Blue Valentine (2010)

It would have been out of character for Hollywood to implicate beautiful people in an unhappy ending. Instead, two dispensable characters take a short-cut to a void that none---except the audience, trained to detect the magic designed to last, and cued by the director if all else fails---anticipated. And the suburbia is not to blame.

Lest one glamorise the ambiguous, the picture deals in sharp, almost telephoto frames. The dream is cropped, not blurred. Mediocrity is not airbrushed. The carefully constructed encroachment of the mundane advocates an evolutionary road taken by the conflict. The evolution feeds on the clash of characters, not on a handful of mistaken actions. Poverty magnifies the collateral damage from personal misery.

More positive scientific results are published than negative ones. Textbooks collects rules, not common mistakes. Paradoxes are intermediate goods that are useless to most. A boring mumblecore with unhappy people need not be redundant, though. It can help one correct for the cinematic bias towards fortuitous events befalling handsome people. It can help one diagnose one's condition. It can pose a sharp question. It can also be improved, however, in at least two ways: it can entertain, and it can give hope, which is but foresight.

"The Idea of Justice" by Amartya Sen (2009)

In a wager similar to Pascal's, Amartya Sen bets on reason---as opposed to emotion and tradition. The ultimate virtue is in the ultimate reason. A merely better reasoner need not be more virtuous, however. This nonmonotonicity's undesirable consequences are mitigated if reasoning advances fast and uniformly across disciplines. Sen's book advocates a shortcut towards such an advancement. The shortcut is in the distributed computing power of democracy.

Stripped of science, short of literature, and shy of data, philosophy is a quaint after-dinner exercise in democracy that inspires after-breakfast progress. Now derivative, philosophy survives as an interdisciplinary conversation.