OSV Field Notes #1
December 23, 2025
Welcome to OSV Field Notes, a weekly, high‑signal curation of things worth your time.
1. For Princess Bride Fans: Cary Elwes’ Memoir of Making the Film
After the awful news that Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were killed, I found myself revisiting his incredible body of work. His legendary run puts him among the greats: This Is Spinal Tap, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, A Few Good Men. Many of my favorite moments come from these films, and from sharing them with my loved ones.
Of these, I’ve probably seen The Princess Bride the most, so when I found out that Cary Elwes wrote a memoir about the making of it, I had to read it. It’s a very fun book and a fast read. And if you haven’t seen the film yet, you have to watch it soon. Chances are, you’ll want to read the book afterwards. [Liberty]
2. Alpha School: The Modern, Effective, AI-Enabled Way to Educate Our Kids?
As a parent of two school-age boys, I often think about how our education system could be improved. Over the years, I’ve heard about a lot of alternatives to traditional schooling, but few have intrigued me as much as Alpha School, which was founded in 2014 by MacKenzie Price and is now led by principal Joe Liemandt, better known as the founder of Trilogy Software. He’s made scaling this educational model to a billion kids his life’s mission.
It’s hard to summarize Alpha without it sounding a bit bonkers, because it’s the opposite of how most of us grew up. The short version: they use software and AI to deliver individualized, mastery-based education and compress core academics into 2 hours per day so that students can spend the rest of the day working on passion projects to develop “life skills” and “love school”. The longer explanation is more convincing, and the reasoning behind those choices makes a lot of sense, so I encourage you to listen to the interview above. If you want to go deeper, read this profile in Colossus. [Liberty]
3. After 48 Years in Space, Voyager 1 is Nearing One-Light-Day from Earth
Voyager 1 is a space probe that was launched by NASA on a Titan IIIE rocket on September 5, 1977. The goal was to study the outer solar system, so it made flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. It studied the weather, magnetic fields, and rings of the two gas giants and was the first probe to provide some of the first close-up images of their moons.
After it was done with its mission, it kept going, becoming the farthest human-made object from Earth, traveling at a velocity of approximately 38,000 mph (about 61,000 km/h) relative to the Sun. It took the famous “Pale Blue Dot” photo on Feb 14, 1990, inspiring Carl Sagan’s famous reflection. After over 48 years of travel, it is approaching a milestone: Next November, it will reach one-light-day from Earth (25.9 billion km/16.1 billion miles)! [Liberty]
4. Charles Dickens + The Muppets
Looking to keep the classics alive for a new generation? Want a kid-friendly introduction to Dickens? This 1992 adaptation of Charles Dickens’ famous A Christmas Carol is surprisingly faithful and touching, even though most of the cast is made up of puppets (and a wonderful Michael Caine).
I didn’t see this film as a kid, so I had no nostalgia for it. But a few years ago, I asked people on Twitter what their favorite Christmas films were, and this one came up a lot. I watched it with my family, and we were so delighted by it that we’ve watched it every year since. If you’re looking for a new tradition, give The Muppet Christmas Carol a try! The lessons taught by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come are just as applicable now as they were in 1843. 🎄 [Liberty]
5. Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing
If you like Borges and you’re a hiker—or drawn to travel adventures—but you’re also the sort of person who takes a couple of books with you (and buys one at the airport, another at the destination, and yet another on the way back), and you’re a wordsmith, or fond of double entendres, or you have that slightly unsettling habit of thinking about language on a meta level—suspecting, perhaps, that language is a kind of virus and your brain merely its host—well, this book is for you.
Mount Analogue has the deadpan seriousness of old travel literature (think Moby-Dick, Dracula, even Frankenstein), where the logistics of the journey are treated as paramount, even as you’re explicitly reminded that the whole enterprise is operating on another, strictly non-literal level. Daumal somehow weaves comedy, sharp one-liners, and real wisdom into a mountaineering expedition that is both literal and not.
The book is unfinished—Daumal died young, the manuscript literally stops mid-sentence—and yet the ending is far less disappointing than you might expect. It feels like a poetic cap rather than an absence, like a lover who left without saying goodbye, on purpose, just to ensure you’d never quite forget them. It’s also a quick read: a dense little beauty, and a lovely way to spend an afternoon. [Jean-Marc]
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