Jane Jacobs loved Greenwich Village so much that she wrote a book about why that was and why more neighborhoods weren’t like it. She looked at other similar areas in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc. as well some failed ones, and gave a few guidelines on what was needed for safe, lively, and desirable city streets.
It has enough whimsical observations of city life to keep things interesting for its too-many—over 400—pages. E.g. on a city park’s homeless population:
Almost imperceptibly, like the hand of a clock, the raggle-taggle reception creeps around the circular pool at the center of the square. And indeed, it is the hand of a clock, for it is following the sun, staying in the warmth.
Or, comparing a safe-but-dirty city street to a desired but decidedly unsafe park:
The sidewalks were dirty, they were too narrow for the demands put upon them, and they needed shade from the sun. But here was no scene of arson, mayhem or the flourishing of dangerous weapons. In the playground where the night-time murder had occurred, things were apparently back to normal too. Three small boys were setting fire under a wooden bench. Another was having his head beaten against the concrete. The custodian was absorbed in solemnly and slowly hauling down the American flag).
It’s all quite lovely. But ultimately, it is an exercise in confirmation bias that misses as many essential points as it reveals. What was arguably the most devastating influence on American cities — Robert Moses — is but a misguided elderly official who, and kudos to him, knows his way around public funds. City planners like big, disruptive projects because of their bad (deductive!) reasoning, not because they give politicians photogenic ribbon-cutting ceremonies.
If you want to know why American cities are the way they are, better read The Power Broker.
Written by Jane Jacobs, 1961
Extraordinary set pieces strung together by the thinnest of plots, based on an absurd, sitcom-worthy failure to communicate. A particular subplot should have been spun off as a buddy cop movie.
The Ray-Luke-Kylo triangle should have been a bigger part of the movie, but then many of the new characters, the ones that aren’t white and/or men, would have nothing to do. Such are the problems of building on an old and popular franchise: you can’t both stay true to the roots and change with the times.
It has cute animals and looks good in 3D though, so Dora (5.4) approves.
Directed by Rian Johnson, 2017
Serbia’s public broadcaster, RTS (that’s PTC in cyrillic) has a good chunk of its archive spread across multiple YouTube channels, and it is magnificent (this one in particular).
Observe the 1960s-1990s televised plays and TV dramas. I still have vivid memories of watching one particular product the first time it aired, about a Serbian family keeping in touch with their ex-pat relatives in Germany via VHS tapes. Replace camcorders with smart phones and speed up the timeline to account for the internet, and it could have been shot today. Technology changes, people don’t.
My favorite childhood TV show hasn’t aged well at all; then again has anything from the ‘90s? If you consider most of it was made during a civil war and in a time of hyperinflation it is actually quite good. What was 90210’s excuse? Better kids’ shows have been made in Serbia both before and after.
Best for last: the celebration of hard core nerddom that is Serbia’s longest-running quiz show, important enough to have its own channel. It starts with anagrams and math problems, makes a detour to Mastermind, then finishes off with three different ways to test for trivia. Jokes about the autism spectrum would be writing themselves if this were an American show, but it’s not, and (before I left, at least) Serbian viewers still had some admiration for the participants. It is all very serious and competitive, and has been on the air every weekday for the last 24 years. (A political side-note: this does not mean Serbia is free from anti-intellectualism, quite the opposite in fact. Some combination of militant anti-intellectuals, gas-lighters, and proponents of economic/financial scientism has been in positions of power since the early 90s. There are no lessons here, just observations).
The world in general, and the US in particular, is spending too much on goal-directed, targeted biomedical research while undervaluing both applied and theoretical physics. Picture Leonardo da Vinci drawing helicopters: that’s the modern-day cancer researcher. The universal cure for cancer — and there should be one, if humanity survives long enough to create it — will not come from an NIH grant. If grants are involved at all, it will be something initially funded by the National Science Foundation. The current system of funding (government, non-profit, biotech, you name it) is broken, and if you account for the opportunity cost it is a complete disaster. Each of these statements deserves at least a paragraph, but I am saving my carpal tunnels for a manuscript, an LOI, and a couple of protocols (oh, the irony).
