Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these but I’m gonna skip the apologies and get right into it. Here’s a list of what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing over the past several months. Let us know what movies, books, art, TV, music, etc. you’ve been enjoying in the comments below!

Dinosaur. It’s a huge pigeon on the High Line — what else do you need to know? (A-)

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. Entertaining and engaging. It’ll make a good TV series. (B+)

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I hadn’t seen this in several years but I still knew all the words. (A-)

My Brilliant Friend (season four). If there’s one thing I’ve watched in the past several years that I wish had gotten more attention from viewers, critics, and awards panels, it’s this wonderful show. (A+)

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow might be the most perfectly cast role in the history of cinema. Great story too. This movie surprised me when I saw it in the theater in 2003 and it’s still in the top tier of action/adventure movies. (A)

Andor (season one). A rewatch to prep for season two. I didn’t understand what the fuss was about this show the first time around, but this second viewing was a revelation. Andor is easily the best Star Wars thing since Empire. (A+)

Galleria Borghese. As previously discussed, the Bernini sculptures were a highlight of the summer. (A+)

Caravaggio 2025. Fantastic exhibition. (A)

The vivid blue color of the Mediterranean. (A+)

La Vita è Un Mozzico. We waited for an hour for sandwiches and it was probably worth it? (A)

Black Doves. British spy thriller? Keira Knightley? Ben Whishaw? Twist my arm. (B+)

Captain America: Brave New World. I’m sorry Sam Wilson / Anthony Mackie, there’s a “we have the Avengers at home” vibe here that’s hard to shake. (B)

Music to Refine To: A Remix Companion to Severance. I love this album; one of my favorite things of the past several months. (A+)

Mickey 17. It was fine? I was distracted while watching it in the theater, which is never a good sign. My favorite Bong Joon Ho film is still Snowpiercer. (B)

Amy Sherald: American Sublime. Absolutely fantastic. (A+)

The French Dispatch. This has quietly become a favorite of mine among Anderson’s films. (A)

The Royal Tenenbaums. However, this is still my favorite. (A+)

Paris Is Burning. Classic documentary of a bygone NYC era & a subculture that is now both flourishing and threatened. (A-)

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (season two). I love these characters, always the sign of a good Trek. The crossover episode with Lower Decks was delightful even though I’ve not watched any of the animated series yet. The musical episode I liked less (not a showtunes guy) but I appreciated the experimentation. Bring on the Muppet episode. (A)

Severance (season two). Perhaps not as good as the first season — there was a lot in the mid-season episodes that didn’t land for me. Still, I always watched when a new episode dropped. (A-)

Army of Shadows. Part of the unplanned resistance film festival I’ve been screening for myself recently. Not quite as good as I remembered it, but it’s nice to watch something that doesn’t just lay everything out on a platter for you so you can emote properly. (A-)

Best in Show. So many lines from this that I use in my daily life. (A-)

The 99% Invisible Breakdown: The Power Broker. This is such a good series with fantastic guests about a legendary book. Who knew that Roman Mars was such a gigglepuss though? (A)

Johnny English. I didn’t find this quite as delightful as my family does. I prefer Mr. Bean. (B+)

Paddington in Peru. Not quite the magic of the first two, but entertaining. (B)

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I have likely said this before, but while Raiders is likely the best Indy movie, Last Crusade is my favorite (probably due to Tom Stoppard’s heavy rewrite of the script). (A+)

Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi. It’s interesting to watch the original trilogy having seen so many subsequent movies & TV series.

Ocean’s Twelve. The dancing lasers scene is completely ridiculous. (A)

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. Well, I wasn’t expecting a critique of AI and the role of technology in society from this animated feature, but maybe I should have? (B+)

A Complete Unknown. Liked this more than I thought I would. (A-)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Just a wonderful book — witty and fun. (A)

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. Fantastic book. Listen to the audiobook version if you can — Scott Brick’s narration elevates the story. (A)

A Quiet Place: Day One. I only watched this because I was on a plane. (B)

Severance (season one). After watching the second season, I rewatched season one. There was apparently much I missed the first time around. (A-)

Black Bag. Soderbergh is always worth watching, especially when he dips into Ocean’s Eleven territory — although this was more serious. (A-)

A Minecraft Movie. The first half was tolerable, enjoyable even. And then not so much. (C+)

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Watched this in the theater for the 20th anniversary. There are some good bits in here, but some of the acting really stinks. Folks in the theater cheered when Anakin slaughtered the younglings, which is probably some sort of meme that I don’t want to know about. (B+)

Sinners. I loved this movie. (A+)

Thunderbolts*. Thought I would like this more than I did. (B)

