Two very fun books about organized crime
Pound for pound, the best movies are always about heists: from Heat to Sneakers, from Dog Day Afternoon to The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, from Out of...
Lynndie England
It was a minor meme in the days after the election that friendships, relationships, families should not be affected by one party voting for fascism. This is,...
Links (2 minutes)
The best media I’ve consumed in the last few months: The Two Popes – An absolute gem of a movie. Not only is it perfectly crafted, it’s the right movie for...
Simple
I’ve seen some long overdue discussions about how to counter fascism in America. Unfortunately most liberals, technocrats, Democrats, progressives don’t come...
Man does not live by bread alone.
Two anecdotes. A few years ago, I was asked to help a small Latino media brand get into premium content. As always happens, they had no money. So I scoured...
I fell in love at work…
Sometimes movies describe reality, sometimes they prescribe it. Consider the quirky comedy Her (2013), which tells the story of a software engineer falling...
opportunistic infections
The body politic — all of us, together, as one — is a wonderful metaphor because it doesn’t struggle to convey what is obvious: each one of us emerges from...
to praise infamous men
It’s possible for a society’s death drive to get the better of it. For enough people to reject this world and choose the fantasy of its inverse. For enough...
good folk
We like to call folk wisdom corny but that doesn’t make it less true. What happens when you squeeze people together, for centuries, what pours out, what gets...
Suffer the fools.
In America, we are now in the final days of the harvest. We are reaping what we have sown. Our fate will be determined by the least informed among us: the...
healing is our greatest achievement
The most important things in life are boring. Or so they seem. The clocks all around us tell us to focus on an ever narrowing timeframe. But this is a lie....
2D desires, 3D realities
It’s the little things. The ones we don’t notice. That’s what defines our reality. Going on nature walks is transformative precisely because a single leaf...
leaving the postmodern
Sometimes I write things that surprise me and, at my ripe old age, I now assume I must be wrong. A younger person, a dumber person, takes shock as evidence...
what to expect
My father grew up in a military family; his father an orphan, his mother could barely read. As a teenager, he wanted to become an air force pilot but he...
the first time
Do you remember the first time you worked with a computer? Or the first time you saw a movie? Can you picture your first beloved toy? I’ve spent the last...
learn to code
if it’s in a museum, it must be… I learned to code* in the 1980s, when my working class immigrant parents bought me a Commodore 64. (today we all “love”...
too hot to work for this pay
I wrote this 45 second melody. It’s a little jazzy. They’re too good to us. If we were being served by the best and brightest, they’d want local innovation...
authenticity
We learn by copying. We borrow words. We try on looks. First we imitate our parents, then the kids around us. There is no authenticity that does not begin as...
bandits get away
Go to a movie theater and watch Furiosa. They won’t make them like that soon. Last week, I watched The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968. It’s a bad movie, well...
Models
Our purpose is implicit in our bodies: we evolved into social animals! We have the gift of speech to serve one another. Our communication is thus moral,...