This week: What endures, and what keeps it going? A game creator’s freedom to be strange, a century-old tavern that keeps finding a way, a Marine memoir that changes how we judge human endurance, the surprisingly familiar panic over teddy bears, and Cormac McCarthy on the ancient mind behind our newest ideas.

1. Death Stranding : Who Gets to Make Games This Strange?

Death Stranding drops you into an America that has come apart. Rain ages whatever it touches. Spectral figures drift over the landscape. You play as Sam Porter Bridges (mo-capped by Norman Reedus), a courier tasked with moving packages across the fractured landscape. The game world is littered with strange things: babies in jars which connect to the ghostly plane, eccentric characters with insane style.

And yet, for all its weirdness, it’s a game about belonging and rebuilding.

Most big-budget games are built by committee to minimize risk. Death Stranding feels different. It’s barely a game (some people have called it ‘a walking simulator’). But the cutscenes are marvelously done, and the world feels rich. Maybe it’s a relic of a different time, when games could be AAA in scope, and be philosophical.

And I couldn’t help but wonder about the game’s creator Hideo Kojima, who has spent his career trying to make bold games like these. How many creators get the freedom to make something this strange?

Death Stranding came out in 2019. Just four years earlier, Kojima had been kicked out of his longtime company Konami, where he had turned the Metal Gear game series into a world-class IP. The times were changing. As The New Yorker reports, free-to-play games had remade the Japanese market, and Konami was turning toward these cheap, high-margin mobile games. Kojima disagreed. “If you’re only focussed on the profits immediately in front of you,” Kojima said, “the times will leave you behind.”

So he established a new independent studio, also called Kojima Productions. And he found a willing patron in Sony, to back his next game which became Death Stranding.

Kojima’s story is a microcosm of what’s been happening in entertainment. Capital is betting on the tried and true, while bold swings are pushed aside. As one of Kojima’s colleagues said: “Why risk producing pricey and sophisticated games in an age that favors indulgence in shallow, convenient entertainment?”

This is a question consistently on my mind. And while I ponder on it, I’ll continue to be immersed in Kojima’s brilliant world. [Rohan]

• 🎮 Death Stranding, Kojima Productions, 2019

• 📰 “Why Did Hideo Kojima Leave Konami?” by Simon Parkin, The New Yorker, Oct 19, 2015

• 📰 “The Blockbuster Video Game That Wants to ‘Make America Whole Again’” by Louisa Thomas, The New Yorker, Nov 20, 2019

2. History Doesn’t Pour Itself

I couldn’t afford World Series tickets. So last week, I ventured half a mile from the stadium and watched Game 1 from the beer garden of a 102-year-old family business where the walls are covered in hand-painted murals of monkeys holding steins, a black cat arching its back — a German symbol for a hangover — and the phrase Trink’ dein glas heute ohne sorgen: drink your glass today without worry.

They installed a giant screen for the packed beer garden. Free Jäger shots were handed out for every Brewers run. It was the biggest party Kegel’s Inn has thrown, probably since the repeal of Prohibition. And it was, improbably, still standing to throw it.

In 1924, an Austrian immigrant named John Kegel opened a soda pop parlor in West Allis. That was the cover. Inside, it was a speakeasy complete with beer brewed in the basement. John’s wife Anna worked the room with flasks tucked in her jacket, slipping homemade whiskey into customers’ “sodas.” On May 1, 1927, state agents raided the place and busted Anna with “several ounces of intoxicating liquor.” An expensive lawyer, a little luck — and in 1929, Wisconsin repealed its state Prohibition enforcement law. Kegel’s was spared.

Shortly before repeal went federal, John unveiled his real vision: a full restaurant with five apartments upstairs, billed as the largest tavern built since the return of beer. It opened August 26, 1933. German-born artist Peter Gries started the murals that same year. They took more than seven years to finish. Nearly everything inside — the hand-carved woodwork, the stained glass, the mahogany bar — is still original. In 2010, it earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places.

Four generations carried it forward. The current steward, Julian Kegel, had no plan to come back at all — he left Wisconsin in 2006 to guide in the Alaska wilderness and figured he’d only return for holidays. He took over in 2016. His philosophy on carrying a century-old family business: “Don’t screw this up.” Kegel’s survived Prohibition, wars, downturns, and COVID. The chances of a business reaching 100 years are less than one percent. Even fewer stay in the family the entire time. Julian infused innovative ideas to get them through the pandemic, including a drive-thru fish fry. This year, the World Series watch parties infused five nights of revenue into one of the region’s oldest German haunts.

Their tagline says it best: “History doesn’t pour itself.” [Taylor]

3. With the Old Breed : How Much Can a Person Take?

I’ve read a lot of wartime memoirs. Some really stand out, and this one stands out among those.

E. B. Sledge had a naturalist’s eye. He loved watching birds as a boy and became a biology professor after the war. His memoir, With the Old Breed, covers his service as a Marine in the war against Japan, on Peleliu and Okinawa.

That scientific background shows up in the prose. Sledge said he learned his writing style from composing scientific papers, where precision mattered. Not that the writing is dry. He’s a great witness of the incredible situations he finds himself in, and of the men around him. We live it through him. On Peleliu, he describes the thirst and the difficulty of digging into hard coral as artillery fire is raining down around him and rotting bodies lie unburied in the tropical heat. The physical conditions become part of your understanding of every decision these men make.

He’s particularly good at conveying the accumulation. Shelling is terrifying, but it happens to someone who is already exhausted, sick with dysentery, whose skin is covered in sores, who has spent another night barely sleeping. Even between attacks, there’s little opportunity to recover. You begin to understand how a person’s world can shrink to finding somewhere to lie down and getting through the next few hours.

His affection for the Marines he served with runs through the book, along with his understanding of their limits. When men finally break under the strain, he doesn’t regard them as weak. And after you read what they’ve been through, you won’t either. [Liberty]

• 📘 With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by E. B. Sledge

4. Panic Patrol : When Teddy Bears Were a Threat

With the latest technological panic upon us, it’s a good time to revisit the moments when some new device or creation burst onto the scene and our fear got the better of us. Thankfully, you’re spared the digging by a site called the Panic Patrol Show.

They’ve created hilarious “case files” on the panics over teddy bears, bicycles, the Walkman, and artificial ice. Yes, even ice had its moment of outrage. In 1907, a Michigan minister warned that replacing dolls with teddy bears could lead to falling birthrates.

The creators use AI to produce convincing portrayals of the news segments that might have been: fake interviews with partisans on either side of a given debate over the gramophone or the teddy bear.

In their thesis statement, the Panic Patrol says this: “The fears featured in Panic Patrol often made sense to someone at the time. New technologies disrupt habits. Social changes threaten established norms. People worry about unintended consequences. Sometimes those fears prove justified. Sometimes they look ridiculous in hindsight.” This team has simply decided to amplify the absurdity, and in making us laugh, maybe make us think, too.

I found this a useful, funny antidote to the recent panic, and a reminder that the people who feared the bicycle and the teddy bear were not fools. They were just like us, just a century earlier. [Jimmy]

5. Cormac McCarthy and the Mind Before Words

“The Kekulé Problem” is one of my favourite essays. Cormac McCarthy published it in Nautilus a few years before he died, and it beautifully put into words something I had long believed: the real work of creativity happens in a place that language can’t go.

The title comes from the chemist August Kekulé. In 1865, stuck on the structure of benzene, he dozed off by the fire and dreamed of a snake seizing its own tail. He woke up understanding that the molecule was a ring. This story - the substance and symbolism of it - struck a deep chord within McCarthy. If the unconscious understood the problem well enough to solve it, then it clearly understands language. So why not just tell him? Why does the unconscious speak in images and symbols? In other words, why the snake?

His answer is that the unconscious has been running the animal for around two million years, and language only turned up about a hundred thousand years ago. The old system never learned to trust the newcomer. So it still speaks to us the way it always has, in pictures and dreams.

This hypothesis sounds like new-age, woo-adjacent nonsense until you investigate the history of not just artistic but scientific discovery. Mendeleev dreamed the periodic table. Otto Loewi dreamed the experiment that won him a Nobel Prize. Banting came up with insulin half asleep. Einstein, Tesla, Darwin, and Poincaré all described ideas arriving as visions or sudden flashes. McCarthy found his answer to the Kekulé problem while emptying a wastebasket.

The same year he published that essay, McCarthy sat down with David Krakauer in the library at the Santa Fe Institute, and in that conversation you can watch him wrestle with these ideas in real time.

There’s no shortage of books and advice on creativity. But given the heights he reached, perhaps Cormac McCarthy is a man whose answers, however speculative, we shouldn’t dismiss lightly. [Dylan]

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This week: swimming pools and suburban dread, a “computer-written” book with some fine print, what Kobe Bryant changed for Team USA, a sword that waits for the truth, and Wes Anderson’s handmade world of miniature hotels and beautiful pastries.

1. The Swimmer : Burt Lancaster Comes Apart (1968)

This is an odd, desperately sad slice of late 1960s ennui, adapted from John Cheever’s short story. Burt Lancaster plays Ned Merrill, a charming and handsome advertising executive who lives among the wealthy suburbanites of leafy Connecticut. We meet him at a friend’s beautiful house atop a beautiful hill overlooking the beautiful neighborhood. It is summer, and he wants to swim.

Ned concocts a plan. He will swim all the way to his home on the other side of the valley, using the pools of his neighbors like stepping stones. So off he goes, wearing nothing more than tight trunks and a plastered-on smile. At each pool he meets increasingly hostile acquaintances, revealing more about this unsettling, childlike man.

Released in 1968, the year after Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, The Swimmer contains the kernels of what would come to be known as the New Hollywood: a slippery editing style, psychological decay, and a rejection of conventional plot mechanics. At times these choices sit uneasily against the vestiges of Hollywood’s golden era (not least the overcooked orchestral score), but the film’s contradictions are held together by Lancaster.

He is extraordinary. This is an allegorical film, but he builds a character rather than a cipher at the center of it, allowing the early facade of movie-star charisma to crack and eventually crumble. [Ed]

• 🎬 The Swimmer (1968)

2. The First Book Ever Written by a Computer?

The cover is a loud shade of red, and it makes a big promise: The First Book Ever Written by a Computer. I recently found this relatively rare copy of The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed (Warner Books, 1984), a slim paperback of prose and poetry credited to “Racter,” a program running on a Z80 microcomputer with 64K of memory. That’s less memory than a single app icon can take up on your phone today.

The writing is strange and grammatically perfect. And it also doesn’t make a lot of sense. Racter likes to talk about lamb chops, electricity, and philosophy, often all in the same paragraph. In the introduction, programmer William Chamberlain asks a question that could have been written this week: What would prose look like if it didn’t depend on human experience at all? The book describes this as “fundamentally different from artificial intelligence programming, which tries to replicate human thinking.” According to the book, Racter could write original work without promptings from a human operator. Once it’s running, Chamberlain says, it’s “cooking by itself.”

Turns out the truth was a bit of a mystery. Researchers eventually concluded that the book was selected from a large amount of output (sound familiar today?) and shaped by templates (sound familiar today?) Chamberlain wrote himself. The original code has been lost. His co-creator, Thomas Etter, has mostly disappeared from the record.

The question of whether computers can write is older than most people tend to believe. In 1952, Christopher Strachey programmed a Ferranti Mark 1 to write absurd love letters. Racter came out three decades after that, and then the conversation stayed in the lab for another thirty years. Now it’s everywhere, and things are moving so fast that each week makes the last one feel like it’s long out of date.

Unearthing this book at a flea market this past weekend brought me all sorts of feelings, the familiar hope, the hype, and the fine print of a book that had largely been forgotten. But this book published almost four decades ago is asking the same questions that we’re talking about and debating today. [Taylor]

• 📘 The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed by Racter (1984; Internet Archive record)

3. The Redeem Team (2022) : What Kobe Changed

A friend once described my writing process as “method writing.” She meant it the way people mean method acting: the actor who doesn’t break character, even when the cameras stop rolling. I don’t go quite that far. But when I’m mid-book, I can become annoyingly single-minded. I read the subject, I watch the subject, I bore my friends with the subject.

So because I’m finishing a sports book at the moment, that means almost the entirety of my media consumption is in some way linked to sports. But this recommendation works for sports lovers and for those who unselfconsciously use the phrase “sportsball.” It’s called The Redeem Team, a Netflix documentary about the 2008 United States men’s Olympic basketball team. Four years earlier, in Athens, a group of NBA stars lost three games and came home with the bronze — a national embarrassment for the country where basketball was invented. The 2008 team, assembled by Jerry Colangelo and coached by Mike Krzyzewski, was built to make that right.

The film moves briskly, and I think it’s a vivid portrait of two things: what a coach can accomplish with a team, and the effect a single player can have on one. In this case, Coach K of Duke fame, and Lakers star Kobe Bryant. The film follows the athletes as they decide to play, contend with the difficulty of balancing it against their NBA commitments, and come to understand what motivates them to participate. It’s an inspiring look at Olympic competition at the highest level, and it also shows you why a team of stars does not necessarily make a team of winners.

I won’t spoil the best Kobe and Coach K moments, but I will say that even if you’re unfamiliar with the life and work of both men, you’ll learn a great deal watching this. You’ll see how a college coach could inspire them. And you’ll see how a player often tagged as aloof, selfish, or worse managed to push his high-achieving NBA colleagues to achieve even more. [Jimmy]

• 🎬 The Redeem Team (2022)

4. Mononoke : Where the Monster Isn’t the Villain

I found Mononoke the way I find most things these days, through an Instagram reel. Even though I’m not a horror person, I’m an anime person. So, I gave this one a shot and ended up binge-watching all twelve episodes last weekend.

Mononoke are spirits that latch onto human grief, guilt, anger and other dark emotions. The story begins with a medicine seller with gorgeously painted eyes wandering old Japan exorcising the mononoke. He does that using a curious sword which only leaves its sheath once it knows three things about the spirit: its Form, Truth, and Reason (I wish that were a rule for all weapons). So before anyone can be saved, someone has to confess.

A woman in a prison cell confesses to murdering her husband’s entire family. A pregnant woman takes a room at an inn already full of the spirits of children who want to be born. I used to think blood and gore would be the most horrifying part of horror. Here, the confessions and the secrets take you to dark, dizzying corners of human nature you’d rather avoid.

It satisfies my visual appetite too, like you’re watching an illustrated book come alive. The art borrows from very interesting sources: old Japanese woodblock prints, Noh theatre and… wait for it… Pattachitra paintings from the Indian states of West Bengal and Odisha!

The sword fascinated me, perhaps because of the man wielding it. He was not a typical monster hunter. He was a healer, a medicine seller. So, the killing of the monster happens after the truth has come out. The confession is the cure as well as the horror. [Aashisha]

• 📺 Mononoke (2007) by Kenji Nakamura

5. The Grand Budapest Hotel : Wes Anderson at Full Strength

I recently watched Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel with my kid. It’s such a fun film, though I have to warn you: Anderson’s style is a love-it-or-hate-it type of deal, so if you ever bounced off hard on one of his films before, this probably isn’t for you. It’s all of Wes Anderson’s idiosyncrasies packed tightly together.

But if it’s for you, it’s probably really for you. Ralph Fiennes is great as Gustave, the hotel’s concierge. I love when his elaborate manners break. The unexpected swearing is a big part of the fun.

I also love the handmade quality of everything. For one train-window shot, Ralph Fiennes and Tony Revolori were sitting on a little wheeled platform with a window frame, out in the snow. Everything is part of the world-building, from the multiple miniatures to the beautiful pastries.

And if, like me, you’ve seen this multiple times and want more, I recommend Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel. A beautiful coffee table book full of interviews, artwork, behind-the-scenes shots, and production design materials. Knowing how they did it is part of the fun. [Liberty]

• 🎬 The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

• 📘 The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel by Matt Zoller Seitz

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This week: familiar things, fresh eyes. New York through a painter’s camera, 26 years of change in the same Bach, a monster who deserves a hearing, an architecture book that makes you notice the room you’re sitting in, and a TED talk that makes getting lost in Wikipedia feel like time well spent.

1. Early Color : A Photographer’s Eye, a Painter’s Colors

I was hunting books in a Charleston thrift store when I noticed a stack of obscure art and photography books piled in the corner. My spidey-sense kicked in. Buried in the pile was a book whose cover immediately grabbed my attention — a photograph so layered with color and abstraction it looked more like a Rothko painting than a photograph. It was Early Color by Saul Leiter, published by Steidl in 2006. It was a signed first edition. I couldn’t have bought it fast enough.

Until this book was published, almost nobody outside a small circle of gallerists knew that Saul Leiter had been shooting color on the streets of New York since the late 1940s — decades before color photography was taken seriously as art. Leiter was a founding member of the New York School of Photography, a contemporary of Robert Frank and Diane Arbus, but his personal color work sat in boxes for half a century while he made his living shooting fashion for Harper’s Bazaar and Esquire. He was the son of a prominent Pittsburgh rabbi, expected to enter the rabbinate, who left home at 22 and was disowned by his father for choosing art over the Talmud.

His first love was painting — abstract watercolors that caught the attention of the Abstract Expressionists on 10th Street — and that painterly eye defined everything he shot. His photographs see New York through rain-streaked windows, snow-blurred intersections, and fields of solid color that dissolve into form if you slow down long enough to look. He once said he liked “things that are lost in a fuzz or in a mist.” Early Color was his first monograph, published when he was 82 years old. His gallerist said he went from making two or three sales a year to two or three sales a week.

