OSV Field Notes #9
Welcome to OSV Field Notes, a weekly, high‑signal curation of things worth your time.
1. The Poisoner in Chief : When America Lost Its Mind
Stephen Kinzer’s 2019 investigation of Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA’s post-World War II mission to achieve mind control through the MK-Ultra program is one of the most haunting books I’ve ever read. Kinzer draws on declassified materials to reconstruct how Gottlieb—a stuttering, club-footed chemist who meditated, practiced Zen, and loved folk dancing—led the most notorious program in CIA history.
MK-Ultra is mostly known for LSD, but the full scope was far uglier. Gottlieb’s team experimented with mescaline, barbiturates, heroin, scopolamine, and other drugs in combinations meant to break down psychological resistance. They funded sensory deprivation research, extreme electroshock therapy, drug-induced comas, and weeks-long isolation. Over two decades, these experiments ran through universities, prisons, and hospitals across the United States, often on people unaware they were subjects. Many were permanently damaged, and others died. Among them: Frank Olson, an Army scientist working with the CIA who was drugged without his knowledge and plunged to his death from a NYC hotel window nine days later.
One of the most disturbing lessons driven home is how easily Cold War fear justified almost any action Gottlieb and his associates undertook. Normal ethical reasoning was suspended. But perhaps most disconcerting is that the very bureaucracy supposedly designed to prevent such ethical breaches essentially enabled atrocity at every turn. Gottlieb didn’t and couldn’t have acted alone; he had sign-off from CIA director Allen Dulles, protection from oversight, and extensive cooperation from doctors, universities, hospitals, and law enforcement.
Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” finds its American chapter here. MK-Ultra caused widespread human suffering while being led by smart, mission-driven people with the full backing of the US government. Virtually no one was held accountable. Ultimately, the program failed completely, never achieving its intended goals.
The book leaves the reader with far more questions than answers. Are we any better prepared today to prevent such institutional runaway — or are we less prepared? [Chris]
📘 Poisoner in Chief by Stephen Kinzer
2. ‘Exercise’ Without Moving (Magic? No, Sauna)
Buried in Finnish epidemiological data is a simple activity with numbers that would make most drug trials jealous: men who used a sauna 4–7 times per week were 40% less likely to die from any cause over a 20-year follow-up, compared to men who went once a week. Same cohort, different paper: 66% lower risk of dementia.
Not bad for sitting in a wooden box.
The numbers are dose-dependent and they held up after adjusting for age, fitness, activity levels, alcohol, smoking, socioeconomic status, and pre-existing conditions.
The study is the Kuopio Ischemic Heart Disease (KIHD) Risk Factor Study: 2,315 middle-aged men, tracked for over two decades, published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2015. It’s the single most important piece of sauna research to date, and Rhonda Patrick’s comprehensive primer on FoundMyFitness is probably the most accessible overview of the broader science.
What makes the data less surprising is the mechanism. During a sauna session, your heart rate can climb to 150 bpm and cardiac output jumps 60–70%. Your body activates heat shock proteins, BDNF (the same growth factor exercise triggers for new neurons), and anti-inflammatory pathways. Your heart can’t tell the difference between a sauna and a moderate jog. It’s not relaxation doing the work, it’s hormesis, the same controlled-stress principle behind exercise. 🫀
Caveats worth mentioning: the KIHD data is observational, not a randomized trial, and it’s drawn almost entirely from Finnish men. “People healthy enough to sauna frequently tend to be healthier” is a real confound that the adjustments may not fully eliminate. But the biological mechanisms are plausible, the dose-response relationship is clean, and smaller interventional studies keep pointing the same direction.
