This week: the hidden machinery behind famous names. Stalin's terrified inner circle after the tyrant dies, Teddy Roosevelt chasing one last adventure down an uncharted river, a 1948 film noir hiding inside the gangster films you love, the slush-pile reader who discovered Conrad and rejected Joyce, and the unseen crews who move most of the world, finally able to call home.

1. The Death of Stalin : The Funniest Movie About Tyranny and Terror

I’ve seen Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin three times, and I’m pretty sure I’ll rewatch it every few years. It’s a comedy set inside one of history’s great murder machines. Specifically, the scramble among Stalin’s terrified inner circle after his fatal 1953 stroke.

In a society where you can be shot for saying the wrong thing, everyone who got to the top is excellent at guessing the tyrant’s wishes. Now they have to figure out how the pieces will fall and how to survive in the new order.

The real protagonist isn’t Khrushchev or the monstrous Beria. It’s the system. When Stalin had a stroke, many of the senior doctors who might have saved him were in prison, arrested in the antisemitic “Doctors’ Plot,” so he lay on the floor for hours while terrified guards did nothing.

Tyranny makes people ridiculous, but the ridiculousness is part of the terror.

The film never even attempts full authenticity: the actors keep their own accents (Steve Buscemi’s New York Khrushchev, Jason Isaacs’s Yorkshire Zhukov), and it works, probably by removing distance (Iannucci said fake accents would put a curtain between the audience and the actors).

Historians will find plenty of inaccuracies, especially compressed timelines. But Iannucci toned reality down, because the truth was too absurd for audiences to believe. The real Zhukov wore twice the medals. The real concert had three conductors, not two (the first too scared, the next was too drunk). It gets many facts wrong, but it gets the absurdity and terror right.

The best proof came after release. Russia banned it and sent police to raid a Moscow cinema that screened it. Banning a comedy about a regime too insecure to be laughed at is the most Stalinist review it could have received. [Liberty]

• 🎬 The Death of Stalin (2017)

2. The River of Doubt : The Expedition That Nearly Killed Teddy Roosevelt

Candice Millard is the only writer I’ve recommended in Field Notes twice. And it’s because she’s just that good. After Destiny of the Republic, the obvious next step is her first book, The River of Doubt, which tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt’s nearly fatal expedition into the Amazon in 1914.

The setup is preposterous and true. Roosevelt, fifty-five years old and freshly defeated in the 1912 presidential race, agreed to lead an expedition down an uncharted Brazilian tributary called the Rio da Dúvida, the River of Doubt. He went with his son Kermit, the Brazilian co-leader Cândido Rondon, the naturalist George Cherrie, and a small crew of Brazilian camaradas. Almost nothing about the trip went according to plan. They lost canoes to rapids. They lost men to drowning, to murder, and to the jungle itself. Roosevelt cut his leg trying to save a canoe, the wound turned septic, and he developed a malarial infection that brought his fever to 105. At one point, he asked to be left behind to die so the others could survive. He lost a quarter of his body weight before they finally reached civilization, weeks behind schedule. The river was later renamed Rio Roosevelt in his honor.

Edmund Morris’s three-volume biography of Roosevelt is the definitive treatment, and if you want the full life, that is where to go. Millard does something different: she takes one chapter of one year and crafts it with novelistic intensity. The Amazon comes alive on every page: the piranha, the candiru, the suffocating heat, the men growing thinner and quieter as the river bends and bends.

Morris will tell you who Roosevelt was. Millard makes you feel what it cost him to stay alive with one of the best adventure stories I have ever read. [Jimmy]

• 📙 The River of Doubt by Candice Millard (2005)

3. Force of Evil : The 1948 Noir Hiding Inside The Godfather and Goodfellas

Back in issue #15, I recommended The Big Heat, an alarmingly violent 1953 noir directed by Fritz Lang. Let’s wind the clock back five years to 1948, and another ruthlessly bleak noir picture, this time from Abraham Polonsky.

John Garfield plays Joe Morse, the charmingly unscrupulous consigliere to mobster Ben Tucker. Tucker is about to seize control of New York’s myriad gambling rackets by rigging an upcoming lottery to create too many winners. When the small outfits are unable to pay out and go bankrupt, in will swoop Tucker. One problem: Joe’s big brother Leo runs one of these outfits. Oh, and Leo’s assistant, whom he thinks of as a daughter, has the hots for Joe. Add in a rival gangster wanting a piece of the action and rumours of a police informer, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for a bloodbath.

At the time, the movie was treated as Just Another Noir, but its whipcrack dialogue, cold-eyed account of capitalist corruption and sheer muscular poeticism quickly moved it into classic status. There are seeds of The Godfather and We Own the Night (recommended in issue #13) in its blend of crime thriller and domestic drama, tracking how exterior violence corrupts the family’s interior life. Scorsese, too, has cited it as a major influence - the dialogue is pure Goodfellas, the brotherly dynamic is Raging Bull, and the protagonist’s moral conflict is… basically every film he’s ever made.

This would be the last film Polonsky directed for 20 years. The Red Scare was about to hit Hollywood. Three years after the film’s release, he refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee and was blacklisted by the studios.

I’ll emphasise again that film noir is one of the highest achievements of 20th-century American art (not to mention one of the funnest), and its influence continues to pulse through international cinema (even Spider-Man is getting involved).

There’s a bitter irony to the fact that Hollywood blacklisted Polonsky and proceeded to make versions of this movie over and over again. So do your duty and start with the original! [Ed]

• 🎬 Force of Evil (1948)

4. The Most Important Literary Figure Not Remembered for His Books

In field note #23, I wrote about Constance Garnett, the woman who translated seventy-one volumes of Russian literature into English after learning the language from an exile her husband had befriended. I left out her husband Edward from that piece.

Edward Garnett left the City of London School at sixteen in 1885 with, according to Helen Smith’s biography, no special promise. His father, Dr. Richard Garnett, the Superintendent of the Reading Room at the British Museum, arranged for Edward to enter the office of the publisher T. Fisher Unwin as a book packer at ten shillings a week. He was, by all accounts, hopeless at it.

But, somehow, Edward slipped into the role of publisher’s reader, the person who checks the slush pile and decides which manuscripts deserve to become books. In 1894, a manuscript arrived from a Polish sailor who spoke English as a third language. Edward said yes to it. That sailor was Joseph Conrad, who later wrote: “Edward made me go on writing. That is what made me an author.”

He went on to champion John Galsworthy (who dedicated The Man of Property to him), mentor D.H. Lawrence, and vouch for writers from Robert Frost to Stephen Crane. When D.H. Lawrence submitted Sons and Lovers, Edward cut ten percent of the manuscript without asking and sent it straight to the printers. Lawrence didn’t fight it. “It’s got to sell,” he said. “I’ve got to live.”

But even the sharpest editorial eye has blind spots. In 1915, Edward turned down James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

What gets me in all of this is that, despite not writing those books, and having his own books largely forgotten, Edward Garnett became one of the most consequential literary figures of the early twentieth century. [Aashisha]

• 📙 An Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett by Helen Smith

5. Ping Pong, Starlink, and the Open Sea: Life Aboard a Cargo Ship

I just got off a seven-day Caribbean cruise on a large liner, basically a floating small city with buffets, waterslides, and a guy playing Jimmy Buffett covers by the pool. While we were at sea, I kept watching cargo ships pass on the horizon, tiny nubs of steel drifting across an enormous expanse of blue, and I’d look up their names, manifests, and routes. What is daily life actually like on one of those things? This video answered the question at exactly the right time.

Jeff is a U.S. merchant mariner who works on container ships (part of a network of ships that carry over 80% of the world’s traded goods) and documents life at sea on his YouTube channel. This particular video is a tour of a working cargo ship’s off-duty amenities, and the contrast with my cruise experience could not be sharper.

There’s a small library of paperback novels and DVDs. A lounge with a ping pong table, a dartboard, and a window facing the open ocean. A modest gym with free weights and a rowing machine. A galley that leaves out leftover salmon and shrimp for the overnight watch crew — because someone is always on navigational watch, 24 hours a day, for the weeks it can take to cross from port to port. Meals and housing are included. There is no payroll deduction. The ability to compound and save salary is a real draw, even against obvious trade-offs: loneliness, dangerous conditions, storms, and the kind of isolation that most people can’t imagine until they’ve lived it.

And then, almost as an afterthought, Jeff mentions the amenity that changed everything — Starlink WiFi. The ability to call your family, check your bank account, or just watch YouTube in your cabin at night. He says it “increased quality of life at sea exponentially,” and you can tell he means it.

There’s a growing universe of creators like Jeff documenting the hidden infrastructure of how the world actually moves, from cargo ships to cockpits to long-haul trucking. But the detail that stays with me is the Starlink. For essentially all of human history, going to sea meant vanishing. Gone for weeks or months, unreachable. A few years ago, that stopped being true. The loneliest job on Earth now comes with a video call home. [Taylor]

• 📺 Jeff Onboard YouTube Channel

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This week: the strange distance between where something starts and how big it gets. A band of engineers one failed launch from bankruptcy who somehow became the biggest IPO ever, a forgotten photo of an empty room that a teenage VFX artist turned into the summer's biggest movie, the 1981 paper that explains why a hundred good actors don't add up to one DiCaprio, a star-stacked 1992 thriller that predicted our data-run world, and a satirical 1823 essay carrying the best writing advice you've never read.

1. One Shot Left

SpaceX went public yesterday, the largest IPO in market history, at a valuation that exceeded two trillion dollars soon after the stock started trading. The right book to read this week is Eric Berger’s Liftoff, which tells you how close the company came to never reaching this morning at all. It is one of my favorite books about a company’s origin story.

Berger’s book covers the years between SpaceX’s founding in 2002 and its fourth Falcon 1 launch in September of 2008. For most of that stretch, the company was a small band of engineers sleeping in mosquito-ridden barracks on a sandbar in the Marshall Islands called Omelek, trying to build a cheap rocket on a shoestring.

They failed three times in a row. The first Falcon 1 caught fire seconds off the pad. The second made it to space and then began to wobble. On the third, the first stage collided with the second at separation. Musk had money for one more attempt. The fourth launch was the make-or-break shot, and Berger’s account of those weeks feels a bit like the Shackleton expedition. He writes beautifully about the improvised solutions in tropical rain, critical hardware flown in on commercial flights, and engineers sleeping under their workbenches.

Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, and his reporting is the kind of access the genre rarely gets. He sat with nearly everyone who was there: the engineers, the launch director, Gwynne Shotwell, Tom Mueller, Musk himself. The result is a book that reads like an adventure story because it is one, and it’s history worth reflecting on as the company reaches another historic milestone. [Jimmy]

• 📘 Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger

2. From a Hobby Store in Oshkosh to A24’s Biggest Hit

In 2003, someone snapped a photo on the second floor of a hobby store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. It showed nothing remarkable — a windowless commercial space with dull yellow walls and fluorescent lighting. The image sat on the HobbyTown Oshkosh website for years, forgotten. Then, in 2019, it surfaced on 4chan, where an anonymous poster captioned it with a description of “the Backrooms” — an endless, empty dimension of humming lights and damp carpet that you could accidentally slip into if you “noclipped out of reality in the wrong areas.” The image went viral. The concept became a full-blown internet mythology, spawning fan fiction, games, and videos.

In 2022, a sixteen-year-old VFX artist from Petaluma, California, named Kane Parsons uploaded a found-footage short to YouTube that turned the meme into something genuinely terrifying.

It got 84 million views.

That short became the basis for Backrooms, which opened May 29, 2026, and has already grossed $237 million worldwide on a $10 million budget, making it A24’s highest-grossing release ever. Parsons directed it. He is twenty years old, making him the youngest director in the studio’s history and the youngest filmmaker ever to direct a #1 movie at the U.S. box office. His parents sat with him on the initial Zoom calls with the studio when he was still in high school. He taught himself visual effects after an arthritis diagnosis at thirteen left him unable to walk for stretches, so he stayed up under the covers watching horror shorts on YouTube and learning VFX software.

He was born in 2005. The same year YouTube launched.

The whole arc is worth sitting with: a throwaway photo from a Wisconsin hobby store, dormant for sixteen years, reanimated by the internet, turned into a mythology by a teenager, and now a box-office phenomenon produced by James Wan and Osgood Perkins. The building in Oshkosh is now a different hobby store. The original room is an RC car track. A24 put a billboard downtown anyway. [Taylor]

• 🎬 Backrooms (2026)

3. Winner-Take-All vs Finding Easy Games

Christian Bale once quipped that any role he ever landed was only because Leonardo DiCaprio passed on it first. It’s a joke with a serious thesis behind it, one that forms the backbone of Sherwin Rosen’s 1981 paper, The Economics of Superstars, and Frank and Cook’s The Winner-Take-All Society.

I’ve been thinking about the business of media a lot lately, and I’m especially interested in how firms underwrite projects. What makes a hit? Who gets to command a premium? Rosen’s paper has some answers.

First, people refuse to substitute. A hundred pretty good actors do not add up to one DiCaprio. Second, technology lets the best performer serve everyone at once. Put the two together and a minor difference in quality produces an enormous difference in outcome. This is why a studio will pay one actor more than the rest of the cast combined.

So what becomes of everyone who isn’t DiCaprio? They have two choices. One is to get better, and most pick it, which is exactly the problem. Winner-take-all markets attract far more entrants than they can pay. The smarter choice is to leave the tournament and find a market where substitution still works. ‘Finding Easy Games’ as Michael Mauboussin would say.

A lot has changed since Rosen wrote his paper and Frank and Cook built on it. There used to be many tournaments. Every city had its scene, every genre its circuit. Our social feeds collapsed them into a single prize pool, with an algorithm handing out the prizes. Slop is what a winner-take-all market produces when the prize is attention.

Maybe the answer is to bring back the smaller tournaments. Scenes, niches, local circuits that don’t compete for global attention. The winner-take-all market is not going anywhere. But nothing says we have to live our whole cultural lives inside it. [Rohan]

• 📄 The Economics of Superstars (1981) by Sherwin Rosen

• 📙 The Winner-Take-All Society (1995) by Robert H Frank and Philip J Cook

4. Sneakers : Too Many Secrets

I've been showing my kids movies from my youth lately. Last week, we watched WarGames and they loved it. I figured the next logical step was Sneakers (co-written by the duo behind WarGames).

It was another hit with the kids, and while it was probably my fifth time, I enjoyed it as much as ever. (Yes, after Butch Cassidy and The Sting, the accidental Robert Redford retrospective continues. It’s oh-so-much-fun.)

Redford leads the crew of security specialists that companies pay to break into their own buildings and systems to find the weaknesses. The cast is bonkers: Sidney Poitier, Dan Aykroyd, River Phoenix, David Strathairn, Mary McDonnell, Ben Kingsley, and James Earl Jones (the voice of Darth Vader!).

It's a bit of everything: a heist movie, a con movie, a comedy, a thriller, and a hangout movie. James Horner's score (with Branford Marsalis on saxophone) is memorable and gives me a Pavlovian response every time I hear it.

One reason it has aged well: the hacking happens through doors, motion sensors, surveillance, and social engineering rather than screens full of code (there’s some of that too).

What hit differently this time was the villain's speech: "The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data... It's about who controls the information." In 1992, it sounded like a supervillain monologue but today it’s just stating a fact.

So why does almost nobody under 40 seem to know it? My best guess is the title is confusing and makes people think it's about shoes, and the poster was mostly text and white space (pre-internet, many people picked films based on the title and poster). The thesis is "too many secrets," but this film shouldn’t be one. [Liberty]

• 🎬 Sneakers (1992)

5. The Censor in Your Head

In 1823, a German journalist named Ludwig Börne published a short essay called How to Become an Original Writer in Three Days. While intended as satire, it contains the best writing advice I’ve ever read. It also happens to be the first ever description of freewriting. Freud was given Börne's essays at thirteen. Decades later, rereading this one, he suspected it had been a buried influence on his method of free association (a case of possible cryptomnesia).

Börne’s argument is simple: originality is more the product of character than skill. Most writers fail to write well (or fail to write at all) because they listen to the market instead of themselves, often subconsciously. Whether rooted in fear or ego, our inner censor stands in our way. The only way past him is through him, and the only way through him is through volume.

As Börne writes: “The good writer follows the same path as the bad writer, only he follows that path somewhat farther.”

You cannot think your way into original writing, and you can certainly overthink yourself out of it. You can, however, write your way into original writing. In fact, that’s the only way in.

Here’s how Börne suggests you proceed: “Take a stack of paper and write. Write everything that goes through your mind for three consecutive days with neither hesitation nor hypocrisy. Write down what you think of yourself, what you think of your wife, what you think of the war with the Turks, what you think of Goethe, of Fonk’s trial, of the Last Judgment, of your superiors. At the end of the three days, you will scarce be able to believe what new, unheard-of thoughts have come to you.”

Five minutes to read. Three days to test it out. Why not give it a go? [Dylan]

• 📄 How to Become an Original Writer in Three Days by Ludwig Börne (free PDF)

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This week: five things that aren't what they look like. A Michael Jordan biography that's really about the birth of the athlete as a global brand, a 2,000-year-old war epic that's really an argument about whether anyone can be good, two clueless bird-chasing brothers and a minivan that somehow add up to one of the best films in years, a Stasi thriller that's really about whether art can change a person, and a con movie whose real mark may be you.

1. He Reported Jordan Like a War: David Halberstam’s Playing for Keeps

I grew up in suburban Chicago in the 1990s, which means I grew up inside the Jordan era. We watched the games on WGN. We argued about Pippen. We knew the announcers’ voices the way other kids knew their grandparents’. So I came to David Halberstam’s Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made with an unusual amount of skin in the game, and I can tell you that he got it right. Every detail, every cadence of the era, every moment of the dynasty’s slow assembly and faster collapse. The book is the era.

What makes Playing for Keeps great is what made Halberstam great. He treated Jordan the way he treated Robert McNamara in The Best and the Brightest or the heads of CBS and Time in The Powers That Be. He reported the hell out of it. He talked to everyone. He wrote about Jordan as a node in a much larger system: Phil Knight’s Nike, the globalization of the NBA, and the rise of the celebrity athlete. The book is as much about the world Jordan made as about Jordan himself, which is what the title told you it would be.

I think about Halberstam and his work and range often. He started at the smallest daily in Mississippi, then covered the civil rights movement for the Nashville Tennessean. He won a Pulitzer at thirty for his Vietnam reporting at the Times. He wrote books about the 1949 pennant race, the Nashville sit-ins, the American auto industry, the 1950s, the Korean War, and FDNY Engine 40 after 9/11.

He covered whatever he wanted and refused the silo. That kind of range is rare in any writer and almost extinct now.

Jordan went global at the exact moment the Cold War ended, and Halberstam was the one reporter serious enough to see that the kid from Wilmington had become America's biggest export. [Jimmy]

• 🏀 Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made by David Halberstam

2. When Telling the Truth Sends You to Hell

I picked up this book in April from the small library in my in-laws’ apartment complex. It seemed to have answers to my own moral conundrums, and after finishing it, I can say that it delivered… and handed me the Mahabharata as a bonus.

The book by Gurcharan Das weaves The Mahabharata (the great Indian epic) with the author’s own journey of intensely studying it in his search for Dharma and how to live his post-retirement life.

In a Greek epic, Das points out, the hero errs and moves on. In the Mahabharata, the action stops while everyone argues the right thing to do for pages. Many stories encapsulate why Dharma is subtle. The story of Kaushika is illuminating.

Bhishma tells Yudhishthira about Kaushika, an unlearned ascetic who has vowed always to tell the truth. When cutthroats ask which way their fleeing witness ran, he tells them. For that truth, which gets an innocent man killed, he is damned to a 'gruesome hell.'

Bhishma explains that while ‘there is nothing higher than the truth’, the thing most difficult to understand in the whole world . . . is that truth should not be spoken and that falsehood should be spoken, where falsehood would be truth, or truth falsehood. Someone simple is dumbfounded in that circumstance where truth is not fixed . . . If escape is possible by not singing your song, then you should not let out the smallest note. But if your not singing would arouse suspicion, then you absolutely have to sing away.

