OSV Field Notes #4
Welcome to OSV Field Notes, a weekly, high‑signal curation of things worth your time.
1. Eavesdropping on Genius: The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
Tolkien is the example today because it’s the volume I’ve spent the most time reading, but what I’m really presenting here is a concept:
If you want to understand the inner workings of a pre-internet public figure’s brain… read their letters. While not everyone has collections of their letters available, you may be surprised how many do, and letters give you a couple of things you never get anywhere else:
You get to see a more personal side to them. A letter is not as intimate as an in-person conversation, but it’s definitely a more genuine look into who they are than their public works and speeches. You can oftentimes learn details of their mindset that you can’t find anywhere else.
For Tolkien, one of my favorite letters is him addressing the question of whether Frodo “failed” at Mount Doom (letter 246, if you’re curious).
Reading the letters of someone who accomplished great things can reveal insights into their motivations as well as how they dealt with their failures and trials. It’s about as close to having them as a mentor as you can get. [Jameson]
✉️ The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Revised and Expanded Edition)
2. Man on Wire: ‘An act justified entirely by its beauty and audacity.’
I have watched James Marsh’s documentary Man on Wire more times than I care to count. It tells the story of Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers, and it unfolds with the tension of a heist film. Petit and his small band of co-conspirators spent months casing the buildings, forging IDs, smuggling equipment past security guards, all to pull off an act that was illegal, unprofitable, and by any reasonable measure insane.
Marsh structures the documentary around this preparation, intercutting archival footage with present-day interviews, and the effect is to make you lean forward even though you know how it ends. Petit survived. He walked for 45 minutes, a quarter mile above the streets of Manhattan, crossing back and forth eight times while crowds gathered below.
What elevates the film beyond spectacle is its interest in the question of why. Petit is charming and elusive on this point, almost allergic to explanation, and Marsh wisely lets the ambiguity stand. The walk had no cause, no sponsor, no message. It was art in its purest form, an act that justified itself entirely by its beauty and audacity.
Watching Petit describe that morning, you sense something that our culture often has trouble accepting: some things are worth doing precisely because they serve no purpose beyond the doing. The Twin Towers are gone now, which gives the footage an unexpected weight. But Petit’s walk remains, suspended in memory, a reminder that human beings are capable of the unnecessary and the magnificent. [Jimmy]
🎬 Man on Wire (documentary, 2008)
3. Le Cercle Rouge : ‘An icy world of trench coats, cigarettes, and gunfire’
If you like the films of Michael Mann (Heat, Thief, Collateral, etc) and haven’t seen Le Cercle Rouge (1970, the title translates to “The Red Circle”), stop what you’re doing and watch it immediately.
A gentleman thief, an alcoholic sharpshooter, and an escaped prisoner come together for one last score: tens of millions of francs in jewelry. But the walls are closing in. An obsessive police officer is on their trail, with his own vendetta to settle.
By this late stage in his career, director Jean-Pierre Melville had perfected his cool, austere minimalism: an icy world of trench coats, cigarettes, and gunfire. These are cold men with cold codes. Perhaps that’s why they start to like each other.
It’s one effortlessly stylish sequence after another, culminating in a gloriously staged thirty-minute heist. It’s only January, but you’ll be hard-pressed to watch anything better this year. [Ed]
🎬 Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
4. Halt and Catch Fire : Unreasonable People & Unreasonable Machines
A show about the dawn of the computing industry and its ascent through the heyday of the dot-com era, made for AMC right on the heels of Mad Men?
*Sign me up!*
What makes Halt and Catch Fire compelling (and essential viewing, not just for us technophiles) is how it started as a Mad Men clone (anti-hero with a superiority complex navigating a creative organization) before metamorphosing into a rich character-driven drama about the myriad ways technology transforms our lives.
The characters begin as archetypes—the geek, the salesman, the housewife, the renegade, the old guard—then evolve into fully realized people. What binds them is the friction of their personalities as they attempt to build companies and products across the different eras of computing. The ’80s PC clone wars, the scramble for online communities, the ISP battles against AOL, and the doomed race to build a search engine before Yahoo. Each provides a vivid canvas for the manic ambition of its flawed core cast. I’m entirely here for it.
P.S. The show is also a quiet manifesto for personal agency. Joe MacMillan (a suave salesman who is the lynchpin of the core group; played by the magnificent Lee Pace) puts it best: “I thought that maybe we could do this precisely because we’re all unreasonable people and progress depends on our changing the world to fit us. Not the other way around.” [Rohan]
📺🔥 Halt and Catch Fire (2014-2017)
5. Retraction Watch: Science Needs Error-Correction Mechanisms
Retraction Watch is a project of The Center for Scientific Integrity that tracks and reports on the retractions and major corrections of scientific papers. Founded to increase transparency, the site maintains an extensive database of over 63,000 retractions (as of Dec 30, 2025) and publishes daily reports on academic misconduct, fraudulent studies, honest errors, and editorial mishaps. It’s not just a list: They also investigate the stories behind the retractions, covering everything from data fabrication and plagiarism to peer-review rings and “hijacked” journals. 📄🔬👩🔬
This matters because science only works as a cumulative enterprise if the public record is reliable and self-corrections are discoverable. Flawed or fraudulent research should be publicly flagged and not cited in future studies. In practice, retractions and corrections are often buried, unevenly disclosed, and easy to miss, which is why having both the reporting and a standardized database available via Crossref’s REST API is so valuable. [Liberty]
Wow. I had never heard of the Retraction Watch org. Impressive work. Instance they’ve got a database of 460 COVID-19 article retractions.