OSV Field Notes #34

Welcome to OSV Field Notes, a weekly, high-signal curation of things worth your time.

This week: things that change when you look at them twice. Two songs written 44 years apart that somehow become one, an AI revolution that may not produce an economic one, L.A. history hiding inside freeway interchanges, a 936-page Bombay epic that blurs life and fiction, and David Milch’s damaged characters seen through the man who wrote them.

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1. This Bitter Earth / On the Nature of Daylight : The Accidental Duet, 44 Years Apart

Dinah Washington and Max Richter

In 1959, Dinah Washington recorded “This Bitter Earth,” a blues song written and produced by Clyde Otis. In 2003, a German composer named Max Richter sat down in Edinburgh and wrote a piece for string quintet as a protest against the Iraq war: “On the Nature of Daylight.”

Two songs in two completely different genres recorded forty-four years apart... Then Robbie Robertson put one on top of the other.

Robertson had been telling Scorsese for years that, instead of an original score, they ought to try building a film out of modern classical music. So when the Shutter Island script arrived, he told Scorsese this was the one - and, thankfully, Scorsese agreed. Richter’s strings went in early and became the theme for Dolores, the dead wife. They play every time she appears.

The end credits were the last thing to solve. Robertson had the Richter piece in his head, and he had also been carrying the Dinah Washington song around for years (she had been one of his favourite singers for decades), and something in him kept setting the two of them side by side. So he went and checked. They were in the same key.

The rest he did by hand. He cut her vocal out of the 1959 record line by line, the way you’d chop a rap sample, then laid each phrase back over the strings exactly where he would have sung it himself. He wasn’t sure he was allowed to do any of this, so he sent it to Scorsese with a warning attached. He had taken a liberty; this was the entirety of two artists laid on one another. Scorsese loved it. Somebody then had to ring Max Richter and Dinah Washington’s family to ask permission after the fact. Again, thankfully, both said yes.

I’ve listened to it more times than I can count, and it still sounds to me like one piece of music that was pulled apart at some point and put back together. Her phrasing falls into the gaps in the strings as though she had been in the room while they recorded it, which adds to how haunting it already is. [Dylan]

• 🎶 This Bitter Earth / On the Nature of Daylight (Shutter Island Soundtrack)

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2. Why AI Might Transform Everything Without Exploding Economic Growth

You have probably heard both versions of the AI future. In one, the transformation is so fast that if you can just stay alive for the next three years, you stand to increase your lifespan by hundreds of years. In the other, AI is cool and all, but all the talk about hypergrowth is mostly… hype.

Charles I. Jones (a Stanford economist and now an Anthropic employee) explores several scenarios in this recent paper. A graph of the avg. US per capita income for the last 150 years (figure 1) shows a steady growth of 2% per year. That’s 150 years that saw electricity, air travel, antibiotics, transistors, personal computers, and the internet to name a few!

All of these were transformative and yet, they translated to a 2% growth in the long run. So, is this time finally different? Could AI really get us to grow at 10% or more?

Jones looks at the “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link” argument with an economic and mathematical lens. Most of the economy is not about manipulating text files, and there are countless complex human interactions that keep the world running. As we automate one part of the job, the bottleneck just moves to another — making that the new weak link. How quickly can AI automate through the bottlenecks? And that assumes the set of things we do doesn’t expand, which seems unlikely.

In April 2025, while visiting California, my wife and I took a Waymo ride for the first time. It still tops our list of mindblowing experiences. What do you mean that a driverLESS car just arrives, you sit and tap a screen, and it calmly maneuvers through traffic and stop lights and drops you to the destination like a random Uber?!

That moment was us living in the future.

While discussing when we could expect this future to arrive back home, in India, we were reminded of how even something as basic as well-paved roads is currently too much to expect. The knowledge required for building good roads is widely available, the tools are inexpensive, but it’s the human-in-the-loop that has persisted as the bottleneck to something that was solved a century ago. Perhaps that’s why Tyler Cowen calls humans the #1 bottleneck to explosive economic growth because of AI. [Vatsal]

• 📄 AI and Our Economic Future by Charles I. Jones

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3. Take THE 405 to THE 10: A Love Letter to L.A.’s Freeways

I grew up watching CHiPs — the late-’70s series about California Highway Patrol officers on motorbikes — and the opening credits always got me dreaming of a place far from my native Midwest.

