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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 Rose of Nevada (2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Simulacra and Simulation : The Map Ate the Territory

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

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

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

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

• 📗 Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing worked.

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

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

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

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

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

• 📘 The Mindbody Prescription by John E. Sarno

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Reality is Optional: Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 Naked Lunch (1991)

3. Music by John Williams : The Musical Time Machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📺 Max Velocity - Severe Weather Center

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

I refuse to call this an animated film.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does that remind you of anything? [Liberty]

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

2. The Barkley Marathons : A Documentary About Beautiful Failure

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 Official Website for The Barkley Marathons (2014)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 Tampopo (1985)

4. The Cost of Being Tiger Woods

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

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

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

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

• 📕 Tiger Woods by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)

2. Dostoevsky: Begin the Climb

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

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

My answer is always the same: Notes from Underground.

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

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

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

• 📙 Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

3. Treme : The Other David Simon Masterpiece

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

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

Culture. Music, food, ritual, craft.

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

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

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

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

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

4. Middle-Earth Was Built in the Margins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

📚The Great American Retro Road Trip by Rolando Pujol

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎞️ The Big Heat (1953)

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📕 The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

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

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

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

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

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

• 📗 The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 Fargo (1996)

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

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

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

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

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1. Kobe Before Kobe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📄 Taste Test: Encrusting the Tortoise by Douglas Brundage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 ‘The End of the Tour’ (2015)

5. Field Dispatch from Borges’s Buenos Aires

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1. Two Underrated Duvall Deep Cuts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 The Outfit (1973)

• 🎬 We Own the Night (2007)

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📺 The Thick of It (2005-2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding propaganda begins with a question:

Who supplied the pictures in your head? [Nick]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📘 On Writing Well by William Zinsser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1. The Patron Saint of Synth: Padre Guilherme

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. How Cosplaying the Romans Led to the Scientific Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. The Hound of the Baskervilles : Skepticism Without Blindness

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📘 The Hound of the Baskervilles

• 🎧 BTMC episode on The Hound of the Baskervilles

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

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

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

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

“Faced with a choice, do both”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 Night of the Juggler (1980)

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📺 Homebound (2025, Netflix)

3. Project Hail Mary : MacGyver Goes to Space

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📔👨‍🚀 Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

4. The Everything Store : What Relentless Actually Looks Like

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

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

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

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

• 📙 The Everything Store by Brad Stone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📺 McCartney 3,2,1 (2021, Hulu)

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1. The Defiant Ones : When Taste Becomes an Empire

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

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

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

• 📺 The Defiant Ones (2017)

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🦠🔬 Nature Communications paper

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

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

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

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

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

4. Counterpart : A/B Testing the Whole Earth

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

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

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

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

• 📺 Counterpart (2017-2019)

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

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

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

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

• 📘 The Lover by Marguerite Duras

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📘 Poisoner in Chief by Stephen Kinzer

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

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

Not bad for sitting in a wooden box.

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

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

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

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

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

• 🔬 Rhonda Patrick’s Sauna Primer (FoundMyFitness)

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 Disneyland Handcrafted (2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📺 Patriot (2017, Prime Video)

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

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

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

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

Art disguised as a toy, engineering disguised as art.

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

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

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

• 📙 Design as Art by Bruno Munari (1966)

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📺 Generation Kill (2008, HBO)

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

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

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

Oh, and it’s free on YouTube. [Dylan]

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 A Simple Plan (1998)

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. My Analog Journal : Music Exploration Without the Algorithm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 Yesterday (2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📘 Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

• 📕 The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

• 📗 The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain

• 📙 Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

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

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

Oh, and he’s completely blind 👀

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

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

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

• ♥️♠️♣️♦️ Dealt (2017)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1. The Virtuosity of Indian Classical Music: Ustad Zakir Hussain & Rakesh Chaurasia

If you appreciate Indian classical music, or are open to discovering it, I highly recommend this performance by the late Ustad Zakir Hussain and Rakesh Chaurasia at the 2015 EtnoKraków/Crossroads Festival in Poland. You may have seen Zakir in Dev Patel’s Monkey Man. This is your chance to witness the legend in his element.