The epic doesn't only live on the page. I recently came across the work of Italian artist Giampaolo Tomassetti, who became a Hindu monk and spent 5 years studying the Mahabharata. He painted twenty-three large canvases between 2008 and 2013. They render the Indian epic in the style of a European Renaissance fresco and are among the finest artworks I’ve seen.

During a May visit to Italy, India's prime minister posted about Tomassetti, and it brought a lot of attention to his paintings.

The epic is 2,000 years old. It has outlasted the empires that copied it and keeps finding advocates: a retired Punjabi CEO, an Italian painter, now a prime minister. Whatever ‘doing the right thing’ means, we’re clearly still arguing about it. [Atman]

• 📙 The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma by Gurcharan Das

• 🖼️ See all of the paintings on Giampaolo Tomassetti’s website

3. 579 Birds, One Minivan, and Zero Idea What They Were Doing

The average American birder is 49 years old. Birders collectively spend $107 billion a year on trips and equipment. The hobby has long carried the image of retirees in khaki vests squinting through spotting scopes.

Listers destroys that image in two hours.

Owen and Quentin Reiser are two brothers from Collinsville, Illinois. The idea for the film came to Quentin while high and staring at the family’s field guide. They spent all of 2024 living in a 2010 Kia Sedona minivan, driving 38,757 miles across the Lower 48, attempting a Big Year — the quest to see as many bird species as possible in a single calendar year. The record to beat was 751. They knew almost nothing about birds. They called every small brown bird a “chickadee.”

What they made from it is profane and proudly juvenile, but also one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in years.

Owen, a professional wildlife videographer with National Geographic credits, balances gorgeous high-definition bird footage with grainy handheld shots of two brothers eating canned beans on the side of a highway, sleeping in Cracker Barrel parking lots (42 nights), and losing their minds over species with names like the dickcissel, the ferruginous pygmy owl, the northern beardless tyrannulet, and the elegant trogon.

They turned down offers from Netflix, HBO, and Amazon and instead released it on YouTube for free. It’s been watched nearly 5 million times, and the comment section is full of people stunned that a two-hour birding documentary is the best thing they’ve watched all year. A companion book, Field Guide of All the Birds We Found One Year in the United States, documents every species they encountered with Quentin’s illustrations.

The Reisers ended their year with 579 species. They didn’t break the record. They didn’t care. Somewhere along the thousands of miles, the contest stopped being the point, and the love of birds took over. [Taylor]

• 📺 Watch the full film on YouTube

4. The Stasi Officer Who Heard Too Much: The Lives of Others

If you ask me to name a favorite film, I will struggle. There are too many great ones, and the answer changes with the weather. But if I had to choose just one, it would be The Lives of Others.

The film is set in East Berlin in 1984. A Stasi captain named Gerd Wiesler is assigned to surveil a playwright, Georg Dreyman, and his actress girlfriend, Christa-Maria. Wiesler is the perfect instrument of the state: humorless, unmarried, ruthless in interrogation.

He sits in the attic above the playwright’s apartment, headphones on, listening through the walls. And as he listens, to the music, to the arguments, to the love, something in him begins, almost imperceptibly, to shift. There is a scene in which Dreyman sits down at his piano after a friend’s suicide and plays a piece called the Sonata for a Good Man. Up in the attic, Wiesler listens. Whatever happens after that, the system has lost him.

I will not spoil the ending. I will say only that the film’s final line is among the great closing lines in cinema. Ulrich Mühe, who plays Wiesler, had himself been spied on by the Stasi as a young actor in East Germany. He died of cancer less than a year after the film won the Oscar. Watching him in this role, knowing that, you understand the weight of the performance.

The Lives of Others is a film about whether a person can change, and whether art can be the thing that changes them. And the answer? Indisputably yes. [Jimmy]

• 🎬 The Lives of Others (2006)

5. The Sting : The Double-Edged Long Con

After watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with my family a few weeks ago (see Field Notes #20), the next stop was obvious: The Sting (1973), the film that reunited Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and director George Roy Hill. Unlike Butch, I had never seen this one.

The setup: small-time grifter Hooker (Redford) and his crew accidentally rob a courier working for mob boss Doyle Lonnegan. Lonnegan has Hooker’s mentor killed, and Hooker recruits a washed-up master con man, Gondorff (Newman), to take the gangster for everything he has. From there, the whole thing is a long, elaborate con.

I don’t want to spoil a 53-year-old film (the statute of limitations on spoilers must’ve expired by now), but let’s just say the real mark isn’t Lonnegan. It’s you. The film spends two hours teaching you to feel like a member of the crew, in on every scheme, and then cons you with the same move it uses on him. But it’s so delightful, you won’t mind.

Gondorff was a smaller role in the original script. Newman’s interest got it enlarged, and the rebalancing turned the film into a twin-lead engine like Butch. I spent the whole time trying to decide which of them is more charismatic (I’d probably vote Newman).

We’ve seen so many descendants that it’s easy to forget that The Sting set the template for the modern heist movie. The ensemble con, the twist that the apparent screwup was the plan all along. The Ocean’s films owe it the most. They even considered casting Newman and Redford as Clooney and Pitt’s grifter dads.

One more thing. This is a 1973 film set in 1936, but it has no interest in the real 1936. The Depression is set dressing, not the catastrophe it actually was. You get sepia tones and snap-brim hats and a Scott Joplin ragtime score that was already thirty years out of date by 1936. Watching it today compounds the effect: it’s an old film pretending to be an older film. Maybe it’s why the con works on the audience: you’re enjoying the fake world too much to keep your guard up. [Liberty]

• 🎞️ The Sting (1973)

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This week: taking one thing and turning it into another. Rocket countdowns and mission-control chatter reassembled into music, the Roman Republic's collapse written like this morning's news, a piano tuner whose perfect ear makes him a master safe-cracker, seventy-one volumes of Russian brought into English by a woman who didn't speak it until she was 29, and a small-market baseball team that films its season like A24 cinema.

1. Turning the Cold War Space Race Into Music

I rewatched Apollo 13 with the kids recently. First time for them, and they loved it. It reminded me of an album I hadn’t played in years.

The Race for Space is a 2015 concept album by Public Service Broadcasting, a British group whose whole conceit is making music out of archival audio (public information films, newsreels, radio chatter).

Here, the source material is the U.S.–Soviet space race from Sputnik (1957) to Apollo 17 (1972), built from samples in the NASA Audio Collection and the BFI National Archive. Nine tracks, 43 minutes. JFK’s famous speech, countdowns, callouts, telemetry, the radio chatter, then the suspenseful silence as Apollo 8 swings around the far side of the moon. Like a documentary you can groove to.

Don't judge it by the first track. The album shifts moods aggressively: electronic, disco, funereal, post-rock, anthemic.

A few favorites. Gagarin turns the first man in space into a brass-and-disco strut. Fire in the Cockpit is the somber Apollo 1 interlude (a cabin fire killed three astronauts). Valentina, about Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, features female vocals from Smoke Fairies (the archival material from that era is almost entirely male voices). But the album’s peak to me is Go!, set to mission control's 'Go/No Go' roll call before Apollo 11's descent to the moon’s surface (The Eagle has landed).

It doesn't compress the space race into a USA-wins story. Sputnik gets a track. Gagarin gets the funkiest one. Tereshkova gets the most beautiful one. The Soviets are co-protagonists, reminding us that for the first decade, they were winning.

The album ends with Tomorrow. The title comes from Gene Cernan's farewell as the last man on the moon, December 1972: America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow. Fifty-three years later, no one has been back, though at least the Artemis II crew flew by in April. [Liberty]

• 🎧 Listen to The Race for Space on Spotify

• 🎧 Listen to The Race for Space on Apple Music

• 🎧 Listen to The Race for Space on YouTube Music

2. Rubicon : The Fall of Rome, Written Like a Thriller

There is a particular kind of envy that writers sometimes feel. You are reading along, admiring a book, and somewhere around page fifty the admiration curdles into something sharper: a wish that you had written it yourself. Tom Holland’s Rubicon did that to me. It is the rare history that reads like a thriller and holds up like scholarship, and I have never quite forgiven him for it.

Rubicon tells the story of the fall of the Roman Republic, the long unraveling that ran from Sulla’s dictatorship to the reign of Augustus. The cast is the greatest in political history: Marius and Sulla, Pompey and Crassus, Cicero at the podium, Caesar at the head of his legions, and Cato the Younger, the unbending Stoic who would rather die than watch the Republic become a monarchy. Holland moves through a century of assassinations, civil wars, and back-room deals without ever losing the thread or the momentum. When Caesar finally brings his army to the banks of the Rubicon in January of 49 BC, you feel the weight of the decision even though the outcome is already known.

I owe this book a debt. Reading it was what sent me to Cato, and Cato became Rome’s Last Citizen, the biography I cowrote about the man who stood against Caesar to the end. So I am biased, and grateful, and still a little envious. Read Rubicon. Then read everything else Holland has written. He makes the ancient world feel like this morning’s news. [Jimmy]

• 📕 Rubicon by Tom Holland

3. Tuner : A Throwback Heist Thriller Worth Your Time

Around halfway through Tuner, Daniel Roher’s new throwback thriller, our piano-tuning protagonist reveals that those in the trade never use the ‘P’ word (Perfect):

“Tuning a piano is about creating harmony out of chaos, and to do that you’ve gotta be okay with imperfection.”

As it happens, that’s a pretty spot-on way of describing the movie. There are imperfections throughout, not least a sequence of eyebrow-raising plot contrivances and awkward tonal shifts, but out of these imperfections emerges a harmonious piece of cinema.

The White Lotus’s Leo Woodall plays Niki, a taciturn piano tuner who is “allergic to loud noises.” His hyper-sensitive hearing (he always wears earplugs) makes him an exceptionally good tuner. It also, he discovers early in the movie, makes him an exceptionally good safe-cracker. When his beloved mentor Harry (Dustin Hoffman, who is having a blast) becomes ill, Niki is forced to put this skill to use. You can guess how it goes from there.

Roher and co-writer Robert Ramsey’s screenplay is carefully designed to hit familiar genre beats, but it’s a testament to the strength of the characters and direction that the film feels fresh and lively, even if the contours of the story are well-trodden. Take the film’s romance, between Niki and Havana Rose Liu’s Ruthie, herself a talented musician and composer. What could have felt formulaic and underbaked is given real weight here, with the film as interested in developing their relationship as in safe-cracking shenanigans. It helps that they have genuine chemistry, charged with just the right amount of unspoken competition (Niki was once a prodigy himself).

Back in issue #5, I recommended last year’s Relay as a throwback thriller worth your time. Tuner is this year’s equivalent. Well-constructed, original, crowd-pleasing thrillers like this are exactly the kind of movie that people claim don’t get made any more. So do your duty and go see it! [Ed]

• 🎬 Tuner (premiered in 2025, but wider release in 2026)

4. Seventy-One Books, One Translator: How Russia Reached English Readers

I remember my first tryst with Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. It was high school and I had begun with Raskolnikov’s unraveling in Crime and Punishment which later took me to other works of Dostoyevsky’s, to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Chekhov’s short stories, and eventually, Gogol. I didn’t think about who had translated these works. For me at that age, the books just existed in English.

Obviously, they didn’t. Most of these English translations were by Constance Garnett, who introduced prominent Russian authors to the English language: Turgenev, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Goncharov, Gogol among others. The strangest part: she didn’t speak a word of Russian until she was 29. Confined by a difficult pregnancy, she learned the language from Feliks Volkhovsky, a Russian exile her husband had befriended. In the winter of 1894, she traveled alone to Russia for three months to visit Tolstoy. It ignited her life’s work. She would go on to translate 71 volumes of Russian literature (two per year, on average).

Nothing stopped her. By the late 1920s, she was “frail and half-blind” but kept translating by dictation.

D.H. Lawrence described her as sitting in the garden, accumulating a “tottering pillar of sheets” on the grass beside her. Joseph Conrad said her translations were to the Russian originals what “a great musician is to a great composer—with something more, something greater. It is as if the interpreter had looked into the very mind of the Master and had a share in his inspiration.” Her typescript of The Cherry Orchard sat in a drawer for years because no publisher believed English readers would care about Chekhov.

Not everyone agreed. Critics like Nabokov called her translations “dry and flat, and always unbearably demure.” Remnick said she edited or skipped the parts that she couldn’t understand (especially the humorous ones). And yet, Hemingway said he wouldn’t have gotten through War and Peace if he hadn’t found her version. She is one of the most important and most criticized translators in literary history.

Would you rather read the real Dostoevsky and risk not falling in love with him, or fall in love with a translated version that wasn’t completely his? [Aashisha]

5. Arthouse Baseball: How a Small Team Out-Edits the Yankees

I grew up watching the Brewers. That’s something that naturally happens when you’re born and raised in Wisconsin. We went to the World Series when I was two (I don’t remember it, thankfully) and haven’t been back since.

Milwaukee is the definition of a small-market team: always trading away talent for assets, always losing to clubs with bigger payrolls. But the front office has turned constraint into identity: a pitching lab that drafts raw arms and rebuilds castoffs into dominant starters, a metrics-driven operation that consistently punches above its weight. What I didn’t expect was for the social media team to be running the same playbook.

Ezra Siegel, the Brewers’ senior manager of digital content, calls what his team does “arthouse baseball” — showcasing the sport in experimental, unconventional ways that baseball fans haven’t seen before.

The season-opening video this year looked less like a hype reel and more like an old Hollywood film; the title card was inspired by the 1953 Audrey Hepburn movie Roman Holiday. Their GTA-style parody starring outfielder Sal Frelick went viral this spring (1.7M views, shot in a single day). Senior videographer Carter Green has pulled references from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and A24 trailer aesthetics. At Dodger Stadium, he recreated The Brutalist‘s upside-down Statue of Liberty shot. In 2018, the team produced a shot-for-shot remake of the “Beast” scene from The Sandlot.

According to Zoomph, the Brewers had the best social performance relative to audience size in all of baseball last season. They do it with about a dozen people — three on social, seven in video, three in graphics — covering 162 games a year.

The lesson is the same one the Brewers have been teaching on the field for a decade: constraints don’t limit creativity, they sharpen it. [Taylor]

• 📄 Upend audience expectations by Rachel Karten

• 🌐 MLB teams invest in internal creative studios to boost fandom in Sports Business Journal

• 📲 Watch Opening Weekend on Instagram

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This week: People picking up what others dropped. Pilots flying their dead airline's planes to a desert grave. A milkman building vivid worlds for blind kids. A murdered teacher’s students doing the work of murder detectives. A cyberpunk film where stillness does the work of action. A map that breaks the unemployment rate.

1. Who Flies the Planes Home After an Airline Dies?

When Spirit Airlines ceased operations at 3:00 a.m. ET on May 2, the headlines focused on stranded passengers and canceled flights. Then a stranger story surfaced: dozens of bright yellow Airbus jets sitting at gates across the country with no pilots, no ground crews, and no one in charge — but still owned by leasing companies that wanted them back immediately.

Enter Nomadic Aviation Group, a small outfit run by pilots Steve Giordano and Bob Allen that specializes in ferrying aircraft around the world on behalf of the banks and lessors who own them. The media called them repo men. They don’t love the term, but it stuck.

Giordano documented the entire operation for his YouTube channel, Cockpit Casual. What he produced, in barely two weeks, while simultaneously running a massive logistics operation, is one of the most heartfelt YouTube documentaries I’ve seen this year.

In eight days, Nomadic moved 23 former Spirit jets to desert storage in Arizona. To do it, they recruited dozens of Spirit pilots who had just lost their jobs, some of whom were mid-trip with passengers — people who hadn’t yet been told their airline was closing — when they got the first call asking them to help move airplanes. (One pilot, just off a flight, asked Allen if he could drop the uniform and fly in shorts. He could.)

The logistics alone are staggering: arranging fuel, handlers, tow bars, flight plans, and FAA airworthiness inspections at airports that had never dealt with anything like this, often with no notice. But the heart of the film is the people. Suzanne Makino, Spirit’s first flight attendant, hired in 1990 when it was still called Charter One, showed up at Atlantic City to watch the last yellow bird take off. Nobody on the tarmac had a dry eye.

The yellow jets are in the desert now. The pilots who flew them there are looking for new jobs. And one of them happened to be filming. [Taylor]

• 📺 Watch Cockpit Casual on YouTube (it’s free!)

2. Redwall : Painting Worlds for Blind Kids

As a kid, I was obsessed with Brian Jacques’s Redwall books. The librarian at my school knew. Whenever a new one came out, she would hold it behind the main desk for me, sliding it across the counter with a small conspiratorial smile, and I would carry it home like contraband. I read Mossflower and Mattimeo until the spines cracked. I would curl up in the corner of the couch and lose hours to those books. They taught me how entrancing reading could be.

For the uninitiated: Redwall is an abbey in a wooded English-feeling countryside, populated by anthropomorphic mice, badgers, otters, squirrels, and hares, who feast on hotroot soup and October ale and deeper’n’ever turnip’n’tater pie, and who occasionally have to fend off the rats, foxes, and weasels that come up the river with bad intentions. Mossflower is the story of how the warrior-mouse Martin freed the woods from a tyrant wildcat and founded Redwall. Mattimeo picks up a generation later, when Matthias's son is kidnapped by a slaver fox named Slagar the Cruel, and a small band sets out to bring him home.

The dialects alone are an education: the moles speak in a thick West Country burr, the hares like Edwardian military officers, the sparrows in fierce chopped fragments. Jacques was a Liverpool milkman who befriended the kids at a school for the blind on his route. He decided the children's books available there were dreadful, so he wrote Redwall for the kids himself. He wrote in pictures.

I haven’t opened a Redwall book in years, and I can still walk you through the abbey. The sandstone walls. Martin’s tapestry above the dais. The long tables groaning with food on a feast day. Few books build a place that solid in a child’s head, and fewer still hold up when the child returns as an adult. Start with Mossflower. Then Mattimeo. Pass them to someone who needs a world to disappear into. [Jimmy]

• 📗 Mossflower by Brian Jacques

• 📘 Mattimeo by Brian Jacques

3. It Would Be Wrong Not to Try: The Keepers

Sister Catherine Cesnik was 26 and taught English at an all-girls high school in Baltimore. One evening in 1969, she went out to buy her sister an engagement gift. Her car turned up the next morning, illegally parked, a box of buns from the bakery still on the passenger seat. Her body wasn’t found for two months. The murder is still unsolved. Two of her former students are the reason this case has not been forgotten.

They were both 17 that night. In 2013, they started a Facebook group to figure out who killed her. The Keepers, the 2017 Netflix series that follows them, has stayed with me longer than almost anything I've watched. A warning before you start: it involves abuse and crimes against children.

In Episode 1, Hoskins says: "I don't think there's any shame in not succeeding, but it would be wrong not to try." The case had been cold for 44 years when she said it. She claims they have more information about the case than any detective who ever worked it. I believe her.

Most true crime makes the viewer a detective: solve the puzzle, weigh the suspects, deliver the verdict. The Keepers makes the viewer a witness. The "keepers" of the title aren't the detectives. They're the women who kept going after everyone else moved on: Gemma Hoskins, a former Maryland Teacher of the Year described as a ‘bulldog’ because of her tenacity, and Abbie Schaub, a retired nurse and the pair’s researcher.

I'm not going to tell you what they find. Let’s just say that when I started watching, I thought it was one thing, and it kept being a lot more. [Liberty]

• 📺 The Keepers (2017, Netflix, 7-part documentary miniseries)

4. The City Behind Ghost in the Shell

I saw Ghost in the Shell for the first time last week at the Carlton Cinema in downtown Toronto. I’d heard great things for years but never got around to it, so I strapped in expecting a sci-fi action movie that inspired The Matrix and Cyberpunk 2077.

That’s not quite what I got.

Directed by Mamoru Oshii, the film is thrilling, but what surprised me was its meditative pacing and the way it sat with open questions about consciousness, humanity, and technological singularity. “I’ve always liked cyborgs,” Oshii once explained, “and think they’re the most fascinating way to express what humanity is.”

I won’t lay out the plot. Go in blind. Instead, I want to focus on the people who built the world, anchored by one sequence halfway through:

First, the music. Composer Kenji Kawai grew up near Tokyo's Shinagawa Shrine, where the drums of the local festival shaped his ear. That same drum anchors this track. The first time it hit, it unsettled me in a way I wasn’t prepared for.

Then the art. Oshii and his team, headed by art director Hiromasa Ogura, were early pioneers of using real-world locations as references. They went to Hong Kong in 1993-94. Photographer Haruhiko Higami shot the looming city in black and white while Ogura worked out its colors. They were after the small details that carry the weight: “how do trash bins look? How do aged posters weather? How does humidity change the feel of a streetlamp?” For a deliberately meditative film (it has 682 cuts as opposed to 2,000+ in a typical film like Akira), this meant that the background art had to carry the story via worldbuilding.

Oshii called it an “overflow of information.” I agree.

Asked what he does between films, he said: “Until a job offer comes in, I don’t think about films, just walking my dog and playing video games while I wait.” At the time, he was hooked on Fallout 4.

For a man whose films won’t leave you alone, that seems about right. [Rohan]

• 🎬 Ghost in the Shell (Original title: Kôkaku kidôtai, 1995)

5. The Map That Made Me Stop Trusting the Unemployment Rate

Marion, Alabama and Las Vegas had almost the same unemployment rate at the end of 2025 (5.1% and 5.2%). One is a town of around 3,000 that has lost half its labor force since 1990. The other has tripled its workforce in the same window. The visualization that made me see this is from Data 4 The People.

I first came across this through an article about the decline of labor force in the United States. I think a lot about the future of work, and seeing an intuitive visualization of the recent history of labor force was incredible — and concerning. The visualization showed me that 32% of U.S. counties are now in structural labor-force decline. That’s four times the share in 2010. The national number doesn't show that.

I’ve since had the chance to talk to Eric Pachman, the creator of the platform, several times, and I love his mission: making the opaque instantly readable. Most public data sits in PDFs and ZIP files that may as well not exist. Pachman pulls it out, maps it, and lets you see things the headline numbers actively obscure.

Data we can actually read changes which arguments are even possible to have. The more we can dig into the data we have, the more introspection we can have as a species, and the better outcomes we can achieve. Since I was a kid, I've wondered why things like… oh, the government… don't run on data and evidence instead of vibes. [Jean-Marc]

• 📊 Data 4 The People (I highly recommend exploring it)

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This week: What we don't see when we see the finished thing. The Oscar-winning director who watches Jaws three times a year, a homeless nobody who became England's answer to Camus, a non-coder who built a hit game in a weekend, a bedridden writer who finished her masterpiece with her eyes closed, and a pre-fame Norah Jones record made with a reformed Vegas gambler.

1. At 63, Steven Soderbergh is Still an Apprentice

Steven Soderbergh had a better Christmas Day than you.

While you were ripping open presents like a toddler, he was easing into the 1953 prisoner-of-war thriller Stalag 17 (2 hours). While you were stuffing yourself with roast potatoes, he was locked into David Fincher’s jet-black thriller Zodiac (2.5 hours). And while you were lying comatose on the couch, he was just getting started with 2025’s head-bangingly intense road movie Sirat (2 hours).

Every January for several years now, Soderbergh has posted his media diary. Unlike the curated top ten lists you usually find at the end of the year, his lists are never filtered or editorialised. You are given two pieces of information: what he watched or read, and on what day.

There’s something strangely compelling in learning, in painstaking detail, exactly how a great artist spends his consumption time. It’s worth checking out the last few years’ entries. They’re packed with fun details (a surprise love for Below Deck), and insights into his astonishingly quick creative process (on 7 February, he began production on The Christophers; by 13 March, he’d already watched the first cut).

Above all, the diary reveals how, despite his success, Soderbergh still thinks of himself as a student.

You’d think that someone with a $2.2bn box office tally, fourteen Academy Award nominations (including best screenplay at just 27), a best director Academy Award win, and the title of youngest solo director to win the Palme d’Or, wouldn’t have much to learn from his peers. Wrong! Soderbergh has long worshipped Steven Spielberg and still studies the old master. Here’s all the Spielberg-adjacent output he consumed in 2025:

• Watched Raiders of the Lost Ark twice.

• Watched Duel twice.

• Watched Jaws three times.

• Watched The Sugarland Express.

• Watched the Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story documentary.

• Watched the Heavy Spoilers YouTube channel’s episode on Jaws.

• Read BFI Modern Classics: JAWS.

• Read BFI Modern Classics: Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

• Read a biography of Robert Shaw.

• Read Ready When You Are, Mr. Coppola, Mr. Spielberg, Mr. Crowe, by Jerry Ziesmer.

Soderbergh has also regularly praised his friend David Fincher. In 2025, he watched Zodiac, Panic Room, Seven and The Social Network. And it's not just contemporaries. He also bashed out The Godfather, Chinatown, Barry Lyndon and Citizen Kane.

Soderbergh still thinks he has a lot to learn from going insanely deep on films and directors he respects. If he does, then so do you. [Ed]

2. The Outsider : Why Some People Can't Accept Comfortable Assumptions

In 1954, Colin Wilson was a twenty-three-year-old nobody. By night, he slept rough in Hampstead Heath, a huge park in North London. By day, he stayed warm in the British Museum Reading Room, writing and reading like a man possessed. On Christmas Day of that year, Wilson opened his journal and wrote the words “Notes for a book The Outsider in Literature.” That sparked a flood of pages.

He typed up a few and sent them to the publisher Victor Gollancz. Gollancz was blown away. The Outsider was published eighteen months later. Cyril Connolly called it “one of the most remarkable first books I have read for a long time.” The day after that review ran, it was a bestseller. The first print run of 5,000 sold out on publication day. Wilson was hailed as England’s answer to Camus.

I came across this book on my father’s bookshelf. It touched on something I’d always felt but never articulated. Wilson’s thesis is that there exists a certain type of person who cannot accept the comfortable assumptions of the crowd. He calls them Outsiders, and traces the type through Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, T.E. Lawrence, Hemingway, and more. People blessed and cursed by an excess of perception. They don’t want to be on the outside, like a hipster. They simply need to feel fully alive. And it is precisely by listening to and expressing this need that they produce masterpieces—works that instill a similar need in us; works that remind us of the Outsider inside all of us, and that we will never be fully alive, never fully ourselves, unless we listen to them. [Dylan]

• 📘 The Outsider by Colin Wilson

3. GeoSports: Five Questions, One Globe, Zero Excuses Not to Play

A guy who describes himself as knowing “very little about software engineering” sat down a few weeks ago, opened Claude, and built a game from scratch. Seven days after launch, GeoSports has 366,000 total plays, 150,000 peak daily active users, and three major gaming companies in his inbox — all without paid marketing. If you’re looking for more proof of what AI tools are making possible right now, this is a good one.

The game itself is dead simple: five sports trivia questions a day, each tied to a location. You drop a pin on a globe. The closer your pin lands to the actual answer, the more points you score. Some are softballs — the city that’s home to Wrigley Field won’t stump anyone — but others send you guessing across continents. What Brazilian town was Pelé born in? Each session takes a few minutes. A leaderboard tracks your ranking for each day.

Frank Michael Smith built it in an eighteen-hour sprint after playing MapTap, a daily geography quiz, and wondering what a sports version would feel like. He shipped immediately. Day one: 79 players. Day two: 575. On day three, Kendall Baker — one of the most-read daily sports newsletter writers in the country — joined to help write questions and featured it, and by noon, GeoSports had crossed 4,000 players. A week later, 165,000 of those plays had been referred from X alone.

For anyone who remembers the white-hot rise and equally spectacular collapse of HQ Trivia, GeoSports scratches a similar itch — that daily, communal, low-stakes competition that makes you feel briefly smarter than your friends. The difference is the architecture: frictionless, fast, and built by one person with an AI copilot over a single weekend. That’s the part worth paying attention to. [Taylor]

• 🌐 GeoSports Official Website

4. Seabiscuit : An Endurance Story Folded Inside Another

In 1938, American newspapers devoted more column inches to a small, knobby-kneed racehorse named Seabiscuit than to Franklin Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, or anyone else alive. Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit: An American Legend tells you why. The book gives full and equal weight to four lives: the horse, the half-blind jockey who lived in stalls and read Emerson, the cowboy trainer who barely spoke, and the bicycle repairman turned automobile magnate who built the whole thing into a national obsession. By the time the match race against War Admiral arrives, you are leaning into the turn.

What you don’t see on the page is the body that wrote it. Hillenbrand fell ill at nineteen, on a drive back to Kenyon, and went through a parade of doctors who told her it was puberty, or in her head, before Johns Hopkins finally identified it as chronic fatigue syndrome. She published an account of those years in The New Yorker in 2003 called “A Sudden Illness.”

It is one of the most honest pieces of personal history I have ever read. She lost the ability to walk a block, then down a hall. She spent two years with vertigo so violent that she could not read the back of a cereal box. She discovered Red Pollard, the jockey, in a photograph from the summer of 1938, on a cool fall day in 1996, when most days she could not stand up.

She wrote the book anyway. Her laptop sat on a stack of books because looking down made the room spin. When she was too dizzy to read, she wrote with her eyes closed. “Living in my subjects’ bodies,” she said later, “I forgot about my own.”

Seabiscuit would be a remarkable book under any circumstances. That she produced it while bedridden, in years when many doctors still refused to believe what she had, lifts it into something closer to a small miracle. Read “A Sudden Illness” first. Then read the book. Two stories about endurance, one folded inside the other. [Jimmy]

• 📙 Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand

5. A Megastar’s Forgotten Gem, Made Pre-Fame With a Reformed Gambler

Norah Jones — the daughter of Ravi Shankar, the sitar virtuoso who taught George Harrison — sold 27+ million copies of Come Away with Me, her debut blockbuster (and it’s amazing, I highly recommend it). She sold 12+ million copies of Feels Like Home, the follow-up, and cumulatively over her career, she’s sold over 53 million albums, won 10 Grammys, and currently has over 8 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

Not exactly obscure, eh?

But somehow, there’s a gem that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. It’s one of my favorite albums of hers. We play it during family dinner. It always puts us in a good mood.

Why did it slip through the cracks?

She recorded it in August and September 2000, weeks before she made her own demos as a solo artist for Blue Note, and over a year before her debut album came out. It’s pretty jazzy, but it has stronger blues elements than her own albums. There’s no filler or fat: Six songs in 30 minutes, the whole band cooks, and it features some of the rawest vocal performances from one of my favorite singers. She sounds like she’s having fun, and the way her voice almost cracks in Deceptively Yours always gets me.

Who is Peter Malick, the man who gets top billing over Jones on this album?

He was a teenage blues prodigy from Brookline/Boston. His band ‘Listening’ was signed to Vanguard when he was around 16; then he played with people like Otis Spann, John Lee Hooker, Big Mama Thornton, and Muddy Waters.

Then he became guitarist/music director for Hair, joined the James Montgomery Band, recorded for Capricorn… and then more or less vanished from music for years. During that period, he made money as a gambler, including time in Vegas. He then started making records again and ended up meeting a pre-fame Norah Jones on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 2000. They became friends, toured New England, recorded six tracks in Boston, and those tracks became New York City (but were only released after she became a superstar).

Thirty minutes of Norah Jones before the world had heard of her, recorded by a man who'd just spent two decades at the card table. [Liberty]

• 🎧 Listen to New York City on Spotify

• 🎧 Listen to New York City on Apple Music

• 🎧 Listen to New York City on YouTube Music

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This week: things that refuse to expire. A 1980s column that is still fresh in 2026, the 1881 bullet that took eighty days to kill a president, a trail cam that broke a hundred-year silence, a hundred manuscripts sealed until 2114, and a 1969 freeze-frame that hasn't aged.

1. Destiny of the Republic : He Survived the Bullet. The Doctors Finished Him.

James Garfield survived the bullet. What killed him, eighty days later, was his doctors. I read Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic years ago and have been pressing it on people ever since.

The setup is straightforward. A delusional office-seeker named Charles Guiteau shoots the new president at a Washington train station on July 2, 1881. Garfield lingers through the summer while Alexander Graham Bell, of all people, races to invent a metal detector that might locate the bullet. Meanwhile, his lead physician (a man whose given first name, improbably, was Doctor) ignores Joseph Lister’s antiseptic methods and probes the wound again and again with unwashed fingers. The infection finishes what Guiteau started. At trial, Guiteau’s defense was that the doctors did the killing. He was, in a strict medical sense, correct.

Millard braids three threads without ever letting the seams show. There is the history of Garfield himself, raised in an Ohio log cabin, who learned Greek and Latin on his way to becoming a college president, a Civil War general, and a reluctant nominee who arrived at the White House almost against his will. There is the science of germ theory at a time when it was reshaping medicine, and the cost of America’s reluctance to accept it. And there is Millard’s narrative engine that carries the whole thing forward.

The book closes with a quiet irony: the assassination shamed the country into dismantling the very spoils system that produced Guiteau in the first place. It is the best argument I know for the proposition that history, science, and storytelling belong on the same page. [Jimmy]

• 📙 Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard

2. The Best Thing on Facebook Is a Trail Cam in Minnesota

Last week, a University of Minnesota research team posted trail camera footage of a mother cougar and three kittens feeding on a deer carcass in northern Minnesota. It was the first documented evidence of cougars reproducing in the state in over a hundred years. The footage is surreal — you can hear the kittens growling and hissing at each other, the mother grooming them between bites. It wasn’t shot by the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) or a news crew. It was captured by the Voyageurs Wolf Project, a small research team that studies wolves in and around Voyageurs National Park, and it landed, as most of their best work does, on their Facebook page.

Voyageurs itself is one of the most under-the-radar parks in the National Park system — 218,000 acres straddling the Canadian border in northern Minnesota, 84,000 of which is water. With more than 500 islands, access is mostly by boat. It draws around 200,000 visitors a year, a fraction of what the big parks attract. The Wolf Project has deployed hundreds of trail cameras across this landscape to study what wolves do during the summer, which remains a surprisingly open question in wolf ecology. The footage they share on Facebook is a unique window into one of the wildest corners of the country. Wolves hunting beavers. Packs moving through fog at dawn. And now, cougars raising kittens for the first time in a century.

Following this page has become one of the few things that stops my scroll on Facebook. In a feed dominated by noise and slop, the Voyageurs Wolf Project is something else entirely: real science, captured in real time, from a place most people will never visit, funded largely by over 10,600 individual donors who care enough to buy the batteries and SD cards that make the cameras run. If your relationship with Facebook needs a reason to exist, this might be it. [Taylor]

• 🌐 Voyageurs Wolf Project website

• 🎥 Voyageurs Wolf Project on Facebook

• 📺 Voyageurs Wolf Project on YouTube

3. The Future Library: 100 Books, 100 Years, and 1,000 Trees

“You’ll have to die to get these books,” Ocean Vuong said about Katie Paterson’s Future Library — Framtidsbiblioteket — a hundred-year art project that began in 2014.

A thousand trees were planted in the Nordmarka forest just outside Oslo that year. If everything goes to plan, the wood of those trees will provide paper for the hundred books that won’t be printed until 2114. Every year, one author contributes a sealed, unpublished manuscript to the Silent Room of the Deichman Library. This room is a space built from a hundred layers of carved wood from the original trees that were cleared for the new plantation. Each layer holds a glass drawer for that year’s manuscript. You can visit the room and see the drawers, but reading is prohibited. Someone took writing for posterity a bit too literally.

Margaret Atwood was the first contributor who walked into the forest, did a ceremonial handover of her manuscript, Scribbler Moon, and walked away. David Mitchell (From Me Flows What You Call Time), Han Kang (Dear Son, My Beloved), Karl Ove Knausgård (Blind Book), and Ocean Vuong (King Philip) have since made the same walk into that forest.

David Mitchell let slip that he quotes the lyrics to ‘Here Comes the Sun’ in his book. The song won’t enter the public domain until the late 21st century, so he wrote a book that can’t legally be published in his own time!

I love how the 100-book project has zero measurable incentive for a writer in their lifetime: no sales figures, no reviews, no audience. They wrote out of the purest possible motive — because they wanted to, and because the work mattered.

I find it fascinating that a book written now might still mean something to readers in 2114, and that we trust those readers to still care. In an age of first-week sales and virality, I would call that an act of powerful optimism and deep time.

Well, the trees are already twelve years old. Only eighty-eight years to go! [Aashisha]

• 📚 Future Library

• 🌐 Future Library Project (Wikipedia)

4. The Last Cool Guy in New York: Glenn O’Brien’s Like Art

My recent obsession is discovering the inner workings of ‘culture creators’—obsessives with taste, who cultivate cool and turn it into influence.

Glenn O’Brien fits that description neatly.

O’Brien wore a lot of hats: writer, creative director, ad man, comic, public intellectual, socialite. He was at The Factory as a Columbia film student, became the first editor of Warhol’s Interview in 1970 (alongside Bob Colacello), and went on to write for Rolling Stone, Artforum, High Times, Spin, and Playboy. His final gig, before his death in 2017, was GQ’s Style Guy.

My introduction to O’Brien came when somebody recommended Like Art: Glenn O’Brien on Advertising to me. The book is a collection of his columns on Advertising, written for Artforum between 1984 and 1990.

I like O’Brien’s work because it’s a perfect anti-algorithm choice. His voice is bold, witty, and charming. For example, his remarks on the fusion of art and commerce:

Advertising was like art, and more and more art was like advertising. Ideally, the only difference would be the logo. Advertising could take up the former causes of art—philosophy, beauty, mystery, empire.

He puts on the charming air of a ‘gentleman of leisure’, but there’s a strong discipline behind his work. There is an art to deploying a perfectly timed aphorism, and O’Brien had it:

It’s always better to be overdressed than underdressed for an occasion. It will appear that you are going somewhere better later.

You can’t improve the discourse without improving the language, and you can’t improve the language by sticking to the hoity-toity of it. You’ve got to get down and dirty with it.

People remember a good listener better than a good talker.

At a time when everybody’s voice is converging into AI-inflected slop, Glenn O’Brien’s columns are a perfect cleanse.

O’Brien’s parting line lands as well as any: “Always be on the lookout for people who remind you of you… Smart, secure, cultured, cool… We are allies in the cultural conquest of the world.”

Smart, secure, cultured, cool. What a wonderful profile to aspire to. [Rohan]

• 📕 Like Art: Glenn O’Brien on Advertising

5. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid : The Buddy Movie's Original Chemistry

I watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) with my kids this week. It was their first time. It’s one of my favorite films, but I was a little worried how they would handle the 1969 pacing. The full credits roll before a single scene, and there’s an extended travel montage that is just sepia photos.

But they LOVED it!

My oldest and I have been quoting lines back and forth all week. William Goldman, who famously said 'Nobody knows anything' about Hollywood, sure knew how to write memorable dialogue (see also: The Princess Bride, All the President’s Men).

What stuck with me on this rewatch: the bad guys are barely characters. The famous “Who are those guys?” posse is shot as a distant, mythic thing. Director George Roy Hill deliberately refused to give them faces. The real antagonist of the film isn’t a sheriff or a gunslinger. It’s the 20th century: railroads, payroll systems, Pinkertons with telegraph lines, institutions that never get tired and can keep coming after you. Charm doesn’t scale against institutions.

There’s a true story about the real Butch that Goldman loved. He called it “the best character introduction I ever came across,” but didn’t end up using it. Butch was offered parole by the governor of Wyoming on the condition he go straight. Butch basically told him: “I don’t want to lie to you, I can’t promise that. But I promise I won’t rob banks in Wyoming.” He got a deal. I mean, how charming do you have to be to get that offer? That episode is the whole story in miniature.

That film runs on Newman and Redford's chemistry. It set the modern buddy movie template. Buddy duos existed before (Hope and Crosby, Abbott and Costello), but those were mostly vaudeville routines. Butch Cassidy established the version that endures: two leads whose rapport is the engine, the plot exists to give them things to do. 2+2=5. Countless others have copied the structure. Almost none have matched the chemistry.

Redford himself liked the role enough that he named his Utah land after the character. That land became the Sundance Institute, which became the Sundance Film Festival (you may have heard of it).

