Perhaps the attraction is that film noir is a way of traveling into the past—the world right before I was born. When watching old films, I like to remind myself that to the people in the film, their world was just as rich as ours and felt just as “now” as ours does. Here’s John Koenig talking about the people in old photographs:

Of course, to them, it wasn’t all flickering silence and grainy black and white. They saw vivid color rushing by in three dimensions, heard voices in deafening stereo, confronted smells they couldn’t escape. For them, nothing was ever simple. None of them knew for sure what this era meant, or that it was even an era to begin with. At the time, their world was real. Nothing was finished, and nothing guaranteed.

That world is now gone. If the past is a foreign country, we’re only tourists. We can’t expect to understand the locals or why they do what they do.

I doubt that today’s young can understand the 1970s. If you cannot imagine a professor smoking in class, or the person next to you on the airplane smoking, without it seeming weird or annoying, then you’ll never understand what life felt like in the 1970s. Just as the people of 2075 will never understand that it 2025 it felt perfectly normal to walk into a friend’s house without taking off your shoes, sit down at a table, and begin eating an animal.

From Scott Sumner.

Once again I’m logging in from Ibiza. I wouldn’t say I’ve gone native, but I’ve been here long enough to get it. This is not fierce, grind-it-out, Silicon Valley society; even Austin Texas, that wellspring of slackerdom, has a harsher work-ethic. This little Mediterranean island with some genuine Lotus-eater aspects to it – the island of the Lotus Eaters was supposed to be Djerba over in Tunisia.

According to the Odyssey, you sail there, you partake of the Lotus, you go kinda blotto and everything’s groovy. You’re not supposed to succumb to this sweet and easy life, of course. Captain Odysseus makes everybody get back on the boat and recommence rowing for Ithaca. A few hundred Greek verses later, every blue-collar guy is dead and only Captain Odysseus is left to manage his narrative.

Maybe staying in Lotus Land wasn’t such a bad idea for the working man…

Enassholeification.

Consumer tech focuses on the process, enterprise tech on the outcome.

I became one of a countless number of young men who found solace in Nietzsche’s thought. A life-affirming philosophy compensated for not being very good at life. Wasn’t I smart enough to reject God, and strong enough not to need a supernatural crutch?

And:

We continue to see demonstrations of some of the same pitfalls of Nietzscheism today. Somewhere in Silicon Valley, there is a venture capitalist telling himself he is the Overman because he is investing in an app that more efficiently separates sports fans from their money.

From “How I outgrew Nietzsche”

“Yes, a book about parking can be fascinating.” 2025 in Review: Reading and Writing Highlights

To understand a man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty, Napoleon is supposed to have said. The quotation is probably apocryphal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. For me, it is this world by the river that counts. When I sit down to write a novel, the natural time for it to take place in is the Eighties, as though that era embodied the world’s true form, its essence, and everything that came later were a kind of deviation. Even though I google various topics as I’m writing, the characters in the novel don’t google anything; it never occurs to them. The same is true when I dream. Cell phones and the internet never appear in my dreams, which are populated mostly by the people I was surrounded by forty years ago.

“The Reenchanted World," Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Another writer said he “was a confident, gray-eyed, wild-bearded, chain-smoking philosopher-poet who lived on whiskey and ice cream and never went to bed before 4 a.m.”

From Rebels of Reason

“Mad Max, an Australian documentary.” Matt.

“It’s a birth scene, not a boss scene.” ChatGPT 5.2 analyzes The Spider-God’s Bride.