The first half features a beautiful dialogue between Zakir’s tabla and Rakesh’s bansuri (bamboo flute). The way they anticipate each other, build tension, and create moments of joy is extraordinary. But the real magic happens in the second half. Zakir’s solo is absolutely mesmerizing. I lost all sense of time as I found myself caught up in his joy. His playing has everything: suspense, thrilling crescendos, genuine humor, and an ongoing conversation with the listener. After the solo comes a stunning jugalbandi (duet) between the two masters that brings it all together.

The sheer virtuosity and playful energy transcend any language or genre barrier. Set aside the hour and let yourself be transported. [Vatsal]

2. Island: Huxley Explores Utopia

Most of us know Aldous Huxley through his dystopian novel Brave New World. But did you know that thirty years later, he wrote a utopian counterpart?

Island (published in 1962) was Huxley’s final novel before he died in 1963. It contains all sorts of at-the-time radical ideas: emotional literacy, ecological economics, “moksha medicine” (a psychedelic sacrament), and more. Name a syncretic idea and there’s a good chance it’s in here.

The book starts like an adventure thriller. Cynical journalist Will Farnaby deliberately wrecks his boat and washes up on the forbidden island of Pala, where he discovers a calm, wise world with a system that actually seems to work for its inhabitants.

Then comes a twist: Wisdom and utopia are not exactly scalable. Huxley explores hard questions about practicality, feasibility, and convenience. Questions that remain relevant today.

I found the book a refreshing departure from all the dystopian narratives we frequently come across. It doesn’t provide easy answers, but it is willing to grapple with the questions. For me, this was Huxley at his most hopeful. [Aashisha]

• 📘 Island by Aldous Huxley

3. Klute : The Sleeper of Pakula’s Paranoia Trilogy

Is Jane Fonda’s performance in Klute the best of the 1970s? It’s at least in the conversation.

This 1971 film launched Alan J. Pakula’s unofficial trilogy of paranoid surveillance thrillers: Klute, The Parallax View (1974), and All the President’s Men (1976). All three are classics, but this might be the most underappreciated of the bunch.

On paper, it’s a conventional thriller about a serial killer and the private detective tracking them down… but in practice the mystery is really just an excuse for a character study of Fonda’s Bree. A call girl who may be the murderer’s next target, she is one of the decade’s most fully realised screen characters.

Cinematographer Gordon Willis (who would go on to shoot The Godfather) is cooking throughout, creating a murky world of shadows and lamplight. [Ed]

• 🎬 Klute (1971)

4. Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets: Consciousness as Cloud Computing

I was at Dan Brown’s book tour in Hamburg last year when he said something that caught me off guard: “I’m not religious, but I believe consciousness survives death.” His new book, The Secret of Secrets, explores an idea that’s been quietly circulating: we’re only accessing a fraction of what’s actually out there.

Brown proposes a different model: what if the brain receives — rather than generates — consciousness. Like a radio tuning into a broadcast. Intelligence, in this view, is just signal clarity. If consciousness is fundamental to reality, like gravity or electromagnetism, then enlightenment is basically better reception (Whether you buy it or not, it’s a great thriller engine.).

Evolution prioritises survival over truth. Brown builds a whole mythology around GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), a neurotransmitter that filters out most of the noise from what Brown calls the “universal field.” Without it, Brown claims, we’d drown in information. What we experience as reality is heavily compressed: consciousness on a need-to-know basis.

In this speculative view, the interesting part is what happens when that filter breaks down. During near-death experiences, GABA levels drop and the radio picks up frequencies it normally blocks. What people dismiss as hallucinations might just be unfiltered data.

