Alan Jacobs wrote about his admiration for two “enormously complex projects that only became possible after the Industrial Revolution”: the manufacturing and logistical challenges the Allies faced in World War II leading up to D-Day and the studio system in the classic Hollywood era:
It’s hard for me to imagine how D-Day did not end in utter catastrophe — I struggle to comprehend how it even got underway; and I still can’t quite believe that movies come together the way they do. …
Maybe my fascination has something to do with the fact that these large collaborative projects are so completely unlike what I do. I once said to a film director I know that I don’t see how movies ever get made, and he replied that in making a movie he has “so much help” from smart and skilled people — he doesn’t understand how I can just sit in a room and write books. But when I’m sitting in a room writing a book I am not accountable to or answerable to anyone else: I only have to manage Me.
He cites two anecdotes about General Dwight Eisenhower and director Sidney Lumet that encapsulate the seemingly impossible complexity of these jobs and show how some people are just better fit for them than others. Read the whole post.
Steven Soderbergh in an interview talking about the grammar of filmmaking:
There’s a certain way you put a sentence together to get the idea across; you can fuck with that, but at a certain point you fuck with it so much the idea is lost. That applies to almost any form.
When I’m on set or thinking about a story, making sure that the audience is engaged and that I’m also excited, I have to fight through the sensation of, “Oh my god, another fucking over-the-shoulder shot.” I have to push through that and go, “You’re building a sentence. Getting upset when you have to shoot an over-the-shoulder shot is like getting upset at using the word ‘and’ or ‘the’ in a sentence. It has to be done. It’s part of the grammar.”
As a lover of nonfiction books, I’ve noticed many of the same phrases being used for subtitles—something that doesn’t happen with fiction since “A Novel” or “Stories” are basically the only options. Some templates I’ve noticed:
There’s a scene from Band of Brothers I’ve been thinking about a lot these days. It’s from the penultimate episode (“Why We Fight”) which finds Easy Company en route to Berchtesgaden in April 1945. Private Webster (played by Eoin Bailey) beholds the thousands of surrendered German POWs marching the other way in defeat and has a (NSFW) moment of clarity and indignation:
Key quote:
Dragging our asses half way around the world, interrupting our lives, for what? You ignorant servile scum, what the f*** are we doing here?!
Perhaps you can see why this might ring true as I consider current events set in motion at the direction of the current president of the United States, including but not limited to a radicalized, extralegal police force laying siege to American cities, kidnapping and murdering people.
Hearing from friends who live in Minneapolis, for example, I imagine they could deeply relate to Webster’s exasperation and exhaustion at having their lives cruelly interrupted by fascists who seek only to denigrate and destroy. And they’re not dragging their asses to the streets to protest or hold candlelight vigils in the frigid cold for slain citizens because it’s fun and a great use of free time.
A man wearing a Batman costume spoke at the Santa Clara City Council to criticize a lack of action against the federal immigration crackdown.
“What the f*** are we doing here? Seriously, you have had months to prepare for this upcoming event. I don’t give a damn if this is out of decorum. People are dying on our streets every single day in this country because we allow this federal government to walk all over you. Look me in the eye. Can any one of you go home to your children and tell them that you did everything you could to protect their classmates? To protect their grandparents? I don’t think you can.”
Thank you, Batman. And no thanks whatsoever to all the ignorant, servile politicians doing the bidding of the geriatric malignant narcissist dementia patient and wannabe mafioso currently occupying the White House who is not long for this earth. What a waste.
Another related lesson courtesy of the Dark Knight: Terror will lose.
Part of our six year old’s bedtime routine is dictating a text for me to send to my wife while he’s brushing his teeth. See if you can detect a pattern in some recent messages:
If these don’t epitomize six-year-old boys, I don’t know what does.
Continuing the trend of the last few years, this is a “books I managed to read” list rather than a curated selection of favorites as my reading hit an all-time low. I could blame any number of attention grabbers in my life, but ultimately I’m just not In My Reading Era like I used to be.
Still, here are the titles that tickled my fancy in 2025, with links to anything I wrote about them.
Poetry is a kind of test case, a training ground for understanding what “expert knowledge” brings to the table. Mercor’s bet is that the same process that trains a model to write better poetry can train it to do better legal drafts, better medical diagnoses, better financial analyses. The core assumption is that professional judgment (a lawyer deciding how to frame an argument) and aesthetic judgment (a poet deciding how to break a line) are computationally similar problems. Both require the model to navigate an “unbounded” decision space where there is no single “correct” answer, only “better” or “worse” ones based on expert consensus.
Suddenly the “they should have sent a poet” line from Contact takes on a whole new meaning.
This is a victory for the humanities I guess? Perhaps a Pyrrhic one though.
Joined my buddy Nicole Kidman at AMC for a 9:15am showing of Marty Supreme. Don’t think I’ve ever done such an early showtime before, but it’s a great way to start the day.
Here’s a snapshot of what this year looked like for me:
Honestly, just keeping up with everything between two active boys, my day job, a part-time job I added in the fall, and everything else life is throwing at us has been a lot. I’m grateful for everything we have and the joys of this particular stage, and I’m eager to see how the next stage will look.
This blog turned 19 years old. Thanks for reading, whoever and wherever you are. Some favorite posts I wrote this year:
