George Saunders is a modern master of the short story, so when he offers his thoughts on masters of old — all of them Russian — you’d better take it. Even if, like myself, you have no intention of ever writing short stories for a living or for personal enjoyment, it will greatly enhance your appreciation of the craft.

An unexpected diversion that is all heart and no plot — not the most terrible thing in the world, but far from the year’s best animated movie.

Similarly to Peter Thiel’s key question in Zero to One, Influence revolves around a list of seven: the seven heuristics our System 1 has accepted as a sign that we can agree to something automatically — what Robert Cialdini calls the Click, run response. Actors both nefarious and benign may use them to get wat they want from us. But of course, it works both ways: we can’t learn defense against the dark arts without picking up some of those dark arts ourselves.

As chance would have it, my finishing the book coincided with a family trip to Las Vegas where all of the principles were tried on us in an attempt to sell us a time share scheme. We got our initial hotel room stays at a well-known and renowned hotel chain (authority) at a discount (reciprocity); the sellers wanted to ingratiate with us with a wink here and a compliment there (liking), citing that she, too, was bilingual and raising a bilingual child (unity); we were taken to a room fool of other potential buyers and witnessed one occasion of a 14,000 point plan being sold (social proof); we had only that day to decide on whether we should buy into this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (scarcity), and we kept being reminded how much we spent on vacations anyway (commitment and consistency).

They were good, but the book was better: we thanked them for the offer and graciously declined. It was a $15 investment that saved us tens of thousands of dollars in frivolous expenses. Well worth an ocassional re-read.

Netflix has a corrupting influence on film makers. Could it be that good art needs constraints?

Witness Don’t Look Up: a two and a half hour movie in which everything is at stake yet nothing happens. As a government farce, it is worse than Burn After Reading; as a disaster movie, it is worse than even Armageddon; and it is much, much worse than Dr. Strangelove by any criteria.

If it was meant to portray our response to Covid it did a terrible job, painting science as all-knowing and the political-buisness cabal as less coherent than your average B-grade movie villain. Spolier alert: (almost) everyone dies at the end, and you (mostly) won’t care.

Good soundtrack, though.

Peter Thiel’s thoughts about startups, which I presume every founder past, present, and future has read and internalized.

But I jest. Browse Twitter and you’ll see his seven fairly simple principles of running a successful startup abused, ignored, and misinterpreted, particularly in biotech.

Instead of building a technology that will be useful 20 years from now — the durability factor — technologies are made to solve problems of 20 years ago. Layering optical character recognition, artificial intelligence and machine learning over the cruft of hand-written notes faxed back and forth between doctors’ offices comes to mind. Compare and contrast to mRNA vaccines, a technology created more than a decade ago to treat today’s pandemic.

Instead of developing drugs and other treatments with at least 10 times the effect size of current standards of care — principle of technology — the regulatory agencies and markets are overwhelmed by me-too drugs whose marginal benefit requires mammoth trials for any chance of detection.

Instead of vertical integration and ownership of drug discovery, manufacturing, clinical operations and biomarker development within the same organization, with positive feedback loops between all the factors leading to a faster pace — the team prinicple — we get ghost companies made of slide decks and good wishes whose only tangible impact on the world is achieved via Contract Research Organizations.

I could go on: the principles of timing, monopoly, and distribution are also violated early and often in a biotech startup’s lifetime. But then I’d be breaking a principle myself, that of the secret.

The 1984 version showed that making a good movie out of a 700-page tome is a complex problem that can’t be solved in 2 hours 17 minutes on a $40M budget. It took 20 minutes and $50M more than that for Denis Villeneuve to cover just half of what Lynch attempted, but the end result is so much better. The story is what it is — between the book, the movie, the TV show, and the game I now know it by heart — but the casting, the pace, cinematography, score, the movieness of it, are all pitch perfect. A cross between Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars, noted our perceptive nine-year-old somewhere around the 30-minute mark. Yes, and more like this, please!

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Viewing notes: we saw it on a 120” screen with a 5.1 surround system. If you have anything less at home I’d strongly recommend going to a movie theater. Yes, it’s nice that it is available for streaming on day 1, but you would be doing a disservice both to the movie and to yourself seeing it on a postage stamp. \</privilege>

A Disney+ TV show that WoG followers would like. Villains are IYI vegans who live in modernist buildings and make children live by absurd and contradictory rules that only give an appearance of freedom (“You are free to go wherever you like, as long as you stay on the path”, to paraphrase one). Our heroes, both children and adults, are messy but resourceful, at home in both a Georgian mansion and the wilderness of (I assume, though it’s never specified) the Pacific Northwest.

It starts in a picturesque costal town right off of Townscaper. By the third episodes the children are stuck in a nightmareish brutalist school that is all acute angles and ‘70s orange-white plastic furniture — not nearly as pretty to look at, but the puzzle-of-the-day aspect makes every episode worthwhile. It ends with most of the loose ends tied up but with promises of more to come. And Tony Hale is in almost evey scene. What’s not to love?

A few notches below Little Miss Sunshine, a movie of a similar sensibilities. Some changes might have improved it — e.g. why does Ruby end up at high-school choir practice because of a boy, and not because of her love of singing? — but none of it can correct the one huge flaw, which is that conflict between Ruby’s supporting her family by providing free ASL interpreter services and Ruby’s becoming a strong independent young woman is a zero-sum game which will end up in either financial hardship or broken dreams.

But, you know, the music was nice.

The Mare of Easttown is the best dead-girl-in-a-sad-town TV show to come out of the US since Twin Peaks. To be clear, the 30-some years that separate them still have many good shows of the genre, but none were American. When they weren’t busy churning out the millionth iteration of CSI, Americans could only muster pale copies of what came out of Britain and Scandinavia, with characters and plots lifted wholesale and Northern European sentiments crammed oddly into New England toponyms.

The Mare takes its setting more seriously, and not just with flannel shirts, odd accents, and dozens of bottles of Yuengling and Rolling Rock drunk per episode. You quickly learn that the town is not all that bad: it has decent homes, an upscale college and high school, and a pretty good sense of community. It’s the people who are sad, each in their own way and for their own reasons, with the titular Marianne the saddest of them all, and the show mostly dedicated to exploring how and why this happened.

There is also a murder or two, some kidnappings, and an action scene that brought back some of the best moments of The Silence of the Lambs. A few of the cliffhangers were the murder mystery equivalent of a jump scare, but that can be forgotten because the show manages to pull off a successful double-twist ending that is both reasonable and unexpected.

Ultimately, if a show is good enough for Kate Winslet to be in, it’s more than good enough for me to watch.

Two parts lifestyle porn one part sociologic study of intergenerational struggle, with a smidgen of mystery to whet your appetite and make you think there is more there there than it actually is, though what is there is still pretty good if not exactly a Knives Out caliber of crime comedy.¹

But oh my that soundtrack.