OSV Field Notes #3
Welcome to OSV Field Notes, a weekly, high‑signal curation of things worth your time.
1. The Dirty Fuel of Revenge: The Count of Monte Cristo
I know recommending this feels a bit like telling you to watch Breaking Bad, but some things earn the hype.
The Count of Monte Cristo is the story of a man who destroys himself to become someone new. Of long-game thinking, youth, love, loss, envy, and revenge. Revenge gets talked about most, but what stayed with me was something else. Edmond Dantès, fueled by decades of rage, systematically destroys every person who wronged him. He gets them all. But revenge couldn’t return the one thing he wanted most: the love of his life. There’s something unsettling about watching someone run on dirty fuel and win every battle except the one that mattered.
It looks a bit daunting when you judge by the cover. If nothing else, read it for the Abbé Faria sections. The scenes of a young prisoner being educated by a dying polymath in a forgotten dungeon are worth the price of admission. Dumas gave Edmond a treasure, and left one for us, too. [Vatsal]
📗 The Count of Monte Cristo (English translation from the original French)
(If you prefer ebooks, I recommend this free version)
2. When Words Were Weapons: Churchill’s Incredible Year
Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile covers a single year, from May 1940 to May 1941, and that constraint is what makes it work. By narrowing his lens to Churchill’s first twelve months as Prime Minister, Larson can do something most World War II histories cannot: slow down enough to show you what daily life actually felt like when German bombs were falling on London every night. You see Churchill dictating memos from his bath, his daughter Mary falling for a young officer, his private secretary picking through rubble where friends had been standing hours before. The intimacy is the point. Larson understands that history becomes real when it becomes specific.
The deeper question the book poses feels relevant now: How does a leader hold a nation together during a genuine crisis? Churchill’s answer was language. He treated every speech as an act of warfare, understanding that morale was a material resource as essential as ammunition or aircraft. Larson shows us the craft behind those famous phrases, the drafts and revisions, the careful calibration of honesty and hope. What emerges is a portrait of leadership as performance in the best sense, the kind that summons from people more than they knew they had to give. [Jimmy]
3. ASML’s Unreasonable Machine
Around 2015, Moore’s Law hit a wall. The physics of light made it impossible to print smaller transistors using existing technology. The solution was extreme ultraviolet lithography, but it had been dismissed as fantasy for three decades. Scientists who proposed it were laughed off stages. The idea required nothing less than building “an artificial sun on Earth,” creating mirrors so smooth that if scaled to the size of our planet, the largest bump would be thinner than a playing card, and hitting 50,000 microscopic tin droplets per second with a laser, never missing once. Sounds easy, right? 😅
Veritasium’s deep dive into ASML, the Dutch company that pulled it off, is a great look into how the most important technologies often look impossible right up until they work.
What makes this story so fascinating isn’t just the technical wizardry, though there’s plenty (mini-supernovas, hurricane-force hydrogen flows, overlay accuracy of five silicon atoms). It’s the human element: the Japanese scientist who lit candles at a chapel near Mount Fuji when the engineering hit its limits, the American researcher who swore never to speak of his humiliating conference presentation again, the decades of moving goalposts that would have broken less stubborn teams. Every advanced chip in your phone, laptop, or AI server exists because unreasonable people refused to accept that this machine couldn’t be built. The $400 million device that results is the most complicated commercial product ever created. [Liberty]
4. From Outsider to Icon: How Martin Scorsese Outlasted His Critics
Apple TV+’s five-part Mr. Scorsese filled a gap in my Scorsese “mental library”: I knew the films, but not much about Scorsese’s decades-long battle to make them. The series traces his journey from Little Italy childhood to cinema sainthood, fought for, film by film. Last Temptation of Christ brought a firebombing and FBI protection, test audiences walked out of Goodfellas. Studios constantly pushed for less violence and happier endings. He refused.
This is a portrait of artistic stubbornness that eventually bent the industry to his vision rather than the other way around. The De Niro years, the DiCaprio partnership, the slow-motion canonization of once-controversial films. It’s a masterclass in how perception shifts when you outlast your critics. [Liberty]
📺 Mr. Scorsese (2025, Apple TV+)
5. Your Brain on Stale Air: The Invisible Tax on Your Thinking
Many of us spend our days in spaces where the air is degrading our ability to think. Outdoor CO2 levels sit around 430 ppm, while a well-ventilated room might be 600-800 ppm. But a closed office, a bedroom after a night’s sleep, a conference room an hour into a meeting… these can hit 1500-2500 ppm. A Harvard-led study found that cognitive performance drops measurably once you cross 1000 ppm, with decision-making, strategic thinking, and information processing all taking hits. By 1400 ppm, subjects performed ~50% worse on cognitive tests. You’ve felt this without knowing it: afternoon sluggishness, the mental fog in a packed meeting room, the way you can’t quite think straight after a few hours in a sealed space.
The Aranet4 is a small CO2 monitor that makes the invisible visible. Once you know there’s a problem, the fix is usually simple: open a window, crack a door, run a fan, check your HVAC. But you can’t fix what you can’t see. Once you start watching the numbers, you realize that “fresh air” is a measurable input to how well your brain works. Good ventilation isn’t just about comfort. It’s about maintaining the environment your brain evolved to operate in. [Liberty]
These are great reads. No 5 is my best.
These are great reviws!