The freeze-frame ending perfects the trick. The film doesn’t deny their deaths. It freezes them as legend at the exact moment history was about to make them corpses. [Liberty]

• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

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This week: Things that arrived without a blueprint, and worked anyway. A ghost ship, a show on the wrong channel, a philosophy that preceded its own proof, a masterpiece found in a trunk, and a cure that shouldn't have worked (but did).

1. This is Not Back to the Future: Rose of Nevada

Given how often I complain about people falsely claiming that nO gOoD fiLmS gEt MaDe ToDaY, I’m slightly ashamed to realise that, of the ten movies I’ve recommended so far for this series, only one is from the 2020s. Whoops!

I’m going to make a conscious effort to sprinkle a few contemporary recommendations into upcoming instalments, starting with Rose of Nevada, a shimmering ghost story from Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin.

Nick (played by George MacKay, whom you may know from 1917) is a taciturn but sweet-hearted family man with a wife to please and a daughter to feed. He’s a lifelong resident of an out-of-time, once lively Cornish village, whose economy and soul have been sucked away by climate change, economic crises and Brexit.

The village is steeped in tragedy. Decades ago, a fishing vessel sank, killing its crew and devastating the tightly knit community. So, when the vessel mysteriously reappears, local businessman Mike decides to launch a new fishing venture, one that is as much a reclamation of the village’s broken past as it is a financial enterprise. Signing up as crew are Nick, mysterious out-of-towner Liam, and salty sea-dog Murgey, who serves as the boat’s captain.

Revealing a film’s premise is a risky endeavour, particularly when common genre tropes are invoked. So take it with a pinch of salt when I tell you that this is a film about characters getting trapped in the past and trying to find a way back to the future. While technically true, there are zero tonal or stylistic similarities to Zemeckis’ perfectly designed piece of pop entertainment. Instead, Jenkin has crafted a weird, uneasy and utterly unique film, one deeply rooted in place and willing to suggest much while answering little.

Jenkin, who writes, shoots, directs, edits and scores his films himself, has an unusual approach. He shoots in 16mm using a hand-held, hand-cranked camera that can’t run longer than 28 seconds per take and doesn’t record sound (all audio, including dialogue, is recorded in post). These formal constraints, far from being gimmicks or poverty tourism, are deeply embedded in Rose of Nevada’s theme and story, with heavy use of close-ups of hands and gutted fish, sparse dialogue, and crackling imperfections in the frame all contributing to a nightmarish nostalgia.

I’ve desperately tried to avoid using the L-word up to now. “Lynchian” is a dangerous adjective, often flattening rather than clarifying a film’s identity. But it really is appropriate here, in how the film’s dreamlike elements, both narrative and formal, blend into the fabric of the story to transcend metaphor.

A wonderful, inimitable film. Go see it. [Ed]

• 🎬 Rose of Nevada (2025)

2. TrueSouth : The Best Show Hiding on a Sports Channel

There is an Emmy-winning television show, now in its eighth season, that explores the American South through food, music, literature, and the voices of people who actually live there… and almost nobody outside of college football circles knows it exists. TrueSouth is buried on the SEC Network, which means it premieres in and around college football season, sandwiched between game highlights, and I have the feeling many of you have never found it. That’s a shame, because it’s one of the best travel shows on television.

Each episode drops host John T. Edge — a four-time James Beard Award–winning food writer — into a new destination, and tells stories about food that open into something larger: the history of a town, the economics of who stayed and who left, the culture that took root in between. The show is executive produced by Wright Thompson, one of the most brilliant writers at ESPN (oh, and he’s also a bestselling author worth checking out), and is clearly made by people who care about getting the details right.

In one episode, Edge follows fiction writer George Singleton, one of the best short story writers in the South, through the Upstate of South Carolina, eating chili-slaw dogs at joints that haven’t changed since the 1950s and wandering the aisles of the Pickens County Flea Market. It’s where Singleton says he gets a million ideas for his stories because flea markets are full of things that are “funny and sad.” In another classic episode, Edge finds himself at Lucky Palace, a Chinese restaurant tucked between a casino and a dingy roadside motel in Bossier City, Louisiana. What unfolds is a portrait of its owner, Kuan Lim, whose generosity made the restaurant a community gathering spot, complete with a wine list that earned multiple James Beard semifinalist nods.

Music is baked into every episode — local bands perform on screen, and the full soundtrack lives on a TrueSouth Spotify playlist that’s become its own discovery engine. If you’re a traveler, a reader, or someone who believes the best places in America are the ones nobody’s marketing to you, this show is a goldmine hiding in plain sight. [Taylor]

• 🌐 TrueSouth Official Website (SEC Network / ESPN+ · Seasons 1–8 streaming)

3. Simulacra and Simulation : The Map Ate the Territory

Early in The Matrix, Neo opens a green, hollowed-out book. If you pause at the right moment, you’ll see the title: Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. This is no mere prop. It’s the philosophical underpinning of the Wachowskis’ entire franchise. Funnily enough, Baudrillard was no fan of the adaptation.

I’d argue that Simulacra and Simulation, published in 1981, is one of the most prescient philosophical books ever written. He begins by inverting Borges. In “On Exactitude in Science,” Borges imagines an empire whose cartographers draw a map so detailed it covers the territory one-to-one, and then over generations the map decays into tatters.

Baudrillard argues that in the digital age, it’s the territory that’s decaying into tatters. The map is all. Experientially, at least, the Simulation has already arrived. And this was decades before social media, algorithms, deepfakes, and the like! Regarding the technology-induced upheavals going on in the psyche of modern life, Baudrillard was earlier than early.

He himself arrives at some wild conclusions, but Simulacra and Simulation still makes for an incredibly fun and eye-opening read—and all within 164 pages. If there’s one quote that really encapsulates the book, it’s this: “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.” [Dylan]

• 📗 Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard

4. The Book of Disquiet : A Candy Bowl That Never Empties

Most books are commitments. But a few are more like a friend you don’t have to talk to every day, and cherish when you do. I was recently gifted a book like this. A curious work called The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa.

It reads like an intermittent diary of a character from a Gabriel García Márquez novel. And then I learned that Pessoa spent his life writing in near-total obscurity. After his death, a trunk with over 25,000 manuscript fragments of unpublished writing was found.

Here’s the thing about that trunk: Pessoa never organized it. The Book of Disquiet was assembled by editors after Pessoa’s death, from fragments he left in no particular order. Different editions sequence the pieces differently. There is no correct way to read it because there was no finished book to begin with.

The value of the book isn’t in the plot, as there is little of that. It’s the quality of the writing, the depth and imaginative flexibility, the precision with which he observes daily life, interactions, personhood, and the strangeness of being conscious at all.

Like a great friend you harmlessly forget to hang out with, I see Pessoa’s book and I’m delighted and weirded out that I forgot I was reading it. Like the days and weeks after Halloween when you remember there’s a big bowl of candy in the cupboard that’s all for you. I pick up the book again and each little entry is like a piece of candy. I haven’t finished it. I’m not sure you’re supposed to. Like that sweet tooth, you find you’re always wanting more. The mind grows sweet on his words. [Jean-Marc]

• 📘 The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (this is the Penguin Classics edition, generally considered very good. But there are at least four English translations that are very different from each other.)

• 📙 The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (this is The Complete Edition, edited by Jerónimo Pizarro. He organized the fragments chronologically for the first time.)

5. The Strangest Thing That Worked: How a Book Fixed My Chronic Pain

About 20 years ago, I started to have pain in my wrist. I figured it was from spending too much time at the computer. Then it moved up my forearm, to my elbow, and eventually all the way to my neck. I Googled a bit, and found scary articles about carpal tunnel syndrome and repetitive strain injury (RSI).

I became serious about best practices: I got an ergonomic chair, various ergonomic mice and keyboards (trackballs, a sideways mouse to reduce wrist strain, a trackpad). I even ended up using the mouse with my left hand for a while. Each of those changes helped for a time… and then it got worse.

I eventually had pain in both wrists and arms. My neck also hurt. There were times when just resting my arms on the armrests of a chair would create shooting pain. Sleeping was an ordeal, since almost any position would cause my arms to go numb and new pains to show up.

I tried everything: doctors, physiotherapy, wrist braces. I lifted weights, did stretching exercises, took breaks from the computer every 15 minutes. I improved my nutrition and kept a pain journal to see if the pain correlated with anything.

Nothing worked.

Or rather, everything worked briefly, and then things got even worse.

This went on for years. My whole life revolved around my pain. It was debilitating. I got depressed. I thought I would have to find a different career and different hobbies. Clearly, my body was damaged and couldn’t handle sitting at a desk and doing things on a computer.

Until one day, out of desperation, I simply Googled “how I cured my RSI”. This is the blog post I landed on at the time. It was published in 2010 by Aaron Iba, a programmer and entrepreneur who studied at MIT and worked at Google. He described a chronic pain journey that sounded very familiar, but the main difference was that he had found a solution. I probably would have dismissed it out of hand — too esoteric, too good to be true — but I was desperate and figured the worst case was wasting a few hours, so I read the book.

That was over a decade ago, and I’ve been cured ever since. I’ve recommended this book to dozens of people when I hear about similar symptoms (never-ending back pain, neck pain, wrists/arms, etc), and it also helped most of them. I won’t try to summarize the book here because it would be too compressed and easy to dismiss. I think if you want to judge this one, you have to go to the source. If you or someone you know has chronic pain, consider adding this to whatever else you're already doing. It especially applies to perfectionists and people who put a lot of pressure on themselves. What have you got to lose?

The last entry in my pain journal is from over a decade ago. Within days of reading Sarno, there was nothing left to write. [Liberty]

• 📘 The Mindbody Prescription by John E. Sarno

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This week: a career begins the night a marriage ends, a film that adapts the author instead of the book, the composer who is everywhere and invisible, a YouTube weather network that beats the pros, and 60,000 oil paintings that refused to stay on the wall.

1. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel : Twenty-Two Emmys, and You Still Haven’t Watched It

I’ll step outside my usual territory of books and documentaries to recommend The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which may be the most criminally underwatched show of the last decade. It ran for five seasons, was nominated for 80 Emmys and won 22, and yet I frequently meet people who haven’t seen it. Rachel Brosnahan is brilliant in the lead role, but what makes the show essential is the writing. It’s sharp, fast, layered in a way that rewards attention. The dialogue has rhythm, which is not surprising since the show was created by Amy Sherman-Palladino, who also created the hyper-verbal Gilmore Girls. The characters talk over each other in ways that feel lived-in rather than choreographed, and the humor lands because it’s grounded in real stakes.

The show is about Midge Maisel, a 1950s housewife in New York who discovers she has a gift for stand-up comedy after her marriage falls apart. On the surface, it’s a period comedy about a woman breaking into a male-dominated field. But really, it’s about what it takes to succeed in a creative profession: the doubt, the grinding work, the nights when you’re not sure if what you’re doing matters to anyone but you. It’s about the audacious act of remaking yourself, of building a career in something you’ve never done before, and anyone who has tried to do that will recognize something in it.

What I keep coming back to is how well the show understands the interplay between characters. Midge’s relationship with her manager Susie, her parents, her ex-husband, the other comedians she crosses paths with - all of it feels textured and real. The writing gives each character a distinct voice and lets them collide in ways that create friction and warmth in equal measure.

It’s a show about ambition, yes, but also about the people who make that ambition possible, the ones who believe in you before you’ve earned it. [Jimmy]

• 📺 The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017 - 2023)

2. Reality is Optional: Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch

I’ve always struggled with David Cronenberg. There is something about his brand of minor-key weirdness that I find difficult to connect with emotionally, and his jet-black sense of humour - by all accounts the skeleton key to truly loving his work - tends to bounce straight off me. I expect I’m the problem here, but alas.

That’s not to say I don’t appreciate any of his movies. The Fly and Dead Ringers are undeniable, as is A History of Violence, his slyly provocative riff on the revenge thriller. But his more ‘out there’ movies like Videodrome, Crash and Crimes of the Future left me frustratingly cold.

At first, so did Naked Lunch, his 1991 interpretation of the supposedly unfilmable William S. Burroughs novel. But, as the days have passed (I watched it last week), it has stubbornly continued to crawl around the dusty corners of my consciousness like one of the cockroaches encountered in the film’s opening scene.

Peter Weller (Robocop himself) plays the bug-eyed, sharp-cheeked Bill Lee, a spiritually comatose exterminator who becomes addicted to the hallucinogenic powder he uses as poison. From there, things take a turn for the surreal as he encounters talking typewriter-turned cockroaches, shapeshifting centipedes and sugar-slurping aliens called mugwumps. All of this is brought to life through astonishing craft - the gooey, gloopy special effects are as good as you’ll ever see.

I read something the other day arguing that true avant-garde film doesn’t differentiate between the surreal and the real. While Hollywood tends to adopt an Alice-in-Wonderland logic of Real vs Imaginary, the underground film dissolves the boundary between them. That’s how I feel about this movie. Much has been written about it as a metaphor for writing, or for addiction, or for homosexuality. All are true; none are true: Naked Lunch operates on a level of abstraction that renders one-to-one analysis as hopeless as trying to grab mist.

Naked Lunch isn’t really an adaptation of the novel in the conventional sense - it’s partly a portrayl of Burroughs writing the novel, including the famous incident where he shot his wife, Joan Vollmer. And in doing so, Cronenberg blurs the real (Burroughs’s life) and the fictional (the novel’s events) until they’re indistinguishable.

On a less philosophical note, any film whose climax features a leering Roy Scheider with a daft accent emerging caterpillar-like from the bosom of a domineering housekeeper is surely worth two hours of your time. [Ed]

• 🎬 Naked Lunch (1991)

3. Music by John Williams : The Musical Time Machine

Watching this was a strange kind of time travel because so much of Williams’ music is burned in my synapses. It’s fused to the movie scenes that put it there. The Jaws shark. Luke’s binary sunset. Indy on horseback.

The more interesting thread, though, is the portrait of the man, and inevitably, of Spielberg, since Williams has scored all but five of his feature films across a 50+ year collaboration.

They’ve worked together so long, and so closely, that you can’t really make a documentary about one without making it partly about the other. Some creative partnerships become impossible to discuss separately, where 2+2=5: Spielberg/Williams, Scorsese/De Niro, Kurosawa/Mifune, Lennon/McCartney.

Watch any of Spielberg’s famous scenes with the score muted, and they’re still very good, but you realize how much of the emotional work the music is doing.

I hadn’t realized Williams was already 45 when he wrote the score for Star Wars. At an age when most careers are easing into their third act, his was just starting to truly reach escape velocity.

In another century, Williams might have been a Tchaikovsky or a Wagner, a composer with a symphonic catalogue studied on its own terms. Instead, film gave him the largest audience any composer in history has ever had, and also made it harder to hear his work as its own thing.

The best moment in the doc: Williams tells Spielberg, after a rough cut of Schindler’s List, “I really think you need a better composer than I am for this film.” Spielberg replies, “I know, but they’re all dead.” [Liberty]

• 🎬🍿🎧 Music by John Williams (2024, Disney+)

4. The Army of Storm-Chasers That Beat the Sirens

Last week, three days of severe weather tore through Southern Wisconsin — hail, flooding, tornadoes. My mom still lives there. I was sitting in Denver, watching a tornado touch down just west of her house on a YouTube livestream from a meteorologist named Max Velocity, and I called her before the local TV station had even issued the warning. I saw Twister in the theater as a kid. I could never have imagined that storm tracking and storm news would converge in a format I could hold in my hand from anywhere in the world.

Max Velocity is a meteorologist from Embry-Riddle who started posting forecast videos on YouTube in sixth grade and now has over 1.8 million subscribers. Whenever severe weather threatens anywhere in the United States, he goes live — sometimes for up to six or eight hours — and what he’s built around those streams is genuinely impressive, sometimes identifying tornado threats at the street level before local weather services issue warnings. He taps into a patchwork of Department of Transportation cameras to give viewers real-time ground-level visuals. He coordinates a network of storm chasers whose positions overlay his weather maps — click on any of them and their live video feeds pop up. I was riveted watching live storm chasers race down country roads I biked on as a kid, as the storm moved closer to my mom.

There’s a bigger shift underneath all of this. Younger audiences aren’t waiting for the local TV meteorologist to break into regular programming anymore. They’re pulling up YouTube on their phones, and creators like Max are filling that gap with coverage that’s faster, more granular, and more useful than what most local stations can deliver. Viewers tip him via Venmo and PayPal as a thank-you for warning them about storms heading their way. That’s not a media model the Weather Channel was planning for. But it’s the one that helped me warn my mom before the sirens did. [Taylor]

• 📺 Max Velocity - Severe Weather Center

5. Heroic Times : When Hungarian Oil Paintings Go to War

I refuse to call this an animated film.

Because the moment I call Heroic Times an animated film, some of you will lose interest, assuming it’s childish. When the reality of this 1984 Hungarian masterpiece is more like walking through a museum and watching the paintings come alive.

Loosely based on János Arany’s Toldi trilogy, about the legendary Hungarian hero Miklós Toldi, Heroic Times is a beautiful fever dream made from 60,000 oil-painted cel-sheets and 600 backgrounds (yes, painted, not drawn). The team that made it wanted to pay homage to the Hungarian Romantic painters of the 19th century, and the result is an art style you have never seen before in traditional Western animation.

On top of the one-of-a-kind visual experience, the story is also captivating. There are many elements of your classic knight in shining armor tale of bravery and daring, but there is more moral complexity to it than anything I’ve ever read in King Arthur tales. It has philosophical dilemmas that left me pondering the story after the credits rolled.

The thoughtful pace and subtitles of this film demand that you watch without a phone in hand. It requires your full attention, or you will miss out on the best parts of this curious masterpiece, which swaps out the frenetic energy of most movies today for the chance to witness art come to life in the retelling of one of Hungary’s oldest legends.

I guarantee it’s worth putting your phone away for about 90 minutes. [Jameson]

• 🎬 Heroic Times (1984, original title: Daliás idők)

• 🆓 You can watch it for free on Tubi in the U.S.

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This week: the craftspeople who went extinct so their art could survive, the runners who lose so the race can mean something, and one man who paid with his humanity to become the best golfer who ever lived.

1. Light & Magic : The R&D Lab That Happened to Make Movies

Industrial Light & Magic is an R&D lab that happens to ship blockbusters. That’s the frame I came away with after binging Light & Magic, the 6-part documentary on Disney+.

It begins in 1975. George Lucas tells a small team he'd cobbled together that he wants something like 2001: A Space Odyssey, but kinetic and fast-moving — and then most of what would make that work doesn’t exist yet. Motion-control cameras, optical compositing: ILM had to invent much of it on the way to finishing Star Wars. The film you know only works because twenty-somethings in a warehouse solved problems that didn’t even have names yet.

The arc across the series is what makes it more than nostalgia. You watch the analog golden age of matte paintings, miniatures, stop-motion, and puppets collide with the digital era around Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. “Big Bang” is the right word; after that, the rules changed for everyone.

Lucas was pushing digital from the start: editing, sound, effects, long before it was obvious. One spin-off from that push: Pixar, later sold to Steve Jobs (you may have heard of them).

Two things stuck with me. First: the best way to understand ILM is as a story-possibility factory. Light sabers, space battles, a liquid-metal killer robot, photoreal dinosaurs — these weren’t effects bolted onto existing stories. They unlocked stories that couldn’t be told until someone figured out how to show them. Second: the human texture of rapid technological change. People who’d spent twenty years mastering the model shop watched their craft evaporate. Stop-motion legend Phil Tippett, watching Jurassic Park's first CGI dinosaur tests, told Spielberg: "I think I'm extinct." Multiple interviewees use the same refrain: we knew it was coming, we didn’t know it would be this fast.

Does that remind you of anything? [Liberty]

• 📺 Light & Magic (Disney+, 2022, 6 episodes)

2. The Barkley Marathons : A Documentary About Beautiful Failure

Every year in the muddy hills of Frozen Head State Park, Tennessee, a cigarette-smoking accountant named Gary Cantrell — who goes by Lazarus Lake — sends a field of forty ultrarunners into the woods to suffer. The Barkley Marathons is 100 miles through punishing terrain: five unmarked 20-mile loops, 60,000 feet of elevation gain, no GPS, no trail markers, no aid stations. Expect dense, prickly undergrowth, wild boar, snakes, poison ivy, and brutal temperature swings.

