-hour lifting fragile items up on top of kitchen cabinets. I go to bed around midnight, which is 6am Eastern Time.

The condo sits next to a golf course and some tennis courts. I don’t play either. There are five beaches within 5 minutes’ driving distance. They are virtually empty save for one, which has a steady stream of snorklers and divers parading up and down. The Costco-chosen guidebook says it’s the best spot on Maui for snorkling lessons, but 18-month-olds can’t snorkle.

The older sibling collects seashells and runs away from waves and builds puddles for the younger one to jump on. She chats up the adults and can carry a conversation better than her dad. We all wear UPF shirts and go through five bottles of Coppertone. We visit Lahaina and Paia and Kihei. We eat at home and take evening strolls through beachside resorts. There are Luaus on every night. The one at the Marriott is there for all to see from a public walkway. It’s the one we attend one night — the pork is good. There is audience participation: children learn the hula, adults blow into a conch shell; one man proposes to his fiance while up on the stage, in front of all us people — it’s a bit corny.

We wake up at 3am and wake up the kids at 4 to drive up a mountain top to see the sunrise. It is 10°C and colder with wind chill, and the sunrise lasts for all of five minutes; the children are not impressed. The other 100 people looking at it seem quite happy. One man proposes to his fiance, on top of that inactive volcano, in front of all us people — it’s quite romantic.

We sign up for an 8-hour van ride up and down a rainforest highway. It takes 12 hours. We are sitting all the way in the back: the older one is sick but doesn’t vomit, the younger one doesn’t say anything but vomits twice. It’s mostly juice and water and doesn’t smell like acid at all so we wipe it up with tissues and wet wipes and don’t ask the driver to stop. The young couple in front of us asks for more air.

The last flight back is a red-eye and the younger one screams for the first hour of the last leg of the journey because i don’t let her play with the restroom faucet. The attendents are out serving drinks so we let her roll around in the back of the plane, head close to the emergency exit door which I eye nervously. They serve us apple juice which she drinks and falls asleep. The older one is excited: there is an Amazon delivery of one toy or another waiting for her back home. She is still tired enough to be sleeping when the plane catches turbulence — the last 3 hours are bumpy. I watch a movie and try to fall asleep.

I’m late to this, seeing as it’s already gotten a bunch of awards including one from the Academy, but wow. Everyone involved in making this should be proud of the work they’ve done. Having said that…:

• Some action scenes (looking at you, final boss battle) are too fast-paced with too much unnecessary stuff going on in the background, just because they could.
• PP’s death was… banal. Is this how he died in the comic book? Sheesh.
• Auntie May should got over his death quickly too.
• That’s not how a linear accelerator looks like or works (not on this Earth, at least).
• But take note: I saw this on the back of an airplane seat during a red-eye flight with a sleeping offspring ramming her head into my flank every few minutes, and I still thought it was amazing. Five stars, will see again.

Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, 2018

• H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” makes an early appearance, foreshadowing some Cthulhu-inspired creatures our hero will first fight and then command. Sadly, the (very!) big baddie in Dunwich is Yog-Sothoth, not Cthulhu, so this also foreshadows a movie that has some good ideas but doesn’t quite get them all right.
• One thing it did get right was a spectacular chase scene on the rooftops of Sicily that reminded me of the best moments of Assassin’s Creed and Uncharted. This is also one of the few places where the setting wasn’t obviously CGI (because it wasn’t).
• Seriously, if your budget is $160,000,000 you should either just film a real sunset or have an obviously fake one as a statement. It looked like most above-ground scenes were shot in the Uncanny Valley.
• William Defoe is a lifelong resident of the Uncanny Valley, no matter the movie.
• Nicole Kidman has a good fight scene. The fight scenes in general were easy to follow and nicely choreographed.
• Dolph Lundgren, huh? Good casting there, but I was hoping he’d have a nice fight as well
• Jason Momoa can’t pull off the dumb muscle look they were going for at the beginning and the smartass one-liners don’t help. So his character’s arc is in costume more than psyche: shirtless, street clothes, Aquaman.
• Speaking of which, that Aquaman costume came fresh off a corpse that had been simmering in the deep sea for millennia. But we already established that Aquaman had bad b.o. so that made it fine I guess?
• The underwater villain was entirely predictable and boring. The human baddie was delightful and I look forward to seeing more of him and his equally delightful new companion in the sequel.
• Nutshell review: Predictable but delightfully over-the-top.

