El Inspector Llama a la Puerta

(Teatro del Centro Cultural Helénico, 21 November 2025)

The play (An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestly, directed by Otto Minera) espouses utilitarian ethics and a Parfitian notion of identity and rejects moral luck. If five people have inflicted enough misery to drive a girl to suicide, it does not matter in the end whether this amount of misery was inflicted on one girl or was spread over five girls, none of whom might have committed suicide. The aggregate guilt remains the same. 

All the character arcs are flat. The play's protagonist is a British upper-middle-class family in the early twentieth century. It is unclear how to project the eccentricities of the British class system from over a century ago onto a rather different society and language. The production lacks physicality.

A House of Dynamite (2025)

The movie opens with lazy cinematography and comes to a halt shortly thereafter, unable to keep its focus on the trajectory of a single rocket. Instead, the lens is trained on federal employees who are using their workplace as a safe space for mental breakdowns. And these are supposed to be the people who have devoted their lives to training for that day! Incoherent.

"107 Days" by Kamala Harris (2025)

Harris's writing is sincere. She sincerely believes all politics is identity politics. She believes that identity trumps policy, certainly during an election campaign and possibly even when in office. She believes in campaigning by reciting only those talking points that have been tested by party pollsters. She possibly believes that being powered by a pollster algorithm continues to be the winning strategy once in office. Harris describes in detail how a political machine driven by these beliefs operates.

Surrendering agency to an algorithm may prove to be the winning strategy one day, but for now, the algorithm lacks vision and fails to imbue candidates with character traits that people have come to admire in leaders. Algorithm-generated policy stances also tend to lack coherence, as Arrow's impossibility theorem would predict. An AI-powered candidate ought to do better on this front.

The author's recounting of her religious domestic rituals and of cooking in sweatpants is an odd instance of oversharing by a political figure. Americans take regular showers more seriously than Europeans have historically done, but one would not normally expect to read about shower hacks from a vice-president.

Harris fairly apportions responsibility for failing to be elected president this time around. There appears to be a mighty force at work that prevents subordinates from delivering bad news and unfavourable takes to their superiors. Harris's entourage was not immune to this force. The hope is that the fear of truth would bend reality if masqueraded as optimism. It does not always work this way.

Tacones Altos

(El Círculo Teatral, 29 September 2025)

It is an adage in theatre and especially in cinema that directing is  90% casting. Tacones Altos (Theresa Rebeck’s Spike Heels) is directed by Otto Minera, with the impeccable cast of Camila Flamenco, Ditmara Náder, David Villegas, and Vladimir Chorny. The play reads as contemporary and appropriately situated in Mexico. The action revolves around Camila Flamenco's character, Guadalupe—the only character whose arc is not flat(ish).

In the course of the play, it dawns on Guadalupe that she is not a character in a play. She has agency. She has power. And that power doubles when used for good.

Camila Flamenco is so good that she turns what otherwise could have been classified as a comedy into a tragedy, at least for the male characters. What is a tragedy? A zero-sum game.

One Battle After Another (2025)

The movie has some nice cinematography by Michael Bauman. It has some nice scenes, by DiCaprio and Del Toro mainly. But it is ultimately a satire, which, by nature of the genre, targets a small niche audience. The movie is an old story retold in the target audience's lingo of the moment, which changes every four–five years.

All character arcs are flat. All characters are cardboard cutouts. (Some are well-cut ones.)

Powerful members of society (which, in a democracy, includes the common man) hold beliefs that the elites know to be wrong. Norms have developed according to which the elites and their allies are supposed to pander to some of these wrong beliefs but not to others.

Babylon (2022)

A free society accommodates a gamut of misfits. In a free society, one does not compete with everyone else; one competes within the domain of chosen peers.

Pre-Code Hollywood of the 1920s and early 1930s was free: free from Broadway, free from the stifling norms of the East Coast, free to innovate. Then it fell victim to its own success. It paid to conform to the prevailing prejudice in order to retain and grow the audience that Hollywood initially won through rebellious innovation. People continued to be free, but often on the fringes, lacking the comforts furnished by a truly free society.

The movie's protagonist is a society. The character arc is not that of an individual but that of a society, which evolves as it passes through eras, some of its own making. The arc is flat. It reveals lessons. These lessons are not acted upon by—and probably are not even revealed to—the society itself, though, and are ever more poignant for it.

"Washington: A Life " by Ron Chernow (2010)

The Founding Fathers have devised the spectacular game that the United States Constitution describes. This game has multiple equilibria. The singular accomplishment of George Washington was to coordinate his contemporaries and successors alike on a particularly beneficent equilibrium, the equilibrium that he thought it wise for future generations to play.

The character of the Founding Fathers affected the character of the country. Individuals and their character matter.

The American colonies rebelled when Britain betrayed its British values and stopped treating equals equally. A system that does not treat equals equally does not survive. The system that treats equals equally is a meritocracy.

Chernow is obsessed with Washington's sex life and slaveholding. The former obsession is particularly odd, for Washington's sex life is poorly documented. So, avocationally, Chernow resorts to armchair psychoanalysis.  

Chernow's interest in slavery is understandable, but his analysis is economically illiterate. For instance, there is nothing odd about Washington's desire to restrict the importation of slaves in order to drive up their prices and then profit from the sale of his own slaves. (Restrictive building codes serve the same purpose.) Washington may have entertained multiple contradictory ideas on slavery (thereby passing F. Scott Fitzgerald's test for first-rate intelligence), but restricting the slave trade while hoping to sell his own slaves were not among them.