Runners navigate by map and compass and prove they’ve hit each checkpoint by tearing pages from books Laz has stashed along the course — prophetic titles like What Did I Do Wrong? and How to Survive and Grow Richer in the Tough Times Ahead. The entry fee is $1.60 and a pack of Camel cigarettes. The acceptance letter advises runners that their time before the race would be better spent updating their wills. Since 1995, only 20 runners have finished.

I first heard about Barkley from an ultra-runner friend, and then I found this documentary — which has become one of my favorite sports films. Filmmakers Annika Iltis and Timothy James Kane followed the 2012 race, and what they captured is less a story about running than a study of what happens when you strip a human being down to the essential ingredients: compass, willpower, and whatever’s left after forty hours without sleep. Laz himself is the film’s central character: part sadist, part philosopher, a man who pulls his own teeth rather than visit a dentist, and who once stocked the entire course with adult-themed novels. He looks like Edward Abbey and talks like the kind of character Cormac McCarthy might’ve dreamed up between novels, sitting on a porch in Tennessee, laughing at something no one else found funny.

What brought me back was a beautifully shot short film by Noah Reese recapping this year’s race, which fielded one of the deepest talent pools in Barkley history. Not shocking, the race didn’t yield a finisher. The best runner only did three loops. Barkley won again, as it almost always does. And somehow, that’s the most inspiring thing about it. [Taylor]

• 🎬 Official Website for The Barkley Marathons (2014)

• 📺 The full film on YouTube (top comment: “I just love the irony of an elite ultra marathon event set up by an eccentric chain-smoking madman”)

3. Tampopo : The Ramen Western That's Also About Everything Else

I recently came across a clip from this 1985 Japanese film, and it instantly piqued my interest. The poster described it as a “Japanese Noodle Western.” The sheer hilarity of that phrase was enough to send it straight to the top of my watch list. What even is a Japanese Noodle Western?

Turns out, it’s one of the most original movies I’ve ever seen.

The central plot follows a pair of truck drivers who, along with a ragtag gang they assemble along the way, help a widowed ramen shop owner master the art of ramen and turn around her struggling business. It’s equal parts earnest and absurd, driven by the same Japanese devotion to craft and perfection that Jimmy talked about in last week’s recommendation of Jiro Dreams of Sushi. This is not a world where mediocre ramen is acceptable. Ramen chefs here are ready to duel you if you leave broth in the bowl or dare insult their work.

But what makes Juzo Itami’s Tampopo truly unlike anything else is its structure. Woven between the main storyline are these vignettes, little short films really, depicting completely unrelated slices of human life revolving around food. They are funny, erotic (kinky food sex?), goofy, and so independently delightful that the lack of connection never bothers you. It’s like picking up a book and finding out it’s both a novel and a short story collection bound together, and somehow it works. I can’t think of another movie that pulls this off.

Nearly every scene exists because of food — even the death scenes, even the credits. Tampopo is a love letter to food, and to all the strange little rituals we build around it. [Vatsal]

• 🎬 Tampopo (1985)

4. The Cost of Being Tiger Woods

Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian’s Tiger Woods opens with a cemetery sexton digging a hole in the Kansas dirt to bury Earl Woods’s ashes. The man’s name is Mike Mohler, and finding him tells you everything about the book that follows. These writers went that far. They interviewed hundreds of people. They tracked down the gravedigger. That’s how they managed to find new insights about a figure who had been relentlessly covered since his childhood.

They found Tiger’s handwritten letter to Stanford’s golf coach from when he was in seventh grade, a document that shows a 13-year-old already thinking in terms of GPA and USGA handicaps and business education goals. They secured break-up letters Tiger wrote to his first girlfriend at Stanford, signed “Sincerely, Tiger” and later “Warmest regards, Tiger,” letters that reveal the awkward machinery of someone being programmed for greatness at the expense of everything else. This is what four hundred interviews get you: the texture of a life.

The book moves. Benedict and Keteyian never let up. The writing is clean and fast, the kind of prose that trusts the story enough to get out of its way. You learn an enormous amount about Tiger — his father’s crushing ambitions, his mother’s ferocity, the machinery that produced the most dominant golfer who ever lived — but you’re also just turning pages, caught in the momentum of a life that feels both inevitable and tragic.

This is a book about what it costs to be the best at something, about the gap between the person you are and the icon the world needs you to be. Benedict and Keteyian handle it without flinching and without moralizing. The result is a portrait of elite performance that feels urgent and true. [Jimmy]

• 📕 Tiger Woods by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian

5. To Hie From Far Cilenia : The 2008 Story That Predicted the Network State

I must have been 15 when I first read Karl Schroeder’s work. Karl is a very underrated science fiction writer, and when he’s not spinning up highly entertaining and grounded narratives, he’s working as a futurist (or as a self-proclaimed ‘speculative designer’).

Karl’s work is a wonder of worldbuilding. Maybe the best place to begin is his short story To Hie From Far Cilenia, which is part of METAtropolis, an obscure sci-fi anthology edited by none other than house favourite John Scalzi. Even though this collection was published in 2008, each of these stories is more relevant than ever — none more so than Schroeder’s.

To Hie From Far Cilenia is perfect for fans of the Network State, decentralized governance, alternate reality city-states, open-source hardware communities, and new aesthetics.

The story follows Gennady Malianov, a Ukrainian radiation inspector who is hired by Interpol to track twelve kilos of stolen plutonium. With his partner Miranda Veen (an anthropologist searching for her estranged son), they are guided by Fraction, a cyranoid — a human ‘shadower’ who speaks and acts out the words of his human ‘source’. Together they descend through nested layers of hidden civilization: a global steampunk game where diplomacy is played for keeps, then a shadow economy that has quietly built its own farms, factories, and cities inside the cracks of the existing world. All these nested virtual worlds are pointing to a distant place called Cilenia. It’s a very enjoyable story, and there’s also an audiobook version of the anthology, which features voices from the Battlestar Galactica cast.

Karl’s work is also admired by fellow SF writer Cory Doctorow, who gave a glowing review to his book Stealing Worlds, which you should check out if you want something longer to read. And I recently found out that Karl has also started writing on Substack. His essays on the current state of AI development are amusing and refreshing. I urge you to check them out. [Rohan]

• 📙 Metatropolis: Original Science Fiction Stories in a Shared Future

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1. Jiro Dreams of Sushi : Still Not Perfect at 100

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a 2011 documentary about Jiro Ono, a sushi chef who runs a ten-seat restaurant near a Tokyo subway station. When the film was made, Ono was 85 years old and the restaurant had three Michelin stars. Last October, he turned 100. Asked by the Tokyo governor what the secret to his longevity was, Ono replied simply: “I believe the best medicine is to work.” He still hasn’t fully retired.

What strikes me every time I watch the film is the specificity of Jiro’s obsession. He has spent more than eight decades making sushi, and he still believes he hasn’t perfected it. His apprentices train for years before they’re allowed to cook rice. One of them practiced making tamago (egg sushi) for months before Jiro finally told him it was acceptable. The film lingers on these details because they are the point. Mastery is a practice, renewed every day, and the people who achieve it are the ones who find meaning in the repetition itself.

The documentary also captures something melancholy about excellence at this level. Jiro’s sons work alongside him, but they will always be in his shadow. His eldest, Yoshikazu, is now in his sixties and widely considered a master in his own right, yet he still runs the restaurant under his father’s name and his father’s standards. There’s a tension between inheritance and identity that the film handles with restraint, letting you feel the weight of expectation without ever stating it outright. Yoshikazu has spent sixty years mastering an art form he'll never fully own. It’s a family story as much as it is a story about craft.

I find the film genuinely inspiring. Watching Jiro work makes me want to be better at my own craft, to care more about the details, to find joy in the pursuit rather than the arrival. The best work about excellence makes mastery look worth the effort. [Jimmy]

• 🎬 Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)

2. Dostoevsky: Begin the Climb

Dostoevsky is a daunting prospect. His novels are intimidating mountains to climb, even for seasoned readers. More daunting still is the fact that the man has so many classics to choose from—classics that run 700, 800, 900 pages, I should add—that most people never begin. They’re terrified of finding themselves halfway up the wrong peak.

“Where do I start? Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov?” That’s a question I’m often asked.

My answer is always the same: Notes from Underground.

It’s the perfect introduction to his psychology, philosophy, and style (and it’s only about 120 pages).

Written as a monologue by a bitter, anonymous man ranting about everything wrong with himself and the world, it’s actually one of existentialism’s foundational texts—the school of thought that would give rise to Kafka, Camus, Sartre, and countless others. There’s a passage in it that’s among the most profound in all of literature, ending with the line: “The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.” Human beings are not widgets to be placed in some mechanical system, nor will they ever accept such a fate. It perfectly encapsulates the fundamental difference between man and machine, and echoes as loudly in 2026 as it did in 1864.

So there you go. No more excuses about Dostoevsky. 120 pages. Begin your ascent. [Dylan]

• 📙 Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

3. Treme : The Other David Simon Masterpiece

Sometimes among siblings, one gets all the attention — and they deserve it. They’re brilliant, kind, beautiful, funny. The real deal. But there’s another sibling who’s also exceptional, quietly overshadowed. Treme is The Wire‘s quieter sibling.

The Wire is one of the greatest shows ever made. I’ve said so before, and I mean it. But David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s overlooked follow-up, set in post-Katrina New Orleans, asks a question The Wire never quite gets to: when the institutions fail completely — when the levees break, the government disappears, your neighborhood is underwater — what holds a community together?

Culture. Music, food, ritual, craft.

The Mardi Gras Indians sewing their incredible suits from exile. A chef fighting to reopen her restaurant. A trombonist scraping by on gigs. Over four seasons, these characters and a dozen more rebuild their lives in a city that is simultaneously one of America’s most beautiful and most broken, with French, Creole, African-American, and Caribbean traditions layered over one another.

The production is obsessive about authenticity. Real New Orleans musicians — Kermit Ruffins, Dr. John, Trombone Shorty, Allen Toussaint — play themselves. Scenes are shot on location. One of the leads, Lucia Micarelli, is a Juilliard-trained violinist who had never acted before. And John Goodman in one of his best roles (along with Big Lebowski, of course). The show has 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, higher than The Wire's 94%. Simon himself called it "a better executed, more careful project." Yet it barely averaged 0.57 million viewers by its second season. Nobody saw it, and that’s tragic.

This isn’t a show for everyone. There are extended musical performances woven into the storytelling, and it’s largely about character moments. But if it is for you, it’s really for you, and nothing else will quite do the same job. If you decide to try it, commit to at least three episodes.

Years after my last rewatch, I still feel like I know these people. They’ve become friends. What more can you ask? [Liberty]

• 📺 Treme (2010–2013, 4 seasons, 36 episodes)

4. Middle-Earth Was Built in the Margins

Unfinished Tales is the book you pick up when you know Middle-earth well enough to want a glimpse into how Tolkien built this world.

If you’ve already read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, or perhaps you’re a big enough Tolkien fan to have read even The Silmarillion, this could be for you. Edited and published posthumously by Christopher Tolkien, Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth is a glimpse into Tolkien’s workshop — the drafts, the contradictions, the obsessive detail — which is precisely why I found it so absorbing.

It made me realize how the scale of Middle-earth was fueled by the enormous labor behind it.

Here you find alternate accounts of Galadriel’s past since Tolkien hadn’t settled on a final version yet, Gandalf explaining how Bilbo became part of Thorin’s quest, and fragments, annotations, and unresolved ideas that reveal how exacting he was. Even small details carry weight: why Saruman secretly acquired a taste for pipe-weed, or the precise value of the Númenórean mile.

It is not as exhaustive as Christopher Tolkien’s later 12-volume archival series, The History of Middle-earth, but it is a far more readable entry point into the same workshop. The success of Unfinished Tales later paved the way for The History of Middle-earth.

The book is divided into sections on the First, Second, and Third Ages, followed by a final section of notes and essays. It’s not an easy read. Some sections feel like notes rather than stories. But for Tolkien fans — and especially aspiring fantasy writers — that's exactly the point. This is where you see how he built it.

What makes it worth the effort: seeing that even the father of high fantasy struggled with unfinished scenes and contradictory drafts — the same man who ended up codifying and lending legitimacy to a genre formerly considered niche and juvenile. [Aashisha]

• 📘 Unfinished Tales: A Comprehensive Epic Fantasy Companion to the History of Middle-earth by J. R. R. Tolkien & Christopher Tolkien

5. A Field Guide to the Restaurants You Forgot You Missed

I was a child of the 1980s. My family didn’t eat out much, but Pizza Hut was the exception. The memories are almost unreasonably vivid: the red roof, the glazed plastic cups of Pepsi, the checkerboard tablecloth, the Galaga machine glowing in the corner.

I was a Book It! kid. It was Pizza Hut’s brilliantly cynical reading program that bribed children with free Personal Pan Pizzas for hitting their book quotas, which, in hindsight, might be the most effective literacy campaign a corporation has ever run. Now, as a parent with kids of my own, I find myself revisiting those memories more than I expected. Not out of sentimentality, exactly, but because there’s something about the sensory specificity of those places — the lighting, the architecture, the signage — that feels like a counterweight to the copy-and-paste sea of sameness that exists across almost every town in America.

Rolando Pujol’s The Great American Retro Road Trip is the perfect gazetteer to many of the remnants that survived from my childhood. Pujol, who writes the fantastic Substack newsletter The Retrologist, has spent years documenting the surviving relics of roadside America — from Pizza Hut to the original Pronto Pup, as well as the giant roadside oddities and neon motel signs that most people drive past without a second look. The book is a coast-to-coast catalog of these places, but what makes it more than a photo collection is Pujol’s storytelling. He traces the origins and design histories of chains both national and deeply regional — this book introduced me to dozens of places I never knew existed as a kid. Each entry reads like a small act of preservation, a case for why this stuff matters before it disappears entirely.

I’ve started bringing it along on road trips. It turns out nostalgia is a better travel guide than most algorithms, and Pujol has drawn the map. [Taylor]

📚The Great American Retro Road Trip by Rolando Pujol

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1. The Big Heat : The 1953 Blueprint for the 1970s Antihero

We had an uncharacteristically hot summer last year in Britain. So I’m told anyway: I spent much of it in a dark room, immersed in the world of film noir, that distinctly American cinematic movement that emerged in the mid-1940s and flourished in the immediate postwar years.

Rooted in the hardboiled crime novels of writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, noirs were generally produced cheaply and efficiently by studios battling tightening production budgets. Despite being often dismissed by contemporary critics, noir has aged into the most interesting and timeless of the American film movements (sorry, Westerns), inspiring filmmakers ever since. One shorthand for the health of American movie culture is how enthusiastically directors return to the genre – both the 1970s and 1990s saw major noir revivals.

The Big Heat is a shockingly violent vigilante tale from 1953. Directed by the legendary Austrian Fritz Lang (Metropolis, M, Scarlet Street), it is among my favourites. Glenn Ford plays a cop investigating another cop’s suicide, getting sucked into the orbit of a mob bigwig in the process. When the stakes become personal, he launches a bloody revenge campaign.

As with all great vengeance stories, it functions as both a brutally effective crowd-pleaser and a complex tale of moral decay. Don’t get persuaded by the seemingly righteous fury of our protagonist; instead, pay attention to who and what he is willing to sacrifice to get his justice.

Warning: this is as dark and bleak as they come (genuinely shocking, for 1953). Ford’s protagonist lacks the wry humour or easy charm of someone like Humphrey Bogart. He is a grimly determined angel of death in a way that feels like a direct precursor to the cynical antiheroes who would go on to stalk 1970s cinema and beyond. [Ed]

• 🎞️ The Big Heat (1953)

2. The Soul of A New Machine : Turning Circuit Boards into Drama

Tracy Kidder, who died last week at 80, was one of my favorite authors and a great practitioner of narrative nonfiction. His book, The Soul of a New Machine, remains his masterpiece and one of my all-time favorite reads.

Published in 1981, just as the personal computer revolution was beginning, the book follows a team of engineers at Data General Corporation as they race to build a new minicomputer. It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and it deserves both. I read it obsessively while working on The Founders, and it shaped how I thought about telling a story set inside a company.

What makes the book extraordinary is Kidder’s ability to render technical work as human drama. He had no background in computers when he started the project, and he relied on his subjects to teach him. I valued this deeply because I’m not an engineer either, and yet I would lose myself reading it, completely absorbed in the details of circuit boards and debugging sessions and the internal politics of a computer company. Kidder was engaging in what Richard Feynman called “the pleasure of finding things out,” and the best nonfiction I read does exactly that. It makes you curious about worlds you never thought you’d care about, and it earns your attention by taking its subject seriously.

Kidder also pioneered a method I came to admire: immersive, long-duration reporting that lets you disappear into a world. He spent months with the Data General team, watching and listening, earning the kind of access that makes scenes feel lived rather than reconstructed. The result is a book that moves even when it’s explaining technical minutiae. It’s a portrait of what it actually feels like to build something under constraints, and it remains one of the best books ever written about work.

His obituary in the New York Times noted that he once described his ambition as writing about “intensely good people.” The Soul of a New Machine is full of them, and Kidder gave them the prose they deserved. [Jimmy]

• 📕 The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

3. The Forever War : The Sci-Fi War Novel Where Physics Is the Cruelest Weapon

I read The Forever War as a teenager, and it blew my mind. I had to tell all my friends about it. Most space-combat novels treat relativistic physics the way superhero movies treat gravity: as an inconvenient problem to handwave away. Joe Haldeman builds his entire plot on it. His soldiers ship out at near-light speed, fight a brief engagement, and return to find that decades have passed on Earth. After protagonist William Mandella’s first campaign — about two years of his subjective time — more than twenty-five years have elapsed back home.

And it compounds! The war drags on for centuries of Earth time. Each subsequent deployment pushes Mandella further out. Each return is worse. The society he comes home to doesn't just change — it becomes alien, in ways more disorienting than anything he faces in combat.

That premise alone would make a good hard-SF novel. What makes it a great war novel is that Haldeman uses time dilation emotionally, not just technically. He’s writing about what every combat veteran knows: you leave, what you experience changes you, and when you come back, the distance between you and everyone who stayed is measured in a different kind of light-years. This isn't WWII-epic clarity of purpose. It's more like the chaos of Vietnam as seen through the eyes of a grunt. Haldeman was a combat engineer in Vietnam, wounded by a booby-trapped munitions cache in the Central Highlands.

It’s remarkable that no film exists. The book won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus — the scifi triple crown. Ridley Scott was attached to adapt the book in 2008; David Webb Peoples, the screenwriter behind Blade Runner and Unforgiven, reportedly wrote multiple drafts. It’s been in development limbo ever since. With Project Hail Mary proving that hard-scifi can pack theaters, maybe the window is finally open. But honestly, the book doesn’t need the movie. Fifty years later, a novel about a war that goes on so long it forgets why it started still doesn’t feel like science fiction. [Liberty]

• 📗 The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

4. Ope! Is That Your Friend In The Wood Chipper? The Making of Fargo

Fargo is my favorite film. It’s the movie that rewired how I think about cinema: a film where a pregnant police chief in a parka could anchor one of the great American neo-noirs and violence could be both horrifying and banal in the same frame.

This past March marked thirty years since Fargo opened in theaters, and I picked up Todd Melby’s book, A Lot Can Happen in the Middle of Nowhere, at exactly the right time.

Melby, an MPR journalist, spent years interviewing the cast, crew, and locals who lived through the production. My favorite chapter is devoted to the wood chipper. In the scene, Peter Stormare feeds Steve Buscemi’s body into a chipper while snow sprays red. Special effects coordinators fed it tiny pieces of raw chicken and pork, figuring the flying meat would pass for human flesh on camera. The chipper itself was a Yard Shark with an eight-horsepower Briggs & Stratton engine, its dangerous guts ripped out so nobody on set lost a limb, then given a fictional name (the Iron Sphincter, Ethan Coen recalls) and a fresh paint job because the Coens wanted the machine to feel, in production designer Rick Heinrichs’ words, “both utilitarian and familiar.”