The book was small enough, by Leiter’s own request, to fit on the table beside his bed. That it ended up in a thrift store in Charleston is the kind of thing Leiter, who spent a lifetime finding beauty in places nobody else was looking, would probably have appreciated. [Taylor]

📚 Read Early Color

• 📷 Saul Leiter Foundation

2. Glenn Gould’s Two Goldbergs, 26 Years Apart

Glenn Gould recorded Bach’s Goldberg Variations in 1955, when he was 22, and again in 1981, at 48. I love Bach. He tingles a part of my brain that most other composers don’t reach. While many other performers have recorded great Goldbergs, I find that Gould’s two versions talk to each other in a special way.

If you have five minutes, try listening to the opening Aria from each recording, one after the other. You rarely get to hear 26 years of change in someone quite so directly.

Before going back into the studio in 1981, Gould listened to his old recording for the first time in years. He still recognized his own technical fingerprints, but, as he told Tim Page: “I could not recognize or identify with the spirit of the person who made that recording.”

It’s a bit like the old saying that you can’t step into the same river twice, because it’s neither the same river nor the same person. The notes on the page hadn’t changed. But Gould had. And so have I over the years that I’ve been listening to these. At various times, I’ve preferred the youthful 1955 version or the more reflective 1981 one. [Liberty]

• 🎵 Goldberg Variations — 1955 recording (Spotify)

• 🎵 Goldberg Variations — 1981 recording (Spotify)

3. Frankenstein : Read the Creature’s Side of the Story

I read classic novels. A lot. Most of them are worth the read. But if you were to ask me “What books do you think everyone needs to read?” this one is on a very short list.

Film and stage adaptations have done a particular hack-job on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But no monster story I’ve come across has so much richness to offer.

If you’re picturing a flat-headed, lumbering, green mute with bolts sticking out of his neck, get rid of that image.

Frankenstein is one of the greatest stories of duality I’ve ever read. You have the reckless ambition of Victor, obsessed with being the first to understand how to create life. But the part almost every adaptation leaves out is the story of the monster. A being born into an uncaring world. With the innocence – and emotional control – of a toddler, but in the body of a super-soldier. He only wants acceptance, but because of his appearance no human gives him a chance to prove that he is worthy of love (except the blind De Lacey, who listens and offers help).

His descent into becoming a real monster comes only as a response to being utterly rejected by humanity.

You will not be prepared for the existential depth you get from a character that Hollywood most often treats as a mute or simple-minded abomination. The creature reads Paradise Lost and tries to understand whether he is more like Adam or Satan.

On top of all of that, Victor Frankenstein is a complex character. He is guilty in the sense that he created the monster, but he wrestles with his own guilt far more than any screen adaptation gives him credit for. In fact, the most beautiful aspect of the story, to me, is the conflict between two strong-willed beings, Frankenstein and his monster, whose incompatible goals drive them toward mutual destruction.

The Del Toro movie that came out in 2025 is the closest we’ve gotten to a faithful adaptation, but it still doesn’t come close to the depth that Mary Shelley created at 19 while on a rainy vacation.

I could soap-box on why this book is worth your time for much longer, but in the words of my childhood storytelling hero LeVar Burton, you don’t have to take my word for it. [Jameson]

• 📕 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

4. A Pattern Language : Why Some Places Feel Right

Think of a building that you love being in. Of a room you enjoy spending time in.

You can probably picture where you’d sit, how the light comes in, what you’d see through the window. Christopher Alexander and his collaborators spent years paying attention to things like these. Their 1977 book, A Pattern Language, gives you a vocabulary for understanding why a place works. How a lot of small decisions add up to a whole that clicks together.

For example, a memorable pattern is Light on Two Sides of Every Room. If you’re talking to someone with a bright window behind them, their face can disappear into shadow. Bringing daylight in from another direction softens that contrast, making it easier to see the small changes in their expression. As the authors put it: “The light on two sides allows people to understand each other.” It’s the kind of thing that once you know, you always notice. And I do find that the rooms that feel best have great light coming from multiple directions.

The book is about architecture, but that way of thinking transfers to other things. When something works, it’s worth asking what made it possible. Was it luck, or were there specific conditions you could recreate? Giving a pattern a name helps you recognize it elsewhere, share it with others, and use it again. You start building up a vocabulary for your own life. [Liberty]

• 📙 A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander and collaborators

5. The Life-Long Learner : The Talk I Watch Every January

Every year, usually in January, I watch a video that I’ve seen about a dozen times. It’s a TED talk by the former president of Wofford College, Ben Dunlap. It’s only about 20 minutes long, but it’s left an indelible impression on me, so much so that I return to it annually.

You should just watch the whole thing, because anything I write about it won’t do it justice. It’s one person’s impassioned plea for lifelong learning and curiosity. That can sound obvious, even annoyingly earnest. But Dunlap sells it, and he does it in a way that makes you want to learn everything under the sun.

The talk mixes his personal story with the stories of the other great, passionate learners he’s known throughout his life. Among them is Sandor Teszler, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who audited classes at Wofford well into his nineties. Dunlap met him there when Teszler was 90.

Dunlap is a master speaker, and he presents his thesis with conviction and pathos and drama and humor. Every time I watch it, I’m reminded of why I enjoy writing books or going down obscure historical rabbit holes. He revives the part of myself that I am too often self-conscious about; he makes me feel like it’s okay to lose myself in Wikipedia entries for a few hours.

It’s rare that one video stays with you this long, but this one has. Check it out, and then tell me you didn’t want to go read something afterward. [Jimmy]

• 📺 The Life-Long Learner — Bernie Dunlap (2007, 19 minutes)

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This week: eleven people and a crane bringing the Alien Queen to life, a 20-page fan letter Iggy Pop actually answered, a second opinion on Ari Emanuel’s favourite villain, a girl raised to distrust schools earning a Cambridge PhD, and dogs playing poker hanging beside a Frida Kahlo self-portrait in George Lucas’s museum.

1. Aliens Expanded : Five Hours Inside the Making of a Classic

I recently watched Aliens (1986) with my 12-year-old son (the extended version, with the sentry turrets!). Forty years later, James Cameron’s sequel still holds up remarkably well. If you haven’t seen it, you should check it out, of course, but what I want to recommend today is something else: Aliens Expanded (2024), a crowdfunded documentary by Ian Nathan that spends 282 minutes exploring how a 137-minute film was made.

Yes, almost five hours devoted to a single movie!

Nathan goes through the film scene by scene, with many of the people who worked on it: James Cameron, Sigourney Weaver, producer Gale Anne Hurd, Michael Biehn, Lance Henriksen, and many of the artists and technicians behind the sets, models, and creatures (sadly, Bill Paxton died in 2017). It’s great to meet the actors who play the marines and see how different they are from their characters.

I love the focus on why things were done a certain way. It’s an education in filmmaking.

One example: Cameron explains that the scene where Ripley enters the Alien Queen’s egg chamber came from a nightmare. He’d walked into a dark room and realized that the walls and ceiling were covered in wasps. If he moved, they’d attack. Cameron wanted Ripley and the audience to feel that same dread, so he slowed the scene down and stripped away the sound before revealing the Queen.

Then there’s the Alien Queen herself. Stan Winston’s team first tested the idea with a crude mock-up wrapped in black garbage bags. The finished creature was a 14-foot-tall puppet, suspended from a crane, with two stunt performers inside and nine more people operating its head, tail, arms, and legs using cables, rods, and hydraulics. Remember, there was no CGI cleanup! So Cameron had to compose the shots to hide all that.

After spending almost five hours learning how they made it, I kind of want to watch Aliens again. [Liberty]

• 🎥 Aliens Expanded (2024)

• 👽 Aliens (1986)

2. Letters of Note : The Things People Say in Private

In Jab We Met, Geet tells a heartbroken Aditya to burn the photo of the person who hurt him and flush it down the toilet. Some people deal with pain that way while others actually send their pain-filled letters to their celebrity idols. In 1995, a 21-year-old woman from Paris named Laurence wrote Iggy Pop a 20-page fan letter, never expecting him to reply. The letter had the grisly details of her parents’ divorce, the social workers, the lawyers and the rest. Iggy Pop not only replied but, in a handwritten note, chose to tell Laurence something as intimate as his memories of being miserable on his 21st birthday, being booed on stage, staying in someone else’s house and being scared. “I read the whole fucking thing, dear...find something to be that you can love…”

My heart was full when I found this letter on Letters of Note, a blog by Shaun Usher, who digs through museums, libraries, and archives for correspondence like that. It has now grown into a series of books and a stage show called Letters Live where actors like Benedict Cumberbatch read these letters out loud. There are Gandhi’s 1939 letter to Hitler asking him to prevent war, Virginia Woolf’s farewell note to her husband, and many others sent by people we’ve never heard of.

This is what E.B. White wrote to John Detmold on 10th February, 1953:

“As to your notion of an allegory, there is none. Charlotte’s Web is a tale of the animals in my barn, not of the people in my life. When you read it, just relax. Any attempt to find allegorical meanings is bound to end disastrously, for no meanings are in there. I ought to know.”

That’s what we lost when letters went out of fashion. A tweet, a forwarded reel, even a WhatsApp message or a Snapchat sticker cannot match the letter’s personality. In a letter, people say things they would only say to a single person. [Aashisha]

• 🌐 Letters of Note Substack by Shaun Usher

• 📘 Letters of Note by Shaun Usher

• 📕 Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White

• 🎬 Jab We Met (2007)

3. The Men Who Would Be King : Jeffrey Katzenberg Deserves More Than a Punchline

Everyone seems to be reading Roll the Calls, Ari Emanuel’s new memoir, and I get why. It’s a loud, angry, very fun book. Emanuel, who co-founded the talent agency Endeavor and is now executive chairman of WME Group, writes about rolling hundreds of calls a day, and the pages are full of inside-baseball on how deals actually get done in Hollywood. He also has a favourite villain: Jeffrey Katzenberg. Ari calls him a “glad-handing phony,” lumps him in with Harvey Weinstein, and traces the grudge back to Katzenberg stiffing him on a packaging fee.

Regardless, I think Katzenberg deserves more than a punchline. He started at Paramount as Barry Diller’s assistant, ran Walt Disney Studios through The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, then co-founded DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen in 1994. Later came WndrCo, his investment firm, and Quibi (a phenomenal failure). On September 23, 2026, he posted a long essay on X telling Hollywood that AI is not going away (which I made a short video about).

For a fuller account of Katzenberg, there’s “The Men Who Would Be King” by Nicole LaPorte, a former Variety reporter who covered DreamWorks. It’s the best account I’ve found of how the studio was built, and it is largely Katzenberg’s story, although it does feature Steven Spielberg and David Geffen as well. LaPorte isn’t gentle with Katzenberg either, but she shows you how he works. The two-to-three-hour Monday morning meetings where Katzenberg would rule over worker bees and aesthetes. 100 to 150 phone calls a day.

There’s also the line he told the Pixar team when they met him while he was at Walt Disney: “Everybody thinks I’m a tyrant. I am a tyrant. But I’m usually right. I will give you a chance, if you think I’m wrong, to change direction, but you’d better be right.”

If you’re into Hollywood, and the media business, read this tale right next to Ari’s memoir. It will become very clear that like all industries, Hollywood is built upon the dreams and passions of people who often sit at opposite ends of the table. [Rohan]

• 📘 The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies, and a Company Called DreamWorks by Nicole LaPorte (2010)

• 📕 Roll The Calls: A Memoir by Ari Emanuel (2026)

• 🎬 The Little Mermaid (1989)

• 🎬 The Lion King (1994)

4. Educated : The Memoir That Set the Bar

A hallmark of the best books I read is that I’m disappointed when they’re done. Once you’re hooked, once a story has you in its thrall, you inevitably face the moment when the last page turns. With the rare book, something else happens: the disappointment sends me back to the first page. Not because there aren’t other books to read, but because the ride was so good that I want to go on it again.

That’s the rare air Educated by Tara Westover occupies. I came to this book later than all the adoring critics. I found it while I was working on When the Light Finds Us, the memoir I wrote with Judy Henderson, a similarly harrowing story of a life that had to be reclaimed. Westover set the highest possible bar for the form.

The book tells the story of Westover’s upbringing in the Idaho mountains. She comes from survivalist Mormons. They run a scrapyard, and they distrust doctors, schools, and the federal government, so much so that Westover doesn’t get a birth certificate until she’s nine years old and doesn’t enter a classroom until the age of 17. At home, she teaches herself enough to score well enough on the ACT for admission to Brigham Young University. She goes on to Cambridge, then a visiting fellowship at Harvard, before returning to Cambridge for her PhD. But every advancement is a step away from her family, one that couldn’t follow her and, in some cases, wouldn’t forgive her.

What brings it to life is the quality of the writing. You can tell you’re in the hands of a master wordsmith and storyteller. Every page has a line I circled or highlighted, and you can sense how hard she worked to make the prose come alive. The book screams care, and in our era of snippets and hot takes, it was refreshing to spend several hundred pages with someone who so obviously cares about the craft.

I was mesmerized by her story, and by how difficult it must have been to tell. It’s a book I can’t wait to read again, because I can’t wait to be back in the company of the mind that created it. [Jimmy]

• 📘 Educated by Tara Westover

• 📕 When the Light Finds Us by Judy A. Henderson with Jimmy Soni

5. George Lucas Built a Museum for the People’s Art

The tall ship cranes that stand guard over the Port of Oakland became the AT-AT Imperial Walkers. The dense redwood canopy of Humboldt County was the film location for the moon of Endor. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Center inspired some of the architecture on Naboo.

George Lucas has spent a career turning the physical world into myth, and now his $1 billion museum — 17 years in the making, rejected by San Francisco and sued off the Chicago lakefront before landing in Los Angeles — is an attempt to explain why that impulse matters. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened in September 2026 in Exposition Park, and it’s been a surprising revelation.

It is not a Star Wars museum. It is the first museum dedicated to what Lucas calls “the people’s art” — visual storytelling across every form, from cave paintings to comic books to cinema. Norman Rockwell hangs near Banksy, who worked personally with Lucas on the fifth-floor murals. Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s 1894 Poker Game — the original dogs playing poker, possibly the most famous piece of “lowbrow” art in America — hangs five feet from a Frida Kahlo self-portrait that has been called “The Mona Lisa of Mexico.” That juxtaposition is the thesis of the entire building: narrative art has no hierarchy, and the stories humans tell through pictures deserve a museum whether they hang in the Louvre or above a bar.

Then there are the theaters which are a cinephile’s dream. Two 299-seat cinemas named after figures only film nerds will recognize: Robert Flaherty, the father of documentary filmmaking, and Slavko Vorkapich, the experimental montage pioneer who later ran USC’s film department. As Nathan Heller reports in Vogue, the theaters are soundproofed so that an action scene in one room won’t disturb a quiet film next door. The Vorkapich still runs 35mm film. Screenings are continuous and included with admission. Lucas built a museum that argues pictures are how humans decipher meaning. And only Lucas would one-up that story with two of the finest screening rooms in the world. [Taylor]

• 🌐 Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

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This week: Films & TV from the early Field Notes archive: a Japanese noodle western that refuses to behave, a British government held together by panic and insults, three men undone by a bag of cash, an ultramarathon designed to defeat its runners, and a high-wire walk planned like a heist.

1. Tampopo : The Ramen Western That’s Also About Everything Else

I 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 Jimmy’s earlier 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)

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. 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). 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 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 the 2026 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”)

5. Man on Wire : ‘An act justified entirely by its beauty and audacity.’

I have watched James Marsh’s documentary Man on Wire more times than I care to count. It tells the story of Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers, and it unfolds with the tension of a heist film. Petit and his small band of co-conspirators spent months casing the buildings, forging IDs, smuggling equipment past security guards, all to pull off an act that was illegal, unprofitable, and by any reasonable measure insane.

Marsh structures the documentary around this preparation, intercutting archival footage with present-day interviews, and the effect is to make you lean forward even though you know how it ends. Petit survived. He walked for 45 minutes, a quarter mile above the streets of Manhattan, crossing back and forth eight times while crowds gathered below.

What elevates the film beyond spectacle is its interest in the question of why. Petit is charming and elusive on this point, almost allergic to explanation, and Marsh wisely lets the ambiguity stand. The walk had no cause, no sponsor, no message. It was art in its purest form, an act that justified itself entirely by its beauty and audacity.

Watching Petit describe that morning, you sense something that our culture often has trouble accepting: some things are worth doing precisely because they serve no purpose beyond the doing. The Twin Towers are gone now, which gives the footage an unexpected weight. But Petit’s walk remains, suspended in memory, a reminder that human beings are capable of the unnecessary and the magnificent. [Jimmy]

• 🎬 Man on Wire (documentary, 2008)

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This week: Five books from the early Field Notes archive: the Titanic through the voices of those who survived it, a road trip to the places America nearly forgot, 777 pages of math, music, and mischief, beauty hiding in the objects we use every day, and a mountain climb that slips from adventure into philosophy.

1. 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)

2. 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

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. 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)

5. Mount Analogue : A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing

If you like Borges and you’re a hiker—or drawn to travel adventures—but you’re also the sort of person who takes a couple of books with you (and buys one at the airport, another at the destination, and yet another on the way back), and you’re a wordsmith, or fond of double entendres, or you have that slightly unsettling habit of thinking about language on a meta level—suspecting, perhaps, that language is a kind of virus and your brain merely its host—well, this book is for you.

Mount Analogue has the deadpan seriousness of old travel literature (think Moby-Dick, Dracula, even Frankenstein), where the logistics of the journey are treated as paramount, even as you’re explicitly reminded that the whole enterprise is operating on another, strictly non-literal level. Daumal somehow weaves comedy, sharp one-liners, and real wisdom into a mountaineering expedition that is both literal and not.

