Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
I’m a huge Dennis Lehane fan. Probably the thing most said about him is that he writes genre fiction that reads like literary fiction—crime that transcends the expectations of crime. He’s a master of tight, propulsive plots and gritty, flawed characters. Whether he’s writing novels (Shutter Island, The Given Day, Live By Night, The Drop) or scripts for The Wire, he keeps you interested, exposes the underbelly of humanity and, at some point, slugs you in the gut.
I first came across Lehane’s name when I read his short story, “Until Gwen,” in the 2005 edition of The Best American Short Stories. It starts: “Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat.” And it just ratchets it up from there.
It took me a while to learn that he’d also penned Mystic River, the novel that Clint Eastwood adapted into a hit 2003 film starring Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, Tim Robbins, Laura Linney, Lawrence Fishburne and Marcia Gay Harden. The movie is faithful to the book, and cuts little in the adaptation.
Mystic River opens in 1975, with three young friends in Charlestown, Boston. As they are playing, a car pulls up and two men claiming to be police order one of the boys, Dave, into the car. Dave is driven away, kept and abused for four days before he escapes.
Twenty-five years later, the boys are men living separate lives. One is an ex-con, one a state police detective, and Dave is a blue-collar worker still haunted by his childhood abduction. When a young woman is murdered, the crime yanks the three men together again. One of the strongest aspects of Mystic River is that, although Lehane jumps us around from character to character, he unwinds the truths and untruths in a way that keeps us hooked. It’s a satisfying read start to finish, with full characters, good dialogue, and great pacing. And the film, which I rewatched after reading the novel, doesn’t disappoint. I’m a reco for both.
The Algorithmic Leader: How to Be Smart When Machines Are Smarter Than You by Mike Walsh
What’s the main idea?
To survive and thrive in a world where technology is constantly reinventing our jobs, we have to be proactive in reinventing how we work. I saw Mike speak at an offsite a few years ago, and he was a compelling speaker.
Is the book compelling?
The ideas in the book are pretty good, though I think the definition of an “algorithmic leader” is a little loose. He presents 10 principles of an algorithmic leader. Some are new, specific and insightful. Others are a bit more obvious or less specific:
- Work backward from the future
- Aim for 10x, not 10%
- Think computationally
- Embrace uncertainty
- Make culture your operating system
- Don’t work — Design work
- Automate and elevate
- If the answer is x, ask y
- When in doubt, ask a human
- Solve for purpose, not just profit
Some of these principles deal with technology, some with management style, some with cultural issues. When I was working at a tech company, they all seemed hyper-relevant. Now that I have some distance, it’s not that they’re not solid principles, but they don’t necessarily hang together in a clear, intuitive system.
The most insightful principles are the ones that deal with technology and how it’s making work more fluid, forcing us to anticipate, evolve and elevate how we work. Embracing uncertainty, designing adaptable systems, defining culture foundational—let our purpose and cultural principles guide us (our why) vs clinging to our what (product) and how (process).
Overall?
Not bad. The main takeaway is important. New tech isn’t something to be feared (ie it’s here to replace me!), but we do need to be proactive and thoughtful about how we adapt to it and evolve our systems and teams to utilize it so it’s a complement, not competition for our human capabilities. If done right, new tech can be an amplifier, not a threat.
Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino
This is not a memoir. As much as I like Tarantino’s films (most of them), I’m not sure I could do a memoir. Cinema Speculation is more of a personal romp through the kinds of films that inspired his work and inspired him to become a filmmaker in the first place—mostly crime, horror, exploitation and other schlocky genre films of the 1970s.
Although he does include some personal stories, Tarantino comes as a fan first, the ultimate connoisseur of films. But he’s also a critic with an encyclopedic knowledge and a deep understanding of filmmaking, clearly. At the same time, he’s never been known to pull a punch or shy away from a subject. Which makes this book both informative and raucous, sometimes erudite and at other times vulgar pulp. It’s fun.
He organizes the chapters around films, some obscure enough that I’d never heard of them—The Funhouse, Rolling Thunder and The Outfit—but others fairly popular, like Deliverance and Dirty Harry. But these are just jumping off points for him to bounce all over the place—film names and directors and actors and random trivia pop off like a fire at an ammo factory.
My list of films to watch grew quite a bit. I’ve never gotten around to Bullit or 8½ or Carrie or The Last House on the Left or The Mack or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Escape from Alcatraz. The Moonshooters—the film that Dukes of Hazzard was based on—is pretty entertaining. Rolling Thunder was awesome. The pace of Death Wish was interesting. And Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore was great—I loved Ellen Bernstein.
In general, I like this era of film—the turn from the New Hollywood directors that had been so heavily influenced by the French New Wave to the early Movie Brats—Coppola, Spielberg, De Palma. It’s cool and gritty and unpolished. It’s easy to see how much it influenced Tarantino’s style.
Cinema Speculation is a must-read for any film lover. Probably not a great general audience read, and there’s relatively little about Tarantino’s films—I might enjoy that book as well. That said, I’m going to use this opportunity to rank Tarantino’s films, many of which I’ve rewatched in the past year.