After the shoot wrapped, dolly grip Milo Durben bought the chipper for his hobby farm outside Minneapolis. He used it for a year, then retired it to storage. When the Coens came back to town to shoot A Serious Man, Durben brought the prop to set and got them to sign it. In 2011, the Fargo-Moorhead Visitors Bureau bought it. Today, it resides inside a grain elevator–shaped visitors center off I-94, complete with a mannequin leg, a fake gym sock, and a rack of fur-lined earflap hats for tourist photos. This summer, the local minor league team is rebranding as the Fargo Woodchippers for five home games in its honor.

Melby’s book is full of details you’d never think to look for about a film you thought you already knew — from a gutted Yard Shark on a hobby farm to the most cheerfully macabre tourist attraction in the Midwest. [Taylor]

• 📖 A Lot Can Happen in the Middle of Nowhere (2021)

• 🎬 Fargo (1996)

5. 1975 Richard Feynman Lecture: "Los Alamos From Below"

For those Richard Feynman fans who, like myself, find the world holds not nearly enough Feynman content, I present one of his most underrated artifacts: “Los Alamos From Below”, a roughly 75 minute lecture Feynman delivered at UC Santa Barbara in 1975. Thankfully, the full audio has been preserved on YouTube.

The lecture explores Feynman’s participation in the Manhattan Project as a young PhD surrounded by some of the most formidable minds alive. Feynman’s hilarious anecdotes — the cat and mouse game that he and his wife played with the censors is great — unwrap one of the most interesting and consequential undertakings of all time in a way it’s never been done before, bringing all his humanity, humor and his famous curiosity to examine the surreal experience that was the Manhattan Project.

I revisit this lecture multiple times a year and find myself always rediscovering pieces I’ve forgotten and loving it more than the last time. The only shortcoming is, like most Feynman, it leaves you wishing it was three times longer. [Chris]

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1. Kobe Before Kobe

Mike Sielski’s The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality is one of the best sports books I’ve read in years, and one of the best books, period. Part of what makes it work is Sielski’s decision to narrow his frame. This is not a biography of Kobe’s entire career. It ends in 1997, after his first NBA season, when he’s still a teenager with everything ahead of him. The heart of the book is his time at Lower Merion High School in the Philadelphia suburbs, where he led a team with just one star player to a state championship in 1996. By focusing on this narrow window, Sielski turns what could have been a familiar legend into a genuine coming-of-age story, and the effect is revelatory.

The reporting is top notch. Sielski conducted more than 100 interviews with coaches, teammates, teachers, and others who crossed paths with Kobe during those years. He also had access to a trove of never-before-released interviews that a former assistant coach recorded with Kobe during his senior season and early days in the NBA. These tapes preserved the thoughts and dreams of a teenager who believed, with total conviction, that he would one day perform on the same stage as Michael Jordan. You hear Kobe’s voice before fame calcified it, before the persona of the Black Mamba was fully constructed.

The writing is masterful. Sielski captures game action with the precision of someone who understands that sports writing, at its best, is about rhythm and detail. But he also brings the same care to the quieter moments: Kobe watching VHS tapes of Jordan in his room, getting nervous every time the team bus crossed a bridge, navigating the strange social terrain of being a kid who had spent his formative years in Italy and returned to America as something of an outsider. You see the influences that shaped him - his father Joe’s basketball career and the coaches who recognized his obsessive drive - without the narrative ever jumping ahead to spoil what’s coming. Sielski trusts the present moment to carry its own weight.

Great books leave you wanting to return to certain passages, to sit with a particular sentence or scene, and The Rise is full of those. The kid Kobe was explains the man he became, and Sielski lets you see the connection without ever making it feel overdetermined. It’s a book about basketball, yes, but it’s also a book about ambition, family, and the strange alchemy of becoming who you’re going to be. [Jimmy]

• 📘 The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality by Mike Sielski

2. A Man on the Moon : The Rest of the Apollo Story

Everyone knows about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Apollo 11 gets almost all of the mindshare in our culture (followed by Apollo 13 — thank you, Ron Howard!). A great adventure has been culturally compressed into one iconic image, but the full story was longer, stranger, more dangerous, and more human than most people know.

Apollo 1 was supposed to be the first crewed flight, but a cabin fire killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee before the program ever got off the ground, delaying crewed flights until Apollo 7.

While Apollo 11 astronauts were the first on the moon, they only spent two and a half hours walking on the surface, venturing about 200 feet from the lunar module. Meanwhile, Apollo 17’s crew spent roughly 75 hours on the surface, more than 22 hours outside the lander, and ranged as far as 4.7 miles from the module.

These men were the biggest celebrities in America — astronauts on cereal boxes, their families photographed for Life magazine. Most were test pilots who had spent careers professionally flying experimental jets that killed their colleagues routinely (Tom Wolfe documented this extensively in The Right Stuff, another book I loved). By the time they reached NASA, they had already normalized levels of risk that would be unthinkable for almost anyone else.

Chaikin spent about a decade researching the book. He did personal interviews with 23 of the 24 Apollo astronauts who flew to the Moon (Jack Swigert, who was on Apollo 13, had died of cancer in 1982), as well as mission personnel at NASA. Reading it made me feel like I was inside the Apollo program, living through those historic moments in real time.

Apollo 11 is the chapter everyone knows. Chaikin gives you the rest of the story. [Liberty]

• 📘👨‍🚀 A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin

3. Encrusting the Tortoise : Taste as the Antidote to Slop

“Taste” has become Silicon Valley’s favorite word. Founders drop it in pitch decks. VCs whisper it over Philz. Everyone has read Rick Rubin’s book. But Douglas Brundage, writing in his Substack newsletter Enfant Terrible, argues that most of the people talking about taste have mistaken it for something else entirely and that AI has made the problem impossible to ignore.

Brundage opens with an 1884 French novel about a reclusive aristocrat who encrusts a live tortoise with jewels until it dies under the weight of its own decoration. It’s a strange and perfect metaphor. He traces a line from that doomed reptile to the flood of AI-generated sameness that blankets the internet. His central claim is sharp: we handed the world a generative engine and most people produce slop with it, then blame the engine. That’s like cursing a Steinway because someone played “Chopsticks.”

What makes the piece land isn’t the takedown, but the standard it restores. Brundage’s argument is that taste is not style, and certainly not curation. It’s the uncomfortable process of discovering what you actually like, often before you can defend it, and then pushing on reality hard enough to make something from that impulse. The moment taste hardens into a system (the right typeface, the correct palette, a Ferrari interior that looks like a giant Apple Watch), it stops being taste and becomes fashion. That gap — between having references and having a point of view — is the one thing no model will close for you.

For those of us who are optimistic about what these tools can unlock, this essay is the sharpest articulation I’ve read of why optimism is warranted, and what it asks of us. [Taylor]

• 📄 Taste Test: Encrusting the Tortoise by Douglas Brundage

4. The End of the Tour : Spend Five Days with David Foster Wallace

Even if you’ve never read David Foster Wallace, even if you’re not ready for Infinite Jest, I think you should listen to his This is Water commencement speech.

If you like that, I think this lesser-known A24 film may also be for you.

The End of the Tour is delightfully small-scale and intimate. In 1996, Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky spent five days with David Foster Wallace during the ‘Infinite Jest’ book tour. The film is a largely word-for-word reconstruction of that extended-interview/road trip/hanging out with DFW based on Lipsky’s recordings and notes (he also wrote a memoir of the experience). There’s none of the usual prestige-biopic machinery. It’s mostly two dudes hanging out in messy living rooms, having interesting conversations.

Of course, DFW’s suicide in 2008 colors everything retroactively, but the film is really about the difficulty of genuine human connection, the weirdness of fame finding someone who distrusts fame, and the fact that brilliance offers no immunity from loneliness, despair, or self-destruction.

Jason Segel doesn’t play Wallace as a marble bust or a bundle of tics. He keeps him human while conveying the painful hyper-awareness that makes him feel more alive and more fragile at the same time. Wallace talks openly about performing for Lipsky even as he's trying not to. The film is full of that recursive self-awareness.

The film isn’t just about Wallace. There’s a lot of Lipsky, too. He’s ambitious, curious, needy, and competitive. The movie understands that interviews are not one-way extractions, they’re social duels.

To me, this film feels like spending an afternoon with someone you'll miss. [Liberty]

• 🎬 ‘The End of the Tour’ (2015)

5. Field Dispatch from Borges’s Buenos Aires

It is 12:29 a.m. and I am wandering the streets of Buenos Aires in search of a lighter. The kiosks are still open. There’s a slight drizzle. A few policemen patrol the streets, chatting with the locals. For some Argentines, the night has just begun, and many continue to drink coffee at hours that would scandalize most North Americans.

I am in the city of Jorge Luis Borges, and two blocks from my hotel is the street that bears his name.

It’s no secret that we at OSV are huge fans of Borges. We’ve mentioned his literary works before in the first two editions of Field Notes. Since I’m in his native city, I want to revisit his work and view this city through the eyes of its defining writer. My journey begins with Borges’s first poetry collection: Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923). Here’s an extract from The Streets:

The streets of Buenos Aires
are already the innards of my soul.
Not the energetic streets
bothered by hurry and bustle,
but the sweet neighborhood street
made tender by trees and sunsets.

And here is another, from Houses like Angels, published in his second poetry collection, Luna de enfrente (1925):

Where San Juan and Chacabuco intersect
I saw the blue houses,
the houses that wear colors of adventure.

Now it’s almost 3 a.m., and I’ve lost myself wandering the night streets in search of these blue houses. There’s a cool breeze, and at a bus stop I hear a ragged man play the guitar. Borges spoke of his love for this boundless city: “Buenos Aires is deep, and never have I, disillusioned or suffering, given myself over to its streets without receiving some unexpected consolation, whether from feeling unreality, from guitars at the back of a patio, or from contact with other lives.”

Borges’s poetry has given me words to express my appreciation of this city. Now my morning walks write themselves the way a Borges poem might; I think I’m choosing the route, but the city knows better. [Rohan]

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1. Two Underrated Duvall Deep Cuts

When you’ve got The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now, and Network at the top of your CV, it can be hard for your other achievements to get a look-in.

Such was my experience with Robert Duvall, an actor I’ve always admired but never truly appreciated. Following his passing on February 15, 2026, at age 95, I’ve been pouring one out for the great man by revisiting some of the hidden gems in his extensive filmography.

In The Outfit (1973), Duvall plays a small-time bank robber who accidentally takes a score on the mafia. When they kill his brother in retaliation, he ropes in his old partner for a revenge mission: a series of raids on mob businesses. A great character detail: Duvall’s protagonist, ever the pragmatist, has no interest in a John Wick-style bloodbath; he simply wants a compensatory payment of $250,000. Naturally, a bloodbath follows anyway.

This is unmistakably a product of the 1970s: stripped to the bone, gritty, packed with memorable characters and defined by a sober, unfussy craftsmanship that elevates its B-movie bones into something far richer.

Something similar can be said for James Gray’s We Own the Night (2007), a downbeat crime thriller in which Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix find themselves on opposite sides of the law. Phoenix runs a nightclub that has become a haven for the mob; his brother, Wahlberg, is a cop investigating it. Caught between those two worlds, Phoenix is forced to choose allegiances.

Duvall plays the morally righteous but emotionally suppressed patriarch, who is also, you guessed it, the deputy chief of police. The role could easily have curdled into a gruff bully, someone incapable of love. Instead, Duvall brings genuine humanity: a real sense of personal betrayal and deep hurt at the fractured relationship between his two boys.

Yes, it’s all a bit convoluted, but Gray pulls it off. He is a devoted student of the morally grey, conspiratorial realism of the 1970s, and brings an unjudgmental complexity to his characters that the material might not, in lesser hands, have earned. He also casually drops in one of the best car chases of the century. [Ed]

• 🎬 The Outfit (1973)

• 🎬 We Own the Night (2007)

2. The Thick of It : Real Politics Was Always This Stupid

If you know Armando Iannucci, it’s probably from Veep. Maybe from The Death of Stalin. But before either of those, Iannucci made a low-budget BBC series about the inner workings of British politics. And it might be one of the funniest comedies ever made.

The Thick of It follows a hapless politician and his team of advisors as they lurch from crisis to crisis under the supervision and wrath of Malcolm Tucker, the Prime Minister’s Director of Communications. The performance of Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker is so hilarious and outrageous that if there’s a Mount Rushmore of comedic performances, Capaldi’s face is right there.

The dialogue feels mostly improvised, delivered at a pace so breathless it blows your mind, and yet somehow winds up as endlessly quotable. True catching-lightning-in-a-bottle stuff. The whole cast were in some kind of flow state.

And hilarity aside, if the last decade or so is anything to go by, I’d argue it’s also one of the most accurate portrayals of politics ever captured on screen. Real politics isn’t House of Cards. Real politics is a comedy of errors.

Much like the two versions of The Office, watching The Thick of It alongside Veep is one of the best ways to understand the difference between British and American comedy. Veep is funny but entirely sanitized and slowed down by comparison. Although they share DNA, The Thick of It is a different animal altogether: meaner, faster, and much closer to the chaos of the real world. [Dylan]

• 📺 The Thick of It (2005-2012)

3. Walter Lippmann: Who Supplies the Pictures in Your Head?

I spend time thinking about human nature and what it means to think critically. It’s incredibly helpful in military leadership, private equity (i.e., spending other people’s money), and storytelling. So I’ve come to appreciate how a book published in 1922, before television existed, can still illuminate algorithmic media consumption 100 years later.

Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) knows how you think because he spent his professional life studying how everyone thinks. In 1922, he gave the word “stereotype” its modern meaning: the simplified “pictures in our heads” that stand in for reality. He used it to describe something he’d watched reshape democracy during World War I.

Public Opinion is his account of how that process works at scale, and why it makes mass societies so vulnerable to propaganda. Lippmann’s core insight: we don’t react directly to the real environment, what he calls the “world outside.” We react to a representation of it, the “pseudo-environment,” built from fragments: news headlines, political speeches, films, textbooks, memes, clips, and the conversations of people who are also operating on their own pseudo-environments. These fragments assemble into a coherent picture that feels like reality, even when it is only a selective sketch.

Most of us will never personally witness the wars we have opinions about, the economic systems we debate, or the political actors we support or condemn. And yet these distant events are enough to blow up Thanksgiving tables across the country.

Journalists choose which events are worth reporting. Editors choose the language to describe them. Platforms decide what gets repeated and to whom. These pictures are constructed and curated for our consumption, and through repetition and familiarity — like a pop song — they begin to feel natural, inevitable, and true. By the time a narrative reaches you, it has already been selected, shaped, and amplified. The power is structural.

Understanding propaganda begins with a question:

Who supplied the pictures in your head? [Nick]

• 📗 Public Opinion: How People Decide; The Role of News, Propaganda and Manufactured Consent in Modern Democracy by Walter Lippmann

4. On Writing Well : A Tuning Fork for the Mind

William Zinsser’s On Writing Well is a book I return to about once a year, the way some people reread favorite novels. It’s ostensibly a guide to nonfiction writing, but it’s really a book about thinking clearly and communicating with intention.

First published in 1976, it grew out of a course Zinsser taught at Yale, where more than 170 students signed up for a class designed for 20. The English department reportedly wondered if perhaps they hadn’t been teaching writing at all. Zinsser, who had spent over a decade at the New York Herald Tribune as a feature writer, drama editor, and film critic before turning to freelance work for magazines like Life and the Saturday Evening Post, brought a practitioner’s eye to the classroom. He wasn’t interested in theory. He wanted to help students write about the world they were living in.

What I love most is how Zinsser insists that writing is meant to be heard, not just read. He wants you to listen to your sentences, to test them against the ear, to feel when a rhythm is off or a word lands wrong. This is advice that sounds simple until you try to follow it, and then you realize how much of what passes for good prose is actually dead on arrival. He also emphasizes warmth, the idea that the writer’s humanity should come through on the page, which serves as a corrective to the bloodless, institutional prose that dominates so much professional writing. His four principles are clarity, simplicity, brevity, and humanity.

Zinsser also does something rare for a writing guide: he shows you his own revisions. The book includes pages from his drafts, covered in cross-outs and scribbled corrections, and the effect is both humbling and liberating. Even Zinsser, one of the best practitioners of the craft, built his clean final pages atop a mountain of rough attempts. The lesson is that revision is where writing actually happens, and that the first draft is just permission to begin. He revised the book itself seven times over its 30-year run, adding examples, updating references, and refining his arguments. He was himself a work in progress; we all are.

The book has now sold over 1.5 million copies and remains a staple of college writing courses. Whether you’re just starting or are decades into a career, it stays useful. It’s a tuning fork for the ear and a reminder of what good writing feels like when it’s working. I’ve given away more copies than I can count. [Jimmy]

• 📘 On Writing Well by William Zinsser

5. The Power of One: The Tokyo Bookstore That Only Sells One Book

Since stumbling across it online, I’ve become a bit obsessed with “Morioka Shoten,” a tiny bookstore nestled in the heart of Tokyo. It struck me as either marketing suicide or an act of genius.

Founded in 2015 by veteran bookseller Yoshiyuki Morioka, this unusual store takes curation to its logical conclusion and sells exactly one book per week. Based on the philosophy of issatsu, isshitsu (single room, single book), the store selects one title and builds the entire space around it: photographs, objects, artworks, and events that extend the text into physical space. So, if Murakami’s 1Q84 were exhibited in this shop, you’d probably encounter a two-mooned-sky ceiling, an air chrysalis and maybe even Little People.

When Morioka Shoten featured Kenya Hara’s DRAW, the shop was filled with around sixty original sketches. For Tomonori Taniguchi’s Gorilla no Kutsuya, the exhibition included original picture-book art and woodblock prints.

What I liked most about the concept is that it treats attention as something to be protected, rather than captured. In a typical bookstore, thousands of titles compete for a reader’s curiosity. Morioka does the opposite; by reducing the choice to one, he turns browsing into something much richer and more immersive. In a world of abundance and frayed attention, this store relies on the power of one to break through the clutter.

The bookstore is housed in the historic Suzuki building, once home to the publisher Nippon Kobo; design studio Takram later helped reshape the space so it feels less like retail and more like a gallery devoted to literature. Sure enough, this bookstore has earned a spot on my Japan travel checklist! [Aashisha]

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1. The Patron Saint of Synth: Padre Guilherme

A church bell rings. Then another. Under the shadow of Christ The Redeemer, a bald-headed cleric drops a beat to Hallelujah.

Thus begins one of the most exciting DJ sets I’ve ever seen. The DJ? Padre Guilherme Peixoto.

A Portuguese Catholic priest and a military chaplain who served in Kosovo and Afghanistan, Padre Guilherme is one of the most unlikely figures on the global electronic music circuit. He started DJing in 2010 on a deployment to Afghanistan, organizing morale events for soldiers. Back home, he learned how to do it properly and when bake sales didn’t work, he used music to fundraise for his debt-ridden parish church in Laúndos.

Liturgical music and melodic techno turn out to be built for the same thing: repetition, lift, and collective transcendence. That’s what makes Padre Guilherme’s sets more than a novelty — Ave Maria threaded through synth lines, church bells woven with beat drops, papal encyclicals sampled over a rolling bassline.

His breakout came at World Youth Day in Lisbon in 2023, where he played an early-morning set at Parque Tejo before Pope Francis’s closing Mass, part of an event that drew about 1.5 million pilgrims. Since then, he has moved quickly onto major festival stages: Afterlife at Hï Ibiza, Medusa Festival in Spain, Zamna in Chile. In January 2025, he performed beneath Christ the Redeemer in Rio for the Youth for Peace Festival, with sacred vocals and melodic techno echoing under the statue’s outstretched arms.

Then in November 2025, outside the 14th-century Cathedral of St. Elisabeth in Košice, Slovakia, Pope Leo XIV appeared on the LED screens behind Padre Guilherme’s booth with a video blessing for the local archbishop’s 75th birthday. Guilherme answered by dropping a “papal beat.”

Padre Guilherme is my new music obsession. I’ve worked out to his beats, and ‘locked in’ many times while listening to his version of Gregorian chants. They feel like proof that ritual and rave have been reaching for some of the same thing all along. [Rohan]

2. The $67.5 Million Bet That Invented the Entertainment Franchise

Hulu's Legacy: The True Story of the LA Lakers is one of my favorite sports documentaries because it's really about the design of a modern institution. Under Jerry Buss, the Lakers became more than a basketball team: they became a prototype for the entertainment-business franchise, where wins, celebrity, branding, and dealmaking all reinforced one another.