The book is unfinished—Daumal died young, the manuscript literally stops mid-sentence—and yet the ending is far less disappointing than you might expect. It feels like a poetic cap rather than an absence, like a lover who left without saying goodbye, on purpose, just to ensure you’d never quite forget them. It’s also a quick read: a dense little beauty, and a lovely way to spend an afternoon. [Jean-Marc]

• 📕 Mount Analogue by René Daumal

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This week: Side doors into worlds you might otherwise miss. A cinema through a peephole, a Soviet spy becoming a little too American, chess after the board finally starts making sense, a film that nearly disappeared, and Mozart through the ears of the man who envied him most.

1. Peepholes, Backrooms, and the Smallest Screens in America

In 2013, an animator named Laurie O’Brien drilled a hole in the exterior wall of her home in San Francisco’s Mission District, mounted a tiny screen behind it, and started playing silent films 24 hours a day. No sign. No admission. Just a dime-sized peephole in an alley that rewarded anyone curious enough to crouch down and look. She called it Peephole Cinema. When O’Brien eventually moved to Brooklyn, she brought the concept with her — opening a second peephole at 97 Wilson Avenue in Bushwick, behind a door labeled “Mr. Manual Wilson, Bureau of Deacceleration.” The original SF location went dark during COVID but reopened in 2025.

Now the idea is multiplying. SFGate reports that Sam Goldstein and Glenn Black are building custom-made hole-in-the-wall TVs — Glenn engineered a CAD-modeled, 3D-printed peephole system — and working to expand them across San Francisco. These whimsical moving picture projects are a fun way of creating a treasure hunt that allows people to explore neighborhoods in new, analog ways.

But the peephole is just the most charming expression of a broader movement: Micro-cinemas. These single-screen venues with fewer than 40 seats, often tucked inside bookstores, coffee shops, and video stores are booming in New York, proliferating across Los Angeles (where Vidiots’ 36-seat MUBI Microcinema and a VHS backroom in Echo Park called Whammy! are leading the charge), and IndieWire declared last year the dawn of a “golden age of microcinemas.” I once had a film screen at a festival in a tiny town along the Mississippi River in Wisconsin, where the local micro-cinema called itself the “Minema” — a name I still love.

What connects all of this is something older than cinema itself: the desire to gather a small group of people in a dark room and show them something worth seeing. Before multiplexes, before streaming, before algorithms decided what played next, there was just a screen and an audience. The micro-cinema trend brings us all back to that. In a world that keeps making screens smaller and more private, these spaces insist on making them communal again — even if the theater only seats a few. [Taylor]

2. The Americans : When the Cover Starts Becoming Real

Actor Matthew Rhys is fresh off a historic night at the Emmys, winning two lead-acting awards in the same night, so it seems fitting to recommend the earlier show that first exposed me to him: The Americans, in which he stars alongside his longtime partner Keri Russell. I never understood why this show didn’t have a bigger following, or maybe it did and I just came to it late. I think it’s fantastically rendered, and it draws a portrait of spy life and the Cold War that is too often overlooked.

Russell and Rhys play Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, deep-cover KGB agents the Soviets called “illegals.” They are operatives inserted into a foreign country with fabricated biographies, no diplomatic protection if caught, and no way home. The Jennings run a travel agency in suburban Virginia. They raise two children who initially have no idea of their parents’ double lives. They run missions for their handlers by night, and an FBI counterintelligence agent lives across the street. The show has all the gripping spy business you’d expect, but what it really shows is how difficult that double life becomes. Their characters have to become Americans, and what is appealing about America can’t help but seep through.

In one of the show’s best threads, Philip starts attending EST seminars, the self-help movement that swept the country in the 1970s and 80s, and you watch him begin to chafe against the Soviet restrictions he grew up with. He enjoys American life and freedom. And it is fascinating to watch him wrestle with that against the mission he and his wife have sworn to uphold.

The show deserves a wider audience. It is two enormously talented actors at their very best, and a spy story where the cover gradually becomes part of the person. [Jimmy]

• 📺 The Americans (2013-2018)

3. There’s Never Been a Better Time to Learn ‘The Game of Kings’

You may be thinking, “Am I really being told to learn chess on a media newsletter?”

Yes. Yes you are.

If you’ve already studied the game, then consider this your reminder to start playing more. For those who have never attempted to understand chess’s beautiful complexity, I’m begging you to give it a shot.

The real reason is the feeling you get when you finally start putting it all together.

The tingle you feel when you see checkmate in three moves for the first time is electric. The smugness you have to hide when an opponent takes your bait of a sacrificed rook... there are a thousand different ways you will feel excitement when you realize you are playing with strategy instead of moving blindly.

It’s been the best way for me to exercise my brain and I’m actually getting better!

The good news is that there are free and easy ways to learn the game in bite-sized pieces.

Did you know Duolingo has chess lessons? That’s where I started for most of this year. Then I discovered Chess.com, which also has free lessons and daily puzzles that have helped teach me actual tactics to use on the board.

Then, when you’ve got a tiny sense of how to think through a game, start playing strangers on the internet. That’s where the real thrill lies. In the arena. You will get smoked many times, but that’s ok. The losses only make the first win feel that much more valuable.

You could study for 5 minutes a day and find out you’re better than any of your friends in less time than you’d think. Sudoku and crosswords are fine, but nothing stimulates my mind like head-to-head combat on an 8x8 grid. [Jameson]

4. The Fall : The Film No One Could Find

Legendary film critic Roger Ebert gave it four stars and said one might want to see it for no other reason than because it exists. For years, the problem was actually finding a way to watch it. The Fall premiered at TIFF in 2006 and received a limited theatrical release in 2008, but after its licensing deals expired it vanished. In 2024, eighteen years after the premiere, MUBI finally brought it back with a 4K restoration.

Director and producer Tarsem Singh shot the film across 24 countries and took 4 years to make it, largely financing it himself. The story is set in silent-era Los Angeles where Roy, a paralyzed stuntman, tells an elaborate fantasy to a six-year-old girl named Alexandria to manipulate her into stealing morphine for him. The places where the film was shot (with minimal CGI) included Rajasthan’s Chand Baori stepwell, Jodhpur’s blue city, Namibia, Bali, Fiji, Prague and other stunning places. One of the interesting parts was when Roy says “Indian,” meaning a Native American from a cowboy film, while Alexandria pictures a South Asian worker from her orange groves back home.

Catinca Untaru, who played Alexandria, was an actual six-year-old Romanian girl who had never acted before. She didn’t speak English when filming began, so she learned her lines phonetically. In fact, she was led to believe that Lee Pace, the actor who played Roy, was actually paralyzed. Talk about being in character.

The film can be slow in places but I believe certain stories need a degree of leisure for the effects to sink in. This was one of those. Even though the film made $3.7 million against a $30 million budget (some did call it self-indulgent), I found the story was a character of its own. That, for me, is a redeeming act. [Aashisha]

• 🎬 The Fall (2006)

5. Amadeus : Imagine Competing With Mozart

I recently rewatched one of my favorite films, Amadeus (1984), with my kids. It was their first time and my... fourth? I lost track.

The movie is really Antonio Salieri’s story. Mozart says at one point, “I’m a vulgar man. But I assure you, my music is not.” That’s basically Salieri’s problem in one line. He’s a successful composer himself, and he has enough musical taste to recognize that this giggling, childish, vulgar guy is producing something he never could. He can hate Mozart all he wants, but every time he hears the music, he knows.

One of my favorite scenes is when Salieri remembers hearing Mozart’s Gran Partita for the first time. He walks us through it: a low pulse from bassoons and basset horns, then an oboe above it, then a clarinet takes over. And while he describes what’s happening, we hear exactly what he hears. F. Murray Abraham is incredible in the role. The guy who hates Mozart is also the guy teaching us why Mozart’s music is so good.

Watching Amadeus when I was younger sent me exploring Mozart and other composers. I hope it does the same for my kids.

The story began as a 1979 play by Peter Shaffer, who also wrote the screenplay for Miloš Forman’s film. Shaffer wasn’t trying to write a biopic and took some pretty big liberties with history. There’s no evidence Salieri tried to murder Mozart, and while they may have been rivals, they weren’t mortal enemies. They even collaborated on a piece. But Shaffer used the two composers to tell a story about talent, genius, envy, and a man who decides to pick a fight with God.

The other scene I love is near the end, when a dying Mozart dictates part of the Requiem to Salieri. Mozart is hearing the whole thing in his head and throwing out one part after another. A half-delirious Mozart is composing faster than Salieri can get it onto paper. [Liberty]

• 🎬 Amadeus (1984)

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This week: things reveal another layer when you look closer. An AI town that starts developing a social life, Star Wars with the mythology stripped away, words for feelings that were already there, the classical music inside Billy Joel, and movie theaters that turn out to be community infrastructure.

1. Smallville: What Happens When 25 AI Agents Live Together

I’m three years late, but the “Smallville paper” is incredibly cool.

In 2023, researchers from Stanford and Google published “Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior.” The paper describes fusing large language models with interactive agents to produce believable simulations of human behavior.

These ‘generative agents’ are designed to behave like believable people, drawing on ideas from cognitive science. The architecture has three main pieces: a memory stream that stores each agent’s experiences, a system of reflection that synthesizes those memories into higher-level conclusions, and a planning module that uses all this information to decide what to do in the current environment.

And to visualize it all, they put 25 of these agents in a small 2D sandbox environment, inspired by games like The Sims. They named this tiny town “Smallville.” Give one resident the idea of throwing a Valentine’s Day party, and the news starts spreading: agents invite each other, make new acquaintances, ask each other on dates, and eventually coordinate to show up at the party. Incredible.

As GPT-6 launched on September 3, my timeline was filled with people building all sorts of interesting toy prototypes in Blender and other game engines. I was reminded of this paper and finally read through it all.

The footnotes are the best part. The researchers cite everything that shaped the work: prior simulations, human psychology, game theory. I’m putting aside a few weekends to go through it all, starting with the talks of Will Wright, the creator of The Sims.

Joon Sung Park, the lead author, now runs Simile, a startup based on these ideas, where companies can use simulated environments to ‘rehearse earnings calls, model litigation outcomes, and test policy changes’.

Fun fact: Park and his team clearly respect the lineage of thinkers around simulations. The company meeting rooms are named after people like Jean Baudrillard, Will Wright, John Conway, Robert Axtell, the Wachowskis, Allen Newell, Sid Meier, Vernor Vinge, and Thomas Schelling. [Rohan]

• 📄 Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior by Joon Sung Park, Joseph C. O’Brien, Carrie J. Cai, Meredith Ringel Morris, Percy Liang and Michael S. Bernstein

2. Andor : Star Wars Without Jedi or Chosen Ones

If you’ve been a Star Wars fan for a long time, you have a complicated relationship with everything that came after the original trilogy. Could anything match it? Why spoil a perfect thing by demanding more of it? And honest to goodness, what could they possibly have been thinking with Jar Jar Binks?

Which is why I make this recommendation gingerly, with all the usual caveats and asterisks attached. It’s Disney. It’s a series. It will never be Return of the Jedi. And Andor is exceptional.

It’s the best thing to come out of the post-trilogy profusion of content, and by a long shot. Diego Luna is terrific as Cassian, a thief and a cynic who has no interest in a rebellion until the Empire leaves him nowhere else to stand. Stellan Skarsgård plays the man who recruits him, and their scenes together are the best writing in modern Star Wars. The relationships are complicated and rich. The drama is riveting. It doesn’t have the sealed-off, virtual-set feeling of some recent Star Wars. Tony Gilroy, one of the main writers behind the original Bourne trilogy, leaned heavily on enormous practical sets and real locations, and you can feel the difference in every frame.

It’s understated and dark in a way that echoes the best of the original trilogy, without trying to recreate it. There are no Jedi here, no chosen ones, no prophecy. Just people deciding, one at a time, that they’ve had enough. [Jimmy]

• 📺 Andor (Disney+, 2022-2025)

3. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows : How Do You Invent Words?

I first came across the word ‘sonder’ when I was starting to dabble in spoken word. It refers to the realization that every passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as ours. It was a beautiful thought and I’d had it so many times but no word to express it. After that, I somehow found fellow bloggers adopting unheard-of names like ‘avenoir’ (the desire that memory could flow backward) and ‘kenopsia’ (the eeriness of a now-empty place that used to be bustling). The words had spread and how.

My favorites are chrysalism, the tranquillity of being indoors during storms, and ellipsism, the sadness of never knowing how history turns out. The idea of allocating words to feelings is fascinating. John Koenig, a college student at Macalester, started doing it when he was trying to write poetry and found the language lacking in the feelings he wanted to express. It was then that he came up with The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It started as a blog, graduated to a YouTube channel and became a book in 2021. What can you say, poets are inventors!

Many of these words borrow from Latin, Germanic, and Greek origins so they sound like words that actually existed but were somehow forgotten. I found vemödalen pretty interesting. The frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist. Remember the countless sunset pictures we click on every vacation? I like how these new words evoke unknown sensations in us and sharpen the feelings we always had but couldn’t name. Sonder alone has been borrowed by a bike brand, a therapy company, a video game and a few albums. So, yes, words are literally for sale! But they do something far more important, they make versions of loneliness and awe feel collectively understood. [Aashisha]

• 📘 The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig

4. Billy Joel: There’s More Than ‘Piano Man’

Until recently, I knew very little about Billy Joel or his music. I watched his interview with Rick Beato because I like how Beato gets musicians talking about their craft, and Joel was interesting enough that I then watched HBO’s two-part documentary, Billy Joel: And So It Goes.

Music was his escape from a life he didn’t want. He decided fairly young that music was going to be his life, and he threw everything into it, sticking with it through years of little reward.

Knowing little about his music except ‘Piano Man’ going in, I was surprised by the variety of styles and genres he explored. They’re very different artists, but that variety reminds me a little of David Bowie. You could never be sure what the next album would sound like.

His classical music roots come out everywhere once you know what to listen for. At one point, he plays “Uptown Girl” at the piano as if it were a Mozart piece and points out Tchaikovsky and Beethoven melodies in his work. But unlike most classical musicians, he learns classical pieces by ear.

His personal life is complicated enough to fill another documentary, and we learn how autobiographical many of his songs are. His ex-wives are there to tell their side, including Elizabeth Weber, who also managed his early career. I was interested in how often he seemed to get his life together and then run into trouble again, with self-destructive phases and relationship troubles. He had worked so hard to become a successful musician, but fame brought its own problems. Careful what you wish for…

The documentary sent me to The Stranger to start exploring his albums, and I’ve added a dozen of his songs to our family playlist. [Liberty]

• 📺 Billy Joel: And So It Goes (HBO, 2025)

5. The Last Picture Shows : The Theaters That Refuse to Go Dark

You’ve heard of food deserts. Rustin Thompson’s new documentary introduces a term that might haunt you longer: cinema deserts — vast stretches of the American West where the nearest movie theater is fifty miles away, if it exists at all. Thompson, a Seattle-based filmmaker and National Emmy winner, drove 10,825 miles across ten states and visited 123 theaters to find out what’s left of small-town cinema in America. He shot, wrote, edited, and directed the film almost entirely alone — just a camera, a tripod, a shotgun mic, and a slider. No crew. No lights. No lavalier mics. It’s filmmaking as lean as the towns he’s documenting, and the intimacy shows in every frame. It’s a technical approach that more filmmakers should embrace.

What he found was a complicated narrative. Some theaters are abandoned, their marquees dark and their lobbies exposed to the elements. Others are barely hanging on — one owner profiled in the film has lost more than $100,000 two years running. He keeps projecting anyway. But the most compelling stories belong to the theater operators who have reinvented their spaces as nonprofits, turning movie houses into community centers that host live music, graduation ceremonies, Met Opera broadcasts, and yes, still films. Thompson originally intended the film to be a black-and-white elegy in the spirit of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 The Last Picture Show, whose clips he weaves throughout. But meeting the owners changed the tone. They were, as the New York Times put it in naming the film a Critics Pick, “a feisty bunch” — willing to name the studios that bully them (A24 and Disney among the worst offenders, threatening to cut off film access for months if a small theater dares to break from their schedule) while still showing up every night to keep the projector running.

There is something about a glowing marquee on a dark Main Street, framed against a western sky, that makes you want to buy a ticket to whatever’s playing. Find a movie house playing it while you can. Bonus if you can drive there. [Taylor]

• 🎬 The Last Picture Shows (directed by Rustin Thompson, 2026)

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This week: what happens when you look a little closer. A wrong number uncovers half a million photographs and an unlikely friendship, Candice Millard finds fresh ground in one of history’s most overexamined lives, John Steinbeck explains how to finish a book by forgetting the book, a baby forces her father to rethink what makes a good children’s story, and Hitchcock turns the simple act of watching into suspense.

1. A Wrong Number, a Half-Million Slides, and a Real-Life Walter Mitty

Have you ever wondered who had your phone number before you? Lauren Stevens found out. When her new work phone started receiving calls and texts for someone named “Verndawg,” she and her friends did some online sleuthing. It didn’t take long. The intended recipient was Wernher Krutein, a 72-year-old San Francisco photographer who has spent six decades documenting the world through a camera lens — bugs, buildings, people, landscapes, everything — and archiving it all into a collection of more than 500,000 individually cataloged film slides. Stevens calls him a real-life Walter Mitty.

The archive isn’t just huge. Krutein built his own system to keep track of it. He invented a cataloging method he calls Fluid Logic, in which every single slide is stamped with a unique code, tagged with location and date, and wired into a digital database containing over three million search terms. The system allows him to locate any image from his life’s work almost instantly. He built Photovault.com in the late 1990s to house it all digitally, and the site remains a staggering artifact — part stock photo archive, part one-man encyclopedia of the visual world. One of his best-known images, a car dangling from the collapsed Bay Bridge during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, has appeared in textbooks and documentaries for decades.