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. The last scene is a masterclass in not having the faintest idea how to end a movie. (B+)

Andor (season two). Only a slight dip from season one. Overall, the series was a brilliant look at radicalization, the messiness of rebellion, and the oppressive flatness of authoritarianism. (A+)

There There by Tommy Orange. Devastating. (A-)

The Fear of Never Landing. Good album to chill out to by Marconi Union, who previously brought you the most relaxing song in the world. (A-)

Novocaine. This was bad. (D+)

Glass Onion. More Benoit Blanc mysteries please — I love watching Daniel Craig and his CSI: KFC accent chewing scenery. (A-)

The Gorge. Half of this was great and the other half was just another pseudo-horror action thing. (B-)

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. Marvelous. (A)

Andor: The Rogue One Arc. This fan edit of Rogue One in the style of a three-episode Andor arc is as Gilroy-esque a cut as you’re ever going to get. (A-)

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. I had been kinda ambivalent about the M:I movies, but Fallout converted me, so now I’m slowly making my way back through the back catalog. (B+)

Via Carota. Best meal I’ve had in a long time. The tagliatelle was better than any pasta dish I had during my trip to Rome — it’s true, don’t @ me! And the roast chicken was perfect. (A+)

V for Vendetta. Underrated. (A-)

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. I’m going to tell you the embarrassing truth: I thought this was about actual samurai and perhaps related to the Tom Cruise movie. It is very much not. I gave it a real shot but ended up abandoning it about halfway through. (C)

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Still a marvel of animated creativity. (A)

The Phoenician Scheme. Didn’t vibe with this at all. (B-)

Downhill mountain biking. This is giving me so much life right now. (A+)

Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death. Not my favorite W&G but still. (B+)

F1. Like Top Gun: Maverick crossed with Ford v Ferarri but Cruise and Bale played the aging outsider role much better than Pitt. Is Pitt even a good actor or is he just extremely charismatic? (B+)

Superman. I thought it was fine but didn’t like it as much as others seemed to. Better than anything Zach Snyder did for DC though. (B)

Shōgun. Rewatch with my son. Just an incredible show all the way around. (A+)

The Last of Us (season two). This show was always fighting an uphill battle with me — I don’t like zombie media and I dislike characters (Ellie!) who wouldn’t survive/thrive in the situations that they’re in with their personalities & characteristics. And I finally won. (C+)

The Handmaid’s Tale (season six). *sigh* No idea why I started watching (and then finished) this season; I’m a sucker for closure I guess. (C)

Nintendo Switch 2. I bought this to play Kart with my kids and also for a better Fortnite experience. So far, so good. (B+)

Mario Kart World. I haven’t played a ton of this, but it’s good so far. Free roam mode is pretty fun. I’ve gotta write up my Kart wishlist sometime…Nintendo only checked off one or two items in World. (B+)

Sargent and Paris. Caught this on the very last day of the show and hoo boy was it crowded. (A- for the show, C+ for the crowds)

Let God Sort Em Out. Need to listen to this one a few more times but I’m liking it so far. (B+)

Right now, I’m watching Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season three, listening to Deacon King Kong on audiobook (fantastic, a lock for an A+), rewatching Wandavision, and picking at Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane.

Past installments of my media diet are available here. What good things have you watched, read, or listened to lately?

Tags: art · books · food · media diet · movies · music · podcasts · travel · TV · video

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You know that embarrassing moment when you realize you’ve become a superfan? Or, more mortifying still, an evangelist? This is a job hazard at Wirecutter, where we’re paid to obsess, and apparently “my thing” is gaffer tape.

So get comfortable, and let me tell you about the most useful spiriform adhesive you’ll ever own. My colleagues have already heard it all.

In a recent Vlogbrothers video and in his newsletter, Hank Green talked about how we don’t take enough notice of the things that quietly keep us alive, healthy, and safe.

The tragedy of prevention goes like this: The most effective way to save lives (prevention) is the least noticeable, which leads us to undervaluing it in our individual choices, in what we celebrate, and in public policy. That undervaluing of prevention leads to a great deal of needless death and suffering.

But there’s a second tragedy here, which is that we spend way less time celebrating the accomplishments of humanity than I think we should. If every person who had their life saved by a vaccine, or an airbag, or a clean air regulation felt the same as a firefighter carrying an unconscious person out of a burning building, I think we’d feel a lot better about humanity, and maybe that would help us move forward more effectively.

This follows Green’s Bluesky post from early April:

A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die.

Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.

In the early days of the pandemic, I wrote about a related concept: The Paradox of Preparation.

