A haunted house movie where the house has a morgue in the basement (America is weird) and the ghost is lying on a stainless steel cart, all peaceful and symmetrical until a father-son team of coroners begins slicing into her. Roose Bolton is again to blame, in a way, but has more sense at the end of this one while leaving room for a sequel (The Autopsy 2: Richmond Horror, a working title that I just made up, so you can stop googling it).
It’s a nice—if short—ride that would be much scarier for those who never attended an autopsy, but between the pacing, the acting, and the near-absence of jump scares, it’s the best horror movie I’ve seen since It follows. It gets extra points for being truer to the genre—no hipster soundtracks here.
And no, you can’t put a think chunk of freshly brain under a microscope and see cells, much less figure out if a neuron is alive just by looking at it for 1.5 seconds. Brian Cox can sell anything, though.
Directed by André Øvredal, 2016
Twenty-somethings here are playing SoCal high-schoolers who talk like they are on the set of The Maltese Falcon; but it’s not Bugsy Malone with a slightly older cast, and it’s not sort-of-like film noir, either. This is a film noir, complete with a Gordian knot of a plot, gritty textures half-concealed in darkness, and telegraphed archetypes (the loner, the vamp, the femme fatale).
The teenagers seem parentless—save for a comic relief scene or two featuring the mom of our archetypal kingpin serving the boys cookies and OJ—and the few other adults in the world treat them as equals. Clearly a fantasy, but you will have suspended your disbelief long before then.
It fares well when compared to the competition—but then, most of it had been made in the 1940s, so I wouldn’t call it a fair fight.
Directed by Rian Johnson, 2005
The Worst Father in the World, here played by Alfred Molina, prefers wedding off his smart and ambitious underaged daughter (Sally Sparrow, 24 going on 16) to a 30-something con artist of means (a smirking Skarsgard), rather than financing her studying English at Oxford. It is the 1960s—why waste money on tuition if her only reason for attending university is to find a good husband?
She likes his opera-champaign-trips-to-Paris lifestyle, he likes that she speaks French and looks at him like a God, so it looks like a win-win-win as she abandons high school for an engagement ring. But if you hang around scammers you will get scammed, and soon she learns he has a wife, a son, and countless past jeunes femmes like her, some of whom ended up with child. A deus ex machina in the form of an English teacher does help her get into Oxford, and she lives long and well enough to be able to write the memoire that Nick Hornby turned into this screenplay.
Not a masterpiece, but serviceable as educational material for preteens. I hope Dora will grow up not to be as impressionable to sleazeballs.
Directed by Lone Scherfig, 2009
Children of Men has aged well. Too well. Between Brexit, Zika, islamist fundamentalists, and police brutality, 2017 is much closer to the version of 2027 the movie portrays than what Cuaron could possibly have imagined while writing and directing it.
Brilliant long tracking shots include Juliane Moore’s bloody demise in a post-apocalyptic British mini-car, and Clive Owen’s race through a desolate seaside town-slash-rebellious refugee camp to find the only baby alive on Earth. A lot of the movie could now be described as a Twitch video, though back then first-person shooters were decidedly less realistic.
If this were Interstellar, Owen would have lived through the end and be reunited with a resurrected Moore. Fortunately, it is not.
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron, 2006
Written by an engineer, and reads like it. It uses a broad brush—with not much description or characterization—to explore such trivialities as life, reality, human perception, and humanity’s place in the universe.
Much of it has a sense of odd turning into familiar: the bloodshed of the Chinese Cultural Revolution projected onto the book’s pro-alien human factions and real world’s opposed-yet-alike movements; virtual realities inside a nesting doll of x-dimensional spaces that may themselves be virtual; environmental dangers, imagined and real.
Einstein supposedly pictured himself chasing a beam of light before developing his theories of relativity. Liu imagined standing on the surface of a planet quite unlike Earth to come to this book and its two siblings. Based on the first installment, I can tell that investing some time in the trilogy will be worth it.
Written by Cixin Liu, 2012
I have cut my commute down to 40 minutes door-door (from ~2 hours), 25 of which are walking, and we only have to pay 1.69 times the rent. Yay?
Some observations about our new neighborhood from a Serbian/European/Baltimorean transplant.
Dogs are everywhere.
Runners and cyclists too.
And a couple of homeless people. One seems to have staked out a bench I pass by every day.
Very few children. Assuming all the little Audreys and Maddisons are attending their ballet lessons, or whatnot.
Restaurants with street seating. It’s like I’m back in Belgrade. Alas, most of them serve nothing but greasy American classics, only they call it Southern-style and put even more grease.
Are people who eat at these places the same ones doing all the running?
Why do two different streets in the same neighborhood have the exact same name? If you put a super-block that cuts a road in half, does it not make sense to rename one of them?
Safeway is a dump.
The title may remind you of Marginal revolution. That’s on purpose. Go read it.
Submitted without comment:
OK, one comment: do not buy any coastal properties.
The next time someone asks me about books to read before residency, I will direct them here. You don’t have to be a medical trainee to benefit from these, but that period of anxious anticipation between match day and orientation is perfect for buffing your attributes.
What better way to start learning about learning than by reading a book about reading books?
