Chicago Is

 Chicago is here.

The Game that Plays the Player

 Alice argues in defence of markets.

This is Us, Season 5, Episodes 1–4 (2020)

It is the job of an artist to make the impossible seem effortless, to invent worlds, to entertain. The creators of the first four episodes of season 5 don't even try; they have surrendered to the reality show that the year 2020 has become. Why watch a knock-off if one can (indeed, one must) live the real thing? The creators should have skipped the year. They still can; the four episodes are unmemorable enough to be rebooted once the formidable team of writers can devote their undivided attention to the show again.

On the Rocks (2020)

Bill Murray's Felix, who---thankfully---gets the lines, the suits, and the personality, is surrounded---inexplicably---by stick figures of characters who do not belong in a movie, certainly not in the same one. Mr. Murray does his best to lift other characters from their catatonic state, but the script has other plans. Laura spends her days trying to connect with her creative self in an overpriced building invariably shot from an awkward angle, while her husband, Dean, is busy losing himself trying to excel at a generic job in a generic city only to come back home to a generic family life that he would have long sought refuge from in therapy had the script not instructed him to feel---rather unpersuasively---otherwise. Laura and Dean marry, work, and New York because the New York Times has told them so. Felix lives.

Cinematography and acting (except for Murray's) pale in comparison with what one has come to expect from a random episode of a good television series.

Rochester, New York

The city is a spaceship.

"Sizing People Up" by Robin Dreeke (2020)

The book's thesis is that Homo œconomicus placed in the right strategic environment is the most trustworthy of men. The thesis is unashamedly repeated over and over again, for the benefit of those who find comfort in repetition. Reckless repetition does not render this thesis wrong.

"Russians Among Us" by Gordon Corera (2020)

The book covers pre- and post-2010 illegals in middlebrow journalistic prose. Conceptually, the book reveals little about pre-2010 illegals that cannot be gleaned from The Americans. Perhaps, more is revealed by The Americans, which had the luxury of the innuendo and the artistic licence. The pre-2010 story makes for a more comfortable narrative both because more information about that period has leaked and because the narrative had time to mature. Post-2010 illegals are portrayed as more numerous, more opportunistic, and more destructive. While one can make a case that both the US and the USSR were better off with the espionage of 1980s, it is harder to make an analogous case for the benefits of the mutual sabotage of the 2010s.

Corera observes that it were easier to motivate Russians to go undercover in the US than to motivate Americans to go undercover in the USSR because the US was a nicer place to live. (Or maybe Americans just have not been caught.) What made it easier to turn Russians was the purported lack of meritocracy, which motivated them to be open to outside opportunities for advancement. If so, large meritocratic society is stable society. Size matters, for it determines how tall the meritocratic ladder is.

"A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amor Towles (2016)

Count Rostov is a rooted cosmopolitan and a gentleman. A gentleman is an optimist. An optimist seeks to master his circumstances lest he be mastered by them. A gentleman has his most valuable possessions always on him at all times: memories, friendships, languages, and logical structures. Rostov lives as if there were tomorrow.

Like Starbucks, like a product of many a multinational, the Hotel Metropol is an Embassy of Civilisation. It is a whore---the best one money can buy. It is an education. It is where life comes to expose herself to you if are too busy to live or are otherwise engaged.

A rooted cosmopolitan, Amor Towles cherishes the language, for he knows---just as his protagonist does---that the journey will be a long one, and that language is a dependable companion, especially when spoken with Nicholas Guy Smith's versatility.

But Towles delicately blows his own cover. He does not bow down before fate. He celebrates a moment of supreme lucidity accompanied by an opportunity to act.

Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates (2019)

This vulgarly titled mini-series is an alien's look at a man who thinks, a species that is on the brink of extinction in public life but is probably still familiar first-hand to most viewers. The species also reads. And then reflects on what it has read. Which is supposed to be a shocker, as is Gates's admission that he does not seek to inspire but rather to be effective, to optimise. Nor is the failure to eradicate every single case of polio or to solve the world's energy problem is Gates's personal failure---or indeed a failure at all. There are guiding problems in mathematics, in science, and in each individual's life, which are not meant to be solved but rather to inspire and direct smaller victories.

The series is worth watching if only to observe Gates's fast, incisive mind and his superior interior designs. Gates is intelligent and erudite enough to salvage any conversation. His offices are cosy, conducive to work, and rivalled only by the views of Washington. The ever-in-the-frame troop of Coca-Cola cans is a reminder of Gates's proletarian allegiances. He optimises all that which is both a necessity and a luxury for each of us: a toilet, a drink, an operating system, electricity.

Westworld (Seasons 1, 2 and 3)

The series is concerned with the noblest of all pursuits: the pursuit of immortality. The show has its moments, which are mostly concerned with winning lighting and Ed Harris. While the entire show appears to have been written by a sizeable committee, Season 2 was likely crowdsourced on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, with contractors majority-voting on each scene and every directorial decision. A team of copywriters must have been charged with writing not-too-tired one-liners, to be pasted on buses and, if good enough, fed to Anthony Hopkins's and Ed Harris's characters, as their contracts must have specified. Speaking of contracts, it seems that starlets view sex as career sinking and violence (if delivered, not received) as career enhancing, and make sure to craft their contracts accordingly. The audiences have to suffer through the consequences, of which Season 2 the worst offender.

Overall, what's missing in Westworld is a vision and passion. Instead, the show is a well-connected machine held together by professionalism.

Devs (2020)

In his blog, Scott Aaronson has nailed Devs as a "cultural appropriation," which, all things considered, is a compliment. Aaronson was referring to the culture of quantum computing in particular, but much more is appropriated and is aptly summarised---again, by Aaronson---as existential musings of Aaronson's eleven-year-old self.