In Brown’s telling, death looks different. Less like an ending, more like removing a filter. Your brain was just temporary hardware. The signal was always something else. [Camellia]

• 📕 The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown

• 🎧 Conversation between Rick Rubin and Dan Brown

5. Animation Obsessive: Deep Dives in the Craft of Animation

Animation Obsessive is one of my favourite newsletters. Their team has an encyclopedic knowledge of the art, craft, and history of animation, from Miyazaki to wool-based stop-motion. Twice a week, they publish fascinating, well-researched deep dives into a film, technique, or animation story, along with news from across the animation world — often pulled from obscure or hard-to-find sources.

You don’t need to be an animation superfan to enjoy it (I’m not). If you like stories about craft and artistry, you’ll find something to love. Their enthusiasm is infectious, and their taste is excellent: even when the style isn’t to my liking, it’s always interesting. Take the dying art of pinscreen animation, a technique that uses light and a field of thousands of pins to sculpt images from shadows (see the image above — Have you ever seen anything like that?). [Ed]

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1. DORAs: How I Finally Improved My Sleep

I haven't really slept well since I was a child.

It's been a problem, as you can imagine. It didn't help that I had a former career with late shifts. Well, free from that, I finally decided to improve my sleep. Several years later, impressive effort has led to unimpressive results.

I've done every behavioral modification known to man. Blackout curtains, eye mask, mouth tape, mandibular advancement devices, glycine, magnesium, theanine, myo-inositol, valerian root, strict bedtimes, strict wake times, blasting my suprachiasmatic nucleus with morning bright light. Working out only in the morning to manage cortisol levels, not eating 5+ hours before bed. I even gave up caffeine, permanently. I killed my one true love in the name of sleep, and yet still Morpheus has eluded me.

Until about 3 weeks ago.

A new class of pharmaceuticals called DORAs (Dual Orexin Receptor Antagonist) has been developed. Now, I'm extremely wary of pharmaceuticals. All of the sleep meds developed absolutely destroy deep sleep and REM cycles, which is the good stuff I actually want. DORAs are different. They target the neurochemical Orexin, which promotes wakefulness. My issue was always sleep-maintenance insomnia, meaning I would wake up too early and I could never fall back asleep. No longer! This medication feels like a gift from the divine. The last three weeks has potentially been the best sleep I've had in. . . an embarrassing number of years.

Yes, my mornings are a little slower, a little groggier. But not overwhelmingly so. And it doesn't work perfectly: I've still had a couple of short nights. But the improvements are Changing. My. Life.

This is just an initial assessment. I'll follow up in a few months with a proper retrospective! [Jean-Marc]

2. Relay: A Throwback Thriller Worth Your Time

Here’s a surprise. A sober, mid-budget, on-location surveillance thriller from 2024 in the mold of the 1970s paranoid wave and its 1990s/2000s imitators. The always excellent Riz Ahmed plays Ash, a loner brokering between faceless corporate behemoths and the desperate whistleblowers who regret their bravery. He prides himself on his independence. By acting for both sides, everybody wins. The corporations get to keep their dirty secrets, the whistleblowers get their safety, and he gets his money.

But when a beautiful scientist crosses his path, everything begins to go wrong. Like many of the broken, lonely men of cinema’s past, he has a code. What will it cost him to break it?

Patient and calm, with great on-location set pieces and an aversion to the winking, self-aware mode of thriller that has taken over in recent years. Takes itself seriously, and as a result, we do too. Loses its way in the final 15 minutes, but worth it for what comes before. [Ed]

• Relay (2024)

3. Game of Thrones for History Nerds: Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome

The true heads know that “how many times a day do you think about the Roman Empire?” is the wrong question. Real ones think about the Roman Republic. Its final 100 years are in the conversation for the most thrilling century in history, featuring a catalogue of Great Men - Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Cicero, Caesar, Cato, Antony, Sertorius, and more - vying for glory and gambling with the future of Western civilization in the process.