The Farnam Street blog has a nice outline of the book’s main ideas. The same establishment is now hocking a $200 course on the same topic. It’s probably good, but at $10 the source material is slightly more affordable.
The first few months you will be neck-deep in scut work no matter what you do. After that, though, you will have to juggle patient care, research, didactics, fellowship/career planning, and piles of administrative drek—and that’s just inside the hospital. At the very least, this book will help you make time for laundry (and maybe some reading).
Superficially, similar knowledge to what is in these 400+ pages can be found in a few Wikipedia entries. But you would miss out on the how and why cognitive biases and heuristics are so important. Medicine and research are bias-driven endeavors, and not understanding them is not knowing real-world medicine.
Only three? Yes. If anything, the two and a half months between mid-March and July 1st won’t be enough to read them all with the attention they deserve. But you should try.
Another year, another round of podcast recommendations:
No, it’s not your browser. The list is empty.
After 10 years of attaching electric appendages to my head using flimsy earhooks some call ear-phones, I have decided that one voice in my head at a time is quite enough, thank you, and that there are better ways to muffle the sounds of everyday existence than the nasal overtones of middle-aged white men.
Who will be crushed to lose me as a listener, I am sure.
I haven’t suddenly decided that they are all bad, mind you—I have spent cumulative months listening to them, so they must be good. The problem is, I like them too much.
Behold my modified CAGE questionnaire for podcasts:
Aced it.
Granted, being mostly free, not too hard on your body, sometimes educational, and often entertaining, podcasts are not the worst thing in the world to be addicted to. But to be alone with your thoughts is exceedingly rare when there is a toddler in the house—rare enough that you do not want to spoil it by introducing external stimuli which make it impossible to string a chain of thought longer than the 30-second commercial break for Squarespace.
Farewell, voices. It was good while it lasted.
Last week I shared a brief reflection on a tiny aspect of my commute. Please check it out it if you haven’t already, it is a quick read.
Wasn’t that nice? It started by introducing some old concepts in a new light—you knew about trains before, and maybe even knew there was a MARC Penn that line goes from Baltimore to DC, but probably didn’t know the specific trains and their timetables. Then it gave you a coherent explanation of a phenomenon you hadn’t known about before. This first caused slight, but not unpleasant, cognitive strain while you were figuring out what I writing about, followed by the small pleasure of an ah-hah moment once the pieces clicked.
It was a brain massage, if you will. It was also complete bull.
Not that anything I wrote was wrong, as far as I know, but I didn’t give many arguments for it being right, either. There were no ridership statistics or arrival times to back up my claims. And even if there were—I didn’t give any alternative hypotheses to explain the situation, nor reasons why those would be less likely than my own explanation. When you think about it, it was more of a brain Twinkie than a massage—all empty calories, with a fleeting feeling of fullness.
Welcome to 99.99999% of the written word, and to anything ever spoken out loud.
We like stories. They need to make a threshold amount of sense (this is why societies universally ostracize schizophrenics). They should contain an element of surprise (it is not that the 7:07 train would come later than the 7:23—twists like that do not surprise anyone any more—it is that it comes in much earlier because people think it wouldn’t). And they get bonus points if—as my last parenthetical implied—they paint the others as stupid or incompetent. There are many more checkboxes; more of them checked, the better the story.
Most professions are based on storytelling. Doctors tell different stories to their patients, each other, and themselves—as do most other scientists, to a different degree. Lawyers tell stories to their clients to make them believe they will craft good ones for the judge, jury, and the opposing side. Ask a marketer what makes a good commercial (spoiler: story).
Being a coal miner doesn’t involve telling stories. No one wants to be a coal miner.
Our minds prefer a good story over a true one, and will have us believe it more, too. However, the more boxes you see checked, the more suspicious you should be that someone manipulated the tale to make it more pleasurable, ergo memorable, ergo believable.
(So, if what you’ve just read made sense…)
If you are looking for an objective truth—or getting as close to it as possible—any medium that involves audio/visual queues will be an impediment. Sights and sounds stir up emotions, and emotions prime us to believe or not to believe. Pay attention to the background music in a documentary, or how the desk of that shifty lawyer they’re interviewing is a complete mess.
TV news is, of course, a joke—this is why comedy shows are becoming the most popular delivery form.
Written word has its own way of deceiving—anecdotes, incomplete data, misquotes, lazy references—all to make a better narrative. Just read anything by Malcolm Gladwell. And look at the time it takes to get to the bottom of just one tiny factoid in that story of the iron content in spinach. Finding truth is exhausting and exasperating, and people whose job it is to find it (hello, accountants) are way less fun than those who make stuff up. Mark Twain said it best:
A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
Misquoted? Most likely. Or is Huff Post wrong? It wouldn’t be the first time.
There is nothing in this post that bigger and better minds than my own haven’t written about already. But that’s a boatload of pages! Not many people have the time, discipline, and interest to read all that—and even if they did, they would keep making the same mistakes over again, as shown in several studies described in those same books (yes, yes, all studies are flawed; one windmill at a time, please). These things are hard-wired, and for a good reason—evolution doesn’t care for objective truths.
Or maybe it does. I don’t know, I’ve just made it up.