Buss bought the Lakers in 1979 as part of a $67.5 million deal, roughly $300 million in today’s dollars — at the time the largest sports transaction in history — that also included the LA Kings, the Forum arena, and a 13,000-acre ranch in the Sierra Nevada foothills. He then proceeded to reinvent what professional basketball could be. He turned courtside seats into the hottest ticket in Hollywood, cultivated a roster of celebrity fans to make home games feel like premieres, and was among the first owners to sell arena naming rights to a corporate sponsor.

Buss was an unlikely architect for all this: a chemist with a doctorate who earned his PhD by age 24, who had stood in bread lines as a child in Wyoming and built a real estate empire from a single $1,000 investment.

What sets Legacy apart is how seriously it takes the dealmaking. You see the negotiations, the financing, the strategic gambles that could have gone wrong. The series shows you how a franchise establishes itself as a brand, how it positions itself within a league and a city. It’s a case study in institution-building, told with access and candor that most business documentaries never achieve.

When Magic Johnson announced his HIV diagnosis in 1991, at a time when such news was considered a death sentence, Buss nearly collapsed at the press conference. Jeanie Buss recalls that she only saw her father cry twice in his life: once when his mother died, and once that day. The series captures both the triumph and the heartbreak of building something that matters.

It is also honest about what happens when a family business becomes a billion-dollar enterprise. After Buss died in 2013, his children fought publicly for control of the franchise, with siblings maneuvering against each other in ways that threatened everything their father had built. Succession is one of the hardest problems in any organization, and mixing bloodlines with balance sheets makes it harder still. Legacy earns its title by showing the extraordinary institution Buss created and the fault lines he left behind. [Jimmy]

• 📺 Legacy: The True Story of the LA Lakers (2022, 10 episodes)

3. How Cosplaying the Romans Led to the Scientific Revolution

A two-hour conversation about Renaissance history does not sound like obvious must-watch material. This one is. Ada Palmer is incredibly eclectic: She’s a historian, hopepunk science-fiction and fantasy novelist, music composer, and Associate Professor at the University of Chicago.

Oh, and she also wrote a popular history book on the Renaissance with a particular focus on Machiavelli and the Medici.

The story I can’t stop thinking about: Petrarch survived the Black Death in the 1340s, watched friends die to plague and bandits, and diagnosed the problem as bad leadership. Lords who cared about family honor over the public good. His prescription was to fill libraries with what the Romans read. Raise princes on Cicero and Plato. Make philosopher-kings by osmosis.

At first, it failed spectacularly. The first generation raised on all that classical learning did not produce Roman virtue. They produced uglier wars and nastier power politics. Cesare Borgia had Cicero memorized and used it to set fire to half of Italy. By some measures, life expectancy in Italy fell during the Renaissance, as greater wealth translated into larger armies and more destructive wars.

But the libraries Petrarch inspired stuck around. Printing, translation, footnotes, and glossaries gradually made those texts accessible to far beyond a tiny elite of classicists. A hundred years after Gutenberg, medical students were reading Lucretius and asking: what if there are atoms, and maybe that’s how diseases work? Through a long chain of second-order effects, that world helped produce germ theory, vaccines, and a treatment for the Black Death itself.

Petrarch wanted a world that shared his values. Instead, he built a world that didn’t share his values, but could solve problems he never imagined were solvable, including treatment for the disease that killed his friends.

The full conversation has plenty more: why Gutenberg went bankrupt, why Leonardo da Vinci was a saboteur, and how the Inquisition accidentally invented peer review.

I’m ordering her book Inventing the Renaissance. [Liberty]

• 🎧📄 Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer

4. The Hound of the Baskervilles : Skepticism Without Blindness

Few stories walk the line between mystery and the supernatural as elegantly as Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. Set against the bleak, fog-laden moors of Devonshire, the novel wraps its central crime in whispers of curses, legends, and a demonic hound said to stalk the Baskerville family. The atmosphere is so expertly constructed that the supernatural starts to feel not just possible, but likely.

What makes this Sherlock Holmes story endure, though, is Sherlock’s discipline under uncertainty. He is skeptical by nature, but he never uses skepticism as an excuse to stop looking. He treats even the most outlandish explanation as a live hypothesis until the evidence rules it out. That habit, more than his brilliance, is what makes him such a compelling detective. He refuses to let premature certainty close off the search.

“Is this Devil Dog a fact, or a fable?” is the question driving the investigation, and Conan Doyle keeps the answer genuinely uncertain longer than you’d expect.

That’s the balance that gives the book its charge. You get the eerie pleasures of folklore and Gothic suspense, but also the satisfaction of watching reason move carefully through fear, rumor, and misdirection. The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of Conan Doyle’s most iconic tales because it understands that the truth can feel supernatural right up until the moment it doesn’t.

If you’ve never read it, it’s worth a trip to Dartmoor. If you have read it, it’s probably time for a return visit.

And if you want a companion listen afterward, I did an episode on The Hound of the Baskervilles last October on my podcast, Becoming the Main Character, about what Sherlock’s method can still teach us. Beyond retelling the story, I give a lot of attention to the attributes that make Sherlock truly exceptional… it has less to do with being a genius than you may think. [Jameson]

• 📘 The Hound of the Baskervilles

• 🎧 BTMC episode on The Hound of the Baskervilles

5. Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies : A Machine for Breaking Creative Loops

“Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” That’s one of the 100-odd cards in Oblique Strategies, a deck Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt created in 1975 to break creative blocks in the recording studio. Fifty years later, it’s still in use, and the reason it works isn’t what you’d expect.

The premise is simple: when a session stalls, you draw a card. Some cards are practical (“Use fewer notes”); some are philosophical (“What would your closest friend do?”); some are almost anti-advice (“Do something boring”). The original edition came in a black box, and Eno used the cards while working with David Bowie on the Berlin Trilogy albums. He would reportedly hold cards up to the musicians mid-take to push them somewhere unexpected. The results are not exactly obscure records.

Here’s the part that actually interests me. The deck treats creative block as a systems problem, not a referendum on your talent. When you’re stuck, it’s usually not because you’ve run out of ideas. It’s because your taste, your habits, and your self-consciousness are vetoing every move before it has a chance to come alive. A random external prompt cuts that loop. Not because it’s wise, but because it’s alien. If the instruction made immediate sense, it probably wouldn’t get you unstuck.

“Faced with a choice, do both”

The cards aren’t smart. But they are very good at creating a small rupture, and sometimes a rupture is all you need to get moving again.

The full deck is free online. There’s also a website version. Keep one nearby for the next time you hit a wall. You don’t have to believe the card. Just try it. [Liberty]

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1. Night of the Juggler : New York Pulp at its Best

Imagine Mad Max: Fury Road, but instead of a post-apocalyptic Australian desert, it’s set in sleazy 1970s New York.

James Brolin plays a down-on-his-luck ex-cop who can’t catch a break. When his daughter is kidnapped in broad daylight by a psychotic criminal with a grudge against the city’s wealthy elite, he launches a relentless, bloody vendetta through New York’s streets, sex clubs, and sewers. Chasing him is a crooked cop (a gleefully demented Dan Hedaya) with his own score to settle.

The action starts with a batshit crazy 20-minute chase scene, all filmed on location à la The French Connection (seriously, I don’t understand how they filmed it without anyone getting hurt), and doesn’t let up from there. Like its apocalyptic Australian cousin, it’s effectively an exploitation movie delivered with maximum craft.

Being an Englishman born in the 1990s, I can’t vouch for how accurately it captures what New York actually felt like at the time, but I can say that it embodies the grimy, pulpy, purgatorial id of ‘70s New York cinema as well as anything I’ve seen.

For a long time, the film was invisible, having never made it to DVD or Blu-ray. Then last year, it was restored for theatrical presentation alongside a delicious 4K Blu-ray transfer. It's now on streaming, but if you can get your hands on the disc, do it — it looks great.

PS: If you’re thinking “they don’t make them like this anymore,” then check out last year’s One Battle After Another and Highest 2 Lowest, both of which feature glorious on-location urban chase sequences. [Ed]

• 🎬 Night of the Juggler (1980)

2. Homebound : A Window Into the India You Haven't Seen

Many of my peers with remote-possible jobs say that COVID was a great time. They may say it half-jokingly, but there’s truth in it. We got to work from home, binge Netflix, skip commutes, students got to skip exams and homework. No one had to pretend they didn’t enjoy at least some of it. And sure, we all intellectually accept that life was brutal for millions during the lockdown. But it stays abstract. It’s a thing we know but don’t really feel.

Homebound changed that for me. The film is set during India’s COVID lockdown and follows two young boys and their families, migrant laborers for whom “stay home” meant losing everything. It makes the devastation real in a way that news coverage and statistics do not. For viewers in the West, the film also opens a window into parts of Indian society that rarely get screen time. The desperation around government jobs as a path to not just financial stability but social dignity. The quiet cruelty of caste, shown through a character who hides his surname because it would invite judgment before anyone even gets to know him. These aren’t presented as exotic spectacle. They’re just the texture of these characters’ lives.

But it is not an exercise in misery. It is, at its core, a story of friendship and connection that manages to capture multiple emotions exceptionally well. The acting is excellent throughout, and Neeraj Ghaywan’s movies are now in my “must-watch” list.

When the credits started rolling, I was pleasantly surprised to see Martin Scorsese listed as an executive producer. That’s the first I’ve seen for a Bollywood film, and it feels like a fitting endorsement.

It’s a film that leaves you feeling more connected to people whose lives look nothing like yours. [Vatsal]

• 📺 Homebound (2025, Netflix)

3. Project Hail Mary : MacGyver Goes to Space

If your favorite scene in Apollo 13 is the one where engineers have to make square CO₂ filters fit into round holes using only what's on the spacecraft, then Andy Weir wrote this book for you.

Project Hail Mary is hard sci-fi with a MacGyver soul. A lone astronaut wakes up on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there, no crew, and a very large problem that needs solving. The book is essentially a series of escalating puzzles: here is your situation, here are the laws of physics, figure it out. You'll absorb more physics and engineering than you'd expect from a page-turner. Weir clearly delights in this, you can feel him grinning as each new obstacle appears.

I've read The Martian, which made Weir's reputation, and I liked it, but I like this one significantly better. I can't tell you why without spoiling it, and avoiding spoilers is particularly rewarding here (if you haven’t seen the film trailer yet, DON’T!).

Thanks to a film adaptation starring Ryan Gosling, this novel is getting a second life. My honest advice: read it first. Even the best adaptations compress. A 156-minute film can't do everything a novel does, and this is a novel that earns its length.

One strong recommendation: get the audiobook. The narrator, Ray Porter, is exceptional, and there's an element of the story that works better in audio than on the page. I’m not surprised that it sold over two million copies in audio format alone.

Just be warned: This is a book people finish at 2 AM and immediately want to tell someone about. [Liberty]

• 📔👨‍🚀 Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

4. The Everything Store : What Relentless Actually Looks Like

Brad Stone’s The Everything Store is the definitive account of Amazon’s rise, and it remains one of the best business books of the past two decades. Stone traces the company from a garage in Bellevue, Washington, through its transformation into a force that reshaped retail, cloud computing, and the infrastructure of the internet itself. What makes the book work is that Stone never loses sight of the human being at the center. Jeff Bezos emerges as brilliant, demanding, occasionally cruel, and utterly relentless.

That last word is not accidental: Bezos originally wanted to call the company Relentless, and if you type relentless.com into your browser today it still redirects to Amazon. He chose Amazon because it started with ‘A’. Even the naming was strategic.

The book is full of nuggets like that. One of my favorites is the origin of AWS, which began as a solution to Amazon’s own infrastructure headaches. The company needed a way for internal teams to build services without constant coordination, so they developed simple building blocks that could be combined and recombined. Then someone realized that if Amazon needed this, other companies probably did too. What started as an internal fix became one of the most profitable businesses in history.

Even if you have no particular interest in Amazon, the book is worth reading because it’s fundamentally about belief, vision, and relentless problem-solving. Bezos has a line I think about often: many things will change in ten years, but no customer is ever going to ask for slower delivery or higher prices. So he built everything around the things that wouldn’t change. Stone captures both the power of that thinking and its costs. When I was writing The Founders, this book served as a model for what I was trying to do: tell a business story with narrative drive, blend strategy and character, and make the reader feel like they’re watching history unfold. It’s a high bar, and I return to it often. [Jimmy]

• 📙 The Everything Store by Brad Stone

5. McCartney 3,2,1: Sixty Years of Familiarity Dissolved

You already know these songs. Or at least you think you do.

Rick Rubin’s premise is simple: sit Paul McCartney down at a mixing board, pull up the master tapes for many of his best songs, and prove that you don’t know them as well as you think. He isolates the individual tracks: first the full mix, then layer by layer until there’s nothing left but McCartney’s bass, or the vocal harmonies, or some detail that’s been hiding underneath the arrangement for six decades. Songs you’ve heard five hundred times suddenly sound fresh.

One thing that surprised me was the bass, how rich a character it is, and how much it adds to these compositions.

McCartney came to it by accident. Nobody in the band wanted to be the bass player after their original bassist left, so Paul got stuck with the job. He approached it without the habits and constraints of most bassists, bringing melodic instinct to an instrument that was too often restrained to rhythm duties. He often showed up to the studio with nothing written down, no plan, and just figured it out on the spot. His bass wasn’t just keeping time, it was playing counterpoint, having a conversation with the rest of the song.

Rick Rubin mostly just listens. He asks good questions, but his method is the same as the show's: strip everything away and see what's actually there. Look for the load-bearing ideas underneath it all.

Six episodes, 30 minutes each. I enjoyed every second. [Liberty]

• 📺 McCartney 3,2,1 (2021, Hulu)

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1. The Defiant Ones : When Taste Becomes an Empire

HBO’s The Defiant Ones is a four-part documentary that has been a longtime favorite of mine because it does something rare: it treats the business story and the personal story as inseparable. It’s about two people who probably shouldn’t have become partners: Jimmy Iovine, a working-class kid from Brooklyn who talked his way into recording studios, and Dr. Dre, a quiet perfectionist from Compton who heard sounds nobody else could hear. The series traces their parallel journeys through decades of American music, from Iovine engineering records for John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen to Dre inventing the sonic template for West Coast hip-hop, until their paths finally converge in the creation of Beats Electronics and its eventual $3 billion sale to Apple in 2014.

I’ve watched it more times than I can count. Part of what draws me back is the underdog element. Neither Iovine nor Dre came from wealth or connections. They built everything from scratch through taste, persistence, and an almost unreasonable belief in their own ears. But the deeper reason it speaks to me is that I spent years trying to tell a similar kind of story in The Founders, one that centered on a partnership between two very different people, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, and how that partnership created something neither could have built alone. Watching Iovine and Dre, you see the mechanics of creative collaboration up close: how two people with different gifts learn to trust each other, how they divide labor and share credit, and how the partnership itself becomes an engine. Business building is a fundamentally human exercise, and this documentary captures that truth better than most.

To me, what makes the series linger is its honesty about how success actually works. You see the creative risks and the commercial calculations, the artistic vision and the deal-making, all tangled together in ways that resist easy lessons. You also see how much of it comes down to chance. Dre discovered Eminem because Iovine played him a tape — a demo Eminem had handed to Interscope staffers at the 1997 Rap Olympics in LA. That moment changed both of their lives, and it happened almost randomly. The series is full of such turns, reminders that talent and persistence matter but so does luck, and that the people who build enduring things are usually the ones humble enough to recognize the difference. [Jimmy]

• 📺 The Defiant Ones (2017)

2. Your Roommate’s Genes Might Be Shaping Your Gut Bacteria

You’ve heard that your gut microbiome is shaped by your diet, your medications, your genetics. Here’s something less obvious: it may also be shaped by the genetics of whoever you live with.

A study published last December in Nature Communications ran an experiment that’s impossible to do in humans. They took over 4,000 genetically distinct rats, put them on identical diets, assigned them random cage-mates, and mapped the relationship between each animal’s DNA and its gut bacteria. The controlled conditions stripped out the usual confounds, and what remained were genes and proximity.

Genes don’t pass between individuals. But microbes do. Certain genes favor certain bacteria and those microorganisms spread through close contact. So your roommate’s genome is quietly shaping your internal ecosystem, and yours is shaping theirs. When the researchers added these indirect genetic effects to their model, the estimated total genetic influence on the microbiome increased by four to eight times for the gene-microbe links they identified.

Evergreen reminder: Rats are not humans. Translation is not guaranteed. But it’s worth digging further.

We tend to think of our genetics as a private matter: risks and tendencies that belong to us alone. This study suggests genetic influences on biology might ripple outward through social networks, without anyone’s DNA changing. If it holds in humans, our best estimates of how much genes shape disease risk have been systematically underestimated, because they never accounted for the other people in the room. [Liberty]

• 🦠🔬 Nature Communications paper

3. Gödel, Escher, Bach : Your Head Will Hurt (In a Good Way)

When he was fourteen, Douglas Hofstadter stumbled across a small, slim book in his local library: Gödel’s Proof by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman. For some strange reason, the book permanently imprinted itself in his brain. Nearly two decades later, Hofstadter eventually caved and sat down to write a short pamphlet in the same spirit. What emerged was Gödel, Escher, Bach, a 777-page epic on language, art, music, and the nature of consciousness. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and become maybe the most unlikely bestseller in history.

Be warned, your head will hurt at times. GEB is a wild ride: incredibly experimental, cerebral, and complex. It doesn’t just explain strange loops, it keeps building little ones under your feet, until you start to feel the idea in your bones. That said, the sheer fun that Hofstadter exhibits page-to-page is so intensely unique, intoxicatingly enjoyable that you don’t even care your head is hurting. It’s one of the rare nonfiction books that captures the vitality of fiction; hell, surpasses the vitality of most fiction.

Funnily enough, similar to Hofstadter’s origin story, I came across GEB on my father’s bookshelf late in my teens. Something about the strange name and strange cover just called out to me. I picked it up, started reading, and physically could not put it down. I still remember where I was when I read it. It’s that kind of book. GEB has since been a kind of personal North Star of mine; both in terms of what I read and what I hope to one day write. It changed my perception of what I thought a book could be. Whatever your final verdict on it, Gödel, Escher, Bach will permanently imprint itself in your brain, just like Gödel’s Proof did for Hofstadter, I can promise you that. [Dylan]

• 📙 Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter

4. Counterpart : A/B Testing the Whole Earth

Counterpart was cancelled after two seasons, largely because it was “a very male show” and Starz was trying to attract more women at the time (Starz’s COO admitted it in an interview). I wouldn’t quite put it up there with Deadwood in the pantheon of shows that shouldn’t have been cancelled, but it’s strong enough to deserve a much wider audience than it got.

The premise has the bones of old-school sci-fi: two parallel Earths, split apart in 1987 during an East German experiment gone wrong. They started identical, but have been diverging ever since, which means somewhere on the other side, there's a version of you that made different choices. Anyone with a scientific mindset will love the idea of A/B testing the whole planet!

There’s one portal between the two worlds, but it’s kept secret. There’s diplomacy and intrigue between the two sides, a kind of inter-dimensional Cold War. The dual protagonists, both played by J.K. Simmons (Whiplash!), work for the Office of Interchange (OI). One actor playing two versions of himself could’ve been a gimmick. It isn’t.

The show’s real topic isn’t geopolitics. It’s the question of who you’d have become if things had gone differently, and whether you could forgive that other version of yourself. [Liberty]

• 📺 Counterpart (2017-2019)

5. The Lover : My Fictional Character's Favorite Book

I’m about a dozen chapters into my first novel, and naturally I asked Claude for its opinion of my story. But I went further and eventually asked it what my main character’s favorite movies, music... and books, would be. I was surprised by how many things on the list I didn’t even recognize. So I asked: if I were to only read one, what would it be? The Lover, by Marguerite Duras. How I came to read this book still boggles my mind — I probably never would have picked it up myself, and I can’t think of a person in my life who might have recommended it to me. But I gave it a whirl, and what a reward it was.