When Stevens got to know him, Krutein was barely making a living. He lived alone in Sonoma County with no heat in the house, no family safety net, and savings he measured in months. Stevens launched a GoFundMe, created the Instagram account Verndawgtales to share his work and their story, and became what she describes as his adopted granddaughter. A wrong number turned into one of the most genuine friendships I’ve seen online.

Start with this video and try not to hit the follow button. [Taylor]

• 🌐 Verndawgtales on Instagram

• 🖼️ Wernher Krutein’s PhotoVault

2. Hero of the Empire : The Escape That Made Winston Churchill

Like the Lakers with Kobe and Shaq, or the Bulls with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, some rare dynasties earn a three-peat. The Field Notes version of those triumphs belongs to Candice Millard, the only author I have recommended three times.

I’ve praised her work on Theodore Roosevelt and James Garfield. But her highest dive may have been the book on Winston Churchill. Why? Because the world’s bookshelves groan under the weight of Churchill books. Worse still, he was a gifted writer himself, and his pen was as energetic as the rest of him. Take on a Churchill book and you’re competing against the man, the myth, and thousands of volumes, many of them canonical.

Millard took it on anyway and came out with something remarkable in Hero of the Empire. She found the story that had been underexplored: Winston as a young man in South Africa, twenty-four years old, hungry for a war record that would launch a political career. He went out as a newspaper correspondent and was captured by the Boers when they ambushed the armored train he was accompanying. He escaped in Pretoria, with no map, no compass, and no Afrikaans, then made his way nearly three hundred miles toward safety in Portuguese East Africa, hopping trains and hiding for a time in a coal mine. The Boers put a price on his head. He came home a national hero and was elected to Parliament within a year.

This is one of those moments in Churchill’s life where history turns on a few inches. During the ambush, he stood exposed on the tracks for the better part of an hour under fire, and later wrote that a bullet passed close enough that he felt certain he should have been killed. Millard tells it with her gift for the adrenaline-pounding scene.

Churchill is a complicated figure, of course. But there’s something bold in what Millard did here: take one of the most exhaustively chronicled lives in history, find a story still worth telling, and take a fresh angle on it. [Jimmy]

• 📙 Hero of the Empire by Candice Millard

3. John Steinbeck’s Best Writing Advice: Forget the Book

I’ve read dozens of books on writing, and ninety-nine percent of them fail in two pretty important ways: (1) they lack any insight into writing, and (2) they themselves are badly written. The only real wisdom I’ve found has been in the Writers at Work interviews published by Paris Review, and of those interviews one stands out: John Steinbeck’s. He actually died before he could give the interview, but the magazine stitched it together posthumously from his East of Eden diaries and personal letters. Maybe that’s why it’s so good. It’s honest.

In this pseudo-interview, Steinbeck lays out six rules (which are actually from a letter to his friend, Robert Wallsten, who was stuck on a novel of his own). The first rule, aptly enough, is the best:

“Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.”

The book is not the problem. The idea of the book is the problem. It’s much like mountaineering. The difference between a heavenly ascent and a hellish one is your eyeline; if you’re constantly staring at the summit, the climb will take forever. You’ve got to forget the summit even exists. That’s how you reach it.

Steinbeck won the Nobel eight months after sending that letter, just so you know. [Dylan]

• 📄 John Steinbeck, The Art of Fiction No. 45 (The Paris Review)

4. Tales from Acorn Wood : Baby Books Parents Can Enjoy Too

If you don’t have a child somewhere between 0 and 3, you can skip today’s recommendation (unless you just love reading books designed for babies, in which case each to their own, I suppose).

Over the first few months of my daughter’s life, we worked our way through much of the Baby Literary Canon, everything from The Very Hungry Caterpillar (greedy bastard!) to Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy (my GOAT).
As far as reading went, these were the halcyon days. The little one didn’t know me from Adam, nor a book from a spoon, so the whole exercise was pretty much entirely for my benefit. In hindsight, I may as well have been reading her a James Ellroy novel.

Anyway, at around 10 months, something shocking happened. She began to engage. This, plus her newfound ability to use her hands and to scream at us the moment she gets bored with a page, led to a dramatic shift in our reading material. Gone were the wry humour of Oi, Frog! and the magical realism of The Tiger Who Came to Tea, replaced by a single-minded fixation on any book that pops or flaps or squeaks or otherwise delights her senses.

The touch-feely, poppy-outty book industry has realised something clever. As long as their books have some physical element for a baby to fiddle with, they don’t need to worry about pesky, time-consuming concepts like language or story or art. So our reading took a turn for the worse. It is, of course, delightful to see the surprise on my daughter’s face every time Olly the Octopus shakes his little tentacles at her, but from an adult reader’s perspective there’s only so much to gain from such books as Pop Up Peekaboo! and That’s Not My Badger.
Which brings me, finally, to today’s recommendation, which I will keep mercifully short.

You may be familiar with the insanely prolific children’s author Julia Donaldson. Everyone’s heard of The Gruffalo and Room on the Broom. We’ll get to those in a couple of years. For now, the Donaldson du jour is her series Tales from Acorn Wood, illustrated by Axel Scheffler. It is the perfect series for our literary predicament.

Set in a whimsical woodland filled with anthropomorphic animals like the wise Doctor Stoat, the always-tired Rabbit and the hapless Frog, these books (we own seven out of eleven) are the only ones in our collection that unfailingly delight us all. For baby: charming illustrations and, crucially, flaps on every page, each hiding some fun little detail. For parents: a simple and amusing story, told in Donaldson’s delightful rhyming musical style. [Ed]

• 📚 Tales from Acorn Wood by Julia Donaldson

5. Rear Window : The Thriller Where All You Can Do Is Watch

I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window for the first time a few days ago with my family. Except, in a way, I already knew it. I grew up on The Simpsons, and season 6 has “Bart of Darkness,” where Bart breaks his leg, gets a telescope, starts spying on the neighbors, and becomes convinced that Ned Flanders murdered his wife. Only years later did I realize this was an homage to Rear Window.

It came out in 1954, so I won’t be as careful as I normally would be with spoilers. Jimmy Stewart plays L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies, a globe-trotting photojournalist stuck in his apartment with a broken leg.

Hitchcock takes away the one thing thriller protagonists are supposed to do: move. Jeff can’t chase anyone, sneak into buildings, or investigate much of anything himself. All he can do is look out the window at the neighbors across the courtyard.

Hitchcock had the whole courtyard constructed on an enormous Paramount soundstage: 31 apartments, many of them fully furnished. From Jeff’s window, they become little screens, each with its own story playing out.

Jeff spends much of the movie doubting that his girlfriend Lisa could fit into his adventurous life. Then she crosses the courtyard to do the investigating he can’t, and ends up in danger. Jeff is stuck in his chair, and so are we. We can see what’s happening across the courtyard, but all we can do is watch. [Liberty]

• 🎬 Rear Window (1954, Alfred Hitchcock)

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This week: what holds things together. Michael Lewis’s hardest book, the Sherlock Holmes who has to work at being Sherlock Holmes, a theory of office politics that explains why Michael Scott is the boss, an alien planet with a life of its own, and the wrestling team holding a Colorado town together.

1. The Undoing Project : Michael Lewis’s Hardest Book

I am a fan of just about everything Michael Lewis has written, and honestly, it’s hard not to be. He writes with elegance and flair, in a style shaped by his New Orleans upbringing. The stories pulse with humor and vivid description. You know when you’re reading a Lewis book that you’re in the hands of a master craftsman.

Of all his work, my favorite may be a surprising choice. It’s The Undoing Project. Other books of his have been made into films, drawn more acclaim, even entered the language. “Moneyball” is a word now. But I think The Undoing Project was the highest dive of the bunch. Consider the degree of difficulty. He gathered material for the book for eight years and later said it took him longer than any of his other books to convince himself to actually write it. How do you turn a story about the friendship between two Israeli psychologists into riveting journalism?

If you’re Michael Lewis, you do it with aplomb. The central storyline is the friendship between Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, two men who could not have been less alike. Tversky was brilliant, brash, and famously certain, the kind of man colleagues joked you could measure your own intelligence against by how quickly you realized he was smarter than you. Kahneman was anxious, self-doubting, forever convinced his best work was wrong. Together they spent years in a room in Jerusalem, laughing, arguing, and finishing each other’s sentences, and out of that room came the research that helped overturn the reigning assumption in economics that human beings are rational actors. Kahneman won the Nobel for it in 2002. Tversky had died six years earlier and could not share it.

The book is a perfect blend of their personalities and quirks, the friendship that gave their ideas life, and the ideas themselves, presented in a way that doesn’t require a PhD to enjoy. It is also, quietly, a story about what happens to a great collaboration under strain, which is a subject nobody writes about well and Lewis writes about beautifully.

Even among Lewis fans, I suspect this one is underrated. I think it’s the best of the bunch, because it was the hardest to pull off. [Jimmy]

• 📘 The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis

2. Elementary : The Sherlock Who Has to Work at It

There have been a lot of Sherlock Holmes adaptations, and I think I just realized that the one that looked least ambitious may be my favorite.

I watched Elementary when it first aired and really enjoyed it, but I hadn’t seen an episode in years. I recently started rewatching Season 1 to see how it held up. It’s even better than I remembered.

But it came out at a terrible time to be taken seriously. We were in the middle of Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, and the BBC’s much flashier Sherlock. Serious TV was supposed to be serialized, cinematic, and ten or twelve episodes long. Elementary was on CBS, usually had 24 episodes a season, and solved a new murder every week. I think a lot of people looked at that and went “nope.”

The murders are fine. Some are clever, some I forget almost immediately. But they’re not really why the show works.

It’s Jonny Lee Miller as Holmes and Lucy Liu as Watson (brilliant casting). And thankfully, they never turned Sherlock and Joan into a romantic thing. They let them become partners (after a rough start), best friends, and eventually something closer to family.

And this works so well exactly because it’s not prestige TV and there are so many episodes. They spend hundreds of hours together, and we get to see them grow and become indispensable to each other.

The other thing I love is that this Sherlock has to work at being Sherlock. Whenever he isn’t solving a case, he’s training: reading, picking locks, studying insects or cadavers, doing chemical experiments, practicing some strange martial art.

That’s what has always annoyed me about Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock: his deductions can feel almost supernatural. Robert Downey Jr.’s version is basically an action hero, solving crimes as much by punching people and running around as by thinking. Which is fine if that’s what you want.

But I want Sherlock-freaking-Holmes to be a detective. [Liberty]

• 📺 Elementary (2012-2019, 7 seasons)

3. The Gervais Principle : Why Michael Scott Is the Boss

I’ve never had a good answer for why Michael Scott runs a branch.

Venkatesh Rao answered that in 2009 with what he calls The Gervais Principle. His theory is that the overperformer gets promoted into middle management, where part of the job is taking the blame when things above them go wrong. The savvy underperformer may get fast-tracked toward the top. And the employee doing exactly enough to keep the paycheck is mostly left alone.

The framing of people as “sociopaths” / “clueless” / “losers” is certainly harsh, and I don’t fully agree with it, but the article will shine a new light on how you think about your corporate job.

Fair warning. You’ll probably start putting names to the three categories. People you like (including you) might land in the wrong one. [Atman]

• 🌐 The Gervais Principle by Venkatesh Rao

4. Scavengers Reign : When the Planet Is the Main Character

Most alien planets in science fiction exist as foes to humans. If not competitors for resources, they are either wallpapers or monster factories. I was getting a bit tired of the trope when I chanced upon this animated series called Scavengers Reign.

The show follows a damaged space freighter whose survivors end up on a beautiful but (of course) hostile planet called Vesta. What makes this show refreshing is how busy the ecosystem is, and how little it seems to care that humans have arrived. There are plants that steal your DNA. This isn’t the Venus flytrap we studied in school. Spore clouds can eat flesh and bone.

I enjoyed how inventive the landscape was. But more than the art, even when it gets grotesque, I found the symbiosis stunning. A vast self-organized network that doesn’t seem to have or need any overseer. Working effortlessly on principles completely unknown but unbelievably efficient.

It’s a 2023 show whose animation was inspired by the art of Moebius and Hayao Miyazaki, particularly the latter’s environmentalist masterpiece Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. I enjoy any story that bucks trends and goes beyond tropes, so an alien world with its own logic scored well on my personal card.

The ecosystem is not fully explained in the show but we begin to see a pattern. Of course, there’s drama where we delve into the individual journeys of the characters and how they survive this unique trial by fire. But the star of the show is the planet itself, reminding us that despite all the human dramas, survival arcs and rivalries, the system is much, much older. [Aashisha]

• 📺 Scavengers Reign (2023, created by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner)

5. The Meloneers : The Wrestling Team Holding a Town Together

Rocky Ford, Colorado, is a town of 3,800 people in the southeastern corner of the state, known for its sweet melons and not much else — at least, not anymore. Like a lot of small towns across the rural West, it has been losing population, losing industry, and losing the economic footing that once made it a hub. But it hasn’t lost its wrestling team. The Rocky Ford Meloneers have been competing since 1950, and in the 75 years since, the program has produced 456 state qualifiers. Under current coach Mike Jurney, 34 wrestlers have won individual state championships.

Brendan Young’s short documentary The Meloneers, now streaming on Yahoo as part of a partnership with the Nonfiction Hotlist, follows several of those kids through a season — and through the harder stuff that surrounds it. Cayson Van Dyk carries the weight of a family legacy: his father and uncle were both state champion Meloneers, and the expectation to perform in the program’s red and gold singlet has followed him since childhood. Jadiss Rodriguez grew up watching his uncles and cousins wrestle, but came to the sport after losing his mother to an opioid addiction that began with a hip replacement. At the center of it all is Jurney, who has coached the Meloneers for 35 years and whose own father disappeared when he was a teenager. He was left to raise himself, and he refuses to let his wrestlers live that same story. He connects them to jobs, to therapists, to anything a town of 3,800 can offer a kid who needs direction but has the willingness and willpower to work for it.

One wrestler puts it this way: “Rocky Ford’s really centered around wrestling. Everybody likes to know they have a team that will win for them.”

In a place where so much has changed, the wrestling mat is the one place where the town still has something to root for. [Taylor]

• 🎬 The Meloneers (2026, directed by Brendan Young)

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This week: what shows up when you give things a little more time. Go players realizing the future arrived early, eight episodes of slow-cooked revenge, Theodore Roosevelt before he became Theodore Roosevelt, Four Tet on repeat, and Danny McBride poking around the Criterion Closet and accidentally explaining half his career.

1. AlphaGo : We’re All Go Players Now

I first watched AlphaGo when it came out in 2017. Really enjoyed it at the time. I rewatched it recently, in large part because I read the excellent book The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut, and the events covered in the film play a big role in the book. I enjoyed it just as much, but it felt like a different film the second time.

Back in 2017, watching some of the best Go players in the world suddenly realize that an AI was much better than they expected felt like a glimpse of some weird future. But in the post-ChatGPT world, it feels a lot more like we’re all the Go players now.

Go was supposed to be safe for a while. Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, but Go is another animal. There are something like 10^170 possible board positions, and good play relies heavily on pattern recognition and intuition, because on every move you can do almost anything. Brute force alone doesn’t work.

Go legend Lee Sedol had seen an earlier version of AlphaGo play. He basically thought: pretty good, but nowhere near me. He predicted he’d win 5–0 or 4–1. The problem was that the games he’d watched were already five months old. He had no idea how much better AlphaGo had gotten in the meantime.

I won’t spoil how the match unfolds, because a big part of the fun is watching Lee, the commentators, and even the DeepMind team keep recalibrating in real time. At one point, AlphaGo plays what became famous as “Move 37,” a move so weird and unexpected that the experts watching initially don’t quite know what to make of it. Lee later said it made him think AlphaGo could be creative.

Director Greg Kohs spent years at NFL Films, and you can tell. He treats this less like a documentary about software and more like a sports film about people under pressure. You really don’t need to know anything about Go to get into it. Half the drama is just watching people’s faces as they try to understand what they’re seeing.

What happened after the film? A 2023 study analyzed 5.8 million professional Go moves from 1950–2021 and found that after superhuman Go AI arrived, human decision quality improved and novel moves became more common. Apparently, getting beaten by a much better player and having a tireless practice partner to learn from can teach you a few things. [Liberty]

• 🎬 AlphaGo Documentary (2017, free on YouTube)

2. The Count of Monte Cristo : Revenge Needs Room to Simmer

Eight episodes is not much time to tell the story of a 1,200-page novel.

But it’s immensely better than trying to fit it into a 2-hour movie.

That’s why I really enjoyed the recent miniseries adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo directed by Bille August, and starring Sam Claflin as the tortured Edmond Dantès.

I’ve seen multiple film adaptations of this epic story and despite their best efforts, they are forced to either rush through major plot points or cut them out entirely.

This series, while still needing to abridge at times, lets the story of betrayal, adventure, and revenge simmer long enough for you to occupy the headspace of different characters. The web of competing ambitions and desires between Dantes, Villefort, Danglars, and Mondego feels palpable.

My favorite part is how the series handles the change in Dantès over the course of the story. If you’ve never consumed this story, I’ll spare you the details so you can enjoy it fresh. But for those who know, Claflin embodies the arc from young and optimistic to ‘experienced’ and cynical very well, allowing the novel’s message to land.

I think one reason this story is so enduringly popular is that the drama plays out like the world’s greatest soap opera. So if you decide to give it a go, make sure you don’t have early meetings the next morning. Because you’ll be fighting the impulse for “just one more episode.” [Jameson]

• 📺 The Count of Monte Cristo (2024, TV Miniseries)

• 🎬 The Count of Monte Cristo (2024 French film, Original title: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, 178 min)

3. The Making of Theodore Roosevelt

There was a stretch in my twenties when I was reading everything I could get my hands on about Theodore Roosevelt. I don’t think that’s uncommon among a certain kind of ambitious person. Whatever your views of the man, you cannot help but admire the sheer volume and range of what he accomplished in a single lifetime.

