Hi all, thanks for bearing with me on the long wait. Welcome back.

I actually have had this mostly written for a while now, so I think monthly is probably a little too long of a cadence between issues. More on this below.

Here’s the next survey, also linked below.

Onto the round-up.

Survey Results

Q1: Remote work - overrated or underrated?

Results

Highlighted Free Responses

• “...Def get more done in office though and it's not even close.”

• “Fully remote and fully in person both suck. The ideal is probably 2-3 days in office with logical flexibility. I also feel for new grads starting learning fully remote is hard and makes work even worse”

• “...I'd rank it as the following: Hybrid: 2-3 days in the office with some logical leniency like around the holidays, etc. But most people do come in + free food Fully Remote: You lose the social aspect of work and it's depressing working alone Fully in office: Barbaric and unneeded. Actually less efficient for the company as well”

• “My job does not require an office and I hear what people say about “oh, productivity is lower at home than at the office.” I think that’s bullshit. Maybe for some cases but I see a guy who walks around and loudly shits 7.5 hours a day. Idk what he does.”

• “Surely bad for relationships and building professional skills but I do wonder about impacts on labor as a class. Better for flexibility and less beholden to 9-5 but also maybe harder to organize. Does it make surveillance easier or harder? More or less privacy? It's not obvious to me if good for people but we sure act like it is. Digital nomads can go to hell.”

• “...Full time remote I think I would hate though, too much time in the house.”

• “Going from a full-time remote to hybrid setup has been good for me (going to an office does help work and the rest of your actual life feel more separate, and some stuff is just easier to do in person). the partial application of remote work across the board is working well, and I would rather work full time remote than full time office any day.”

• “I truly think hybrid is really the best of the best. As someone who has done fully remote, hybrid, and fully in-person...you miss out on social interaction and opportunities when you are fully remote but having a little time at home during the week also allows you to utilize your free time more effectively. Also, it's really nice to not have to be fully presentable, walk out the door ready, every single day.”

• “Will always and perpetually be underrated. Something we take for granted as younger professionals, and an institution that needs to be defended. Up until 2020 the thought that a person could do their work from home responsibly was unheard of. Literally countless hours have been wasted commuting, or hanging out with boring ass people as opposed to doing their job often more efficiently from home.”

Commentary

I agree that neither the full binary of fully remote and fully in-person are really ideal. Having recently been close to fully remote, it would kind of drive me crazy. Sure, it was nice to stay home and do laundry or make myself lunch or take a nap or something. But doing that day after day would drive me stir crazy a lot of the time. Especially as Julia started going into the office 3x days a week, I would really start to feel lonely and bored.

And when you don’t have an incentive to put on real clothes or do your hair or get out of the house, you start to feel like a bit of a slob.

On the other hand, I don’t think that going into the office 5 days a week for most white collar jobs is really necessary. When a lot of your work is done via your own computer, and most coordination can be conducted via Slack or Teams, it’s frankly overkill to have to put on your business casual fit every weekday and make your commute to the office.

So in theory, I agree with most of you that the answer is somewhere in the middle, 2-3 days a week.

However, since starting this new job that has required me to be in the office ~3 days a week, I can’t say I’m getting too much out of it besides the free weekly bagel and endless supply of MoFo chapsticks.

Maybe it’s just the particular nature of my job, but I still spend almost the entire day sitting at my own computer, rarely talking to people in person. Even if I have a call with my coworkers down the hall, we often still do it over Teams because it’s easier that way. And when so many of my coworkers are spread across the globe anyways, it’s basically like we’re just working remotely again, but we still have to commute.

I don’t know if there’s ever going to be a perfect equilibrium; at the end of the day work just kinda sucks.

But in an increasingly atomized society, it is probably worth it for us to get out of our shells every so often and be forced to politely interact with other people, even if they are our coworkers. So I think overall I land on remote work being overrated, in the same way I think food delivery and car culture is overrated in today’s society.

There’s probably also an age-related factor to all of this. If you’ve spent any actual time working fully in-office, then the proliferation of remote work is probably a welcome change. Even more so if you have obligations like a dog or a child at home. But if you’re a fresh college grad who’s young, dumb, and full of gum (do kids still chew gum?) — then you probably do want to get some of that in-person, social experience with your coworkers. 

Anecdotally, I definitely noticed that fresh-faced Deloitte analysts were much more eager to come to the office than the managers. After all, the Rosslyn office tends to contain lots of other young, single, horny people, but does not tend to contain free childcare.

Q2: Were you pleased that the New York Knicks won the NBA Finals this year?

Highlighted Free Responses

• “Brunson went to Stevenson high school”

• “BING BONG”

• “I went to Villanova at the same time as the Nova Knicks! Dad and brothers were not happy as we are lifelong Celtics fans but for the Nova Knicks I absolutely converted this year!!”

• “Jalen Brunsen is cute and Wemby is evil”

• “New Yorkers seemed excited [insert shrug]”

• “As a non sports person I was jazzed. There’s a great cultural reset happening that began with Mamdani. Apologies to the Spurs but a NYC team under a socialist mayor winning against a Texan team is a story of Gondor v Mordor.”