Those aerial shots of freeways snaking through the L.A. basin, the late-afternoon light catching eight lanes of traffic flowing in formation, made the infrastructure itself look cinematic. So when I stumbled onto the X account Freeways of Los Angeles, it hit my nostalgia and history nerves: a steady feed of archival photos, engineering histories, construction timelines, and route stories drawn from roughly 650 miles of freeway crisscrossing Los Angeles County.

What makes the account so good is that the freeway is almost never just the freeway. You click on an old interchange photo and wind up reading about the political fight that put it there. The account traces all of it: from the Arroyo Seco Parkway, the first freeway in the western United States when it opened in 1940, to the controversies and construction sagas that shaped the system Angelenos navigate today. It’s the kind of niche, deeply regional content I’m a sucker for: the history of a place told through its infrastructure.

My wife’s family is all from L.A. and Orange County, and I love giving them a hard time about route planning. Everyone has a preferred freeway. Everyone has a strong opinion about the 405. And of course, everyone calls them THE Five or THE 10 — a habit that dates back to when the freeways had names instead of numbers, and “the San Diego Freeway” simply became “the 405.” If you’ve seen SNL’s The Californians, where Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig, and Fred Armisen argue about routes in exaggerated Valley accents, then you already understand. [Taylor]

• 🌐 @FreewaysLA

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4. Shantaram : Prison, Bombay, Mafia, War

Years ago, during the middle of summer, I read a novel called Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. I don’t remember how I first came to it. I remember being absorbed from the jump. This despite its length, which clocks in at 936 pages. The heft is worth it, and I recommend it enthusiastically.

The story follows a man called Lin, an Australian convict who escapes a maximum-security prison, buys a false passport, and disappears into the crowds of Bombay in the 1980s. He finds a guide, a taxi driver named Prabaker who has the best smile in the book and possibly in literature. He finds a slum, and in it he builds a free clinic, drawing on his earlier training as a medic to treat thousands. He finds a woman named Karla, who is beautiful and withholding and running from something of her own. He finds a mafia don named Abdel Khader Khan, who becomes a kind of father to him and who will eventually lead him into the mountains of Afghanistan. Along the way there is a village monsoon, a Bombay prison, a Bollywood set, an opium den, and a war.

It is loosely based on the author’s life, but this is one of those books that, whether it’s fact or fiction, it doesn’t much matter. Because the book has a gem of writing or emotion or wisdom on almost every page. Its people and places have stayed with me long after I finished it. Roberts spent years living in Bombay, and you can tell. He knows what the air smells like at four in the morning outside a Colaba bar. He knows how people talk to each other when they have nothing. [Jimmy]

• 📙 Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts

• 📺 Shantaram (2022, Apple TV+ adaptation)

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5. How David Milch Keeps Looking for the Full Human

David Milch was already one of my favorite writers before I had seen most of his work. Just based on Deadwood, my favorite TV show (which I will tell you more about in a separate note — I’m keeping that one for later as dessert), I knew I loved that man’s mind.

When I first read his Life’s Work a couple of years ago, it completely changed my perception of Milch, and of Deadwood. I realized how much of himself is in his characters. The damaged people that he writes about seem like reflections of his own struggles with addiction, gambling, and being abused as a child.

On my first read, I had not yet seen what made Milch famous, NYPD Blue. For some reason, I expected it to be a vanilla police procedural from the 1990s. I thought maybe Milch started out more conventional, and built up the permission with the TV networks to experiment later. Well, my wife and I have been watching NYPD Blue from the beginning for the past few months, and I couldn’t have been more wrong. This is clearly one of the ancestors of modern prestige TV. Characters are flawed in ways that network TV ‘heroes’ rarely were at the time. Milch loved to deviate from the formula and throw out the outline. He was known to revise and improve scripts until the last second.

We’ve just hit episode 5 of season 6. I went in blind, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I won’t say more to avoid spoilers. The very next day, I started re-reading Milch’s memoir, and now the section about NYPD Blue is making me see the show in a completely new light.

Milch said the real person detective Sipowicz (played by Dennis Franz) most closely resembles is his father, Elmer Milch, a brilliant surgeon who also was an alcoholic and compulsive gambler. Once you know that, Sipowicz feels different. Milch wanted to portray that kind of person in “full human complication,” capable of ugliness, but not reducible to his ugliness.

Milch writes in the memoir about how things that happen later can change the meaning of what came before. That’s exactly what this reread feels like. NYPD Blue is changing how I read Life’s Work, and Life’s Work is changing how I watch NYPD Blue. [Liberty]

• 📙 Life’s Work: A Memoir by David Milch

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