Directed by James Wan, 2018

• Top four South Maui beaches, best one first: Po’olenalena, Keawakapu (a close second), Wailea (only in the afternoons), Mokapu.
• Top guide book is Maui Revealed. NB: Hotel/lodging information is on their app ( Hawaii Revealed), and that part of the app is free.
• Top place for shopping is Paia, especially if you’re into that 21st century hippie aesthetic that’s popular with Instagram influencers these days (though mine being aware of it means it won’t be popular for much longer).
• There is a notable absence of panhandlers. If there are any homeless, they are indistinguishable from a certain type of tourist. Locals are indifferent to appreciative of your business, but they don’t go out of their way to get you to pay for stuff (which is unlike any other tropical/Mediterranean island I’ve been to, but then again I haven’t been to many).
• The sand sticks to anything and everything. There’s enough of it in the car that I’ll happily pay any extra cleaning fees the rental agency will surely charge.
• Prices at low and mid-scale restaurants are same or just slightly higher than D.C. This does not bode well for D.C.
• There are more veterinarian than human hospitals on Maui.
• The one general hospital on the island is Keiser’s Maui Memorial Medical Center. It looks like they have a heme/onc service with an infusion center, so don’t think I haven’t thought about it.
• Only two days left.

• I used to say Maryland was the best U.S. state. I’d like to change that to the best continental state. I don’t know about the rest of Hawai’i but Maui is spectacular. That 50th star should be gold.
• This is why: there are so many things to do on the island that many visitors get a FOMO-induced urge to do as much as possible. That leaves the wonderful beaches mostly empty during the weekdays, when the locals are working, and quite bearable (compared to the Montenegrin beaches of my youth) on weekends.
• There are at least five kid-friendly beaches within a 5-minute drive from our condo. One is a go-to for snorkeling, one if full of sea turtles for those who enjoy swimming around them (which should be everyone with a heart), one is looong, peaceful, with shallow water no waves, excellent shade, and also an occasional turtle (swimming with sea turtles naturally being better when you didn’t even expect to find them).
• “The road to Hana” would be a great find if you had some business to do in Hana, then stumbled into seeing a few waterfalls and making a pit stop at a black sand beach. It’s overrated otherwise, and the poor residents of Hana and central Maui have to deal with droves of slow-moving tourist vehicles looking for the next instagrammable moment.
• Hana highway is also the home to the best vegan ice cream I’ve ever had, so there’s that.
• No, I’m not vegan. Kalua pork is too good.
• Each new state I visit means I get to learn more about American exceptionalism. The story of Hawai’i’s annexation taught me that it’s OK for a private corporation to hold the ruler of an independent nation hostage in order to control the said nation’s resources, as long as the corporation is American and the nation is not European.
• Yes I’ll keep writing Hawai’i.
• It’s also OK to ban the native language and culture well into the 20th century. Safeway came to the islands well before the Hawaiian language was legal again.
• Having said that, there is now also a Walmart and — crucially — a Costco on Maui. Prices are the same or lower than in D.C. That is how you conquer a nation, Serbia.

For someone who supposedly likes science fiction I’ve been late getting to Asimov’s best known works. That’s too bad, since 20 years ago I would have enjoyed the first book much more.

• The literal title of the series could be The Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire, and How to Survive It.

• Amazon says “Foundation” is book three. It’s not: books 1 and 2 are prequels and if you read them as published, this is the rightful Book One (you’re not one of those people who shows their kids The Phantom Menace first, are you?)

• The future has no women, save for a shrill daughter of a viceroy wedded off to a barbarian ruler. This is literally the only female character in a book that spans 80+ years and five star systems. I would not have noticed this 20 years ago.

• The Empire’s degeneracy is most evident in its approach to culture and science: our ancestors knew more that we did so we’d better maintain the status quo and not let things get too much worse on our watch. Over a few centuries of such policies things inevitably get much worse. The premise is a good counterfactual to Tyler Cowen’s Stubborn Attachments.