• “Very likable team, guys who have been around the league for awhile and play great team basketball”

Commentary

I’ve had a soft spot for the Knicks ever since Linsanity, so I was definitely pulling for the Knicks.

Plus, Brunson is just a great guy to root for. He went to Stevenson, he has a normal wife for an NBA superstar, he took a massive pay cut to keep his Nova boys with him, he’s a great second-round pick underdog story, and he’s just a little crafty guy. 

It was interesting to me how much this Knicks Finals run kind of broke containment outside of the normal bounds of sports fandom. I can’t say there was nearly the same level of interest in the 2025 NBA Finals that featured the Oklahoma City Thunder vs. the Indiana Pacers (RIP Haliburton).

And as suggested by this poll, New York had a real moment of unity, pride, and national support that it hasn’t had maybe since... 9/11?

(Fun fact: they have the FDNY jacket that Bush is wearing here in the National Archives but if you try to take a picture of it they make you delete it off your phone.)

You don’t often see this kind of mass support around New York, in sports or in general. As previously discussed in this newsletter, New York City is not without its fair share of haters. I guess it helps to have an 8 foot tall communist Frenchman on the opposite side for us to root against.

Regardless of how you felt about the basketball outcome, I think it’s hard not to appreciate the joy and unity it brought to New York.

Unless you’re a Spurs fan or you really have it out for Karl Anthony-Towns or something, I feel like you have to be a Real Hater™ to not have your heart softened a little by all this.

But I know there are still some of you Haters out there, and I salute you for your dedication.

Q3: Do you think you have ADHD?

Results

Highlighted Free Responses

• “At least ADHD, maybe a touch of the 'tism or some kind of neurodivergence. Meds. No, but probably a lot of the people I'm friends with.”

• “...I think it’s probably fair to say that we all have some degree of attention deficit. Some of us are just better at managing it than others, some of us are just less interesting than others”

• “I’d like to pretend I have ADHD but really I think I just have high screen time and a milk reinforced funny bone. I’ve never had even a single friend who struggled with what they described as ADHD symptoms who haven’t then also gone on to take adderal and be happy about that.”

• “Probably the opposite”

Commentary

Interesting to see so many people say “not at all.”

My kind of half-belief is that we all basically have some degree of ADHD nowadays, thanks to the light-up dopamine machines we stare at for hours a day. Growing up, before smartphones reached full adoption, I never thought I really had attention or focus problems, or at least never in a serious way. 

Now, it’s hard to pretend like I have zero problem focusing. I can still read a book or watch a movie without looking at my phone, sure. But I’ll be damned if I don’t peek at my phone multiple times during a 30 minute meeting.

Even if I try to moderate my screen-time with some hare-brained mechanisms, I still can’t really kick the impulse to be stimulated or move around throughout the workday. I get restless if my meetings go over 45 minutes. I can’t seem to get any real work done between 3 and 4pm. I hardly think I’m in need of medication, but this does seem to whiff of something like an attention problem, no?

I’m sure a smarter person than I would say that I am underestimating the severity of truly, professionally diagnosed ADHD as opposed to the gradual erosion of attention spans in society writ large. Even if the levels start to get closer, I’m probably still a far cry from really having ADHD. But when watching an Instagram Reel over 60 seconds starts to test my patience, it’s hard not to feel like there might be sum ting wong wit my bwain.

Q4: Do you think that alien life forms have ever deliberately made contact with humanity?

Results

Highlighted Free Responses

• “I'm not saying that alien life isn't out there, but I do think that with the number of people obsessed with it...you would think that someone would've come up with something more substantial by now--humans aren't very good at keeping secrets.”

• “Made contact but we didn’t notice”

• “Nahhh bruv. Nice try FBI”

• “it’s been my long held belief that a lot of the UFO sightings were literally just experimental aircraft and hoodwinks that we dumped money into during the Cold War. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the first big boom of sightings cropped up after 1947.”

• “They've probably made contact with us, decided we were too stupid, and then looked elsewhere.”

• “We are definitely NOT alone in the universe but I think it's way more likely we discover alien life from an accidentally intercepted radio wave from far away or as algae or something than a little green man crash lands in New Mexico”

• “I think the government is for sure hiding stuff from us but I also think if there was an alien race that has mastered FTL travel it’d take more than the FBI agents I know from college to keep that secret safe.”

Commentary

This question is somewhat inspired by Disclosure Day, the recent Steven Spielberg alien movie (that has its issues but still has some of that signature Spielberg magic).

In Disclosure Day, part of the premise is that aliens have been interfacing deliberately with humanity basically since Roswell, and that the government has been keeping it a secret for decades, for reasons both plausible and selfish. Of course, this is just a fictional movie (one that features “The Sweet Escape” by Gwen Stefani), but I have never found this kind of conspiracy theory very convincing.