Here was someone who ran the New York City police board, served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, left civilian life to raise a volunteer cavalry regiment and fight in Cuba, came home to be elected Governor of New York, then Vice President, then President at forty-two, the youngest we have ever had. He wrote some three dozen books, the first of them a serious naval history published when he was twenty-three. He boxed at Harvard. He reportedly read a book a day, sometimes more. Just reading a list that long can make you tired and leave you wondering if he’s from the same species as the rest of us.

That’s why my recommendation this week is The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, the first volume of Edmund Morris’s masterful three-part life. The book is the story of how that resume began. It’s also the story of the things the resume leaves out: the asthmatic, sickly boy whose father told him he had the mind but not the body, and that he would have to make his body, which the boy then set about doing in a home gymnasium with a grim determination that never really left him. The early political defeats. The years of being underestimated by everyone in Albany. Once you’re done, you feel a pep in your step.

Most powerfully, Morris gives us February 14, 1884, the day Roosevelt’s young wife Alice and his mother Mittie died within hours of each other, in the same house. He drew a large X in his diary that night and wrote that the light had gone out of his life. This is what sent him back west to the Dakota Badlands, far from the politics and the literary world he had known in New York. Then you watch him come back, and everything he goes on to do looks more remarkable for what it cost. Watching Roosevelt move through his grief reminds you that he was a human being, and there is something in the way Morris renders that humanity that makes you respect the man more.

It’s beautifully written and exceptionally well researched, and it won everything when it came out. If you’re just beginning your Rooseveltian journey, this is where to start. But I revisit it regularly, because it always returns me to the person behind the long Wikipedia entry. [Jimmy]

• 📘 The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

4. Four Tet: Electronic Music for Deep Work

As I look back, I see a running theme with some of my Field Notes selections. I covered DJ Padre Guilherme earlier, and Barry Can’t Swim a few issues back. Clearly I’ve been on an electronic music binge lately, and this note is no different.

Lately a friend of mine mentioned the musician Four Tet in passing, and I decided to check him out. Four Tet is the stage name of English electronic musician Kieran Hebden. The kaleidoscopic cover art caught my eye (Jason Evans made the cover by photographing printer-test images on film, hole-punching the film, arranging the tiny discs on glass, and making a C-print), so I picked his 2010 album There Is Love in You. I’ve been listening to him almost non-stop for the past week.

There’s an absorbing quality to the music, and for someone who’s new to electronic music in general, it’s perfect. I don’t quite have the words to describe it, except perhaps to tell you where I listen to it: while in a state of deep work, often when I’m writing, editing a video, or on long drives.

As Pitchfork put it in its review:

“Instead, it’s both heady and physical, subtle but powerful music for thinking and moving or ideally doing both at the same time: It’s been a while since a brisk walk through the city sounded this good.”

A few favourites from the album. First, the opener ‘Angel Echoes’. It’s uplifting and rhythmic, with a soft vocal sample looping through it. It’s awesome. ‘Love Cry’ has these strange industrial hums and buzzes, but then suddenly a wonderful drum loop begins and I’m transported into the world of this song. I can see it playing in a dance club straight out of Mirror’s Edge. When the words ‘Love Cry’ start to repeat, I’m deep in a trance.

The Expanded Edition of the album also has remixes of these songs, and I’ve been really loving Floating Points’ remix of ‘Sing’. [Rohan]

5. The Closet That Became Cinema’s Tiny Desk

In 2010, Guillermo del Toro stopped by the Criterion Collection’s New York office for a meeting. Someone on the social media team suggested taking a picture of him in the closet. Criterion president Peter Becker went one step further: he pulled out his iPhone and filmed him picking movies. That one-off video became the Criterion Closet Picks series, which has since filmed more than 300 episodes featuring everyone from Cate Blanchett to Hideo Kojima to the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and has quietly become one of the most reliably great things on YouTube. Think of it as cinema’s answer to NPR’s Tiny Desk: intimate, unscripted, and revealing in ways that press junkets never are.

The latest episode features Danny McBride, who studied filmmaking at UNC School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. He picks Badlands and explains how Malick’s naturalistic style shaped his own filmmaking instincts. Five Easy Pieces reveals that the cold ending of Eastbound & Down’s first season was lifted directly from Jack Nicholson’s final scene. A Face in the Crowd traces Andy Griffith’s fraudulent-southern-charm performance straight into Kenny Powers’ fourth-season media arc. “It’s funny how much of Eastbound is actually inspired by classic films, but it is,” he says. And he explains that on George Washington he was the second-unit director — his first-ever production job, shot in two weeks around Winston-Salem the day after graduating film school.

The Closet lets you see the invisible thread between the movies people love and the work they make. Three hundred episodes in, and the formula hasn’t changed. Here’s to hoping it never does. [Taylor]

• 🌐 Criterion Closet Picks

• 📺 Criterion Closet on YouTube

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This week: things that change when you look at them twice. Two songs written 44 years apart that somehow become one, an AI revolution that may not produce an economic one, L.A. history hiding inside freeway interchanges, a 936-page Bombay epic that blurs life and fiction, and David Milch’s damaged characters seen through the man who wrote them.

1. This Bitter Earth / On the Nature of Daylight : The Accidental Duet, 44 Years Apart

In 1959, Dinah Washington recorded “This Bitter Earth,” a blues song written and produced by Clyde Otis. In 2003, a German composer named Max Richter sat down in Edinburgh and wrote a piece for string quintet as a protest against the Iraq war: “On the Nature of Daylight.”

Two songs in two completely different genres recorded forty-four years apart... Then Robbie Robertson put one on top of the other.

Robertson had been telling Scorsese for years that, instead of an original score, they ought to try building a film out of modern classical music. So when the Shutter Island script arrived, he told Scorsese this was the one - and, thankfully, Scorsese agreed. Richter’s strings went in early and became the theme for Dolores, the dead wife. They play every time she appears.

The end credits were the last thing to solve. Robertson had the Richter piece in his head, and he had also been carrying the Dinah Washington song around for years (she had been one of his favourite singers for decades), and something in him kept setting the two of them side by side. So he went and checked. They were in the same key.

The rest he did by hand. He cut her vocal out of the 1959 record line by line, the way you’d chop a rap sample, then laid each phrase back over the strings exactly where he would have sung it himself. He wasn’t sure he was allowed to do any of this, so he sent it to Scorsese with a warning attached. He had taken a liberty; this was the entirety of two artists laid on one another. Scorsese loved it. Somebody then had to ring Max Richter and Dinah Washington’s family to ask permission after the fact. Again, thankfully, both said yes.

I’ve listened to it more times than I can count, and it still sounds to me like one piece of music that was pulled apart at some point and put back together. Her phrasing falls into the gaps in the strings as though she had been in the room while they recorded it, which adds to how haunting it already is. [Dylan]

• 🎶 This Bitter Earth / On the Nature of Daylight (Shutter Island Soundtrack)

2. Why AI Might Transform Everything Without Exploding Economic Growth

You have probably heard both versions of the AI future. In one, the transformation is so fast that if you can just stay alive for the next three years, you stand to increase your lifespan by hundreds of years. In the other, AI is cool and all, but all the talk about hypergrowth is mostly… hype.

Charles I. Jones (a Stanford economist and now an Anthropic employee) explores several scenarios in this recent paper. A graph of the avg. US per capita income for the last 150 years (figure 1) shows a steady growth of 2% per year. That’s 150 years that saw electricity, air travel, antibiotics, transistors, personal computers, and the internet to name a few!

All of these were transformative and yet, they translated to a 2% growth in the long run. So, is this time finally different? Could AI really get us to grow at 10% or more?

Jones looks at the “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link” argument with an economic and mathematical lens. Most of the economy is not about manipulating text files, and there are countless complex human interactions that keep the world running. As we automate one part of the job, the bottleneck just moves to another — making that the new weak link. How quickly can AI automate through the bottlenecks? And that assumes the set of things we do doesn’t expand, which seems unlikely.

In April 2025, while visiting California, my wife and I took a Waymo ride for the first time. It still tops our list of mindblowing experiences. What do you mean that a driverLESS car just arrives, you sit and tap a screen, and it calmly maneuvers through traffic and stop lights and drops you to the destination like a random Uber?!

That moment was us living in the future.

While discussing when we could expect this future to arrive back home, in India, we were reminded of how even something as basic as well-paved roads is currently too much to expect. The knowledge required for building good roads is widely available, the tools are inexpensive, but it’s the human-in-the-loop that has persisted as the bottleneck to something that was solved a century ago. Perhaps that’s why Tyler Cowen calls humans the #1 bottleneck to explosive economic growth because of AI. [Vatsal]

• 📄 AI and Our Economic Future by Charles I. Jones

3. Take THE 405 to THE 10: A Love Letter to L.A.’s Freeways

I grew up watching CHiPs — the late-’70s series about California Highway Patrol officers on motorbikes — and the opening credits always got me dreaming of a place far from my native Midwest.

Those aerial shots of freeways snaking through the L.A. basin, the late-afternoon light catching eight lanes of traffic flowing in formation, made the infrastructure itself look cinematic. So when I stumbled onto the X account Freeways of Los Angeles, it hit my nostalgia and history nerves: a steady feed of archival photos, engineering histories, construction timelines, and route stories drawn from roughly 650 miles of freeway crisscrossing Los Angeles County.

What makes the account so good is that the freeway is almost never just the freeway. You click on an old interchange photo and wind up reading about the political fight that put it there. The account traces all of it: from the Arroyo Seco Parkway, the first freeway in the western United States when it opened in 1940, to the controversies and construction sagas that shaped the system Angelenos navigate today. It’s the kind of niche, deeply regional content I’m a sucker for: the history of a place told through its infrastructure.

My wife’s family is all from L.A. and Orange County, and I love giving them a hard time about route planning. Everyone has a preferred freeway. Everyone has a strong opinion about the 405. And of course, everyone calls them THE Five or THE 10 — a habit that dates back to when the freeways had names instead of numbers, and “the San Diego Freeway” simply became “the 405.” If you’ve seen SNL’s The Californians, where Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig, and Fred Armisen argue about routes in exaggerated Valley accents, then you already understand. [Taylor]

• 🌐 @FreewaysLA

4. Shantaram : Prison, Bombay, Mafia, War

Years ago, during the middle of summer, I read a novel called Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. I don’t remember how I first came to it. I remember being absorbed from the jump. This despite its length, which clocks in at 936 pages. The heft is worth it, and I recommend it enthusiastically.

The story follows a man called Lin, an Australian convict who escapes a maximum-security prison, buys a false passport, and disappears into the crowds of Bombay in the 1980s. He finds a guide, a taxi driver named Prabaker who has the best smile in the book and possibly in literature. He finds a slum, and in it he builds a free clinic, drawing on his earlier training as a medic to treat thousands. He finds a woman named Karla, who is beautiful and withholding and running from something of her own. He finds a mafia don named Abdel Khader Khan, who becomes a kind of father to him and who will eventually lead him into the mountains of Afghanistan. Along the way there is a village monsoon, a Bombay prison, a Bollywood set, an opium den, and a war.

It is loosely based on the author’s life, but this is one of those books that, whether it’s fact or fiction, it doesn’t much matter. Because the book has a gem of writing or emotion or wisdom on almost every page. Its people and places have stayed with me long after I finished it. Roberts spent years living in Bombay, and you can tell. He knows what the air smells like at four in the morning outside a Colaba bar. He knows how people talk to each other when they have nothing. [Jimmy]

• 📙 Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts

• 📺 Shantaram (2022, Apple TV+ adaptation)

5. How David Milch Keeps Looking for the Full Human

David Milch was already one of my favorite writers before I had seen most of his work. Just based on Deadwood, my favorite TV show (which I will tell you more about in a separate note — I’m keeping that one for later as dessert), I knew I loved that man’s mind.

When I first read his Life’s Work a couple of years ago, it completely changed my perception of Milch, and of Deadwood. I realized how much of himself is in his characters. The damaged people that he writes about seem like reflections of his own struggles with addiction, gambling, and being abused as a child.

On my first read, I had not yet seen what made Milch famous, NYPD Blue. For some reason, I expected it to be a vanilla police procedural from the 1990s. I thought maybe Milch started out more conventional, and built up the permission with the TV networks to experiment later. Well, my wife and I have been watching NYPD Blue from the beginning for the past few months, and I couldn’t have been more wrong. This is clearly one of the ancestors of modern prestige TV. Characters are flawed in ways that network TV ‘heroes’ rarely were at the time. Milch loved to deviate from the formula and throw out the outline. He was known to revise and improve scripts until the last second.

We’ve just hit episode 5 of season 6. I went in blind, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I won’t say more to avoid spoilers. The very next day, I started re-reading Milch’s memoir, and now the section about NYPD Blue is making me see the show in a completely new light.

Milch said the real person detective Sipowicz (played by Dennis Franz) most closely resembles is his father, Elmer Milch, a brilliant surgeon who also was an alcoholic and compulsive gambler. Once you know that, Sipowicz feels different. Milch wanted to portray that kind of person in “full human complication,” capable of ugliness, but not reducible to his ugliness.

Milch writes in the memoir about how things that happen later can change the meaning of what came before. That’s exactly what this reread feels like. NYPD Blue is changing how I read Life’s Work, and Life’s Work is changing how I watch NYPD Blue. [Liberty]

• 📙 Life’s Work: A Memoir by David Milch

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This week: hidden worlds in plain sight. A fake ’60s hit that became real nostalgia, a KGB colonel living a secret double life for eleven years, the Letterboxd for photobooks, twin sisters on a bloody revenge mission, and Delhi as seen from one foot off the ground.

1. That Thing You Do! : The Fake Band That Became Real Nostalgia

It may sound like a good idea to make a film about a one-hit wonder band from the 1960s. But then you have a problem. You have to write the hit song.

Tom Hanks had that challenge with That Thing You Do!, the 1996 movie he wrote and directed about four guys from a small city in Pennsylvania whose band records an insanely catchy song and briefly becomes famous.

To me, the film is pure fun. It follows the Wonders (they’re originally called something else, but I won’t ruin the joke) as they go from playing local talent shows to hearing themselves on the radio, touring the country, and eventually going on national television. Don’t expect evil managers or crazy rock-and-roll excesses. It’s not the Goodfellas arc, where the manic rise is followed by a descent into hell. It’s mostly just four young guys riding a big wave, and then it fizzles out.

Hanks really captures how exciting it must have felt while it lasted.

But for any of this to work, they needed a hit song. So Hanks put out the call: write the song. Around 300 versions came in. One was from a then-little-known songwriter named Adam Schlesinger, who had just co-founded the band Fountains of Wayne (you may know their biggest hit, Stacy’s Mom).

After the film came out, something funny happened: the fake hit became a real one. “That Thing You Do!” reached #41 on the Billboard Hot 100, #22 in the UK, and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song. The soundtrack eventually went platinum.

The Wonders never existed. Play-Tone Records never existed. None of these songs were actually on the radio in 1964. But almost 30 years later, there are people who grew up with this movie. To them, the song is a real hit, and they feel real nostalgia for this fake band from a fake version of the ’60s.

Hanks even named his real production company Playtone after the record label in the movie. I don’t know, I kinda love that. [Liberty]

• 🎬 That Thing You Do! (1996)

2. The KGB Colonel Who Spied for Britain for Eleven Years

Of all the books I have read so far this summer, the one that stands out is Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor. I am probably a little late to the Macintyre fan club, but I have joined it now, and I have joined it with enthusiasm.

The book tells the story of Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB colonel who spent more than a decade passing Soviet secrets to British intelligence while continuing to climb the ranks in Moscow and London. Around that story, Macintyre builds a portrait of spycraft itself: the dead drops, the tradecraft, the constant low-grade terror of a double life. Macintyre had more than 100 hours of taped interviews with Gordievsky and interviewed every British intelligence officer involved in his case. You feel that access on every page.

There is enough context to understand the era, but Gordievsky’s story stays firmly at the center. Macintyre has done so much reporting that even the smallest scenes have texture. And the book moves. You just keep turning pages.

I will not say more, because I do not want to spoil how good it is. I will say that it deserves every piece of praise it received, and that it does the thing great nonfiction is supposed to do: it reads as well as fiction.

The book is so good that — just having finished it — I'm starting it all over again. [Jimmy]

• 📘 The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War by Ben Macintyre

3. The Letterboxd for Photobooks Has Arrived

The photobook is one of photography’s most enduring forms. But discovering a great one has always been a scavenger hunt — trawling used book sales, Instagram rabbit holes, small press websites, and the stacks at bookstores where you overhear someone say “you have to see this one.” I’ve been collecting photobooks for years from all of these places, and I’ve always wished there were one good place to keep track of what I find. Photobookers comes pretty close.

Photobookers was built by Éanna de Fréine, an Irish photographer who founded The Velvet Cell in 2011, an independent publisher that has put out more than 60 photobooks. At its core, the site is a big curated database: search for a photographer or publisher, find their books, save the ones you want, follow people whose work you like. But there’s also an editorial side, with featured books and photographers and longer interviews. I like the way the site describes the idea: “a hub, not a dump.” There’s also an iOS app, and it’s free.

