The Incomparable’s episode about The Boy and the Heron was a good sanity check that my own intuition was right. Yes, it’s weird and yes, most of it is just a dream, following the incoherent-but-comprehensible dream logic better than most movies. As a non-native speaker of English I did not find Christian Bale’s voice acting as off-putting as TI guests did, but I agree that he comes off as not a very nice person and even a bit of a war profiteer. How that can be any different in the Japanese version I can’t foresee, but I’ll find out soon enough.
🍿 Ten Meter Tower (2017) is a 15-minute documentary available at The New York Times website (it’s a gift link, feel free to watch now). “Documentary” is a loose description as the setup is contrived: 67 people who saw an online add asking them to climb up a 10m diving board and jump (or climb down!) in exchange for ~$30. There are cameras and microphones and other volunteers waiting for you to jump so they would have their turn and the reactions people have are priceless. Recommended.
I had Linus Lee’s blog The Sephist filed under “Paused and Defunct” for a while now, but he is back at it. Although most of the subject matter is out of my wheelhouse this mental model of Motivation as a function of Exploration (or was it the other way around) rang true — certainly truer to the scientific method than what my 6th-grader has been hearing at school.
For the second time this week, my man at the Financial Times knocks it out of the park:
To read well is to ignore the now. This is true of no other art form, because no other art form is so time-intensive.
Pair with Taleb’s advice on writing.
An interesting entry to the big and ever-growing book of unintended consequences:
Chernobyl caused many more deaths by reducing nuclear power plant construction and increasing air pollution than by its direct effects which were small albeit not negligible.
🍿 The Babadook (2014) is a better meme generator than it was a horror movie. A bit of a spoiler here, but the movie is ten years old: the ending killed the mood by turning it into a morality tale. Kudos for making it bloodless yet suspenseful; negative points for the too cheery of a conclusion.
Nassim Taleb wrote about how he writes:
The common fallacy is that if you want people to read you in the future, you must project something related to the future, focused on the contemporary and be as different from the past as possible –say by populating your work with space machines, high technology, and revolutionary ideas. My U.S. publisher still tries to squeeze modern art on the cover when I am looking elsewhere.
No, no; it’s the exact opposite. If you want to be read in the future, make sure you would have been read in the past. We have no idea of what’s in the future, but we have some knowledge of what was in the past. So I make sure I would have been read both in the past and in the present time, that is by both the contemporaries and the dead. So I speculated that books that would have been relevant twenty years in the past (conditional of course of being relevant today) would be interesting twenty years in the future.
But there is also this:
Another discovery I made then, and to which I have been adhering until the present. If you consider writing a creative endeavor, then avoid practicing it in mundane matters as it may both dull your vitality and make it feel like drudgery, work. I find it painful to write outside of my books (or mathematical papers) –and immensely pleasurable to write in book form. So I limit my emails to one or two laconic (but sometimes incomprehensible) sentences, postcard like; the same with social media posts that are not excerpts from books. There is still such a contraption called a telephone. Likewise, I don’t read letters and emails longer than a postcard. Writing must have some solemnity. Reading and writing, in the past, were the province of the sacred.
Not to belabor the point, but I too have found pleasure in writing articles of a certain length — and it’s not the length of a book! To each their own.
🍿 The Boy and the Heron (2023) was the weirdest Miyazaki movie we’ve seen, and the competitions is strong. It starts with the misleading title (the original How Do You Live would have made more sense), continues with the heron’s terrifying transformation, and ends with bizarre fantasy world building.
The best explanation I can think of is that most of the movie was the boy’s fever dream after a self-inflicted wound to the head. I’ve had dreams where strange twists made perfect sense and in which I acted as if I knew what was going on. It is best, then, to squint and follow the dream logic without worrying too much about the mechanics. The message in that case is clear: there is malice in all of us, but let’s not allow it to carry us away. Not original, but important.
Janan Ganesh, telling it like it is:
The hardest thing to convey about modern politics to intelligent readers, who tend to assume that ideas drive events, is the tribal shallowness of it. People take a certain position because the opposing side doesn’t.
He is writing about foreign policy, but applies just as well to masks, vaccine mandates, approach to tech, etc. which gets us to the package of sometimes incompatible beliefs you can expect to get from either side.
Dave Winer has some good advice:
I’m often tempted to offer advice to the parents, but I won’t offer it unless asked, except this. If you have children, there’s a good chance one or more of them will not have children, and you should love them the same, and provide models of acceptance while they’re growing up, by bringing childless people into your home, so the kids know that this is one of the legitimate choices in life, offering proof that you won’t love them any less if they go down that path. And here’s the hard part, imho, for people with children – keep that promise.