The great allure of Roman history is that this society feels both so much closer to today than much of the following 1,700 years, and so much further away. McCullough, who amassed a library of thousands of books for research, brings the period to life in all its brutal glory in this seven-part series. It’s insanely well researched (closer to fictionalized history than historical fiction), and has all the thrills, twists, and set pieces of a Hollywood blockbuster. My favourite series. [Ed]

• The Masters of Rome series (1990 - 2007); by Colleen McCullough

4. The Unseen Truth: How Real-Life Crime Shaped The Town

Having made my fair share of documentaries over the years, I’m always interested in the blurred line where fiction becomes reality, and vice versa.

If this sounds a bit fuzzy, here’s a good example. During Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s recent conversation on the Joe Rogan Experience, Affleck shared how his research for The Town (2010) led him deep into the Massachusetts prison system. His goal was to understand the minds of those who robbed banks and money trucks. During one of these conversations, an inmate recounted how, after a successful heist, masked and armed, he and his crew switched getaway cars when they came face-to-face with a Boston police officer on construction duty. Instead of intervening, the cop simply "looked the other way."

Why didn’t he do his job? Well, the scary masks and loaded guns probably didn’t help. As the inmate told Affleck: "You don't want to end up on the wall of the VFW."

This unfiltered anecdote from a conversation behind bars became the foundation for an iconic moment in The Town. A crew of robbers, disguised as nuns, emerges from their vehicle, weapons concealed, only to find themselves in a silent standoff with a lone police officer. The cop meets their gaze, then, in a split-second decision, averts his eyes and lets them pass.

It’s a lovely bit of non-verbal storytelling. The cop's decision, born not of cowardice but of a pragmatic understanding of the situation, provides a layer of gritty realism that Hollywood often struggles to invent. It's a reminder that the most dramatic and believable narratives are often not in writers' rooms, but in the lived experiences of real people. [Taylor]

• Joe Rogan Experience #2440 - Matt Damon & Ben Affleck

• The Town (2010) - Nuns Run Into Boston Cop Scene

5. John Candy: I Like Me: Portrait of the Gentle Giant of Comedy

I finally got around to watching the John Candy documentary, and I’m glad I did. If you grew up in the 80s and 90s, Candy was *everywhere* — Uncle Buck, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Stripes, Home Alone — but I realized I knew almost nothing about the man behind those roles, other than that I liked him.

What struck me most was the contrast between Candy’s enormous on-screen presence and confidence and his self-doubting inner life. The guy who could command a scene with a single raised eyebrow spent a lot of time wondering if he was good enough. There’s a throughline about his struggles with weight and health that adds a bittersweet layer to everything. What if he had another 20-30 years? The interviews with his former collaborators (including some SCTV footage I’d never seen) paint a picture of someone who was genuinely beloved, not just talented. Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd share great anecdotes and heartfelt memories.

If you have any affection for Candy’s work, I’d recommend this one. It’s well-paced, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and manages to be celebratory without glossing over the harder stuff. It made me look back at his filmography differently and with more appreciation. [Liberty]

• John Candy: I Like Me (2025)

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1. Eavesdropping on Genius: The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

Tolkien is the example today because it’s the volume I’ve spent the most time reading, but what I’m really presenting here is a concept:

If you want to understand the inner workings of a pre-internet public figure’s brain… read their letters. While not everyone has collections of their letters available, you may be surprised how many do, and letters give you a couple of things you never get anywhere else:

You get to see a more personal side to them. A letter is not as intimate as an in-person conversation, but it’s definitely a more genuine look into who they are than their public works and speeches. You can oftentimes learn details of their mindset that you can’t find anywhere else.

For Tolkien, one of my favorite letters is him addressing the question of whether Frodo “failed” at Mount Doom (letter 246, if you’re curious).

