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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🌐 RAGBRAI Official Website

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📕 John Adams by David McCullough

• 🎬 John Adams the miniseries (2008, HBO)

4. The Man Who Photographs Actors Like Dioramas

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📷 Szilveszter Makó on Instagram

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except he was right!

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 Marty Supreme (2025)

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

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

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

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

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

3. Which Odyssey Is the Real Odyssey?

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

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

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

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

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

• 📄 The Homeric Versions by Jorge Luis Borges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. The Best Book on Creativity Nobody Has Read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎧 Dry Cleaning

2. Football is the Only Religion Without Atheists

Good news: it’s World Cup season.

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📕 Football in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano

• 📕 My Turn by Johan Cruyff

3. Before Guy Ritchie Came the Long Good Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 The Long Good Friday (1980)

4. 1917 : You Only Know What They Know

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 1917 (2019, directed by Sam Mendes)

5. How I Learned to Love Mary Bennet

Mary Bennet bored me stiff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📕 The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a way to experience music. [Rohan]

• 🎧 Barry Can’t Swim at The Lot Radio

• 🎧 Barry Can’t Swim in Brooklyn

2. The Woman Who Noticed Everything

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Three Hours, One Writer, One Camera

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📺 C-SPAN Book TV

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. The Man Who Was More Hemingway Than Hemingway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎆 The Family That Lights the Sky

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🌐 Bartosz Ciechanowski

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

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

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

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

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

4. The Pasta Shape That Was Also a Startup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎧 The Sporkful: Mission ImPASTAble

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

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

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

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

• 📺 Louie (2010-2015)

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 Tim’s Vermeer (2013)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🌐 Explore Starfront

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📺 Widow’s Bay (2026, Apple TV+)

4. The Writer Who Can Cut You Open

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

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

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

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

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

• 📕 Manto: Selected Short Stories translated by Aatish Taseer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 The Death of Stalin (2017)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 Force of Evil (1948)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📺 Jeff Onboard YouTube Channel

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

1. One Shot Left

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It got 84 million views.

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

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

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

• 🎬 Backrooms (2026)

3. Winner-Take-All vs Finding Easy Games

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Sneakers : Too Many Secrets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 Sneakers (1992)

5. The Censor in Your Head

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. When Telling the Truth Sends You to Hell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listers destroys that image in two hours.

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

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

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

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

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

• 📺 Watch the full film on YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 The Lives of Others (2006)

5. The Sting : The Double-Edged Long Con

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎞️ The Sting (1973)

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

1. Turning the Cold War Space Race Into Music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎧 Listen to The Race for Space on Spotify

• 🎧 Listen to The Race for Space on Apple Music

• 🎧 Listen to The Race for Space on YouTube Music

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

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

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

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

• 📕 Rubicon by Tom Holland

3. Tuner : A Throwback Heist Thriller Worth Your Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📄 Upend audience expectations by Rachel Karten

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

• 📲 Watch Opening Weekend on Instagram

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Redwall : Painting Worlds for Blind Kids

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

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

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

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

• 📗 Mossflower by Brian Jacques

• 📘 Mattimeo by Brian Jacques

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. The City Behind Ghost in the Shell

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

That’s not quite what I got.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. At 63, Steven Soderbergh is Still an Apprentice

Steven Soderbergh had a better Christmas Day than you.

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

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

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

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

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

• Watched Raiders of the Lost Ark twice.

• Watched Duel twice.

• Watched Jaws three times.

• Watched The Sugarland Express.

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

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

• Read BFI Modern Classics: JAWS.

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

• Read a biography of Robert Shaw.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📘 The Outsider by Colin Wilson

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

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

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

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

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

• 🌐 GeoSports Official Website

4. Seabiscuit : An Endurance Story Folded Inside Another

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

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

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

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

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

• 📙 Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand

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

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

Not exactly obscure, eh?

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

Why did it slip through the cracks?

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎧 Listen to New York City on Spotify

• 🎧 Listen to New York City on Apple Music

• 🎧 Listen to New York City on YouTube Music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🌐 Voyageurs Wolf Project website

• 🎥 Voyageurs Wolf Project on Facebook

• 📺 Voyageurs Wolf Project on YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📚 Future Library

• 🌐 Future Library Project (Wikipedia)

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

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

Glenn O’Brien fits that description neatly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People remember a good listener better than a good talker.

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

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

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

• 📕 Like Art: Glenn O’Brien on Advertising

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

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

But they LOVED it!

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 Rose of Nevada (2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Simulacra and Simulation : The Map Ate the Territory

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

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

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

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

• 📗 Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing worked.

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

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

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

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

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

• 📘 The Mindbody Prescription by John E. Sarno

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Reality is Optional: Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 Naked Lunch (1991)

3. Music by John Williams : The Musical Time Machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📺 Max Velocity - Severe Weather Center

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

I refuse to call this an animated film.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does that remind you of anything? [Liberty]

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

2. The Barkley Marathons : A Documentary About Beautiful Failure

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 Official Website for The Barkley Marathons (2014)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 Tampopo (1985)

4. The Cost of Being Tiger Woods

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

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

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

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

• 📕 Tiger Woods by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)

2. Dostoevsky: Begin the Climb

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

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

My answer is always the same: Notes from Underground.

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

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

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

• 📙 Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

3. Treme : The Other David Simon Masterpiece

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

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

Culture. Music, food, ritual, craft.

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

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

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

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

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

4. Middle-Earth Was Built in the Margins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

📚The Great American Retro Road Trip by Rolando Pujol

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎞️ The Big Heat (1953)

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📕 The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

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

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

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

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

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

• 📗 The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 Fargo (1996)

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

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

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

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

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1. Kobe Before Kobe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📄 Taste Test: Encrusting the Tortoise by Douglas Brundage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 ‘The End of the Tour’ (2015)

5. Field Dispatch from Borges’s Buenos Aires

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1. Two Underrated Duvall Deep Cuts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 🎬 The Outfit (1973)

• 🎬 We Own the Night (2007)

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📺 The Thick of It (2005-2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding propaganda begins with a question:

Who supplied the pictures in your head? [Nick]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 📘 On Writing Well by William Zinsser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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