Pastkartes Ziemassvētkos

(Latvijas Nacionālais Teātris, 17 December 2025)
One may assert the inferiority of AI companions relative to human friends because humans are shaped by their unique circumstances and friendships, whereas AI is trained on generic text and, therefore, in some ineffable way, is less human and, so, is inferior. This criticism may become untenable rather soon. AI may not become more human. Humans will become more AI because they will end up being trained on largely the same data. These data will consist not only of shared X and Instagram feeds but also in increasingly expansive conversations with AI, from whom humans will adopt both factoids and style. There will be silos. Within silos, though, humans and AI will become directly comparable, and not in the favour of humans. Some–the Amish-lite–will refuse to be trained on the common feed and the common AI and will stick to human friendships. Most won't.

Viss Par Ievu

(Latvijas Nacionālais Teātris, 13 December 2025)

Acting is properly mid-Atlantic. Each actor and each actress comes across as perfectly cast, which is a testament to each individual's great craft because the pool of actors is limited by the company. The night's cast included Evija Krūze (Margo Channing), Agate Marija Bukša (Eve Harrington), and Daiga Kažociņa (Karen Roberts), alongside mainstays such as Normunds Laizāns ("director") and Egons Dombrovskis ("playwright"), among others.

The game is bigger than you think. The game surprises, catches one unawares, and often disappoints. The part of one that remains unchanged after such surprises is often not the best part.

The world is imperfectly just, imperfectly meritocratic. Taking matters into one's hands by bending the rules to restore justice (typically to one's advantage and typically through deception) may contribute to or subtract from the overall justice. 

Meistars un Margarita

(Rīgas Dailes Teātris, 12 December 2025)

Every now and again, when one thinks nothing is left to be invented in theatre, a production comes along that shatters the status quo and sets the tone for theatre for decades to come. This is one of those productions. In this production, camerawork is not a gimmick, a distraction, or a way to save on a painted backdrop. And it is good.

Acting is good. Every character is meticulously crafted. Every actor is convincing. Ieva Segliņa shines, and so do Artūrs Skrastiņš, Arturs Krūzkops, Madara Viļčuka, and Niklāvs Kurpnieks.

The production is staged like a ballet, expansively, meticulously, in CinemaScope. Every remark is perfectly timed. Every musical number is interrupted perfectly.

Harold Bloom used to say: “The only method is yourself.” He was referring to literary criticism. The same maxim applies to morals. The self is the ultimate authority on what is moral. Following one's cultivated moral tastes is the best one can do. A life lived to cater to one's tastes is the only moral life there is.

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.

Tacones Altos

(El Círculo Teatral, 29 September 2025)

It is an adage in theatre and especially in cinema that directing is  90% casting. Tacones Altos (Theresa Rebeck’s Spike Heels) is directed by Otto Minera, with the impeccable cast of Camila Flamenco, Ditmara Náder, David Villegas, and Vladimir Chorny. The play reads as contemporary and appropriately situated in Mexico. The action revolves around Camila Flamenco's character, Guadalupe—the only character whose arc is not flat(ish).

In the course of the play, it dawns on Guadalupe that she is not a character in a play. She has agency. She has power. And that power doubles when used for good.

Camila Flamenco is so good that she turns what otherwise could have been classified as a comedy into a tragedy, at least for the male characters. What is a tragedy? A zero-sum game.