OSV Field Notes #12
Welcome to OSV Field Notes, a weekly, high‑signal curation of things worth your time.
1. The Patron Saint of Synth: Padre Guilherme
A church bell rings. Then another. Under the shadow of Christ The Redeemer, a bald-headed cleric drops a beat to Hallelujah.
Thus begins one of the most exciting DJ sets I’ve ever seen. The DJ? Padre Guilherme Peixoto.
A Portuguese Catholic priest and a military chaplain who served in Kosovo and Afghanistan, Padre Guilherme is one of the most unlikely figures on the global electronic music circuit. He started DJing in 2010 on a deployment to Afghanistan, organizing morale events for soldiers. Back home, he learned how to do it properly and when bake sales didn’t work, he used music to fundraise for his debt-ridden parish church in Laúndos.
Liturgical music and melodic techno turn out to be built for the same thing: repetition, lift, and collective transcendence. That’s what makes Padre Guilherme’s sets more than a novelty — Ave Maria threaded through synth lines, church bells woven with beat drops, papal encyclicals sampled over a rolling bassline.
His breakout came at World Youth Day in Lisbon in 2023, where he played an early-morning set at Parque Tejo before Pope Francis’s closing Mass, part of an event that drew about 1.5 million pilgrims. Since then, he has moved quickly onto major festival stages: Afterlife at Hï Ibiza, Medusa Festival in Spain, Zamna in Chile. In January 2025, he performed beneath Christ the Redeemer in Rio for the Youth for Peace Festival, with sacred vocals and melodic techno echoing under the statue’s outstretched arms.
Then in November 2025, outside the 14th-century Cathedral of St. Elisabeth in Košice, Slovakia, Pope Leo XIV appeared on the LED screens behind Padre Guilherme’s booth with a video blessing for the local archbishop’s 75th birthday. Guilherme answered by dropping a “papal beat.”
Padre Guilherme is my new music obsession. I’ve worked out to his beats, and ‘locked in’ many times while listening to his version of Gregorian chants. They feel like proof that ritual and rave have been reaching for some of the same thing all along. [Rohan]
2. The $67.5 Million Bet That Invented the Entertainment Franchise
Hulu's Legacy: The True Story of the LA Lakers is one of my favorite sports documentaries because it's really about the design of a modern institution. Under Jerry Buss, the Lakers became more than a basketball team: they became a prototype for the entertainment-business franchise, where wins, celebrity, branding, and dealmaking all reinforced one another.
Buss bought the Lakers in 1979 as part of a $67.5 million deal, roughly $300 million in today’s dollars — at the time the largest sports transaction in history — that also included the LA Kings, the Forum arena, and a 13,000-acre ranch in the Sierra Nevada foothills. He then proceeded to reinvent what professional basketball could be. He turned courtside seats into the hottest ticket in Hollywood, cultivated a roster of celebrity fans to make home games feel like premieres, and was among the first owners to sell arena naming rights to a corporate sponsor.
Buss was an unlikely architect for all this: a chemist with a doctorate who earned his PhD by age 24, who had stood in bread lines as a child in Wyoming and built a real estate empire from a single $1,000 investment.
What sets Legacy apart is how seriously it takes the dealmaking. You see the negotiations, the financing, the strategic gambles that could have gone wrong. The series shows you how a franchise establishes itself as a brand, how it positions itself within a league and a city. It’s a case study in institution-building, told with access and candor that most business documentaries never achieve.
When Magic Johnson announced his HIV diagnosis in 1991, at a time when such news was considered a death sentence, Buss nearly collapsed at the press conference. Jeanie Buss recalls that she only saw her father cry twice in his life: once when his mother died, and once that day. The series captures both the triumph and the heartbreak of building something that matters.
It is also honest about what happens when a family business becomes a billion-dollar enterprise. After Buss died in 2013, his children fought publicly for control of the franchise, with siblings maneuvering against each other in ways that threatened everything their father had built. Succession is one of the hardest problems in any organization, and mixing bloodlines with balance sheets makes it harder still. Legacy earns its title by showing the extraordinary institution Buss created and the fault lines he left behind. [Jimmy]
📺 Legacy: The True Story of the LA Lakers (2022, 10 episodes)
3. How Cosplaying the Romans Led to the Scientific Revolution
A two-hour conversation about Renaissance history does not sound like obvious must-watch material. This one is. Ada Palmer is incredibly eclectic: She’s a historian, hopepunk science-fiction and fantasy novelist, music composer, and Associate Professor at the University of Chicago.