I agree with whoever wrote in “humans aren’t very good at keeping secrets.” As Marc Maron likes to say about supposed shadowy government operators who keep these existential secrets from the public: “these people just aren’t that organized.” Having spent a fair amount of time working within the federal government, I can attest to that. I’m sure my other DC friends can relate.

If we can’t even keep plans for a missile strike on Yemen out of a Signal chat with the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, I have a hard time believing that we could keep substantial evidence of intelligent alien life away from Trump’s Truth Social account. So I think I’m firmly on the “no” side here.

The other thing I think about is that if aliens have made contact with us first, then they are ostensibly far more advanced than us. And if that’s the case, I think they would have taken us out by now, like in Destroy All Humans! or Mars Attacks!

Lastly, I do think it would be pretty funny if one day we do make contact with aliens and they actually do look like one of those oblong-headed green guys 👽. Or E.T., that would be cool too.

Q5: Are you proud to be an American?

Results

Highlighted Free Responses

• “...The cruel and ugly parts of America do not get to claim pride and patriotism as solely their own. It is because I love my country that I am willing to be so critical and upset about it”

• “All of the freedoms that I would usually feel proud to have as an American and are under direct assault under the Trump administration...Every day a hundred Watergates!”

• “Living abroad has made me appreciate certain privileges of my passport and the advantages of growing up in the US but also has made me highly critical. Overall definitely not super proud but can acknowledge that it has its advantages of course.”

• “Just go off what people assume of you whenever you travel to another country: you must be stupid, fat, support Trump, own a gun, go to church every day of the week.”

• “‘"It was stated best in a letter I [Reagan] received not long ago. A man wrote me and said: 'You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.’”

• “I do believe in what America could be. I’m reminded of George McGovern, who said “come home, America” and, most importantly “ We are not content with things as they are. We reject the view of those who say: “America—love it or leave it.” We reply; “Let us change it so we can love it the more.””

• “Interesting question as an immigrant who doesn’t feel a lot of allegiance to the US. Tbh if another country became the world power I’d be fine leaving but I do love the diversity of the US. At its core it is a very unique place that melts cultures together”

• “…I will stand up for America in terms of it being the most diverse country in the world and that's unique. Nearly every other country is monolithic in their culture. Plus football and national parks

  I associate more with Chicago than America”

• “…The only truth I know is that a lot of people I know who are fully red white and blue their load all over make me ashamed to call me their countrymen. Boring answer is I’m glad I live here, and we have a lot of problems.”

Commentary

I’m getting close to bending my “no politics” rule a little on this one, as it is tough to have this conversation nowadays without wading a little into politics. Without getting too much into it, I’m sure most of you can guess that I am not feeling great about this particular moment in American history and the general direction of things.

But I thought this would be an interesting question to ask at this point in time because of the recent America 250 anniversary stuff plus the US’ exciting — but brief — run in the World Cup in recent weeks. These are ostensibly moments that should inspire national pride and unity, and I think they did, to an extent.

However, national embarrassments such as a new never-ending war in the Middle East, a Green Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and a blatant act of corruption to overturn a red card haven’t helped to keep the patriotism vibes super high.

Despite all that, though, I still love America and I am proud of my country. And I don’t think that should be inherently political. I really resent that “patriotism” as a concept has been almost entirely co-opted by certain political factions in this country. 

I understand why that is the case, but patriotism should be for everyone, even if we come to it in different ways. I think many of you share my same kind of patriotism: a love of the ideals and the best parts of this country while always wanting it to be better and live up to those aspirations more often.

This sentiment is probably summed up best by James Baldwin: “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."

It can be easy to bash on the US when you’re living in it every day, when you closely observe its issues and take it for granted. But personally, whenever I leave the country for a while I can’t help but miss it and appreciate it. To me, no other country can stack up in the same way.

America is the home of hip-hop, rock-and-roll, and jazz. Michael Jordan and Serena Williams and Simone Biles and Michael Phelps are Americans. We make the best barbecue and bagels and burgers and pizza in the world (pizza is American food, by the way). We made Jaws and Star Wars and Seinfeld and Sex and the City and Step Brothers. All of the best companies and universities are here (Vanderbilt > Oxford). Ernest Hemingway, Emily Dickinson, John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner: Americans. And who could forget the “purple mountain majesties”: the Grand Canyon, Zion, Yellowstone, Yosemite.¹ C’mon!

USA #1.

Programming Notes

After giving it a try, I think a month is actually too long of a gap between editions. And now that I’ve found more of a rhythm with this new job, I think I should be able to handle going back to a bi-weekly cadence.

As previously mentioned, my engagement with this project is directly correlated with how much I am discontented with my job. Now that the honeymoon period is over with the new gig, I can finally get back to looking at Good Screen.

However, I’ll still be sticking to the Monday release schedule to give myself some time over the weekends to write the round-ups and make new surveys. So the next survey will be closing in two Friday’s time: August 14th, with the next round-up out on the 17th.

Here’s the next survey. Don’t forget to fill it out.

See you in a few weeks,

Nathan