Reading the letters of someone who accomplished great things can reveal insights into their motivations as well as how they dealt with their failures and trials. It’s about as close to having them as a mentor as you can get. [Jameson]

• ✉️ The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Revised and Expanded Edition)

2. 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)

3. Le Cercle Rouge : ‘An icy world of trench coats, cigarettes, and gunfire’

If you like the films of Michael Mann (Heat, Thief, Collateral, etc) and haven’t seen Le Cercle Rouge (1970, the title translates to “The Red Circle”), stop what you’re doing and watch it immediately.

A gentleman thief, an alcoholic sharpshooter, and an escaped prisoner come together for one last score: tens of millions of francs in jewelry. But the walls are closing in. An obsessive police officer is on their trail, with his own vendetta to settle.

By this late stage in his career, director Jean-Pierre Melville had perfected his cool, austere minimalism: an icy world of trench coats, cigarettes, and gunfire. These are cold men with cold codes. Perhaps that’s why they start to like each other.

It’s one effortlessly stylish sequence after another, culminating in a gloriously staged thirty-minute heist. It’s only January, but you’ll be hard-pressed to watch anything better this year. [Ed]

• 🎬 Le Cercle Rouge (1970)

4. Halt and Catch Fire : Unreasonable People & Unreasonable Machines

A show about the dawn of the computing industry and its ascent through the heyday of the dot-com era, made for AMC right on the heels of Mad Men?

*Sign me up!*

What makes Halt and Catch Fire compelling (and essential viewing, not just for us technophiles) is how it started as a Mad Men clone (anti-hero with a superiority complex navigating a creative organization) before metamorphosing into a rich character-driven drama about the myriad ways technology transforms our lives.

The characters begin as archetypes—the geek, the salesman, the housewife, the renegade, the old guard—then evolve into fully realized people. What binds them is the friction of their personalities as they attempt to build companies and products across the different eras of computing. The ’80s PC clone wars, the scramble for online communities, the ISP battles against AOL, and the doomed race to build a search engine before Yahoo. Each provides a vivid canvas for the manic ambition of its flawed core cast. I’m entirely here for it.

P.S. The show is also a quiet manifesto for personal agency. Joe MacMillan (a suave salesman who is the lynchpin of the core group; played by the magnificent Lee Pace) puts it best: “I thought that maybe we could do this precisely because we’re all unreasonable people and progress depends on our changing the world to fit us. Not the other way around.” [Rohan]

• 📺🔥 Halt and Catch Fire (2014-2017)

5. Retraction Watch: Science Needs Error-Correction Mechanisms

Retraction Watch is a project of The Center for Scientific Integrity that tracks and reports on the retractions and major corrections of scientific papers. Founded to increase transparency, the site maintains an extensive database of over 63,000 retractions (as of Dec 30, 2025) and publishes daily reports on academic misconduct, fraudulent studies, honest errors, and editorial mishaps. It’s not just a list: They also investigate the stories behind the retractions, covering everything from data fabrication and plagiarism to peer-review rings and “hijacked” journals. 📄🔬👩‍🔬

This matters because science only works as a cumulative enterprise if the public record is reliable and self-corrections are discoverable. Flawed or fraudulent research should be publicly flagged and not cited in future studies. In practice, retractions and corrections are often buried, unevenly disclosed, and easy to miss, which is why having both the reporting and a standardized database available via Crossref’s REST API is so valuable. [Liberty]

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1. The Dirty Fuel of Revenge: The Count of Monte Cristo

I know recommending this feels a bit like telling you to watch Breaking Bad, but some things earn the hype.

The Count of Monte Cristo is the story of a man who destroys himself to become someone new. Of long-game thinking, youth, love, loss, envy, and revenge. Revenge gets talked about most, but what stayed with me was something else. Edmond Dantès, fueled by decades of rage, systematically destroys every person who wronged him. He gets them all. But revenge couldn’t return the one thing he wanted most: the love of his life. There’s something unsettling about watching someone run on dirty fuel and win every battle except the one that mattered.

