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.