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Clueless
Pride & Prejudice and Emma are Austen’s two greatest books. But while Pride & Prejudice has a slew of fine, straightforward adaptations, Emma has proven much more difficult to bring to the screen. That’s probably because it’s not a great romance like P&P. As a comedy of manners, though, it’s plainly superior. Clueless is far…
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The Open Society as the Enemy
The interaction of our embodied selves with the world creates cognitive structures that instantiate preferences, values, dispositions, and skills. Much of this requires neither thought nor justification. One can choose to attach reasons to liking steak more than pork, or blackjack more than poker, but the exercise is post-hoc and unnecessary. This isn’t to say…
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Capital and Ideology and Ideology and Ideology
Not many authors have ever made as big a cultural splash as Thomas Piketty did with Capital. His 2019 follow-up, Capital and Ideology, is a big book dedicated to the same general themes but expanding their scope both philosophically, historically and geographically. At the very beginning of Capital and Ideology, Piketty steps outside the narrative…
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The Hornet’s Nest
This is as close as you can (or would want) to come to combat in Afghanistan. Those are slugs whispering by the camera and you can see the very unsimulated fear on the faces of the father and son doing the filming. There is no real story arc (it’s Afghanistan), just visceral, hard-to-watch, gripping, and…
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Cities in Dust and Go, Go, Godzilla
Seems like Mr. Shuffle might have played these two songs in the wrong order. I would have put them the other way around. But then… History Shows Again and Again How Nature Points Out the Folly of Men.
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Apollo, the X-Prize and the Art of Making Better People
I’ve been listening to Julian Guthrie’s “How to Build a Spaceship” which tells the story of the X-Prize, the $10 million prize that helped kickstart the private space industry and transform the space program. It’s a compelling story with dozens of fascinating people, from Burt Rutan and Paul Allen (who ultimately won the prize) to…
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The French Connection
Probably the Platonic Form of the cop chasing criminals movie. A great star (Gene Hackman), a great supporting cast, a ZERO frills (1.44 run-time) script so tight your jaw will need unclenching by the end, one of the great car chases ever – so good it holds up after five decades – and a dark…
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(Anything But) Babylon
La La Land was about people who take their art seriously. Babylon is about people who don’t. And while Hollywood might always have had more of the latter, Babylon fails because A) people who take their art seriously are a lot more interesting than people who are just screwing around and B) Chazelle doesn’t seem…
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Living
A London-based remake of the Kurosawa classic, Ikuru, with Kazuo Ishiguro doing the screenplay and Bill Nighy playing the lead. This version hits many of the same beats and sometimes does it just as well as the original. If there’s a flaw, it’s in the decision to set the story (like Ikuru) in the 1950’s.…
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Longtermism: A Lot Less Rational Than It Might Seem
In What We Owe The Future, William MacAskill presents the case for longtermism, the idea that we should place much more moral weight than we do on the very long-term future. It’s an intriguing book, well and clearly written, with interesting things to say about issues as diverse as AI, the value of having children,…
We are not rational animals, we are animals that must work to be rational
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