"The Strange Career of Jim Crow" by C. Vann Woodward (2001)

The book's view of history is the standard one, of the one-damned-thing-after-another variety, unadulterated by theorising, which is but laziness in the archives. Radical things were happening in race relations, but the book offers little by way of explanation. Slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow backlash, and the Civil Rights Movement in its peaceful and its violent forms are described but never explained.   

The Declaration of Independence, The Federalist Papers, and the U.S. Constitution embody principles. These principles are responsible for Reconstruction and the eventual success of the Civil Rights Movement. They explain progress at low frequencies. The high-frequency oscillations remain unexplained—at least by the book. Just as the principles laid out by the Founding Fathers determine the long-term path of progress, a certain entrepreneurial spirit appears to be responsible for the violent fluctuations along this path.

"Pulphead: Essays" by John Jeremiah Sullivan (2011)

John Sullivan is a photographer. He makes photography look easy, just as Truman Capote did. 

Sullivan has little interest in a narrative. His is impressionistic, photographic writing driven by an open, curious mind. He is especially good at writing about people, for people supply their own narrative by virtue of living. In the “Career of an Eccentric Naturalist,” his writing is akin to a stack of B&W street photographs. The narrative the protagonist's life supplies culminates in exposing secular humanism as self-evident. 

Sullivan's non-biographical writing lacks a narrative, which makes it hard to deduce the subject matter. Was “American Grotesque” about Obamacare? Was it about the American right? It is unclear.

Is Sullivan's writing particularly Southern? Adam Gopnik wrote that science was competitive storytelling. Sullivan does not compete. He is nonjudgemental and kind. Is Southern excellence achieved by means other than competition?

Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen (2026)

The movie is expertly edited by Dev Singh. The cinematography is good outdoors but is way too dark indoors. Camila Morrone is a formidable lead.

One of the questions the movie raises is whether the property of being soulmates is symmetric. The apparent answer is that it is not.

No decision is worse than indecision.

Shrinking: Seasons 1–3 (2023–2026)

Paul in Shrinking is Harrison Ford's best role ever. He is consistently superb throughout the series. So is Jason Segel. Indeed, every character is perfectly written and cast—except for Derek #2, who is so impossibly dull that one could not help but to anticipate a plot twist whereby he would turn out to be a villain in disguise.

The motion picture is perfectly written, perfectly directed, perfectly photographed (one does not notice the cinematography), and perfectly edited. It is intelligent, optimistic, and witty (which is another way to say that it is optimistic). This coherent project has been conceived and executed by a pride of producers, a wisdom of writers, and a murder of directors. Only in Hollywood may an ecosystem like this exist and resist (and perhaps occasionally profit from) the recent onset of climate change.

The motion picture leans into the idea that people need (and, in some corners, can still afford) people.

The Drama (2026)

Zendaya and her character are good. The male protagonist is a fashionable weakling. The movie's dilemma is whether three people who did wrong ought to ostracise a self-confessed one-time thought criminal who did not. The moral of the story is that everyone deserves to be forgiven, weaklings and thought criminals alike.

"Churchill: Walking with Destiny" by Andrew Roberts (2018)

Throughout his life, Churchill held remarkably modern, enlightened views. Many prominent figures throughout history—including the Founding Fathers—did. Enlightened views possess universality, by definition of Enlightenment.

Churchill remained consistent in his views throughout his life. This consistency is typical of great men. They perfect their views all while betting that their time will come instead of scheming how to best take advantage of prevailing political fashions.

Churchill respected tradition but challenged norms. This quality would have helped him in American politics, had he been born there.

Churchill's privileged upbringing prepared him well to thrive on adversity. Perhaps the same upbringing has also taught him what kind of adversity the British people were willing to endure and what kind they would have had none of. Only a great man can live with the enormous responsibility of choosing action over inaction: of sending his people to fight in a world war instead of surrendering. A defining feature of greatness is the willingness to accept responsibility.

Pluribus (2025)

The AI is well aligned beyond anyone's wildest expectations. And yet, in spite of its best efforts, it somehow fails to please two out of a dozen remaining humans. The two do not want communism. They even reject the interim feudalism that is lavished upon them while their joining the AI race is pending. Why refuse favours if the end is inevitable? Why not be the last glorious individual on earth? Why waste energy on resisting change instead of embracing and perfecting it?

The hive mind that is the AI race in the series can be viewed literally, as a sudden arrival in the near future, or metaphorically, as the population drawn to the LLMs that are already here.

The series is a two-part affair: the first two episodes followed by the remaining seven. Cinematography by Marshall Adams and Paul Donachie is superb. Rhea Seehorn is superb as the rather mediocre Carol Sturka. On paper, Carol's lines are dull, as is her character. Onscreen, Seehorn's character is alive and interesting, an intense one-man aggregation of the personalities that have not (yet) made it into the AI hive mind. Carol is a remarkable achievement by Seehorn and the series' directors.

Also remarkable is Karolina Wydra, who portrays Zosia, a retconned Pole (why? because her English is so pure?). The series is ultimately about them two, Carol and Zosia. It is hard to imagine a sequel adding much to the story. 

Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World

(The National Portrait Gallery, 21 December 2025)

Beaton's failing as a fashion photographer lies in succeeding as a fashion photographer. People like to connect with other people, and fashion can serve as a catalyst. The subject of the photograph is always the connection, never the fashion itself. There is precious little of human connection in Beaton's photography. Beaton was an aesthete, not a humanist.

Fashion photography as a genre is generally rather good not (only) because its subject matter is beautiful but also because it is answerable to the objective metric of market success.

Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary

(The Photographers’ Gallery, 20 December 2025)

One becomes a photographer because one does not find what one is looking for in others’ photography. For this to be true, one’s tastes must be rather niche. With niche tastes, one is unlikely to create that which many others would find pleasing. As a result, most photography is bad. 

“No politics, no whining” is not an uncommon refrain on bulletin boards. The photographs from Mikhailov's exhibition would not have belonged on this board.

The Importance of Being Earnest

(The Noël Coward Theatre, 20 December 2025)

The production diminishes Oscar Wilde’s characters by erasing their principal traits: class, Englishness, sex, and manners. The time and the place are gone. All that is left is director Max Webster’s lazy caricature of the here and the now. All history has been abolished. The future that remains is the perpetual depreciation of the now.

In Webster’s now, only a priest and a governess—perhaps also Lady Bracknell—remain straight. Actors and actresses adopt an improbable menagerie of manners and speech patterns. The text is true to Wilde but is often recited as a mantra in a foreign tongue; Shakespeare is spoken thus when the meaning eludes the player. What remains of Wilde is carried and carried out by Stephen Fry in his two scenes.

If one believes that historical figures ought not to be judged by present-day prejudices—whether those prejudices are correct or mistaken—then one also ought to be sceptical of ascribing modern-day mannerisms and affectations to each and every character in Wilde’s classical play. By rejecting the past, the production insulates the present from scrutiny by comparison and thereby denies the future.

Webster’s is a decadent production in the best sense of “decadent.” It illustrates how a society in which the past looked exactly like the present would have no future.

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.

One Battle After Another (2025)

The movie has some nice cinematography by Michael Bauman. It has some nice scenes, by DiCaprio and Del Toro mainly. But it is ultimately a satire, which, by nature of the genre, targets a small niche audience. The movie is an old story retold in the target audience's lingo of the moment, which changes every four–five years.

All character arcs are flat. All characters are cardboard cutouts. (Some are well-cut ones.)

Powerful members of society (which, in a democracy, includes the common man) hold beliefs that the elites know to be wrong. Norms have developed according to which the elites and their allies are supposed to pander to some of these wrong beliefs but not to others.

Babylon (2022)

A free society accommodates a gamut of misfits. In a free society, one does not compete with everyone else; one competes within the domain of chosen peers.

Pre-Code Hollywood of the 1920s and early 1930s was free: free from Broadway, free from the stifling norms of the East Coast, free to innovate. Then it fell victim to its own success. It paid to conform to the prevailing prejudice in order to retain and grow the audience that Hollywood initially won through rebellious innovation. People continued to be free, but often on the fringes, lacking the comforts furnished by a truly free society.

The movie's protagonist is a society. The character arc is not that of an individual but that of a society, which evolves as it passes through eras, some of its own making. The arc is flat. It reveals lessons. These lessons are not acted upon by—and probably are not even revealed to—the society itself, though, and are ever more poignant for it.

"Washington: A Life " by Ron Chernow (2010)

The Founding Fathers have devised the spectacular game that the United States Constitution describes. This game has multiple equilibria. The singular accomplishment of George Washington was to coordinate his contemporaries and successors alike on a particularly beneficent equilibrium, the equilibrium that he thought it wise for future generations to play.

The character of the Founding Fathers affected the character of the country. Individuals and their character matter.

The American colonies rebelled when Britain betrayed its British values and stopped treating equals equally. A system that does not treat equals equally does not survive. The system that treats equals equally is a meritocracy.

Chernow is obsessed with Washington's sex life and slaveholding. The former obsession is particularly odd, for Washington's sex life is poorly documented. So, avocationally, Chernow resorts to armchair psychoanalysis.  

Chernow's interest in slavery is understandable, but his analysis is economically illiterate. For instance, there is nothing odd about Washington's desire to restrict the importation of slaves in order to drive up their prices and then profit from the sale of his own slaves. (Restrictive building codes serve the same purpose.) Washington may have entertained multiple contradictory ideas on slavery (thereby passing F. Scott Fitzgerald's test for first-rate intelligence), but restricting the slave trade while hoping to sell his own slaves were not among them.