It looks a bit daunting when you judge by the cover. If nothing else, read it for the Abbé Faria sections. The scenes of a young prisoner being educated by a dying polymath in a forgotten dungeon are worth the price of admission. Dumas gave Edmond a treasure, and left one for us, too. [Vatsal]

• 📗 The Count of Monte Cristo (English translation from the original French)

(If you prefer ebooks, I recommend this free version)

2. When Words Were Weapons: Churchill’s Incredible Year

Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile covers a single year, from May 1940 to May 1941, and that constraint is what makes it work. By narrowing his lens to Churchill’s first twelve months as Prime Minister, Larson can do something most World War II histories cannot: slow down enough to show you what daily life actually felt like when German bombs were falling on London every night. You see Churchill dictating memos from his bath, his daughter Mary falling for a young officer, his private secretary picking through rubble where friends had been standing hours before. The intimacy is the point. Larson understands that history becomes real when it becomes specific.

The deeper question the book poses feels relevant now: How does a leader hold a nation together during a genuine crisis? Churchill’s answer was language. He treated every speech as an act of warfare, understanding that morale was a material resource as essential as ammunition or aircraft. Larson shows us the craft behind those famous phrases, the drafts and revisions, the careful calibration of honesty and hope. What emerges is a portrait of leadership as performance in the best sense, the kind that summons from people more than they knew they had to give. [Jimmy]

• 📘 The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson

3. ASML’s Unreasonable Machine

Around 2015, Moore’s Law hit a wall. The physics of light made it impossible to print smaller transistors using existing technology. The solution was extreme ultraviolet lithography, but it had been dismissed as fantasy for three decades. Scientists who proposed it were laughed off stages. The idea required nothing less than building “an artificial sun on Earth,” creating mirrors so smooth that if scaled to the size of our planet, the largest bump would be thinner than a playing card, and hitting 50,000 microscopic tin droplets per second with a laser, never missing once. Sounds easy, right? 😅

Veritasium’s deep dive into ASML, the Dutch company that pulled it off, is a great look into how the most important technologies often look impossible right up until they work.

What makes this story so fascinating isn’t just the technical wizardry, though there’s plenty (mini-supernovas, hurricane-force hydrogen flows, overlay accuracy of five silicon atoms). It’s the human element: the Japanese scientist who lit candles at a chapel near Mount Fuji when the engineering hit its limits, the American researcher who swore never to speak of his humiliating conference presentation again, the decades of moving goalposts that would have broken less stubborn teams. Every advanced chip in your phone, laptop, or AI server exists because unreasonable people refused to accept that this machine couldn’t be built. The $400 million device that results is the most complicated commercial product ever created. [Liberty]

4. From Outsider to Icon: How Martin Scorsese Outlasted His Critics

Apple TV+’s five-part Mr. Scorsese filled a gap in my Scorsese “mental library”: I knew the films, but not much about Scorsese’s decades-long battle to make them. The series traces his journey from Little Italy childhood to cinema sainthood, fought for, film by film. Last Temptation of Christ brought a firebombing and FBI protection, test audiences walked out of Goodfellas. Studios constantly pushed for less violence and happier endings. He refused.

This is a portrait of artistic stubbornness that eventually bent the industry to his vision rather than the other way around. The De Niro years, the DiCaprio partnership, the slow-motion canonization of once-controversial films. It’s a masterclass in how perception shifts when you outlast your critics. [Liberty]

• 📺 Mr. Scorsese (2025, Apple TV+)

5. Your Brain on Stale Air: The Invisible Tax on Your Thinking

Many of us spend our days in spaces where the air is degrading our ability to think. Outdoor CO2 levels sit around 430 ppm, while a well-ventilated room might be 600-800 ppm. But a closed office, a bedroom after a night’s sleep, a conference room an hour into a meeting… these can hit 1500-2500 ppm. A Harvard-led study found that cognitive performance drops measurably once you cross 1000 ppm, with decision-making, strategic thinking, and information processing all taking hits. By 1400 ppm, subjects performed ~50% worse on cognitive tests. You’ve felt this without knowing it: afternoon sluggishness, the mental fog in a packed meeting room, the way you can’t quite think straight after a few hours in a sealed space.