I found it at exactly the right time. Social media has become a powerful discovery engine for photography, and my Instagram and X bookmarks are jammed with photographers and new books I want to track down. The work is easier than ever to stumble across, but keeping track of it is still a mess. Photobookers fills a real need. A few of my favorites are “Dormant Season” by Erinn Springer and “Driving Through Flyover Country” by Lewis Ableidinger. [Taylor]

• 🌐 Photobookers

4. Is God Is : A Revenge Movie Bound by Fury

A combination of the World Cup, work, and that deeply unfortunate side-effect of existence known as “a social life” has taken a sledgehammer to my movie-watching over the past few weeks. But there have been highlights. Modern cinema is back (although I’ve long argued it never really left): any month where you can go see The Invite, The Furious and The Odyssey in packed-out screens is a good one.

My viewing of Aleshea Harris’s revenge-thriller Is God Is was less satisfying. The film never got a theatrical release here, so I was forced to watch it at home: an imperfect solution at the best of times, but doubly so for a film as lively as this one.

Racine and Anaia (Kara Young and Mallori Johnson) are twin sisters who were badly burned in a fire started by their father (a silkily venomous Sterling K. Brown). When their absentee mother summons them and demands they take vengeance so she can die in peace, the sisters hit the road. Bloody hijinks ensue.

Joel Coen once said that a director’s job is “tone management.” This is Harris’s feature directorial debut (she adapted it from her own 2018 play), and her superpower is how delicately she balances the film’s seemingly conflicting sensibilities. There are hints of Tarantino in its bloody set pieces and exploitation-movie DNA, but this has far more on its mind than the subpar Pulp Fiction knockoffs that populated the 1990s, folding in bouts of hyper-earnest melodrama, goofy humour, and magical realism.

Add in the episodic plot and it should all feel overwhelming, but by and large the film holds together, its disparate elements bound by a barely concealed fury. More please! [Ed]

• 🎬 Is God Is (2026)

5. The Cats Who Owned Delhi

I have a weakness for books about, around, based in, or even remotely connected to Delhi. Because Delhi is my city, the city I was born in. So Nilanjana Roy’s The Wildings had an unfair advantage with me from the start.

This novel is about a bunch of feral cats that live in Nizamuddin, among dargahs, ruins, rooftops, drains, and trees, and have their own codes, rivalries, and myths. They call us Bigfeet and share a common language called Junglee (pretty obvious, I know). There is an old Siamese named Miao who teaches kittens to hunt and a tom named Hulo who patrols the territory. Things go sideways when an orange kitten named Mara shows up. She is a special one who can project herself across distances through her whiskers and is what the cats call a ‘Sender’.

Many authors anthropomorphize animals but end up giving them too many human qualities that break character. Roy never pretends to humanize the cats. They remain feral, sweating, mewing, eating rats and doing whatever cats do.

I loved how she built a microcosm of a civilization using the cats’ version of the Nizamuddin neighborhood with its iconic dargahs, canals, lanes and trees. The book gives a strange sheen to the place with the raat ki rani smelling ten times stronger. The shift in perspective reminded me of the Panchatantra tales I read as a child: talking animals making their world feel strange and exciting while smuggling in lessons about our own.

The author was a literary critic for years before she wrote her first novel. The Wildings won the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award in 2013 and also has a sequel, The Hundred Names of Darkness. If you want to see Delhi from a foot off the ground, go for it. [Aashisha]

• 📙 The Wildings by Nilanjana Roy, illustrations by Prabha Mallya

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This week: a 433-mile bike ride that brings small towns to life, a D&D campaign disguised as a heist movie, a Pulitzer-winning book and HBO miniseries about the marriage behind one of America’s founders, portraits staged like tiny theatres, and a documentary about a dump with one of the greatest sounds in music history.

1. Biking Across Iowa: Water Towers, Pie, and Small-Town Hospitality

In 1973, two Des Moines Register journalists wanted an excuse to get out of the office. John Karras, an avid cyclist, suggested they bike across Iowa and write their column from the road. Don Kaul, who authored “Over the Coffee,” agreed, but only if Karras came along. That ride became RAGBRAI, the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, now the oldest, largest, and longest multi-day bicycle touring event in the world. I just finished this year’s edition — 433 miles by my own tracker, thanks to an optional century loop and a campsite set well outside town — and I’m still feeling it.

Iowa is not flat. That myth dies somewhere around your fourth relentless roller on Day 2. This year’s route was the tenth-hilliest in RAGBRAI history, with over 16,000 feet of climbing. The heat and humidity can be unbearable. But the towns are what make this ride. You spot a water tower miles before you arrive.

Fitting that this year’s theme, “An Iowa Classic,” actually celebrates those beacons on the horizon. Then you roll into a community with a few hundred people and find churches serving homemade pies, kids with lemonade stands, and grain elevators taller than anything else in town.

In Marshalltown, an overnight stop of about 27,000 people, I counted at least four family-owned businesses that have been operating for more than 90 years. A miracle for a town that was practically leveled by an EF3 tornado in 2018.

An estimated 20,000 riders pour through these communities each day, and the money goes directly to local projects: new baseball fields, pool repairs, scoreboards. For towns losing people and businesses, one week of bikes can really help the local economy.

I have been all over this country. The hospitality and friendliness of Iowans remains unmatched. I also fulfilled a lifelong wish and got to take batting practice at the Field of Dreams. Until next time, Iowa. [Taylor]

• 🌐 RAGBRAI Official Website

2. Honor Among Thieves : What if Danny Ocean Played D&D?

A few days ago, Jonathan Goldstein, one of the writer-directors of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, mentioned that they’ve written a sequel, and that he doubts it’ll ever be shot “for a number of financial reasons.” So there’s a finished script for a movie nobody will pay for. Which is a shame, because the first one is a lot of fun. I watched it again recently with my kids (their first time), and it was a hit with them.

It’s a heist movie in a fantasy setting. Chris Pine plays a bard whose only real weapon is being charming (he’s the Danny Ocean of this film), and he assembles the usual crew of specialists: a barbarian, a sorcerer who keeps flubbing his spells, a shape-shifting druid. The goal is to rob a vault belonging to his old partner, played by a very funny Hugh Grant, clearly having a great time as the smiling con man.

My favorite scene is in a graveyard. The sorcerer casts Speak with Dead, a real D&D spell that lets you ask a corpse exactly five questions. The party immediately starts wasting them arguing about whether asking if something counts as a question counts as a question. The scene keeps finding new ways to make five a very small number, and it pays off later in a way I won’t spoil.

The reason it works, I think, is that a heist and a D&D campaign are the same thing. Both are an elaborate plan meeting reality and failing again and again until it somehow comes together. I’ve played D&D weekly for years, which is the only expertise I bring to this. What the film adapts is the playing, not the lore: somebody always improvises something idiotic, it half-works, and the party spends the rest of the night arguing about it.

You don’t need to have played to enjoy it. Knowing the game gets you extra references, but my wife has never rolled a d20 and enjoyed it as a straight adventure movie.

It’s a well-made crowd-pleaser, which is rarer than it sounds. They did a good job, the hard way. The dragonborn is an animatronic with motors in its face rather than a CGI render, and the directors said they were aiming at Willow and The Princess Bride (see Field Notes #1 for Cary Elwes’ memoir of making that film).

Stay through the credits for a bonus scene. Too bad the sequel will never be more than a PDF on somebody’s hard drive. [Liberty]

• 🏰 Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)

3. John and Abigail Adams: The Founding’s Greatest Partnership

Two of my all-time favorites are really one story told twice: David McCullough’s John Adams and the HBO miniseries it became seven years later. I can’t think of another case where a book and its adaptation actually improve each other, but these two do.

McCullough won the Pulitzer for it, and it holds up.

He spent years in the Adams papers and came out with a portrait that doesn’t sand anything down. The vanity and the temper are all there, right alongside the courage. Adams wasn’t Jefferson and knew it, which is part of what makes him such good company on the page. He was a stubborn New England lawyer with an overdeveloped sense of duty who kept volunteering for the hardest jobs of the founding — defending the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre, arguing independence in the Continental Congress, negotiating the peace in Paris — and got most of them right, including the one nobody remembers to thank him for: losing an election, handing power to his rival, and going home.

The miniseries, directed by Tom Hooper, somehow adds to all this. Paul Giamatti plays Adams squat and twitchy and brilliant, funny and heartbreaking in the same scene. I’ve loved Giamatti in almost everything he’s done, but I think this is the best thing he’s ever done (I think it even edges out Billions!). That said, it’s Laura Linney’s Abigail who holds the seven episodes together.

The two of them wrote each other more than a thousand letters over the course of their marriage. He was gone for years at a stretch, and she ran everything in his absence: the farm, the money, the children, and a good deal of his political thinking. On many questions, she was the sharper politician. Watch Linney and Giamatti argue about slavery, the vice presidency, or the loneliness of Paris, and they stop looking like historical figures. They look married. So much of the founding was really a story of partnerships. This was one of the great ones.

I would say first read the book, then watch the series. And if you’re still not done with the Adamses after that, the letters themselves are in print. Worth a read on their own, as a portrait of what two people can do in a lifetime. [Jimmy]

• 📕 John Adams by David McCullough

• 🎬 John Adams the miniseries (2008, HBO)

4. The Man Who Photographs Actors Like Dioramas

Willem Dafoe has always been one of my favorite actors. As a kid, I remember seeing him in the Spider-Man movies, and he shines in every role. It helps that he has a classic theatrical face, which makes him seem natural as a mad sea-captain or in the many distinct roles he plays in Wes Anderson movies.

A few years ago, this photo of Willem Dafoe started circulating online. It’s part of a GQ Italia photoshoot. I was mesmerized by it. First of all, it’s strange. Why is Willem’s head inside a cardboard house? Why is he posing like that? Every single photo from that sepia-toned shoot accentuated his theatricality.

This was the work of photographer Szilveszter Makó, who I’ve been obsessed with ever since. Aperture magazine recently did a feature on him, and they showcase a lot of his strange work. Makó does not really think of himself as a photographer. He builds the sets, makes the props, and stages his subjects inside box-like rooms. The photographs look less like portraits than tiny theatre productions.

Two details from the Aperture profile stood out to me. One was Makó’s insistence on making sure everything is handmade, to elevate the textures and grain of the image. The other was the feature’s exploration of Makó‘s inner rooms:

“When he speaks about his inner architecture, though, the style morphs into something more intricate. He imagines “lots of little rooms,” each distinct, each filled with carefully gathered trinkets. Every object is collected and stored, separate yet connected in a sort of organized chaos…”

This snippet made me wonder: can we really know what’s going on in our favourite artists’ inner minds? Can we use our own inner chaos and channel it into magic the way Szilveszter does? [Rohan]

• 📷 Szilveszter Makó on Instagram

5. Brown Shag Carpet on the Walls and a Hundred Platinum Records

The Sound City studio opened in 1969 in a former Vox amplifier factory in a Van Nuys industrial park in Los Angeles. Brown shag carpet on the walls, no windows, and everyone who worked there describes it as a dump. It also had a Neve mixing console that cost $75,000, one of only four in the world, and twice what one of the owners had just paid for his own house. He says in the film that his wife never found out.

Neil Young recorded part of After the Gold Rush there. Fleetwood Mac made their 1975 self-titled album. Tom Petty made Damn the Torpedoes. Rick Springfield made “Jessie’s Girl.” Nirvana made Nevermind.

In 2013, Dave Grohl made a documentary about the place, his first time directing. He'd recorded Nevermind there in 1991, and bought that console when the studio closed in 2011 (it reopened in 2017, after the film came out). Then he interviewed forty musicians and staff who had worked in the room. That's the best part: people telling stories about how the records actually got made.

It took four months to dismantle and move the Neve console, and then a few hours for, as Grohl puts it, a guy with a toothbrush to remove all the cocaine and fried chicken from its insides.

My favorite of those stories: in 1974, Mick Fleetwood came by looking for a place to record. Keith Olsen, the house engineer, played him "Frozen Love" to show off what the room could do, a track he'd cut there with a duo called Buckingham Nicks. Lindsey Buckingham happened to walk past while his own record was being used as a sales pitch. Not long after, Fleetwood Mac needed a guitar player, and Buckingham told them they'd have to take his girlfriend too.

This is why I like a good behind-the-scenes documentary. It shows how random life can be. That room turned out to have one of the best drum sounds in the world, entirely by accident, and nobody wanted to make changes to it in case they ruined it.

The second half is weaker. Grohl brings a bunch of musicians to his own studio to write and record new songs on the old console, and it's fine. He’s very likeable, so it’s still fun to hang out with him, but I much prefer the first half.

The place was a dump. But make enough great records in one room and it gets a halo. Even the ugly carpet is part of the legend now. [Liberty]

• 🎬 Sound City (2013, documentary, directed by Dave Grohl)

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This week: a table-tennis movie that’s really about being made obsolete, the Chappelle special that isn’t stand-up, Borges on whether there’s any such thing as the “real” Odyssey, the strange story of how the world’s best movie projector became impossible to build, and a forgotten book on where ideas actually come from.

1. Marty Supreme : When a Better Tool Changes the Rules

I watched Marty Supreme for the second time a few days ago and liked it even more than the first time, though it still comes close to my limit for how stressful a film can be. It’s less anxiety-inducing than the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, but that’s not saying much.

This time, I noticed the craft more: the period detail, how every background face is interesting. But I also caught something central to the film, a major theme that I had not even noticed the first time.

When Marty plays Japanese champion Koto Endo, he’s completely thrown off. He holds the paddle differently and makes shots Marty can’t anticipate. I assumed it was kind of like a karate champion encountering a jiu-jitsu black belt for the first time.

After losing, Marty throws a tantrum and there’s a throwaway line about Endo’s paddle. It sounds like a sore loser making excuses, and that’s what I thought it was.

Except he was right!

The film is loosely inspired by American table-tennis champion and hustler Marty Reisman. Endo is based in part on Japanese player Hiroji Satoh, who arrived at the 1952 World Championships with a paddle covered in thick sponge.

Traditional “hardbat” paddles had thin rubber attached directly to wood. Sponge compressed and sprang back, producing unfamiliar speed, spin, bounce, and trajectories. It even changed the sound of contact. Players who spent years building finely tuned instincts for how a stroke looked and sounded found themselves with a useless toolkit.

Satoh won the world championship. Sponge spread rapidly. Table tennis became a different game.

That changes how I see the whole film. It goes from a story about Marty vs. Endo to one about the old guard raging against a technological shift.

This pattern repeats everywhere. Someone becomes exceptional under one technological regime, then a new tool changes which skills count. You’re still just as good. It just stops mattering. Silent-film stars when talkies arrived. Hand-drawn animators when the studios moved to CGI.

Marty wants the game frozen at the moment when he is best positioned to dominate it. But he hasn’t just met a better player. He has met the next version of his sport. [Liberty]

• 🎬 Marty Supreme (2025)

2. Dave Chappelle’s Best Special Isn’t Stand-Up

I have been a Dave Chappelle fan for a long time. I’ve enjoyed just about everything he’s done: Killin’ Them Softly, For What It’s Worth, Chappelle’s Show, and the run of Netflix specials. But the Chappelle work I keep coming back to - and recommend to friends, no matter their opinion of his comedy - is not stand-up comedy. It is a forty-minute speech he gave at his old high school in June 2022, released on Netflix the following month as What’s in a Name?, and it is one of the most thoughtful defenses of free expression I have ever heard.

The context matters. Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, DC, is where Chappelle went as a teenager, and in October 2021 the school announced it would rename its theater after him. His special The Closer had come out the same month and drawn intense criticism for some of its controversial jokes. Some students objected to the naming, and the school held a contentious Q and A with Chappelle. And on June 20, 2022, at what was supposed to be a naming ceremony, Chappelle stood in front of the students who had opposed him and made an unusual proposal. “Rather than give this theater my name, I would like to give these students my message.” He asked that the space be called the ‘Theater for Artistic Freedom and Expression’. The school agreed.

What makes the speech worth watching is the elegance with which Chappelle treats his critics. He does not dismiss the students. He remembers being one of them. He tells the room what art is for and what it costs, and he makes the case, without hyperbole or heat, that a school named for Duke Ellington should be a place where the hardest ideas can be tested out loud. Netflix put the speech on the platform in July 2022 without fanfare, and it later won the 2024 Grammy for Best Comedy Album. But at heart it is a working artist explaining to a room that had opposed him why the freedom to say difficult things is worth protecting. [Jimmy]

• 📺 What’s in a Name? (Dave Chappelle)

3. Which Odyssey Is the Real Odyssey?

I went into Nolan’s The Odyssey last weekend knowing almost nothing about Homer’s poem. I came out so enthralled by both the theatrical experience and the story itself that I decided to read Homer’s Odyssey and see the film again in a week.

As I did some brief research into which translation to pick (a customary ritual before reading any ancient text), I came across this essay by Jorge Luis Borges in which he explores the art of translation by comparing several English versions of a single passage from The Odyssey. The differences can be large: Pope turns one ship into an entire fleet, while Butler makes Homer sound like a series of “sedate news items.”

Borges calls the belief that translations are inferior to their originals a “superstition.” The same words, even within one language, can invite different interpretations depending on who reads them, when, and where. A translation is thus one of many possible perspectives on a text, rather than a necessarily inferior copy of it. Borges writes, “To assume that every recombination of elements is necessarily inferior to its original form is to assume that draft nine is necessarily inferior to draft H—for there can only be drafts.” (I think the mismatched ‘nine’ and ‘H’ are deliberate, to avoid any direct comparison or ranking.)

How much of what we call fidelity is really familiarity? How much belongs to the author’s style, and how much to the language itself? Which translation is most faithful: the most literal, the most florid, or the simplest?

I won’t spoil Borges’s answer, but the essay made my search for “the best” Odyssey translation much easier. [Vatsal]

• 📄 The Homeric Versions by Jorge Luis Borges

4. We Stopped Building the World’s Best Projector, and Then Forgot How?!

Unlike Vatsal above, I haven’t seen The Odyssey yet. But I read a fascinating piece about how we’ve lost the knowledge of how to build new 70mm IMAX projectors, so we’ve been repairing and rebuilding old ones, hoping they last.