If you have access to a sauna, use it. It’s one of the lowest-effort, highest-return health practices available. [Liberty]
🔬 Rhonda Patrick’s Sauna Primer (FoundMyFitness)
📄 Laukkanen et al. (2015), JAMA Internal Medicine
3. Disneyland Handcrafted : 160 Acres, One Year, and a Dream
I'm no Disney fanatic, but as a documentary filmmaker, I love a great story, and Disneyland Handcrafted is exactly that. The documentary covers the year leading up to Disneyland's opening, and the origin story is irresistible: Walt Disney converting a dusty 160-acre stretch of orange groves southeast of Los Angeles into a theme park unlike anything that existed before. In just one year.
The film likely would not have been made if not for a chance discovery of a stash of 16mm film reels stored away in the Disney archives, unseen for decades. Academy Award–nominated filmmaker Leslie Iwerks — whose grandfather, Ub Iwerks, was the co-creator and original animator of Mickey Mouse — directed the film, cataloging and processing this footage into a cinéma vérité portrayal stitched together by narration and audio interviews of the artists, engineers, builders, and landscape architects who brought the park to life. The resulting images are stunning — a tapestry of time-lapse photography, 16mm shots, and aerial footage. On the construction site, there were no project managers, no blueprints, and barely a plan. Instead, Disney conjured the park from his mind, and workers were expected to solve problems and execute without delay (or at least, that’s the film’s narrative).
That Disney turned orange groves into the template for every theme park on Earth in just twelve months still defies belief. The footage of workers hammering, tinkering, and molding the entire theme park by hand is a reminder that nothing will be able to replace your creative aspirations and dreams. [Taylor]
🎬 Disneyland Handcrafted (2026)
4. Patriot : The Best (Funny) Spy Show Nobody Watched
The premise of Patriot sounds like a dozen other spy thrillers: CIA officer John Tavner goes undercover at a Milwaukee industrial piping firm. The job is a cover for a Luxembourg operation to prevent Iran from going nuclear. What you actually get is something closer to a Coen Brothers absurdist comedy stretched into ten episodes, where every mission spirals into a chain reaction of misfortune, layered with genuine melancholy (I’ve seen the show described as: sad spies).
Here's what makes it special. Tavner is falling apart. He's depressed, he's got PTSD from a previous job gone wrong, and his coping mechanism is performing folk songs at open mic nights that narrate his covert missions in startling detail (he’s past the point of caring about operational security 😬).
Michael Dorman, a New Zealand–born actor and musician, performed all the show’s original folk songs, which were largely written by show creator Steven Conrad. They're genuinely good, and add interior life to a genre that usually lacks it.
The production is impeccable. Prague stands in for Luxembourg and Chicago for Milwaukee, and the vibe is more Le Carré than Bourne. Kurtwood Smith and Terry O'Quinn play it with total commitment.
Amazon barely promoted it and quietly cancelled it after two seasons. It has a small cult following, and the kind of gap between quality and audience that this OSV Field Notes exists to close. [Liberty]
📺 Patriot (2017, Prime Video)
5. Design as Art : Why a Butcher's Sign Can Be a Masterpiece
In my quest to read more on Art and Design, I recently picked up Design as Art by Bruno Munari.
Originally published in 1966, it’s a collection of short, witty essays where Munari, once described by Picasso as “the new Leonardo,” lays out his ideas on visual, graphic, and industrial design, and the role they play in the objects we use every day.
From the very start, Munari pulls you in with his famous useless machines - delicate hanging assemblages of lightweight geometric forms, painted on both sides, that drift and rotate with the slightest movement of air. While they seem simple, even randomly built, they are anything but. There is a harmonic mathematical relationship between all the parts that make up their beauty.
Art disguised as a toy, engineering disguised as art.
The real argument of the book is bigger than any single invention. Munari believed art and daily life should never be separated:
“There should be no such thing as art divorced from life, with beautiful things to look at and hideous things to use... Anyone who uses a properly designed object feels the presence of an artist who has worked for him, bettering his living conditions and encouraging him to develop his taste and sense of beauty.”
In 1966, that was a radical position. In 2026, surrounded by objects designed to be disposable, it reads like a rebuke and an invitation. [Atman]
📙 Design as Art by Bruno Munari (1966)