• The peak of science is neither interstellar travel nor advanced atomic energy: both of these survive the decline and continue to be used even by “barbarians”. What waits to be re-discovered is psychohistory (PH), an invention of Asimov’s which is to psychology what Newtonian physics is to quantum mechanics: an averaging out of individual variability in order to predict “future history”.

• PH notably can’t predict actions of individuals, yet at critical moments it’s the individuals who make the critical decisions that make the PH predictions come true. Paradox? Irony? Both?

• Also, for someone who keeps saying that PH can’t predict the future of an individual human, the inventor of PH is really good at predicting the future of individual humans. That’s neither paradox nor irony but rather bad plotting on Asimov’s part, but I’ll hold final judgment until the end of the series.

Written by Isaac Asimov, 1951

This could have and should have been the wrap-up of Sapiens rather than a book of its own. The first two thirds are a rehash of the last few chapters of Sapiens, dealing with three different flavors of humanism (liberal, social, evolutionary) in more depth. Only the last third deals with predictions, the main one being that, the postulates of liberalism being incompatible with our current understanding of biology, two other candidate “religions” may replace it: techno-humanism (out of which springs Homo Deus) and dataism (wherein humans need not apply).

So far so good; unfortunately, his claims about the current state of affairs are supported by the thinnest of cobwebs, at least where medicine is concerned:

“It is highly likely that during your lifetime many of the most momentous decisions about your body and health will be taken by computer algorithms such as IBM’s Watson.”

It isn’t.

“Google, together with the drug giant Novartis, is developing a contact lens that checks glucose levels in the blood every few seconds by analysing the composition of tears.”

Not any more.

“Twentieth-century medicine aimed to heal the sick. Twenty-first-century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy.”

Is he referring to the “ADHD” epidemic? Anabolic steroid use? Medicine’s record of messing with the healthy has so far been abysmal, there are no indications that this will change, and there are plenty of sick that still need healing. It’s not medicine that wants the upgrading, it’s the Silicon Valley tech bros, for the most part.

Yes, it’s only medicine, but it’s the part I understand the most and his conjectures, deductions, and extrapolations fall flat on their face.

A darker prediction: the best minds of the West are too busy monetizing the unjustified optimism and hubris of the monied classes to work on the important problems. A breakthrough, when it comes, will be out of left field and from somewhere less regulated, less devoted to a good narrative, and more prone to experimentation for its own (rather than financial) sake. It is now indescribable but will in hindsight seem inevitable, which makes it a terrible subject for a book on future history but a terrific one for true science fiction.

Written by Yuval Noah Harari, 2018

Fifty years and what feels like ten times as many people crammed into a story of physics, engineering, politics, psychology, diplomacy, and war. An awesome book about an awesome topic, and yes that’s how awesome was meant to be used.

• I enjoyed the first half of the book, about the physics of it all, much more than the second. It has fewer characters, all of them characters, and has fewer parallel stories to tell. A whole chapter is devoted to a manuscript authorship dilemma: kudos to Rhodes for making it interesting.

• Niels Bohr and Ernest Rutherford were some of those characters. So was Marie Curie: “How does it feel to be married to a genius, Mdm. Curie?” “I don’t know, ask my husband”. Indeed.

• If there’s anything that I got from the second half, about engineering and deploying the thing, it’s that large projects are messy, costly, and never completely satisfying. But that’s kind of a given.

• With all the firebombing (Dresden et al), and two atomic bombs top it off, how much worse must have the Allies behaved for their atrocities to be equal to those of the Nazis? Note that Stalin was an Ally.

• I knew little of Oppenheimer before reading this except that he got into political trouble after Los Alamos. The book doesn’t go there, but every mention of him foreshadows his troubles to come. Which would be very confusing if I knew absolutely nothing about him, and was still kind of confusing with the little knowledge I had.

• Soldiers were much more interesting to read about than politicians, and came out on top in almost every confrontation.

• I know what I wrote about the second half of the book, but the last three chapters are easily the best, and the way Rhodes covered the actual bombing of Hiroshima was masterful.

This will probably be the best book I read this year.

Written by Richard Rhodes, 1986