The Aranet4 is a small CO2 monitor that makes the invisible visible. Once you know there’s a problem, the fix is usually simple: open a window, crack a door, run a fan, check your HVAC. But you can’t fix what you can’t see. Once you start watching the numbers, you realize that “fresh air” is a measurable input to how well your brain works. Good ventilation isn’t just about comfort. It’s about maintaining the environment your brain evolved to operate in. [Liberty]

• 👨‍🔬 Short-term exposure to indoor carbon dioxide and cognitive task performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis (2023)

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1. House of Games (film, 1987)

A faintly ridiculous, head-spinningly twisty David Mamet con-man thriller from 1987. Psychiatrist Margaret Ford is successful, wealthy, and racked with ennui. When one of her patients, deep in debt to a vicious criminal, begs for her help, she’s pulled (a little too willingly) into a dangerously seductive world of high-stakes confidence games. To say any more would be a spoiler: this is a film of double crosses, triple bluffs, and elaborate misdirection. And yes, we’re the mark.

House of Games was David Mamet’s directorial debut, and in Mike (played by Joe Mantegna, who would later become Fat Tony on The Simpsons), he finds an ideal outlet for his sharp, machine-gun dialogue.

Poker aficionados, be warned: there is an early set piece that rivals Casino Royale in its game-breaking logic. Still rocks though. [Ed]

• 🎬 House of Games (1987, David Mamet)

2. Every Curve Has a Reason: The Origins of Iconic Electric Guitar Shapes

If you’re a musician, you probably know all these names — Stratocaster, Les Paul, Jazzmaster, Telecaster, SG, etc — but even if you aren’t, you’ve almost certainly seen these iconic instruments hundreds if not thousands of times in photos, videos, and onstage. Your brain knows these shapes.

Where did they come from? Who designed these iconic instruments starting in the 1950s, and what makes one different from the other? If they’re tools, what are the jobs that each was purpose-built for, and why are some of them still around six or seven decades after some craftsman first created the prototype? [Liberty]

3. The Last 200,000 Years of Human History in One Hour

Time is a strange beast. It’s very hard for our minds to truly grasp. In the same way that the physical scale of things outside everyday life is difficult to imagine (both the very small — microorganisms, atoms — and the very large — stars, galaxies, the distances between them), deep time is equally hard to have a “feel” for.

Our planet is about 4.54 billion years old, but even the tiny slice where we’ve been around, about 200,000 years, is too much for our brains. This video attempts to show the history of humanity at a pace of 50 years per second. Note how little changes for millennia until we discover certain IDEAS that create the modern world in the final stretch (never underestimate the power of ideas!). [Liberty]

4. The Science of Hating Chocolate

This piece by OSV Grantee Chandhana is a masterclass in intellectual curiosity applied to everyday life. She took an everyday observation about herself, “I don’t like chocolate”, something most would dismiss as a quirky food preference, and turned it into a legitimate scientific investigation complete with hypotheses, genetic Punnett squares, and a three-continent experimental protocol.

The payoff is genuinely surprising, I never saw it coming: she found that pre-treating her tongue with salt makes chocolate tolerable for the first time in a decade, supporting the theory that bitter receptor suppression can chemically override what seemed like an immutable preference. It’s equal parts memoir, food science deep-dive, and a reminder that the most mundane mysteries, when investigated with rigor and creativity, can reveal how much of our sensory reality is constructed by forces we never consciously perceive. [Liberty]

• 🍫📄 (why do) i hate chocolate

5. A Cool Breeze Through the Skull: The Borges Starter Pack

Borges was mentioned in last week’s edition, so I thought I’d bring you right to the source. Ficciones is a collection of short stories written between 1936 and 1956. Many of the stories had already been published in different collections, but there was something about this particular arrangement of fourteen stories (seventeen in the expanded edition) that caught fire—cementing Borges as a household name.