To open more locations for The Odyssey, IMAX spent over a year tracking down old broken projectors to salvage their parts. Despite this effort, there are still only 25 theaters in the U.S. and 41 theaters worldwide that can do true IMAX 70mm film. That’s 11 more than Oppenheimer had in 2023 (just 30).

How did we get to this sad state of affairs? How did we lose the ability to make more of the very best projection format that humanity has ever created?

The industry’s shift from film to digital is mostly to blame. And sadly, IMAX let that institutional knowledge go. By the time film projection began its vinyl-like revival, the expertise and supply chain had already atrophied. The original design files and manufacturing blueprints were created roughly half a century ago (yes, IMAX was founded in 1967! I didn’t realize this until I looked it up), and they were never properly maintained. The engineers who understood these machines have mostly retired or passed away.

Building another projector today is like recreating an Apollo-era spacecraft. It’s technological archaeology. [Liberty]

• 📽️ Why Aren’t There More IMAX 70mm Screens? (Variety)

5. The Best Book on Creativity Nobody Has Read

In 1940, an English music scholar named Rosamond Harding (better known, if she’s known at all, for writing the standard history of the pianoforte) published a short book entitled An Anatomy of Inspiration. And yet, despite its thinness, this unassuming paperback probably sits at number one on my HPL index (highlights per line). It was basically yellow by the time I was done with it.

Instead of coming up with new platitudes about creativity, Harding did something far more useful. She collected what the people who actually made things said about how they did it -- the letters, notes, and routines of Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, and dozens more.

What they had in common surprised her. They described themselves less as inventors than as discoverers. The idea arrives on its own, unbidden. The genius is not in producing it, but recognizing it. Just as a farmer can’t grow a crop himself, an artist can’t have an idea. All either can do is cultivate the conditions for its arrival.

For anyone trying to understand the creative mind, it casts a light I’ve found nowhere else. Why it has been forgotten -- out of print, nine ratings on Goodreads, none on Amazon -- is beyond me. Especially given the slop that usually passes for books on creativity.

Two hundred pages. Hunt down a copy if you can. [Dylan]

• 📘 An Anatomy of Inspiration, and An Essay on the Creative Mood by Rosamond Harding

• 📖 You can borrow an ebook version for free on the Internet Archive

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This week: a British post-punk revival cures an allergy to new music, two books explain why football is the only religion without atheists, Bob Hoskins terrorizes 1980s London, a movie doubles as a history lesson, and the overlooked Bennet sister gets the spinoff she deserves

1. Dry Cleaning: British Post-Punk at its Best

Something no one told me about getting older is how much harder it gets to discover new music. I’m finding new movies, books and art all the time, but despite listening to hours and hours of music a day, I find myself consistently underwhelmed, retreating to the safety of my favorite artists. Why is this? Is it just a skill issue? Or is there something unique to music that makes us more discriminating in our tastes?

Anyway, after a brief interlude in the electronic music I listened to as a student, I’ve been back to bands recently. In particular, I’ve been digging Dry Cleaning, a British outfit headed by the taciturn lyricist Florence Shaw. They’re firmly in the post-punk lineage, with Shaw’s monotone, spoken-word delivery dancing over janky, spiky guitar riffs and moody basslines. There is something profoundly British about their weary, resigned tone (exactly what I need on the morning after yet another crushing World Cup exit).

Shaw’s lyrics - non-sequitur fragments accumulated magpie-like from found text and the dusty corners of her mind - are consistently interesting, just on the edge of amusing without veering over into parody or self-mockery. Take this interlude from Strong Feelings, complete nonsense that somehow makes poetic sense:

Tin blades, earthen ware
Flower brick painted in blue
On the sloping edge of a vase of flowers
On the front, Chinese landscape
On the sides, figures in a Dutch landscape
It’s Europe

Going through their back catalogue has reminded me of how I felt discovering new music when I was younger. I’d suggest starting with Strong Feelings and the slow-building Liberty Log for a good sample of their sound. If you like them, check out their first album and work from there. [Ed]

• 🎧 Dry Cleaning

2. Football is the Only Religion Without Atheists

Good news: it’s World Cup season.

Bad news: it’s nearly the end of World Cup season.

As a football fan for over twenty years, I’ve watched thousands of matches. I could probably have learned another language in the number of hours I’ve spent watching 22 people kick a little ball around a field (no regrets).

But some of my most profound football experiences have come a long way from the stadium or the screen. Two books have taught me more about the art and science of the beautiful game than a TV pundit ever has.

The Art: Football in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano. This is a collection of vivid, bite-sized vignettes celebrating the “great pagan mass” of the sport. Galeano writes like a poet, and he is better than anyone at articulating the religious fervor that football invokes in its fans.

The Science: My Turn by Johan Cruyff. The Dutch master and architect of modern Barcelona delivers a masterclass on “Total Football,” skipping the ghost-written platitudes common to celebrity autobiographies to explain how he engineered space and rhythm on the pitch. Anyone wanting to understand Spain’s masterclass against France earlier this week should start here.

As the World Cup draws to an end, these books remind us why we care so much about 90 minutes of controlled chaos. As Galeano wrote, football remains “the only religion without atheists.” [Camellia]

• 📕 Football in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano

• 📕 My Turn by Johan Cruyff

3. Before Guy Ritchie Came the Long Good Friday

Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins, in his breakout role) is a London gang boss with lofty visions of legitimizing his operation by building a Docklands property empire, aided by an impending partnership with the American mafia.

Alas, a lifetime of murder and extortion has a nasty habit of leaving a few loose ends. When a series of attacks from a mysterious adversary threatens to dismantle Harold’s meticulously laid plans, he must threaten, bribe, shoot and slice his way into finding and stopping his enemy before it’s too late.

This film is an urtext for the British crime flicks popularized by Guy Ritchie and Matthew Vaughn in the early noughties. Snatch, Lock Stock, and Layer Cake aficionados will find a lot to love in the acidic script (“The Yanks love snobbery. They really feel they’ve arrived in England if the upper class treats ‘em like shit”), dreary London backdrop and compounding eruptions of eyewatering violence.

Oh, and need I add that there is a sinister mustachioed sidekick called ‘Razors’?

Bob Hoskins is inspired as the unnervingly vulnerable head honcho, imperiously sneering and snarling his way through London’s underbelly like a Cockney Robert De Niro one moment; shedding a tear for the death of his best friend the next.

There are stylistic flourishes aplenty (keep an eye out for the exquisite long take that closes the film), but there is a lot more going on under the hood. Gone are the winking, teenage-boy-coded sensibilities of Ritchie’s films, replaced by a sinking sense of claustrophobic dread as the noose tightens around the impulsive Harold. The script is whip-smart, landing blows on Thatcherist individualism, British exceptionalism and class tensions while still knowing when to shut up and play the genre hits. [Ed]

• 🎬 The Long Good Friday (1980)

4. 1917 : You Only Know What They Know

I’ve started watching war films with my 12-year-old. Not Rambo III or Commando. The more historically grounded ones. It started when I mentioned that something happened “during World War II” and realized the words meant almost nothing to him. How could they? My own love of history began with films rather than textbooks. They aren’t always accurate, but they gave the words meaning. Now I’m trying to do the same for my son.

So I built us a little curriculum: 1917, Saving Private Ryan, and Band of Brothers. They’re more violent than what I usually watch with him, but I know my kid, and the violence isn’t gratuitous. It’s supposed to be horrible.

We started with 1917 because I wanted to begin with the First World War before moving to the Second. I’d already seen it twice, including in the theater, and Roger Deakins is my favorite cinematographer.

Everyone talks about how it's made to look like a single continuous shot, unfolding in near real time. It’s neat, but it's not what I care about. What makes it special is that the camera never leaves the soldiers. You see nothing they don't see, you know nothing they don't know. There are no establishing aerial shots of the battlefield, no cutaways to the Germans setting their trap, no shot of Blake's brother waiting at the other end. That absence denies us the reassurance of knowing more than they do.

In 1917, you're just there. It’s the closest a film has gotten me to what it might feel like to be a young soldier having to cross no man’s land. I pointed out to my son how many of the soldiers looked like teenagers, or barely out of their teens.

The violence happens the way it often does in life: fast, brutal, unannounced, no slow motion.

The filmmaking is incredible. Sequences that would be the highlight of another director’s entire career are just stacked one after another. The ruined town at night, lit by drifting flares and fire, is out of this world.

Being told about a war and seeing one are very different. The next time I tell my son something happened in 1917, he won’t hear only a date. [Liberty]

• 🎬 1917 (2019, directed by Sam Mendes)

5. How I Learned to Love Mary Bennet

Mary Bennet bored me stiff.

Jane was beautiful, Lizzy was witty and Lydia was reckless. When I first read Pride and Prejudice, it felt like all Mary did was give solemn little speeches and play the piano. Dull!

Honestly, given my dislike for Mary, I don’t know why I read Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister, a partial retelling of Austen’s novel from her perspective. But I’m so glad I did.

I expected a clever extension of Pride and Prejudice. I did not expect to become so invested in Mary.

The first half revisits familiar territory: Longbourn, assemblies, drawing rooms, exhausting marriage calculations, etc. But now it’s all filtered through Mary’s acute self-consciousness. She is bookish, gauche and overlooked, and she knows it. It’s heartbreaking to sit with her as she watches her sisters attract attention she knows she’ll never get.

But once her sisters are settled and her own future becomes uncertain, the novel expands beyond Austen’s plot and forces Mary to build an identity for herself. A slow-burn reinvention follows (my favorite kind), managing to thread the needle between growing Mary as a person while keeping her recognizably Austen’s creation.

If you loved Longbourn (Pride and Prejudice from the servant’s perspective) or Wide Sargasso Sea (the madwoman from Jane Eyre given her own story), you’ll probably love this too.

It got me thinking about other stories whose side characters we’ve overlooked. Is it time for an Animal Farm from the horse’s perspective? [Aashisha]

• 📕 The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow

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This week: the YouTube algorithm delights us, a Heian-era book feels like X or Threads, C-SPAN gives one author three uninterrupted hours, the world’s largest operating steam locomotive crosses America, and Louis L’Amour lives a life worthy of Hemingway.

1. Barry Can’t Swim & Crate-Digging at The Lot

Sometimes the YouTube algorithm gifts us in surprising ways. I’ve been getting into DJs lately, and after listening to Fred Again and the sets of Padre Guilherme (who I had the pleasure of seeing in Buenos Aires), YouTube started pushing a name onto my feed: Barry Can’t Swim.

I ignored it for a long time. Then one day, I clicked a set of his from Brooklyn and put it on while working through an essay. Within a few minutes, I was on my feet, swaying.

Was I able to finish the essay? No. Was my creative brain on fire? Absolutely.

Right after the Brooklyn set I put on another one, from The Lot Radio, and now I can’t stop listening to the guy. This one was even more surprising. Halfway through, I recognized a classic song of my parents’ generation: Anish Kumar’s Nazia, which samples Nazia Hassan’s 1980s Pakistani pop banger Disco Deewane.

Stuff like this is why I love DJs. The best ones are masters of “crate digging” — going into the musical archives, pulling out amazing tunes, and resurfacing them. And Barry Can’t Swim is really good at it. For example, near the end of this set he plays Midnight or Late Afternoon by Mike Simonetti, which is an edit of a bangin’ 70s disco track titled I’m Your Boogie Man by KC and The Sunshine Band. That’s just a taste of his worldly ear; he’s cited Ravi Shankar and Fela Kuti as inspirations.

It helps that the setting suits him. The Lot Radio is a small 24/7 online station in Greenpoint, built by Francois Vaxelaire in a triangular patch of vacant land he found full of trash. A DJ booth and a coffee kiosk inside a repurposed shipping container, and not much else. It runs live all day and takes no brand money. “We never want to contribute to the noise,” Vaxelaire likes to say. The programming is open format on purpose: techno at noon, a rock band at six, whatever a resident wants at two in the morning.

What a way to experience music. [Rohan]

• 🎧 Barry Can’t Swim at The Lot Radio

• 🎧 Barry Can’t Swim in Brooklyn

2. The Woman Who Noticed Everything

I live for little observations. When someone says something a bit too loudly, the particular way someone pinches their nose, the small irritation that reveals way more than a dramatic confession ever could. That’s probably why Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book felt so alive to me.

It read like a diary when I started, but halfway through I realized it was a huge list — a collection of lists, gossip, memories, judgments, court scenes, aesthetic preferences, and private annoyances, written by a court lady in tenth-century Japan. Shōnagon writes about “things that make one’s heart beat faster,” “things that should be short,” “hateful things,” “elegant things.”

I loved how contemporary her lists felt. She was snobbish, funny, observant, vain, tender, and cutting, sometimes on the same page. The best thing about her was that she noticed everything: clothing, handwriting, weather, flirtation, rank, timing, embarrassment. Basically, she’s the Heian-era version of X, Bluesky, or Threads — or, better, an aristocratic WhatsApp group chat.

In one section, usually translated as “Very Tiresome Things,” she writes: “When a poem of one’s own, that one has allowed someone else to use as his, is singled out for praise.” I laughed so hard at that line.

The book can feel fragmentary, but that is also its pleasure. It doesn’t have a plot as such, but if you read it to see what a Heian court felt like, you’ll be fascinated. Read it with a cup of tea and it will feel like Shōnagon is talking to you.

If you like books that preserve the texture of a mind rather than just the events of a life, this is worth reading. Some writers build worlds through plot. Shōnagon does it by noticing what everyone else would have missed. [Aashisha]

• 📕 The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon translated by Ivan Morris

3. Three Hours, One Writer, One Camera

I realize I’m going full book nerd on you, but it comes with the territory when you make books for a living. So indulge me: today’s recommendation is C-SPAN’s Book TV.

I stumbled onto it back in 2017, when Michael Lewis came on In Depth, Book TV’s flagship program, for a three-hour interview. Three hours. One writer. One camera. He talked about Liar’s Poker and Moneyball and The Undoing Project, and he took questions from a moderator and, one after another, from viewers calling in from their kitchens and their cars. It was the most unhurried treatment of a working writer I had ever seen on American television. I have been hooked ever since.

Book TV airs Sundays on C-SPAN2 and has run since 1998. C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb once said he got tired of watching authors show up on talk shows and disappear before he could decide whether he wanted to read the book. So he built the thing he wished existed. For years, C-SPAN estimated that Book TV featured roughly two thousand nonfiction authors a year.

In Depth ran monthly from 2000 through 2023, with later episodes shortened from three hours to two. The complete archive remains online. The format was simple: one writer, one moderator, viewer call-ins, no b-roll, no jump cuts. The camera just sits there and the writer talks.

I find the whole thing quietly moving. The writers take the questions seriously. The moderators let them answer at length. And for a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon, the country’s most patient literary talk show carries on, an artifact of a slower era doing its slow work.

If you love books, spend a Sunday with it. You will not want the show to end. [Jimmy]

• 📺 C-SPAN Book TV

4. Big Boy: 1.2M Pounds of American History, Steaming Across the Country

In 1941, an unknown worker at the American Locomotive Company in Schenectady, New York, chalked the words “Big Boy” on the smokebox door of No. 4000, the first locomotive in a new class so large nobody had a better name for it. The name stuck. Eighty-five years later, one of its surviving sisters — Union Pacific No. 4014 — steamed east from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to Philadelphia for America’s 250th birthday, and thousands of people lined the tracks to watch it pass.

Big Boy is the world’s largest operating steam locomotive: 133 feet long, 1.2 million pounds, sixteen driving wheels, and enough power to haul a 3,600-ton freight train over the Wasatch Range without a helper engine. It was built to move war materiel over the Wasatch Range and logged over a million miles before being retired in 1961. It sat in a museum in Pomona, California, for just over half a century.

Then Union Pacific spent three years taking it completely apart and rebuilding it. In May 2019, it moved under its own power for the first time since John F. Kennedy was president. This summer’s eastern tour — the centerpiece of Big Boy’s 250th anniversary celebration — marks the first time a Big Boy has traveled on eastern rails since 1941, when it rolled off the assembly line. It crossed the Rockville Bridge into Pennsylvania this week and is now making its return westward to Wyoming. Even mega-transportation influencer and new Grand Tour presenter Francis Bourgeois showed up.

You can feel Big Boy before you see it. The ground shakes. The whistle carries for miles. The heat radiates off the boiler and you understand, in your body, why people drove hours to stand trackside in the rain. As lead engineer Ed Dickens told WJAC, “Everywhere we go, we have looks of amazement, some looks of terror when people are too close.” In a country that moves everything by algorithm, there is something deeply right about a machine you can hear coming. [Taylor Pipes]

• 🗺️ Big Boy’s Remaining Summer Schedule (Union Pacific)

5. The Man Who Was More Hemingway Than Hemingway

I won’t say you have to live an interesting life to be a good writer, but I’d definitely say it’s an advantage. That’s why I’ve always been drawn to Louis L’Amour.

He left his small North Dakota home at 15 and took on any job he could find while traveling the world. Miner, fruit picker, elephant handler for a circus — he even had a few stints as a professional boxer. He went to China, Japan, Singapore, Egypt, Europe... I could go on. All of this happened before he made a living as a writer.

Even though none of his books are as acclaimed as Ernest Hemingway’s, and he’s often dismissed as “only” a genre writer good at cowboy stories, L’Amour wrote about 100 novels and hundreds of short stories across many genres. He pushed himself to write every day because he believed that “nature has no place for non-producers.”

