Ja Tevis Nebūtu...

 (Latvijas Nacionālais Teātris, 24 July 2021)

A plaque on a building that was JFK's home in Riga for a couple of days in 1939 attributes to him the poetic observation "Latvians will always reach upwards." True to JFK's prophecy, Raimonds Pauls and Elīna Garanča created new music and reinterpreted old music for the evening, instead of choosing to recycle their old hits. One can ever hope to go far only if one keeps walking. The evening illustrates how come both have gone so far and why they fully deserve the acclaim.

"Apropos of Nothing" by Woody Allen (2020)

Woody Allen's life follows the familiar blueprint for success: Be born with a talent. Be born with a passion. Follow your passion. Show up. Be lucky. Be generous. Do not compromise. Do not care about what other people think.

"The Tyranny of Merit" by Michael Sandel (2020)

The book catches some of the political and intellectual winds of the last decade, correctly senses that much of the social strife can be traced down to economics, but fails to engage with economics. Nevertheless, the book is a useful resource in the "what I think people around me think (or should think)" genre.

Philosophy can be theoretical or empirical. Theory builds logical structures to derive prescriptions from a handful of axioms and to cross-check axioms for consistency. Empirics makes inferences about what kind of a society people (think they) would like to live in. The Tyranny of Merit is empirics relies on one observation, the book's credentialed author.

The author's fundamental observation is that people have become rude to each other. The credentialed deride high school dropouts, the coastal elite despises the fly-over elite, and the Ivy Leaguer taunts the community colleague graduate. Politics has lost its civility. Instead of addressing bullying, the book proposes making everyone equal, so that there is nothing to be bullied for.

Narration is OK at 2x the speed.

The Undoing (2020)

The ending is botched, but it admits a saviour interpretation: People are what we imagine them to be. Not always, but often enough. Sometimes, imagination bends reality.

It is a Hugh Grant movie. Direction, acting, and writing are all superb (with the exception of the finale hiccup). There are elements of Hitchcock, but this is not Hitchcock. Hitchcock know how to handle ambiguity.

The Queen's Gambit (2020)

Movie portrayals of academia are invariably cringeworthy. Most movies usually get away with that as long as academia is not the main character, which it rarely is.

The Queen's Gambit achieves the near-impossible by conveying the spirit of academia, through the metaphor of chess. Anya Taylor-Joy's genius is so intense that it not only makes one feel what it is like to be a woman, a chess player, or a chic dress but also makes one desire to be all of those things.