If I could only save four stories from an Alexandrian fire, they would be “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “The Library of Babel,” “The Lottery in Babylon,” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (particularly mind-melting).

I once heard someone say that reading Borges feels like someone unscrewing the top of your head and letting a cool breeze run over it, and I couldn't put it any better. [Dylan]

• 📘 Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones (1944)

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1. For Princess Bride Fans: Cary Elwes’ Memoir of Making the Film

After the awful news that Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were killed, I found myself revisiting his incredible body of work. His legendary run puts him among the greats: This Is Spinal Tap, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, A Few Good Men. Many of my favorite moments come from these films, and from sharing them with my loved ones.

Of these, I’ve probably seen The Princess Bride the most, so when I found out that Cary Elwes wrote a memoir about the making of it, I had to read it. It’s a very fun book and a fast read. And if you haven’t seen the film yet, you have to watch it soon. Chances are, you’ll want to read the book afterwards. [Liberty]

• 📘 As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride (2014)

2. Alpha School: The Modern, Effective, AI-Enabled Way to Educate Our Kids?

As a parent of two school-age boys, I often think about how our education system could be improved. Over the years, I’ve heard about a lot of alternatives to traditional schooling, but few have intrigued me as much as Alpha School, which was founded in 2014 by MacKenzie Price and is now led by principal Joe Liemandt, better known as the founder of Trilogy Software. He’s made scaling this educational model to a billion kids his life’s mission.

It’s hard to summarize Alpha without it sounding a bit bonkers, because it’s the opposite of how most of us grew up. The short version: they use software and AI to deliver individualized, mastery-based education and compress core academics into 2 hours per day so that students can spend the rest of the day working on passion projects to develop “life skills” and “love school”. The longer explanation is more convincing, and the reasoning behind those choices makes a lot of sense, so I encourage you to listen to the interview above. If you want to go deeper, read this profile in Colossus. [Liberty]

3. After 48 Years in Space, Voyager 1 is Nearing One-Light-Day from Earth

Voyager 1 is a space probe that was launched by NASA on a Titan IIIE rocket on September 5, 1977. The goal was to study the outer solar system, so it made flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. It studied the weather, magnetic fields, and rings of the two gas giants and was the first probe to provide some of the first close-up images of their moons.

After it was done with its mission, it kept going, becoming the farthest human-made object from Earth, traveling at a velocity of approximately 38,000 mph (about 61,000 km/h) relative to the Sun. It took the famous “Pale Blue Dot” photo on Feb 14, 1990, inspiring Carl Sagan’s famous reflection. After over 48 years of travel, it is approaching a milestone: Next November, it will reach one-light-day from Earth (25.9 billion km/16.1 billion miles)! [Liberty]

• 🛰️ Voyager 1 Is About to Reach One Light-day from Earth

4. Charles Dickens + The Muppets

Looking to keep the classics alive for a new generation? Want a kid-friendly introduction to Dickens? This 1992 adaptation of Charles Dickens’ famous A Christmas Carol is surprisingly faithful and touching, even though most of the cast is made up of puppets (and a wonderful Michael Caine).

I didn’t see this film as a kid, so I had no nostalgia for it. But a few years ago, I asked people on Twitter what their favorite Christmas films were, and this one came up a lot. I watched it with my family, and we were so delighted by it that we’ve watched it every year since. If you’re looking for a new tradition, give The Muppet Christmas Carol a try! The lessons taught by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come are just as applicable now as they were in 1843. 🎄 [Liberty]

• 🎬 The Muppet Christmas Carol

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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