I bring all this up because I admire him as someone who wrung every last drop out of life — and lately I’ve been reading a lot of those short stories. Most of them have been collected in seven volumes, and I’ve been working my way through volume one. L’Amour’s straightforward prose is easy to read, and I’ve been struck by how many simple stories have left me with something to think about.

If you’ve got an appetite for short fiction that instills values like bravery and integrity, add L’Amour to your rotation. [Jameson]

• 📕 The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour, Volume 1: Frontier Stories

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This week: familiar things can become something else when taken seriously enough. A 133-year-old fireworks family turning Hunter S. Thompson’s dying wish into a spectacle, a web page that reminds you the browser can still be a laboratory, a Lakers drama that got close enough to the dynasty to provoke an answer, a food podcaster who treated pasta like a startup, and Louis C.K. turning FX money and a laptop into one of the rawest shows to get passed the corporate suits.

1. The Fireworks Family That Fired Hunter Thompson Into the Sky

Today is America’s 250th birthday, and there’s a decent chance the fireworks you see will be made by a family that’s been doing this for 133 of those years.

In 1893, a sixteen-year-old Italian immigrant named Antonio Zambelli arrived in New Castle, Pennsylvania, with a notebook full of his family’s pyrotechnic recipes and took a job in the Carnegie steel mills. He started making fireworks by hand on the side. Four generations later, Zambelli Fireworks is still family-run, still based in New Castle, and still the company behind many of the biggest shows in the country — more than 2,000 displays a year, 800 of them on the Fourth of July alone.

They’ve fired their rockets for every president since Kennedy. They lit up the Statue of Liberty centennial, Mount Rushmore, Times Square on New Year’s Eve, and the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana.

But the show I keep coming back to happened on a Saturday night in August 2005, in Woody Creek, Colorado. Hunter S. Thompson — the gonzo journalist, author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and one of the most ungovernable writers in American history — had shot himself six months earlier at age 67.

He’d spent decades telling anyone who’d listen exactly how he wanted to go out: his ashes blasted into the sky from a 153-foot monument shaped like his personal logo, a two-thumbed red fist with a peyote button at its center.

His friend Johnny Depp wrote the check for $3 million. Zambelli got the call. Technicians at their Pennsylvania facility encased Thompson’s remains inside mortar shells, sealed them with fireworks, and drove the whole payload to Colorado in an armored car.

At sunset, in front of 350 guests — John Kerry, Bill Murray, Ed Bradley, George McGovern — 34 lines of fireworks erupted simultaneously. Thompson’s ashes lingered in great puffs of milky smoke, then vanished. The blast itself lasted less than a minute.

A 133-year-old family business, a notebook of recipes from Naples, and the wildest funeral in American literary history. That’s a hell of a Fourth of July story. [Taylor]

• 🎆 The Family That Lights the Sky

2. Bartosz Ciechanowski: The Web Page as a Thinking Machine

Once in a while, I find something that reminds me the web doesn’t have to be bland and boring.

Bartosz Ciechanowski makes loooong, beautiful, interactive explanations of complicated systems: mechanical watches, GPS, airfoils, bicycles, gears, sound, and the Moon. That sounds like a kind of blog, but his pieces are closer to museum exhibits in a browser. You drag the Moon around and scrub time. You rotate a watch movement and look at what is going on with the mechanism. You drop particles into air flowing around a wing in a virtual wind tunnel.

Ciechanowski builds mechanisms you can operate and play with, so you don't just understand cause and effect, you actually feel it.

I like that the subjects he picks are things we don’t even notice anymore. Planes fly. GPS works. Watches tick. Bikes move and stay upright when you pedal. Then I read one of his essays, and, oh yeah, familiarity is not understanding.

Start with his piece on the Mechanical Watch if you like machines, Airfoil if you want the “make the invisible visible” experience, or GPS if you want to feel grateful for your phone. Ciechanowski’s work makes the modern internet feel a little unimaginative. We have this amazing medium, and we use it mostly to scroll. [Liberty]

• 🌐 Bartosz Ciechanowski

3. The Sports Drama So Good the Lakers Made a Documentary to Answer It

A few months ago, I wrote about Hulu’s Legacy, the 10-part docuseries on the Buss family and the Lakers. What I did not mention is that Legacy was, among other things, the family’s response to Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, the HBO drama that ran for two seasons before HBO pulled the plug in 2023. The show got under the family’s skin; maybe because it worked.

I am no expert on prestige television, but what impressed me most about Winning Time was the casting. The people they cast were phenomenally good fits, and each person looks and plays the part with an almost eerie degree of accuracy. John C. Reilly disappears into Jerry Buss. Quincy Isaiah, in his first major role, plays Magic Johnson with such easy warmth that after ten minutes you have forgotten you are watching an actor. Solomon Hughes, an actual former basketball player, plays Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with the exact silence and stillness the man carried. And then, most improbably, Adrien Brody plays Pat Riley. On paper, you would not think it works. On screen, within one scene, you cannot imagine anyone else in the part.

Watching a sport come to life this way is a strange pleasure. I have not seen many attempts at the form, and part of the fun of Winning Time was watching the writers figure out what a basketball dynasty looks like from the inside: one meeting, one loss, one late-night phone call at a time. The record is there on every page of the script. The Jack McKinney bike accident. The Westhead firing. The Riley elevation. The personalities and rivalries and small unhinged decisions that make a dynasty. Whatever the critics said, it was an act of imagination applied seriously, if not always literally, to real events. Real events aren't obligated to make a good story. This one did, and it deserved more than two seasons to finish telling it. [Jimmy]

• 📺 Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty (2022-2023)

4. The Pasta Shape That Was Also a Startup

A few years ago, I listened to a five-part podcast series about a guy trying to invent a new pasta shape. I loved it, and I tried to buy the pasta, but it was sold out and I kind of forgot about it. Recently, my wife cooked some pasta with terrific home-made sauce, and I was reminded of this podcast and its quest for pasta nirvana.

I didn’t expect a podcast about pasta extrusion to scratch the same itch as a good startup story, but it did.

The man-on-a-mission is Dan Pashman, who’s run the food podcast The Sporkful for over a decade (three James Beard Awards, two Webbys). In 2018 he decided to try something he’d never done: not critique, but create. “I built a large part of my career on these opinions about food,” he says, “and yet, I’ve never really made anything. So maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.” Inventing a pasta shape became, in his words, the ultimate test of his own opinions.

So he did what founders do: tried everything on the market, then made up his own way to measure what was missing. He came up with sauceability, forkability, and toothsinkability for the three jobs pasta has to do. Then he spent three years discovering that the real bottleneck was industrial: there’s one company left in the U.S. that still makes bronze pasta dies (solid discs the size of an extra-thick manhole cover, with dozens of holes for the pasta to extrude through, Play-Doh-style), and the factories built around them run tens of thousands of pounds a day, not the few thousand one guy with a podcast needs.

He named his pasta Cascatelli (after the Italian word for waterfalls, with the grammar wrong on purpose, because it sounded better with the “i” at the end). It launched in March 2021. The first 4,000-pound run sold out in under two hours. Pashman personally fronted about $9,000 for the new die, earned it back within the year, on the way to 300,000 pounds sold.

Why should you care if pasta isn’t your thing?

It’s a familiar arc: he’s sure he’s onto something, then he starts wondering whether he has gone bonkers, then manufacturer after manufacturer explains why his idea is annoying or impossible. Every small decision has unexpected consequences. The curve of the noodle, the thickness of the ridge, the length, and whether it cracks when drying. It reminds me of stories from founders and artists, even if it’s about comfort food.

TIME Magazine called it one of the year’s best inventions and a design museum in Germany asked Pashman for his original Cascatelli sketches (drawn on graph paper from a CVS) to put on display. Not bad for a podcast side project. [Liberty]

• 🎧 The Sporkful: Mission ImPASTAble

5. Louis C.K. Wrote, Directed, Starred In, and Edited This Show On His Laptop

I’ve never seen a work of art that so perfectly mirrors its artist as Louie. In 2009, FX gave Louis C.K. something impossible: near-complete creative control. It was unheard of then. It’s even more unheard of now. FX wired him the money and saw nothing until the finished episodes arrived. No studio-mandated writers’ rooms, no notes from the suits. He wrote it, directed it, starred in it, and edited it himself on his laptop. A pure, unfiltered vision. What came back was sixty-one episodes of some of the best television I’ve ever seen.

The show finds that deep, deep place where the underground rivers of tragedy, comedy, and drama intersect. The thing that hits you (and stays with you) is how raw it is. It doesn’t feel scripted, even if it is. The camera work is guerrilla. I still think about the opening shot, Louie coming up out of the subway, getting a slice of pizza, heading down the stairs into the Comedy Cellar. He doesn’t even romanticize New York. He makes it real.

And the best part: the stand-up in the show is actual-comedy-special good. This shouldn’t be remarkable, but it is. In every other show or movie that depicts comedy, the comedy sucks. Why is that? Why can’t they do it? Watch any film with a “brilliant comedian” character and you’ll sit through material you’d never pay for. Then watch “Louie” work the Cellar between vignettes and realise you’re seeing the real thing, embedded in fiction, and you can’t see the seams. [Dylan]

• 📺 Louie (2010-2015)

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This week: what it looks like to go all the way in. An inventor who’d never painted, out to reverse-engineer the master, an aerospace engineer who turned Texas ranchland into the planet's largest telescope ranch, a horror-comedy almost twenty years in the making, the Urdu writer who poured his last seven years into stories that can break you, and a con man who commits to a stolen life so fully it starts to come true.

1. The Engineer Who Taught Himself to Paint Like a Master by Building a Room

Tim’s Vermeer is a documentary about a man who taught himself to paint by building a room. Tim Jenison is a Texas inventor, co-founder of the computer graphics company NewTek, and has never picked up a brush. He becomes convinced, after reading David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge and Philip Steadman’s Vermeer’s Camera, that the Dutch master must have used an optical device to achieve those impossible interiors. So Tim sets out to prove it in the most literal way available: by painting a Vermeer himself.

The film, directed by Teller and produced by Penn Jillette, follows him for five years. He chooses The Music Lesson from the Royal Collection. He flies to Delft to measure the room Vermeer painted in. He rents a warehouse in San Antonio and rebuilds the room down to the floorboards. He grinds his own pigments and polishes his own lens. He builds the furniture, weaves the carpet, has the stained glass fabricated to specification. The key insight, when it comes, is small and beautiful: a comparator mirror, a small piece of silvered glass set at an angle above the canvas, which lets the painter see the subject and his paint simultaneously and match the colors until the seam between them disappears. With that, Tim sits down and paints for one hundred and thirty grueling days.

The scene I will not forget comes near the end, after he finishes the painting and adds the layer of varnish. He sits with it. He looks at what he has made, and he breaks down. By the time the camera reached his face, I was emotional too. I think it is because by then you have spent the entire film watching a man pour everything he is into one single image, and you understand, with him, that the picture has answered him back. That is what art can do to the person who makes it. [Jimmy]

• 🎬 Tim’s Vermeer (2013)

2. Deep in the Heart of Texas, 850 Telescopes Are Waiting for Instructions

It is said that the stars at night are big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas. Bray Falls took that literally. On 40 acres of former ranchland outside Rockwood — near Brady, the self-proclaimed "Heart of Texas" — the 27-year-old former Honeywell aerospace engineer runs Starfront Observatories, what is now the largest remote telescope hosting facility on the planet.

The operation is elegantly strange: stargazers from around the world ship their telescopes to Falls, who bolts them to concrete piers inside a series of plain metal buildings whose roofs roll back automatically every clear night. Owners control their scopes from a laptop anywhere on Earth. Falls tends the machines, troubleshoots the mounts, and keeps the whole herd pointed at Polaris. He is the telescope rancher.

The model isn’t new. Remote observatories exist in New Mexico, Chile, and Utah. But they have historically charged around $3,000 a month, pricing out all but the most obsessed hobbyists. Falls and his co-founders reimagined the economics by pricing floor space based on each telescope’s physical swing diameter rather than a fixed footprint, packing scopes densely and dropping the entry point to $99 a month.

Light pollution is so bad that people now ship their telescopes away to see the sky they used to have at home.

In eighteen months, Starfront has grown to roughly 850 telescopes, adding two or three every day, under Bortle Class 1 skies — the darkest designation on the scale. Falls has personally discovered roughly 15 previously uncatalogued deep-sky objects with his own rig, which uses duct-taped water bottles as counterweights because he could afford the optics but not the finishing touches. Serious stargazing is not a cheap hobby. Falls estimates his rig and lenses cost about $20,000.

Ashlee Vance’s Core Memory episode that travels to Starfront is the kind of video that makes you want to ship a telescope to Texas. They arrived on a night when Comet Lemmon (C/2025 A6) was making its first pass through our sky since the 7th century and caught it live, ion tail and all. Some real estate is measured in square feet. This kind is measured in light-years. [Taylor]

• 🌐 Explore Starfront

3. Widow's Bay: What if Parks and Rec Wandered Into a Horror Movie?

“This show is like if the cast of Parks and Rec found themselves in a horror movie.”

That is one description I’ve heard of Apple TV’s break-out series Widow’s Bay. Not only is it spot on, but there’s a good reason for it: Show creator Katie Dippold was a writer on Parks and Rec.

In fact, Dippold had already written an early version of Widow’s Bay as a spec/original pilot, and it is that script that helped get her hired on Parks and Rec. She's been developing the idea for nearly two decades.

The classic trope of ‘sleepy town with a dark secret’ gets new life as a supernatural mystery plot that fuses equal doses of comedy and horror. The show is drawing comparisons to Lost in terms of how obsessed fans are with solving the mystery.

Apple TV’s production value has already proven they can make any story feel cinematic (Hiro Murai, the director of Atlanta and Station Eleven, directs and exec-produces). What makes Widow’s Bay really stand out is how it succeeds at one of the hardest things for any storyteller: fuse genres without feeling cheap.

In any given episode, you’ll laugh, you’ll cover your eyes, and you’ll hold your breath in anticipation of learning one more piece to the puzzle. The story is propelled by the masterful performances of Matthew Rhys (The Americans, Perry Mason) and the rest of the cast.

Most horror-comedies pick a lane and almost apologize for the other. Widow's Bay wants you laughing hard and properly scared. [Jameson]

• 📺 Widow’s Bay (2026, Apple TV+)

4. The Writer Who Can Cut You Open

I discovered Saadat Hasan Manto on a sweltering hot day when the teacher didn’t show up for class. Thirty minutes weren’t enough for me to enter the world of a novel, so I picked up Manto’s short stories. I started reading Toba Tek Singh. Compared to what I was reading, the next class felt childish. By the time I finished reading Khol Do (trigger warning), I was devastated.

The first one is about the aftermath of Partition (of 1947) when the Indian and Pakistani governments decided to exchange their asylum inmates — Muslim lunatics to Pakistan, Hindu and Sikh lunatics to India. The inmates are confused. Their questions are played for comedy until you realize they’re the same questions everyone outside the asylum walls was asking. The difference is that the lunatics say them out loud. At the centre is Bishan Singh, a Sikh whose hometown is now in Pakistan. He is being sent to India but he refuses to cross.

Khol Do is four pages about a father searching for his daughter in a refugee camp. It is the hardest thing I’ve ever read and I’ve not been able to unread it to this day.

Manto, who wrote in Urdu, was tried for obscenity six times, never convicted, and drank himself to death at forty-two. He produced some of his greatest work in the last seven years of his life, a time of great financial and emotional hardship. In 2018, the BBC named Toba Tek Singh one of the 100 stories that shaped the world.

I find an unflinching quality in Manto’s writing that can easily make the reader flinch. There are no speeches or history lessons in his work. He writes about people and what happens to them. But I promise, each of his stories has the power to break a reader. [Aashisha]

• 📕 Manto: Selected Short Stories translated by Aatish Taseer

5. Sneaky Pete : Bryan Cranston’s Emmy Speech Became a Show, and He’s the Villain

When Bryan Cranston won his last Breaking Bad Emmy in 2014, he dedicated it to “all the Sneaky Petes of the world” — the nickname his family gave him as a kid because he was forever looking for a shortcut. The next morning, a Sony executive called: what if your teenage Sneaky Pete never grew out of it? That idea became this show.

The premise is almost too much. Giovanni Ribisi plays Marius, a con man who gets out of prison and steals his cellmate Pete’s identity. He moves in with the cellmate’s estranged grandparents, who run a bail-bonds business and last saw the real Pete decades ago. Ribisi is why it works. He doesn’t play a suave Danny Ocean, he plays twitchy and overclocked. Always on the ragged edge of losing control.

But the most interesting thing about Season 1 is that you can watch it become a good show in real time. The pilot was built for CBS by Cranston and House creator David Shore as a case-of-the-week network procedural. CBS passed, Amazon grabbed it and asked them to make it more serialized. Justified‘s Graham Yost took over, and things rapidly change from episode two onward (so don’t judge the show too quickly!).

Speaking of Justified, Margo Martindale, who won an Emmy for playing scene-stealing Mags Bennett on that show, plays Pete’s grandmother here. And Bryan Cranston didn’t just produce the show, he’s in it, playing the villain: Vince Lonigan, a soft-spoken card-room boss who’s basically the anti-Walter White. The whole ensemble brings real heart, so it’s more than a string of clever set pieces.

What sneaks up on Pete Marius is the family. He moves in to use them as cover, then realizes he doesn’t want to lose them. What do you do when the love you pretend to have becomes real?

One caveat: I’ve only seen Season 1, so it’s the only one I can vouch for. Seasons 2 and 3 are on my list, but I hear S1 was the peak, and it works well as a standalone.

(Yes, that’s three con man stories in four issues, after The Sting and Sneakers. Apparently, this is who I am now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) [Liberty]

• 📺 Sneaky Pete (2015–2019, Season 1, Prime Video)

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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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