Welcome to OSV Field Notes, a weekly, high-signal curation of things worth your time.
This week: what holds things together. Michael Lewis’s hardest book, the Sherlock Holmes who has to work at being Sherlock Holmes, a theory of office politics that explains why Michael Scott is the boss, an alien planet with a life of its own, and the wrestling team holding a Colorado town together.
1. The Undoing Project : Michael Lewis’s Hardest Book
I am a fan of just about everything Michael Lewis has written, and honestly, it’s hard not to be. He writes with elegance and flair, in a style shaped by his New Orleans upbringing. The stories pulse with humor and vivid description. You know when you’re reading a Lewis book that you’re in the hands of a master craftsman.
Of all his work, my favorite may be a surprising choice. It’s The Undoing Project. Other books of his have been made into films, drawn more acclaim, even entered the language. “Moneyball” is a word now. But I think The Undoing Project was the highest dive of the bunch. Consider the degree of difficulty. He gathered material for the book for eight years and later said it took him longer than any of his other books to convince himself to actually write it. How do you turn a story about the friendship between two Israeli psychologists into riveting journalism?
If you’re Michael Lewis, you do it with aplomb. The central storyline is the friendship between Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, two men who could not have been less alike. Tversky was brilliant, brash, and famously certain, the kind of man colleagues joked you could measure your own intelligence against by how quickly you realized he was smarter than you. Kahneman was anxious, self-doubting, forever convinced his best work was wrong. Together they spent years in a room in Jerusalem, laughing, arguing, and finishing each other’s sentences, and out of that room came the research that helped overturn the reigning assumption in economics that human beings are rational actors. Kahneman won the Nobel for it in 2002. Tversky had died six years earlier and could not share it.
The book is a perfect blend of their personalities and quirks, the friendship that gave their ideas life, and the ideas themselves, presented in a way that doesn’t require a PhD to enjoy. It is also, quietly, a story about what happens to a great collaboration under strain, which is a subject nobody writes about well and Lewis writes about beautifully.
Even among Lewis fans, I suspect this one is underrated. I think it’s the best of the bunch, because it was the hardest to pull off. [Jimmy]
📘 The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis
2. Elementary : The Sherlock Who Has to Work at It
There have been a lot of Sherlock Holmes adaptations, and I think I just realized that the one that looked least ambitious may be my favorite.
I watched Elementary when it first aired and really enjoyed it, but I hadn’t seen an episode in years. I recently started rewatching Season 1 to see how it held up. It’s even better than I remembered.
But it came out at a terrible time to be taken seriously. We were in the middle of Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, and the BBC’s much flashier Sherlock. Serious TV was supposed to be serialized, cinematic, and ten or twelve episodes long. Elementary was on CBS, usually had 24 episodes a season, and solved a new murder every week. I think a lot of people looked at that and went “nope.”
The murders are fine. Some are clever, some I forget almost immediately. But they’re not really why the show works.
It’s Jonny Lee Miller as Holmes and Lucy Liu as Watson (brilliant casting). And thankfully, they never turned Sherlock and Joan into a romantic thing. They let them become partners (after a rough start), best friends, and eventually something closer to family.
And this works so well exactly because it’s not prestige TV and there are so many episodes. They spend hundreds of hours together, and we get to see them grow and become indispensable to each other.
The other thing I love is that this Sherlock has to work at being Sherlock. Whenever he isn’t solving a case, he’s training: reading, picking locks, studying insects or cadavers, doing chemical experiments, practicing some strange martial art.
That’s what has always annoyed me about Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock: his deductions can feel almost supernatural. Robert Downey Jr.’s version is basically an action hero, solving crimes as much by punching people and running around as by thinking. Which is fine if that’s what you want.
But I want Sherlock-freaking-Holmes to be a detective. [Liberty]
📺 Elementary (2012-2019, 7 seasons)
3. The Gervais Principle : Why Michael Scott Is the Boss
I’ve never had a good answer for why Michael Scott runs a branch.
