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.