In the meantime, a few things physician-scientists should do for the overall good:
How beneficial any of this would be for one’s career is a different question altogether, but let’s not get into incentives because RSI. I am also very open to opposing opinions, since my being wrong would make my life easier.
For better or worse, the American system of government is strong. Those who say otherwise have a financial interest in people thinking the opposite.
Culturally, US has more similarities with Iran than with Saudi Arabia, even if you count religion and religiosity as part of culture. The Christian right is working hard to make them even more similar.
Though still quite hard, it’s easier for a high-skilled immigrant to come to America than to any other country in the world. Comparison is even more favorable for low-skilled and unskilled immigrants. For all of them, quality of life, acceptance, and protection they get are better than anywhere else.
The randomness of the Green Card lottery process is a feature not a bug.
Reading the non-fiction sections of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and whatever their conservative equivalents are, is good for generating fake insight but ultimately pointless. The Economist is useful for a tiny segment of the population but lets be real: if you’re reading this you are not it.
The only useful section in the daily newspapers is Local. Maybe Sports, if you are into that sort of thing, but professional and college sports are a scam so stick with the amateur leagues.
TSA agents and airline personnel are nice people but some passengers check out their brains at the curb and make everyone’s lives less pleasant.
Apple hardware products are underpriced for what you get but do you actually need what they offer? This doesn’t include the AirPods, which are the best thing Apple has made in the last 20 years and still underpriced; though they unfortunately resemble in both name and appearance a mind control method from Doctor Who S2 and paired with a smart phone are not far from it.
The world doesn’t need another IPA. America needs more tripels.
This is all coming from a non-immigrant resident alien with no expertise in politics, international law, transportation, or technology. I do know beer though.
What you do is you take as many fairy-tales and myths and other stories as you can — Campbell is extraordinarily good at collecting them — then squint and trace out the patterns. Us humans are very good at finding patterns where none exist (just ask Percival Lowell), so it is no wonder that we end up with an overarching story, albeit disjointed, which is — of course it is — steeped in New Age monism.
Plot twist: unlike similar attempts in other arts, this one becomes wildly successful, serving as a template for other stories that end up following it more closely than any of the tales of old ever did (see Kevin Garvey’s literal and metaphorical travails for the most recent example). I like The Leftovers, so I would say The Hero… is a net benefit for the civilization. It just wasn’t for me.
Full disclosure: I stopped reading the book near the end of the first (of two) sections, the one about The Hero’s Journey. I therefore never got to the Cosmogonic cycle, and cannot comment. Do let me know if there was a surprise ending.
Written by Joseph Campbell, 2008
Inception for the Disney Franchise Age of American cinema. Trying to be deliberately inoffensive to a particular class of consumer, it dodges Mickeydom’s most glorious moments of cultural sensitivity only to fall on the sword of blandness. But credit where it is due — it takes talent to make a trippy 60s comic book that’s oddly relevant in today’s world of magic mystery turmoil into a boring, predictable, dull, uninspired, yawn-inducing, delta wave-producing, paint-by-numbers origin story.
And if you thought only the Strange-ness was fumbled you must not be a doctor, because his day job features the most laughable medicine this side of the Human Centipede. Though I shouldn’t complain too much — I imagine aerospace engineers cringe an order of magnitude more when watching any other Marvel miracle.
Thumbs down.
Directed by Scott Derrickson, 2016
Every ballet metaphor told and/or written by dancers, visualized: you don’t feel like a swan, you become one; competitiveness means murdering the competition; and liberating yourself from constraints is suicide. It is on the nose and at times painful to watch, but I would not expect anything else from the master of the afterschool special.
Portman is a pro: she gets you to swallow the banal white swan/black swan analogy whole, and ask for more, goes through every exercise in Aronofsky’s mental torture playbook like it’s nothing, and looks believably cool and composed until she believably isn’t. Watching her in this movie makes a certain trilogy an even bigger crime against directing.
Thumbs up.
Directed by Darren Aronofsky, 2010
Derivative drivel.
Directed by Chan-wook Park, 2013