Venkatesh Rao answered that in 2009 with what he calls The Gervais Principle. His theory is that the overperformer gets promoted into middle management, where part of the job is taking the blame when things above them go wrong. The savvy underperformer may get fast-tracked toward the top. And the employee doing exactly enough to keep the paycheck is mostly left alone.
The framing of people as “sociopaths” / “clueless” / “losers” is certainly harsh, and I don’t fully agree with it, but the article will shine a new light on how you think about your corporate job.
Fair warning. You’ll probably start putting names to the three categories. People you like (including you) might land in the wrong one. [Atman]
🌐 The Gervais Principle by Venkatesh Rao
4. Scavengers Reign : When the Planet Is the Main Character
Most alien planets in science fiction exist as foes to humans. If not competitors for resources, they are either wallpapers or monster factories. I was getting a bit tired of the trope when I chanced upon this animated series called Scavengers Reign.
The show follows a damaged space freighter whose survivors end up on a beautiful but (of course) hostile planet called Vesta. What makes this show refreshing is how busy the ecosystem is, and how little it seems to care that humans have arrived. There are plants that steal your DNA. This isn’t the Venus flytrap we studied in school. Spore clouds can eat flesh and bone.
I enjoyed how inventive the landscape was. But more than the art, even when it gets grotesque, I found the symbiosis stunning. A vast self-organized network that doesn’t seem to have or need any overseer. Working effortlessly on principles completely unknown but unbelievably efficient.
It’s a 2023 show whose animation was inspired by the art of Moebius and Hayao Miyazaki, particularly the latter’s environmentalist masterpiece Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. I enjoy any story that bucks trends and goes beyond tropes, so an alien world with its own logic scored well on my personal card.
The ecosystem is not fully explained in the show but we begin to see a pattern. Of course, there’s drama where we delve into the individual journeys of the characters and how they survive this unique trial by fire. But the star of the show is the planet itself, reminding us that despite all the human dramas, survival arcs and rivalries, the system is much, much older. [Aashisha]
📺 Scavengers Reign (2023, created by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner)
5. The Meloneers : The Wrestling Team Holding a Town Together
Rocky Ford, Colorado, is a town of 3,800 people in the southeastern corner of the state, known for its sweet melons and not much else — at least, not anymore. Like a lot of small towns across the rural West, it has been losing population, losing industry, and losing the economic footing that once made it a hub. But it hasn’t lost its wrestling team. The Rocky Ford Meloneers have been competing since 1950, and in the 75 years since, the program has produced 456 state qualifiers. Under current coach Mike Jurney, 34 wrestlers have won individual state championships.
Brendan Young’s short documentary The Meloneers, now streaming on Yahoo as part of a partnership with the Nonfiction Hotlist, follows several of those kids through a season — and through the harder stuff that surrounds it. Cayson Van Dyk carries the weight of a family legacy: his father and uncle were both state champion Meloneers, and the expectation to perform in the program’s red and gold singlet has followed him since childhood. Jadiss Rodriguez grew up watching his uncles and cousins wrestle, but came to the sport after losing his mother to an opioid addiction that began with a hip replacement. At the center of it all is Jurney, who has coached the Meloneers for 35 years and whose own father disappeared when he was a teenager. He was left to raise himself, and he refuses to let his wrestlers live that same story. He connects them to jobs, to therapists, to anything a town of 3,800 can offer a kid who needs direction but has the willingness and willpower to work for it.
One wrestler puts it this way: “Rocky Ford’s really centered around wrestling. Everybody likes to know they have a team that will win for them.”
In a place where so much has changed, the wrestling mat is the one place where the town still has something to root for. [Taylor]
🎬 The Meloneers (2026, directed by Brendan Young)
⭐ Explore the OSV Field Notes Archive ⭐
Enjoyed OSV Field Notes? 💌 Forward it to a friend!
