In California, I dream of snow

and all the places we used to go…

I went to see the much-maligned mega-flop Digger last week, out of sheer boredom and an inability to resist an invitation to an outing. I have been perpetually annoyed by Mr. Iñárritu since at least Birdman, one of the most irritating movies ever made, but I figured — hey, why not? It appears that the marketing for the film was badly mishandled, drawing paltry crowds to this $180 million turkey. I had no real idea what it was about, apart from Tom Cruise hamming it up in a Tropic Thunder-style disguise. I get the feeling most audiences probably didn’t know what the whole thing was about either.

To be fair, Digger wrings some decent laughs out of a scenario reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove. But the Kubrick film also happens to be one of the funniest political satires of all time, and Digger is… not.

A closer approach to Strangelovian lunacy can be found in Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s much-anticipated documentary You Can See Everything. Not to be all hipster about, but I was an Elizabeth Holmes early adopter — an O.G. Holmes-head. I love stories of grifters, con artists, and flim-flam folk, and the idea of a turtle-necked cutie scamming the likes of Henry Kissinger and Larry Ellison was all too delightful. It was only when I later realized actual normal people had been harmed grievously by Holmes’s fake technology that it stopped being so funny.

Fielder brings his trademark deadpan awkwardness to Holmes and her meathead husband, acting as a sounding board for their increasingly unhinged rhapsody of denial and delusion. Why anyone would let a comedian, let alone an entire film crew, into their home on the eve of serving a 10-year prison sentence is beyond comprehension. Liz seems to genuinely believe she is innocent, though what lies behind that glassy blue-eyed gaze is ultimately impossible to know. I won’t spoil anything, because the movie deserves to be seen and speak for itself.

I could think of nothing so much as the late, great Kurt Vonnegut’s peroration on “psychopathic personalities”:

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: “C-Students from Yale.”
George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.
To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot . . .
PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

In doing so, Vonnegut cited the 1941 book by psychiatrist Hervey M. Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity. That would actually have been a pretty apt name for Fielder and Oppenheim’s movie.

In any case, here are this week’s reading picks from our editors!

• Why we should heed Barbara Ward’s vision of planetary justice (Aeon Essays)
• Gothic Marxism: A Manifesto on the Dark Way of Being Red (Gotham Guillotine)
• The Surprising, Cut-Throat Race for L.A. Mayor (Guardian)
• Primates Also Become Germophobes After Living Through a Viral Outbreak (Nautilus)
• The Chocolate Conspiracy… Everyone in my life agreed: It tastes different now. I ventured into the molten belly of our crumbling world to find out why. (GrubStreet)
• Streaming at the End of the World: Cinema in the Age of Chaos — coming July 2027 from Rutgers!
• Sam Altman: ‘I No Longer Think We’re Gonna Be Able to Just Patch All the Bugs’ (Gizmodo)
• Palantir’s billionaire CEO says only two kinds of people will succeed in the AI era: trade workers—‘or you’re neurodivergent’ (Fortune)
• An excerpt from God, Human, Animal, Machine on subjectivity and a visit to Kierkegaard’s grave – Meghan O’Gieblyn (BookForum)
• AI’s data center boom could require 3.6% of GDP in annual investment through 2032, and financing is shifting toward structures that make risk harder to see. (Brookings)
• I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down. (NYT)
• Does the principle of sufficient reason make panpsychism true? (Aeon Essays)
• Fraudsters Are Using Polymarket to Extract Money From Stolen Debit Cards (Futurism)
• The federal government is backing away from a decades-old disability rights promise (19th News)
• The Madness of Roland, i.e. Tears for Fears frontman (Philip Christman)
• Cartoon Network gigaleak exposes 200GB of hidden animation files from Gumball and Powerpuff Girls as fans discover decades of production secrets (India Times)
• Heartbreak, hope and human imperfection: Leonard Cohen’s greatest songs – ranked! (Guardian)
• How a Toronto shop owner founded Video Store Day and helped launch a scene (The Star)
• How The Sad Puppies Won — By Losing (NPR)
• Anti-imperialist activist Michael Parenti speaks in 1986 (Sovereign Media)
• The insect apocalypse, and why it matters (Science Direct)