The Lover is Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical novel about a teenage girl and an older man in colonial Vietnam. The circumstances are categorically off limits by today’s standards. What’s most striking is that the book is not drenched in transgression but grief. Not grief over what happened, but over the fact that it ended. Duras refuses to deliver a verdict (like Nabokov’s Lolita, another book that withholds the verdict you came looking for). She has a gorgeous ability to weave narrative into a stream of consciousness exploration of memory. The effect is a montage of moments and feelings that dance across the protagonist’s timeline. While the devil lives in the details, so does the divine.

Meanwhile, our culture sends wildly contradictory signals: a booming sex industry on one side, and plummeting fertility rates on the other. Something doesn’t seem right. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that while modern culture is obsessed with sex, it seems to have completely forgotten about love. [Jean-Marc]

• 📘 The Lover by Marguerite Duras

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1. The Poisoner in Chief : When America Lost Its Mind

Stephen Kinzer’s 2019 investigation of Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA’s post-World War II mission to achieve mind control through the MK-Ultra program is one of the most haunting books I’ve ever read. Kinzer draws on declassified materials to reconstruct how Gottlieb—a stuttering, club-footed chemist who meditated, practiced Zen, and loved folk dancing—led the most notorious program in CIA history.

MK-Ultra is mostly known for LSD, but the full scope was far uglier. Gottlieb’s team experimented with mescaline, barbiturates, heroin, scopolamine, and other drugs in combinations meant to break down psychological resistance. They funded sensory deprivation research, extreme electroshock therapy, drug-induced comas, and weeks-long isolation. Over two decades, these experiments ran through universities, prisons, and hospitals across the United States, often on people unaware they were subjects. Many were permanently damaged, and others died. Among them: Frank Olson, an Army scientist working with the CIA who was drugged without his knowledge and plunged to his death from a NYC hotel window nine days later.

One of the most disturbing lessons driven home is how easily Cold War fear justified almost any action Gottlieb and his associates undertook. Normal ethical reasoning was suspended. But perhaps most disconcerting is that the very bureaucracy supposedly designed to prevent such ethical breaches essentially enabled atrocity at every turn. Gottlieb didn’t and couldn’t have acted alone; he had sign-off from CIA director Allen Dulles, protection from oversight, and extensive cooperation from doctors, universities, hospitals, and law enforcement.

Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” finds its American chapter here. MK-Ultra caused widespread human suffering while being led by smart, mission-driven people with the full backing of the US government. Virtually no one was held accountable. Ultimately, the program failed completely, never achieving its intended goals.

The book leaves the reader with far more questions than answers. Are we any better prepared today to prevent such institutional runaway — or are we less prepared? [Chris]

• 📘 Poisoner in Chief by Stephen Kinzer

2. ‘Exercise’ Without Moving (Magic? No, Sauna)

Buried in Finnish epidemiological data is a simple activity with numbers that would make most drug trials jealous: men who used a sauna 4–7 times per week were 40% less likely to die from any cause over a 20-year follow-up, compared to men who went once a week. Same cohort, different paper: 66% lower risk of dementia.

Not bad for sitting in a wooden box.

The numbers are dose-dependent and they held up after adjusting for age, fitness, activity levels, alcohol, smoking, socioeconomic status, and pre-existing conditions.

The study is the Kuopio Ischemic Heart Disease (KIHD) Risk Factor Study: 2,315 middle-aged men, tracked for over two decades, published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2015. It’s the single most important piece of sauna research to date, and Rhonda Patrick’s comprehensive primer on FoundMyFitness is probably the most accessible overview of the broader science.

What makes the data less surprising is the mechanism. During a sauna session, your heart rate can climb to 150 bpm and cardiac output jumps 60–70%. Your body activates heat shock proteins, BDNF (the same growth factor exercise triggers for new neurons), and anti-inflammatory pathways. Your heart can’t tell the difference between a sauna and a moderate jog. It’s not relaxation doing the work, it’s hormesis, the same controlled-stress principle behind exercise. 🫀

Caveats worth mentioning: the KIHD data is observational, not a randomized trial, and it’s drawn almost entirely from Finnish men. “People healthy enough to sauna frequently tend to be healthier” is a real confound that the adjustments may not fully eliminate. But the biological mechanisms are plausible, the dose-response relationship is clean, and smaller interventional studies keep pointing the same direction.

If you have access to a sauna, use it. It’s one of the lowest-effort, highest-return health practices available. [Liberty]

• 🔬 Rhonda Patrick’s Sauna Primer (FoundMyFitness)

• 📄 Laukkanen et al. (2015), JAMA Internal Medicine

3. Disneyland Handcrafted : 160 Acres, One Year, and a Dream

I'm no Disney fanatic, but as a documentary filmmaker, I love a great story, and Disneyland Handcrafted is exactly that. The documentary covers the year leading up to Disneyland's opening, and the origin story is irresistible: Walt Disney converting a dusty 160-acre stretch of orange groves southeast of Los Angeles into a theme park unlike anything that existed before. In just one year.

The film likely would not have been made if not for a chance discovery of a stash of 16mm film reels stored away in the Disney archives, unseen for decades. Academy Award–nominated filmmaker Leslie Iwerks — whose grandfather, Ub Iwerks, was the co-creator and original animator of Mickey Mouse — directed the film, cataloging and processing this footage into a cinéma vérité portrayal stitched together by narration and audio interviews of the artists, engineers, builders, and landscape architects who brought the park to life. The resulting images are stunning — a tapestry of time-lapse photography, 16mm shots, and aerial footage. On the construction site, there were no project managers, no blueprints, and barely a plan. Instead, Disney conjured the park from his mind, and workers were expected to solve problems and execute without delay (or at least, that’s the film’s narrative).

That Disney turned orange groves into the template for every theme park on Earth in just twelve months still defies belief. The footage of workers hammering, tinkering, and molding the entire theme park by hand is a reminder that nothing will be able to replace your creative aspirations and dreams. [Taylor]

• 🎬 Disneyland Handcrafted (2026)

4. Patriot : The Best (Funny) Spy Show Nobody Watched

The premise of Patriot sounds like a dozen other spy thrillers: CIA officer John Tavner goes undercover at a Milwaukee industrial piping firm. The job is a cover for a Luxembourg operation to prevent Iran from going nuclear. What you actually get is something closer to a Coen Brothers absurdist comedy stretched into ten episodes, where every mission spirals into a chain reaction of misfortune, layered with genuine melancholy (I’ve seen the show described as: sad spies).

Here's what makes it special. Tavner is falling apart. He's depressed, he's got PTSD from a previous job gone wrong, and his coping mechanism is performing folk songs at open mic nights that narrate his covert missions in startling detail (he’s past the point of caring about operational security 😬).

Michael Dorman, a New Zealand–born actor and musician, performed all the show’s original folk songs, which were largely written by show creator Steven Conrad. They're genuinely good, and add interior life to a genre that usually lacks it.

The production is impeccable. Prague stands in for Luxembourg and Chicago for Milwaukee, and the vibe is more Le Carré than Bourne. Kurtwood Smith and Terry O'Quinn play it with total commitment.

Amazon barely promoted it and quietly cancelled it after two seasons. It has a small cult following, and the kind of gap between quality and audience that this OSV Field Notes exists to close. [Liberty]

• 📺 Patriot (2017, Prime Video)

5. Design as Art : Why a Butcher's Sign Can Be a Masterpiece

In my quest to read more on Art and Design, I recently picked up Design as Art by Bruno Munari.

Originally published in 1966, it’s a collection of short, witty essays where Munari, once described by Picasso as “the new Leonardo,” lays out his ideas on visual, graphic, and industrial design, and the role they play in the objects we use every day.

From the very start, Munari pulls you in with his famous useless machines - delicate hanging assemblages of lightweight geometric forms, painted on both sides, that drift and rotate with the slightest movement of air. While they seem simple, even randomly built, they are anything but. There is a harmonic mathematical relationship between all the parts that make up their beauty.

Art disguised as a toy, engineering disguised as art.

The real argument of the book is bigger than any single invention. Munari believed art and daily life should never be separated:

“There should be no such thing as art divorced from life, with beautiful things to look at and hideous things to use... Anyone who uses a properly designed object feels the presence of an artist who has worked for him, bettering his living conditions and encouraging him to develop his taste and sense of beauty.”

In 1966, that was a radical position. In 2026, surrounded by objects designed to be disposable, it reads like a rebuke and an invitation. [Atman]

• 📙 Design as Art by Bruno Munari (1966)

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1. Generation Kill : Warrior Subculture, Seen From the Passenger Seat

Evan Wright, a Rolling Stone reporter, was embedded with the U.S. Marines’ 1st Reconnaissance Battalion during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He wrote a sharp, vivid book about it, which David Simon and Ed Burns (best known for The Wire) adapted into a 7-part HBO miniseries.

It’s one of the rare war stories that nails the subculture of elite frontline units. When a group of men live on top of each other 24/7 in a combat zone, they grow a dialect, a moral code, their own gallows humor, and a way of moving through the world that’s almost its own species. The show doesn't explain this culture to you. It just drops you into it.

Part of why it works is the obsessive craft. They went to unusual lengths to ensure authenticity. Rudy Reyes, one of the real Marines, plays himself. Other Marine veterans served as consultants/advisers. You can feel the difference. And then there’s something you might not expect from a ‘serious war series’: humor. Physical comedy, hilarious banter, ‘hurry up and wait’ absurdity of military life, bureaucratic insanity, and the disconnect between those making decisions and those executing them.

Most war stories are made to help civilians understand war. This one feels like it was made for the people who lived it, and that's exactly why it hits harder for everyone else. Reportedly, real Marines said the dialogue was toned down for TV because the uncut version sounded too insane to be believable.

I almost never hear Generation Kill mentioned anymore, which is bonkers to me, because it's one of the best miniseries ever made. It figured out something most war stories can't: how to be funny and devastating without choosing between them. [Liberty]

• 📺 Generation Kill (2008, HBO)

2. The Century of the Self : How Freud's Nephew Weaponized Psychology

In 2002, Adam Curtis released a four-part documentary on Freud’s American nephew. That may sound a little dull or arcane, but it’s one of the most gripping and prescient documentaries I’ve ever seen. The Century of the Self follows Edward Bernays, propagandist-in-chief at the Committee on Public Information (established in 1917 to drum up support for American intervention in World War I), as he uses psychoanalytic theory to wage “psychological warfare” (his words) on democracy itself.

Curtis takes us on a wild ride through wartime propaganda, the co-option of ‘60s counterculture, CIA-funded psychiatric experiments, and focus-group politics, all through the lens of unbelievable archival footage from the BBC. The music is fantastic, Curtis has a voice you could listen to for weeks on end, and the script is so good I’ve read it on its own.

Oh, and it’s free on YouTube. [Dylan]

3. A Simple Plan : How Good People Talk Themselves Into Evil

Sam Raimi has been back in the news recently with the gonzo desert-island thriller Send Help (very fun, go see it in the cinema). Best known for directing the still-influential Evil Dead movies and the equally influential 2000s Spider-Man trilogy, Raimi is beloved among cinephiles for his dark humor and kid-in-a-candy-store directing style, defined by extravagant camera moves, extreme close-ups, and gore. So much gore.

His 1998 thriller A Simple Plan was a blind spot for me, and occupies a curious place in his filmography. A swing for critical prestige in the vein of Fargo (Raimi was an early collaborator of the Coen Brothers), it sees Raimi abandon many of his favorite moves in favor of a sober, tragic account of three blue-collar Midwesterners - two of them brothers - who stumble across a duffel bag stuffed with cash and must decide how far they're willing to go to keep it. It's hardly a spoiler to say things turn bloody.

Great performances all around, particularly from Billy Bob Thornton as Jacob, whose childlike innocence proves ripe for corruption by his seemingly upstanding younger brother (Bill Paxton).

A great thriller on its own merits, and for anyone interested in the art of directing, a compelling example of a filmmaker putting away the toys to achieve something stylistically different. The ease with which ordinary people convince themselves they're still good while doing terrible things can be darker than gore. [Ed]

• 🎬 A Simple Plan (1998)

4. The Mythmaker and the Mechanic: The Operators Behind the Legends

I was in the library this weekend and came across William C. Rempel’s The Gambler, about the exploits of ‘penniless dropout’ Kirk Kerkorian. He was once MGM’s controlling shareholder, and David Senra did an episode on him back in 2019. Since I’ve become a bit of a media history fanatic, I checked it out.

The Gambler is a fast read, a whirlwind tour through the highs and lows of Kirk’s life. But often it’s not the main player who’s most interesting. In 2004, Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote a short profile on Kerkorian’s right-hand man at MGM Studios: Alex Yemenidjian1. Alex’s story is no less entertaining than Kirk’s. The son of a shoemaker, born in Buenos Aires to an Armenian family, he moved to the U.S. as a teenager, founded an accounting firm, and got introduced to Kerkorian.

Two days after their meeting, Kirk asked Alex to help him sell MGM. What was supposed to be a six-month project turned into a career. Eventually, he became chairman and CEO.

That’s the kind of detail that makes a biography worth reading. There’s a lot of mythmaking around larger-than-life characters. But the person one degree removed, the one who actually made the machinery turn, that’s where the magic is. The Gambler is Kirk’s story, but it keeps gesturing at a whole ecosystem of operators, dealmakers, and immigrants who built modern Hollywood from the side entrance. [Rohan]

• 📕 The Gambler: How Penniless Dropout Kirk Kerkorian Became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History by William C. Rempel

5. My Analog Journal : Music Exploration Without the Algorithm

There's a YouTube channel with over a million subscribers where people watch someone play vinyl records in a plant-filled room. No flashy transitions, no club lighting. Just turntables and the desire to have a good time.

The origin story is perfect: Zag Erlat (Istanbul-born, London-based) started uploading mixes in late 2017, after inheriting his grandfather’s record collection and falling down a Turkish psych rabbit hole. It’s old-school vinyl crate-digging serendipity as a guided tour.

One comment became the thesis: “I don’t understand a single word, but I love this music.” In an era when music discovery has been optimized for short attention spans and outsourced to machines, being blindsided by something you had no reason to seek out and that no algorithm would have recommended is deeply satisfying.

Pick an episode in a genre you don’t know and hit play. Your next favorite genre may be out there: Japanese City Pop, Brazilian grooves, Soviet jazz, Thai luk thung, Afrobeat… The best part might be the comments: thousands of people swapping deep-cut recommendations like it’s a global listening party. It feels human in a way most music discovery doesn’t anymore. [Liberty]

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1. Yesterday : A Stress Test for the Greatest Songbook Ever Written

I recently read Ian Leslie’s John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs. It’s a detailed exploration of the Lennon-McCartney partnership through the songs themselves, not the myth, not the mop-tops, but the craft first. I loved it. And it made me want to rewatch Yesterday.

The premise is simple: What if The Beatles were suddenly erased from history... except for a struggling musician who remembers. In sci-fi speak, the songs become “found technology” and he starts performing them as his own.

But here’s what the film is really asking: if you ripped these songs out of their context—no 1960s, no Beatlemania, no cultural mythology—would they still land?

It’s also a lovely Richard Curtis rom-com (Love Actually, About Time), directed by Danny Boyle with his usual visual energy. There are many good laughs (that L.A. agent steals every scene she’s in). Himesh Patel performs all the songs himself, and he sells it. He’s not doing Beatles karaoke, he’s building on the essence of the songs. And Lily James is charming enough that you genuinely root for her too.

I watched it with my kids a few days ago. They loved it. I think I’m raising Beatles fans now. Mission accomplished. [Liberty]

• 🎬 Yesterday (2019)

• 📘 John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie

2. Walter Lord Interviewed 63 Titanic Survivors. The Result is a Masterpiece.

Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember might seem like an odd recommendation. The Titanic story has been told so many times, in so many ways, that it can feel like cultural furniture, something you already know without ever having studied it. The spoiler is common knowledge. The ship sinks.

But Lord, writing in 1955, found a way to make the familiar feel urgent. He interviewed 63 survivors, tracked down letters and diaries, and assembled a narrative that moves with the pace and precision of a thriller. The book runs barely 200 pages, yet it contains more lived detail than films ten times its length. Lord understood that the power of the Titanic story lies in its particulars: the specific conversations, the small decisions, the moments when ordinary people discovered what they were made of. (Readers of my book The Founders will know I’m a sucker for anyone willing to do the unglamorous work of interviewing as many living witnesses as possible, and Lord was obsessive about it.)

You feel the disaster from the inside: the confusion, the strange calm, the bravery and cowardice existing side by side, all rendered without sentimentality. Lord grasped something essential about historical writing: a story everyone thinks they know can still yield new truths if you ask different questions and do the hard work of finding people who were actually there. The reporting makes the prose possible. It remains a model for how to write about the past, and one of my all-time favorite reads. [Jimmy]

• 📘🚢 A Night to Remember by Walter Lord (1955)

3. Lunch Break Literature (Big Ideas, Small Packages)

2025 was the year I fell in love with short stories, ranging from 10-minute reads to a couple of hours. That format hits the spot for packaging thought-provoking premises into very digestible portions.

One of my favorite volumes of all time is Stories of Your Life, by Ted Chiang. It’s best known for the titular Story of Your Life, which was turned into the movie Arrival by Denis Villeneuve, but my personal favorite (as long as you’re game for a bleak tale) is Hell is the Absence of God, which conjured up visuals I have not been able to forget since (The premise: angels appear on Earth regularly, performing miracles and causing destruction with equal indifference. Heaven is real and visible — and not everyone gets in.).

Many great novelists have collections of short stories: Hemingway, Twain, and Bradbury, for example. You'll finish one on a lunch break and think about it for weeks. [Jameson]

• 📘 Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

• 📕 The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

• 📗 The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain

• 📙 Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

4. Dealt : The World's Greatest Card Mechanic Is Blind

What does it take to become the best in the world at something? In Richard Turner’s case: 14-16 hours of practice a day, for decades. He shuffles cards while eating, while sleeping, while doing other things I won’t mention here (according to his wife Kim). He named his son Asa Spades (get it?). He’s done one particular card move somewhere between 50 and 60 million times.

Oh, and he’s completely blind 👀

Dealt is a documentary about Turner, widely considered the greatest card mechanic alive. “Card mechanic” is the technical term for someone who can manipulate a deck with perfect control. It’s the vocabulary of cheaters, though Turner uses it for performance. The film takes you inside a subculture most people don’t know exists: a world of “touch analysts,” obsessive practitioners, and sleight-of-hand purists who can tell the difference between 43 and 44 cards by weight alone.

But what makes the documentary genuinely moving isn’t the tricks, it’s Turner himself. He refuses to be “the blind magician.” For years, he refused to use traditional aids like braille, a cane, or guide dog. He doesn’t want to be the best for a blind guy. He just wants to be the best. The tension between that pride and the reality of his condition gives the film an emotional core that elevates it beyond a simple profile.

Teller, of Penn & Teller, said it best: “Dealt knocked me dead.” Same. [Liberty]

• ♥️♠️♣️♦️ Dealt (2017)

5. Four Hundred Meters on Mars: AI Takes the Wheel

On December 8 and 10, 2025, something quietly incredible happened: the commands sent to NASA’s Perseverance Rover were written by an AI. Specifically, by Anthropic’s Claude.

JPL engineers fed it years of accumulated rover-driving wisdom, and it plotted a four-hundred-meter path through a field of Martian rocks, writing commands in Rover Markup Language (yes, that’s a real thing). The AI analyzed overhead imagery, strung together ten-meter segments, and even critiqued its own work before submitting.

When engineers ran the plan through simulations, modeling over 500,000 variables, they found only minor tweaks were needed. The rover drove the path successfully.

Four hundred meters isn't far, but it's a start. What strikes me most isn't that Claude can do this, but what it enables next.

JPL estimates the AI cuts route-planning time in half. Less tedious manual work means more drives, more scientific data, more discoveries. And this is just a test run. Autonomous AI could eventually help probes explore Europa or Titan, destinations where signal delays stretch to hours and harsh environments cut robotic lifespans short. This was a warm-up lap. The real race is just starting. [Liberty]

• 🛰️ The first AI-planned drive on another planet.

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