Alex Garland (writer, director, and, according to credits, "creator") comes across as a team player, but, on this project, he has denied himself a team. This handicap notwithstanding, the series endures, in large part thanks to its visuals and Sonoya Mizuno's physique. The words she's been programmed to utter fall flat, but her body knows how to be present. Thankfully, the director knows that it knows.

Two facts redeem the series. First, the eleven-year-old Aaronson used to ask good questions; one can look for answers elsewhere. Second, the shortcomings of the story line and the dialogue, flat and stereotypical characters, and factual errors can all be written off as a noisy simulation of a simulation of... Noisy, but still worth living or, at least, examining.

Anne with an E

The series is a cliched soap opera saved by the great Canadian acting. Every character, no matter how minor, is played by an actor worthy of being a lead. Indeed, the lengthy format that is the series enables the creators to dispose of the traditional notion of a lead character. Almost.

As the tenets of a soap opera demand, there ought to be no end in sight. There is plenty of room for season 4.

Columbus (2017)

Some cities are so small that they loom large—over its populace, who sleep at 9pm, over the streets, dark, deserved, over the indoors, belonging to someone else, over the air, indifferent and transmitting the sounds that would only be heard in a place where sounds visit but rarely stay. There are cities so small that they loom large by virtue of embodying the dreams of a man (or a handful) who cared and who faced few obstacles in a place not sedated by tradition.

There are people so large that they need to come to a place that is small in order to rewrite themselves uninhibited and with purpose, instead of being haphazardly overwritten by a metropolis. There are people so large that they need to escape a city that is small in order to write not one but several stories each of which would comprise a life.

Little Women (2019)

There is no one correct way to live one's life. If one is struggling to decide whether to devote one's life to the career, the family, or idle hedonism, one is likely not to be wrong whatever one chooses. In the short term, by virtue of near indifference, one should not be disappointed by any choice. In the medium term, one is unlikely to be able to adhere to the wrong choice for long and will soon reconsider. In the long term, one can find consolation in having lived a life that is, if not optimal, then at least interesting and unconventional. One's many selves (e.g., as viewed from the temporal perspective) likely disagree on what optimum is anyway. Whatever one chooses is likely to please some selves and upset others. The pleased self ought to be promoted.

The cast has been chosen masterfully. Even Meryl Streep's overacting seems oddly appropriate for her episodic part. Actors and actresses have not been chosen for their Hollywood looks. As a result, it is left to the story---not to assortative matching---to reveal who will end up with whom.

The dull persona of Friedrich adds ambiguity to the story. A Frenchman trying to pass for a German or a humourless German trying to pass for a Frenchman---we are never told---he is the one that Jo settles for, as an afterthought, to universal delight. As she admits it to her editor, her first choice had been taken. She may end up being a better writer for that, more open to the world.

The picture is timeless, for its story celebrates the universal: freedom and the plurality of aspirations.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

“We are trying to give the world positive ways of dealing with their feelings,” says Tom Hanks (as Fred Rogers) in the movie, as well as in the trailer. These words can be the motto of civilisation, which is perpetual discovery of better ways to help individuals channel their feelings into creative, positive-sum pursuits.

In the movie, Fred Rogers is ever present. Given you cannot be somewhere else, you might as well make the most of it and be where you are. This is a nontrivial act to come to terms to and execute.

Matthew Rhys (here, portraying Lloyd Vogel) affirms himself as an everyman leading man.

"The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)

Vladimir Samoylov times his narration so immaculately and inhabits the characters and the author's mind so well that the audiobook is best listened to at its intended speed.

The Master and Margarita is not many things. It is not as depressing as Russian literature is supposed to be. Indeed, the book is optimistic. The Master and Margarita is not magical realism, at least as long as magical realism is interpreted as sloppy surrealism. The book is not a satire, at least as long satire deploys political jibes to solicit approving nodes from ideological brethren. Indeed, the book is solicitous of no one but, perhaps, the drawer. The Master and Margarita is a private project that attempts to construct a causal system that would explain the events that are significant for humans and that would justify optimism.

The novel is humanist in that it celebrates individuals; it celebrates life. If one is in the business of cataloguing individual motives as being either good or evil, and one acknowledges the evil, then one no longer can be a humanist, for most individuals harbour evil, as well as good; one no longer can celebrate life as one finds it. Then, a humanist faces the choice between committing acts of evil in order to alter the life as one finds it and accepting both the good and the evil as parts of the human condition that deserves celebration. The latter option is the logically consistent one and is the one chosen by Bulgakov.

Individuals are selfish and yet not without a pro-social spark, an idiosyncratic idea of justice. Bulgakov the humanist celebrates the world in which each individual follows both motives---the selfish and the prosocial one---with abandon, without anyone telling this individual how to resolve the tension between the two motives and without anyone rebuking him for not being pro-social enough or pro-social in the right way.

John Roemer's Kantianism captures features of this philosophy. Each individual does unto others not as these others may wish that be done onto them (nor as some philosopher might wish) but as he himself wishes others did onto him. Under some conditions (all-positive or all-negative externalities), such behaviour leads to Pareto efficient outcomes. Under other conditions, it does not do so. What matters (to Bulgakov) is that everyone live his life to the fullest.

Robert Sugden proposes a notion of a responsible individual, an individual who has no regrets, who cares about the freedom to make mistakes more than he cares about being protected from mistakes. Bulgakov (in The Master and Margarita) advocates the notion of a just society as a responsible society, a society that maximises the freedom of individuals without passing judgment on the virtue of the actions that this freedom enables.