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Harakiri
A meditation on honor that captures its essence and its danger. Though wrapped in the form of a vengeance movie, the suspense is genuine and you never quite know exactly how it’s going to come out. Nor does the ending disappoint – though in some respects it definitely DOES disappoint. No spoilers, but…justice? Forget it,…
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The Incomparable Mr. Buckley
In a world of consumer-packaged ideology, we have come to expect our political thinkers to be stupid. Sometimes, as with so many of the “thinkers” of the new right, they are rabidly stupid: dogs in heat screwing ideas. Often, particularly on the left, they are profoundly stupid: obscuring their Saharan cranial emptiness with a word-salad…
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Comfort Books
When you’re depressed or feeling stressed, there’s no better cure than friends. But when you’re sick, there isn’t much friends can do for you. You’re at home, feeling bad. If you’re too sick to work but not quite at the vegetative stage (like I was for a good chunk of February), you tend to go looking…
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Escape from New York
Bear with me here. I’m not saying Escape from New York is a good movie. It most definitely is not. But it is a fun movie. Like Highlander, it would benefit hugely from a remake. Many of the special effects are risible. Some of the casting decisions are worse than that. Donald Pleasance (surely one…
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Asteroid City
Wes Anderson movies are an acquired taste and, unfortunately, I seem to have acquired the taste. It was Grand Budapest Hotel that really did me in. I love it. And while no other Wes Anderson movie is in the same ballpark (I merely survived The French Dispatch), I enjoyed his Roald Dahl shorts and –…
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In Memoriam: Bob Knight
As an Indiana boy and Duke graduate, Bob Knight had peculiar salience in my life. He was growing into legend as I was growing into fanhood. And while there’s no denying that he could be a jerk (he wasn’t always a jerk, but he obviously had problems with his temper), he was, quite simply, the…
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Exhalation: Transformative Experience and AI
Ted Chiang’s Exhalation is one of the best collections of short science fiction that you can find. It also happens to have several stories directly concerned with transformative experience and decision-making. That’s unusual. Most short science fiction stories are idea driven. They take a concept and run with it. In Exhalation, for example, Chiang writes…
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A Daughter of the Samurai: A Memoir
Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto’s memoir from the early twentieth century lives inside one of the great cultural collisions of the modern era. It spans her girlhood in Japan living through the final collapse of the samurai tradition and the Western-mania that swept Japan to her arranged marriage and life in America. Much was lost and much…
We are not rational animals, we are animals that must work to be rational
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