Preparation, prevention, regulations, and safeguards prevent catastrophes all the time, but we seldom think or hear about it because “world continues to function” is not interesting news. We have to rely on statistical analysis and the expert opinions of planners and officials in order to evaluate both crucial next steps and the effectiveness of preparatory measures after the fact, and that can be challenging for us to pay attention to. So we tend to forget that preparation & prevention is necessary and discount it the next time around.

Tags: Hank Green · science · video

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In an increasingly casual era, it seems almost old-fashioned to need, let alone recommend, a garment bag. A bag dedicated to protecting a suit or beautiful dress? There’s something vaguely ridiculous about it.

That is until you suddenly find yourself with a single garment that demands special treatment. And that’s how, in an instant, the ridiculous somehow transforms into the necessary. In other words: wedding season.

Our top pick is a sturdy garment bag that you can travel with as well as store your clothing in at home. We’ve also selected a simple garment bag just for travel and an inexpensive convertible duffel.

Sometimes a garment bag needs to make a statement, almost as much as the dress or suit inside of it. For those occasions, we have two picks: a leather garment duffel and an impressively heavy and well-made leather and canvas garment bag.

However, there’s a good chance you may not need a garment bag at all, so we also have some advice on how to make that decision.

Everything we recommend

Why do we retrospect on our incidents? Why spend the time doing those write-ups and holding review meetings? We don’t do this work as some sort of intellectual exercise for amusement. Rather, we believe that if we spend the time to understand how the incident happened, we can use that insight to improve the system in general, and availability in particular. We improve availability by preventing incidents as well as reducing the impact of incidents that we are unable to prevent. This post-incident work should help us do both.

The typical approach to post-incident work is to do a root cause analysis (RCA). The idea of an RCA is to go beyond the surface-level symptoms to identify and address the underlying problems revealed by the incident. After all, it’s only by getting at the root at the problem that we will be able to permanently address it. When doing an RCA, when we attach the label root cause to something, we’re making a specific claim. That claim is: we should focus our attention on the issues that we’ve labeled “root cause”, because spending our time addressing these root causes will yield the largest improvements to future availability. Sure, it may be that there were a number of different factors involved in the incident, but we should focus on the root cause (or, sometimes, a small number of root causes), because those are the ones that really matter. Sure, the fact that Joe happened to be on PTO that day, and he’s normally the one that spots these sorts of these problems early, that’s interesting, but it isn’t the real root cause.

Remember that an RCA, like all post-incident work, is supposed to be about improving future outcomes. As a consequence, a claim about root cause is really a prediction about future incidents. It says that of all of the contributing factors to an incident, we are able to predict which factor is most likely to lead to an incident in the future. That’s quite a claim to make!

Here’s the thing, though. As our history of incidents teaches us over and over again, we aren’t able to predict how future incidents will happen. Sure, we can always tell a compelling story of why an incident happened, through the benefit of hindsight. But that somehow never translates into predictive power: we’re never able to tell a story about the next incident the way we can about the last one. After all, if we were as good at prediction as we are at hindsight, we wouldn’t have had that incident in the first place!

A good incident retrospective can reveal a surprisingly large number of different factors that contributed to the incident, providing signals for many different kinds of risks. So here’s my claim: there’s no way to know which of those factors is going to bite you next. You simply don’t possess a priori knowledge about which factors you should pay more attention to at the time of the incident retrospective, no matter what the vibes tell you. Zeroing in on a small number of factors will blind you to the role that the other factors might play in future incidents. Today’s “X wasn’t the root cause of incident A” could easily be tomorrow’s “X was the root cause of incident B”. Since you can’t predict which factors will play the most significant roles in future incidents, it’s best to cast as wide a net as possible. The more you identify, the more context you’ll have about the possible risks. Heck, maybe something that only played a minor role in this incident will be the trigger in the next one! There’s no way to know.

Even if you’re convinced that you can identify the real root cause of the last incident, it doesn’t actually matter. The last incident already happened, there’s no way to prevent it. What’s important is not the last incident, but the next one: we’re looking at the past only as a guide to help us improve in the future. And while I think incidents are inherently unpredictable, here’s a prediction I’m comfortable making: your next incident is going to be a surprise, just like your last one was, and the one before that. Don’t fool yourself into thinking otherwise.

In 1987, Wendell Berry wrote an essay called Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer. In it, he outlined his standards for adopting new technology in his work.

1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

The whole essay is worth a read, especially now as contemporary society is struggling to evaluate and find the proper balance for technologies like social media, smartphones, and LLMs. (via the honest broker)

Tags: artificial intelligence · computing · lists · technology · Wendell Berry

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