Oh, and she also wrote a popular history book on the Renaissance with a particular focus on Machiavelli and the Medici.
The story I can’t stop thinking about: Petrarch survived the Black Death in the 1340s, watched friends die to plague and bandits, and diagnosed the problem as bad leadership. Lords who cared about family honor over the public good. His prescription was to fill libraries with what the Romans read. Raise princes on Cicero and Plato. Make philosopher-kings by osmosis.
At first, it failed spectacularly. The first generation raised on all that classical learning did not produce Roman virtue. They produced uglier wars and nastier power politics. Cesare Borgia had Cicero memorized and used it to set fire to half of Italy. By some measures, life expectancy in Italy fell during the Renaissance, as greater wealth translated into larger armies and more destructive wars.
But the libraries Petrarch inspired stuck around. Printing, translation, footnotes, and glossaries gradually made those texts accessible to far beyond a tiny elite of classicists. A hundred years after Gutenberg, medical students were reading Lucretius and asking: what if there are atoms, and maybe that’s how diseases work? Through a long chain of second-order effects, that world helped produce germ theory, vaccines, and a treatment for the Black Death itself.
Petrarch wanted a world that shared his values. Instead, he built a world that didn’t share his values, but could solve problems he never imagined were solvable, including treatment for the disease that killed his friends.
The full conversation has plenty more: why Gutenberg went bankrupt, why Leonardo da Vinci was a saboteur, and how the Inquisition accidentally invented peer review.
I’m ordering her book Inventing the Renaissance. [Liberty]
4. The Hound of the Baskervilles : Skepticism Without Blindness
Few stories walk the line between mystery and the supernatural as elegantly as Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. Set against the bleak, fog-laden moors of Devonshire, the novel wraps its central crime in whispers of curses, legends, and a demonic hound said to stalk the Baskerville family. The atmosphere is so expertly constructed that the supernatural starts to feel not just possible, but likely.
What makes this Sherlock Holmes story endure, though, is Sherlock’s discipline under uncertainty. He is skeptical by nature, but he never uses skepticism as an excuse to stop looking. He treats even the most outlandish explanation as a live hypothesis until the evidence rules it out. That habit, more than his brilliance, is what makes him such a compelling detective. He refuses to let premature certainty close off the search.
“Is this Devil Dog a fact, or a fable?” is the question driving the investigation, and Conan Doyle keeps the answer genuinely uncertain longer than you’d expect.
That’s the balance that gives the book its charge. You get the eerie pleasures of folklore and Gothic suspense, but also the satisfaction of watching reason move carefully through fear, rumor, and misdirection. The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of Conan Doyle’s most iconic tales because it understands that the truth can feel supernatural right up until the moment it doesn’t.
If you’ve never read it, it’s worth a trip to Dartmoor. If you have read it, it’s probably time for a return visit.
And if you want a companion listen afterward, I did an episode on The Hound of the Baskervilles last October on my podcast, Becoming the Main Character, about what Sherlock’s method can still teach us. Beyond retelling the story, I give a lot of attention to the attributes that make Sherlock truly exceptional… it has less to do with being a genius than you may think. [Jameson]
5. Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies : A Machine for Breaking Creative Loops
“Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” That’s one of the 100-odd cards in Oblique Strategies, a deck Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt created in 1975 to break creative blocks in the recording studio. Fifty years later, it’s still in use, and the reason it works isn’t what you’d expect.
The premise is simple: when a session stalls, you draw a card. Some cards are practical (“Use fewer notes”); some are philosophical (“What would your closest friend do?”); some are almost anti-advice (“Do something boring”). The original edition came in a black box, and Eno used the cards while working with David Bowie on the Berlin Trilogy albums. He would reportedly hold cards up to the musicians mid-take to push them somewhere unexpected. The results are not exactly obscure records.
Here’s the part that actually interests me. The deck treats creative block as a systems problem, not a referendum on your talent. When you’re stuck, it’s usually not because you’ve run out of ideas. It’s because your taste, your habits, and your self-consciousness are vetoing every move before it has a chance to come alive. A random external prompt cuts that loop. Not because it’s wise, but because it’s alien. If the instruction made immediate sense, it probably wouldn’t get you unstuck.
“Faced with a choice, do both”
The cards aren’t smart. But they are very good at creating a small rupture, and sometimes a rupture is all you need to get moving again.
The full deck is free online. There’s also a website version. Keep one nearby for the next time you hit a wall. You don’t have to believe the card. Just try it. [Liberty]
Sherlock Holmes, creativity hacks, and techno: those are three things that you can find in my study at all times.
Love this issue so much! Good job, team!