All the President's Men (1976)

The professional press will not perish, even though only the sedentary rich will care to subscribe to paper editions. Had Deep Throat blogged, his conspiracy theory would have been lost among many. Wikileaked he could have. But much of what is worth uncovering is not packaged for leaking. Investigative journalism requires as much dedicated research as police investigations, scientific studies, and film productions do.

In addressing strangers, the credential "I am a reporter for the Washington Post" reassures more than "I am a blogger" does---which rather resembles a confession, akin to "I talk to myself" or "I have imaginary friends." Reporting requires exuberance that a collegial environment incites, and the critical judgement that a detached editor exercises. Passion, censorship, and a long-term outlook rarely combine in a lonely investigator.

"The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chandler (1939)

Rain drops break against the canvas top. Tires press the gravel. A spread-out, anonymous, automobile-mediated metropolis hums and rains. Consistency of one's character carries one through the daily routine.

Philip Marlowe has an artist's compulsion to guard beauty. His instrument is integrity. (An artist, in contrast to an artisan, is not discouraged by the scarcity of paying customers. An entrepreneur combines an artist's compulsion to create with an artisan's belief in marketability as the measure of merit.)

Sternwood sisters are unforgiving of unrequited purchases. Too rich to be grateful for being purchased themselves, the sisters negotiate the vacuum sustained by their inherited wealth and made attractive by the prevailing social norms, which esteem a female as but an accessory.

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.

"The Bicycle Thief" (1948) and "Play it Again, Sam" (1972)

Most motion pictures have a narrative, characters, and the illusion that the characters control the narrative. The formula entertains and encourages. In "The Bicycle Thief," circumstances---without forming a narrative---control the characters, who conform without the luxury to dissent. The picture articulates no lesson, but supplies a reading of a society's condition in the pre-sweatpants era. It reminds one to care about those whose lives do not add up to a poem, and whose interests are best served by a non-parochial community whose optimal design is still an open question.

The lucky able to be unable to conform have the option of advertising their deviation as the norm. Doing his own jokes and others' jokes, his own acting but without undoing that of the others (the film is directed by Herbert Ross), Woody Allen broadcasts a character who cannot be unless he sees himself reflected against the minds and bodies of others. He speculates in jokes to reap immediate returns (or embarrassments) instead of investing in ideas. His activity, however, helps his fellow characters appreciate their long-term goals.

"A Disappearing Number" by Simon McBurney (2007)

What makes the primeness of number 7 so real (to some) as to be comforting (to some) is the absolute and shared confidence in the law that 7 is a prime. Absolute confidence in a law is attainable when external consistency (i.e., applicability across time and space) is replaced by internal logical consistency, as occurs in mathematics. What constitutes the logical is a matter of instinct, and is perceived as the beautiful. By pursuing the beautiful one pursues knowledge---in addition to gratification---as the concepts of the logical and the beautiful share their aesthetic origins. In creative work, the acute sense of beauty can replace the foresight of the relevance of one's creations.

Individuals will acknowledge proved mathematical laws to be true as long as the individuals' inborn concepts of beauty are similar. The mathematical truth is a property of the brain in the same way as the physical truth is a property of the outside world. An individual has the sense of control over experiments in mathematics that does not apply to experiments in physics---which justifies the distinction between mathematics and physics, for now.

"The Finkler Question" by Howard Jacobson (2010)

One island, one city, one employer, one way to succeed, and one way to perish leave only private ruminations to differentiate one failure from another. The novel's one-liners are funny at first, but wear off as they subordinate the narrative and substitute for substance, instead of being the inevitable expressions of wit. Jacobson's novel is as repetitive as its endorsement by Safran Foer, on the front cover. By page 107, the novel ceases to exist.