Amongst the flurry of articles these past few weeks about whether Sinners would turn a profit (lol), or the discourse around how the deal Ryan Coogler made with Warner Bros. would destroy the film industry as we know it (lol again, read my thoughts on that here), one humble detail about how the film came to be has gotten lost in the shuffle.

In this extremely excellent profile of Ryan Coogler for The New Yorker, writer Jelani Cobb details where and when inspiration struck:

The idea for “Sinners” came to Coogler one day as he was washing dishes in the home in Oakland that he shares with his wife, Zinzi, and their two young children. He was listening to “Wang Dang Doodle,” a classic of upbeat blues about a juke-joint party, featuring Howlin’ Wolf. Coogler put down the dishrag and began framing an idea for a story rooted in the centrality of music to the Black experience.

I’ve gotten into a bad habit of using podcasts to fill every empty crevice of my days. I listen to them while making lunch, while walking the dog, and while I perform every monotonous household chore, including… when I’m doing the dishes.

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Creative people need time for ambient, purposeless daydreaming. They need time where their brains are not being inundated with information, where algorithmically-influenced scrolling ends and they are allowed to mentally wander through the detritus of their own minds and come back with something new and interesting. They need boredom.

Imagine if in 1905, when Albert Einstein was busy at his day job filing patents in Switzerland, instead of staring out the window and imagining how a housepainter falling off a roof would experience gravity and inventing his general theory of relativity, he had earbuds in and was listening to the latest episode of Blank Check’s series on the films of the Lumière brothers (would love a 3-hour+ Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory episode with J.D. Amato, honestly.)

Finding silence can be harder than it sounds. Almost everything we engage with is literally designed to capture our attention. I’ve worked hard over the past few months to eliminate these kinds of distractions. I’ve deleted both my Facebook and TikTok accounts, and shuttered my Instagram. (As a side note, I recommend cleansing yourself of as many of these apps as you can manage. Your mental health will thank you.) Trying to check my phone less, even with only one social network app, is a daily struggle.

There’s nothing wrong with some distractions. And there are situations that practically demand them. You will never see me “raw-dogging” a flight, for instance. Half the reason to get on an airplane is for the chance to watch two to three movies that exist in that beautiful, mysterious liminal space known as “the airplane movie”: not good, not bad, just the perfect narcotic lull of banal, unoffensive three-star entertainment (last airplane movie watched: The Bucket List).

In the absence of other voices, other external stimuli, all that’s left to listen to is you. That can be scary. But you’re also never going to discover real artistic breakthroughs until you do.

Speaking of distractions, for our evening entertainment we’re currently alternating between the following new shows:

• The Pitt (we’re about halfway through; if Noah Wiley doesn’t win all the awards, we riot)

• The Last of Us

• The Studio

• The Rehearsal

I don’t use this word lightly: Nathan Fielder is a genius.1 Calling him “original” is an understatement. The second episode of the new season of The Rehearsal, which aired last Sunday, elicited from me a kind of laugh I’ve never heard come out of my body before. I will never be able to hear the words “Paramount+” again without giggling like a lunatic (you’ll know it when you see it). Like the best of Fielder’s work, it was not only tear-inducingly funny but also thought-provoking and oddly poignant. I’m so glad he’s back.