Tarantino films ranked:
- Pulp Fiction
- Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
- Inglorious Basterds
- Jackie Brown
- Kill Bill
- Reservoir Dogs
- Django Unchained
- The Hateful Eight
* Death Proof (have not seen)
The Holocaust: An Unfinished Storyby Dan Stone and The Zone of Interest, a film by Jonathan Glaser
For my money, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest was the most impactful film of 2023. It brings us into the home of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, in the summer of 1943. We observe daily life around the house and its manicured grounds, and Höss at work in unremarkable spaces, mostly performing the bureaucratic tasks of running the camp.
Although the camp physically looms over the wall and is ever-present in the audio track, we never go inside. We never see prisoners. We never see the killing. Sometimes we see black smoke drifting away in the distance. We hear trains arriving and departing. We hear other industrial sounds. Sometimes we hear shouts and gunshots in the background audio, but nothing is made of it by the characters on screen.
Rudolf meets with two men in what looks like a typical business meeting. They discuss a project to upgrade the equipment to a more efficient system that allows for one set of ovens to cool while others are loaded and unloaded. In another scene, we see a group of women sorting through clothes in a home, picking out items to keep for themselves and their families.
The Zone of Interest is a depiction of everyday life, just at a particularly evil moment and place in history. It is evil-adjacent, evil in the periphery. The film forces us to look away. It intentionally obstructs our view. As viewers, we have to fight to notice the sounds. We have to fight against their normalization, against our natural tendency to become acclimated and let them fade into the background like we might become acclimated to crickets or highway noise.
The dissonance of this setup is so effective, so disturbing. It personifies Hannah Arendt’s notion, from her 1963 book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, of the “banality of evil.” That evil often does not look particularly evil. It can also look like relatively normal people doing relatively normal things. Following the rules, going about their lives, acquiescing or turning a blind eye.
This notion of the everyday nature of evil is one that Dan Stone, Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at the University of London, re-introduces in The Holocaust: An Unfinished Story. But he does so in the context of setting straight some of the misconceptions about the Holocaust that have crept into our public understanding of it.
The notion that the Holocaust was evil monsters doing evil things provides a perhaps comforting, but inaccurate, answer to the big question: how did this happen? If Arendt’s notion is that it does not necessarily take a monster to do monstrous things, Stone’s addendum might be paraphrased as “monsters need help.”
The Holocaust was not simply a rogue band of sociopaths acting in isolation. Society was swept up in the movement, not just in Germany but across Europe. Many “normal” people—that is, people we might all consider to be friendly neighbors—participated to varying degrees.
And yes, Berlin may have been the epicenter, but it was a continent-wide crime, with varying levels of susceptibility and complicity from other countries, a spectrum that ranged from participation in the extermination efforts to deportation schemes to turning a blind eye to simply failing to act soon enough.
Stone also argues against the perception that the Holocaust was all industrialized murder in the camps. Much of it, especially early, was a “Holocaust by bullets,” where as many as two million Jews and other victims were killed, en masse, by being shot. This, too, indicates and requires a wider participation than the centralized, industrialized picture that many of us hold.
Modern Implications
Dismissing the Nazis as monsters, or Nazism as merely madness, denies a critical examination of an uncomfortable truth—the conditions needed to grow “monsters” lies in every society, and in humanity itself. Stone writes of a “modern world that creates and carnalizes deep passions that have no obvious outlet.” The seeds of antisemitism found root in the passionate, irrational anger of Germany’s economic crisis of the late 1930s. Hitler, as Stone puts it, was just the charismatic rainmaker.
And much as we want to believe that it was a unique time, place and people, history provides ample evidence to the contrary. “Never again” is a promise we have failed to keep.
Stone draws a link from Nazism to modern far-right movements, some who share ideology and others who flirt with similar rhetoric. He also discusses the complicated shadow the Holocaust throws across modern politics, where it is difficult to criticize the actions of Israel without counter-claims of anti-Semitism.
After seeing Zone of Interest, I listened to the seven-part series on the rise of the Nazis by The Rest Is History podcast. And then I listened to Dan Carlin’s interview with Dan Stone, which led me to Stone’s book. It’s a great interview, and he discusses the current war in Gaza and its relation to the legacy of the Holocaust.
There’s an overwhelming amount of content available about the Holocaust, but Stone’s book is a good entry point from a modern perspective. It takes a meta-historical approach, with a relatively limited recounting of the events of the Holocaust, focusing more on our understanding of that history, how it has evolved in the 80 years since, where we get it wrong, and how it shapes our modern world. I’d also highly recommend The Zone of Interest.
Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger
About the Author
Junger has spent most of his life as a journalist with people in extreme, dangerous professions. His best-known book is The Perfect Storm, the bestseller about fishermen caught in a 100-year storm in the Atlantic. I first read Fire, a collection of his writing, in 2007, and War, in which he embedded with an Army platoon in the Korangal Valley in Afghanistan, in 2010 (he also made the award-winning documentary, Restrepo, about that experience).
What’s the book about
Tribe is about soldiers after war, about what their combat experience provides them that their home experience might lack.
It’s hard to generalize the experience of war or to consider the “benefits” of combat experience, but there is ample evidence to suggest that for many soldiers, it provides a deep sense of community and communal purpose. War—and combat specifically—binds groups of people in an existential struggle, against a common enemy or, at the very least, for their own survival.
This daily fight for survival is largely absent from our modern lives, and Junger argues that there is a downside to that. We lose tribal cohesion. “The beauty and tragedy of the modern world is that it eliminates many situations that require people to demonstrate a commitment to the collective good.”
Modern life has many benefits, but it also makes it difficult to attain the things humans actually need. The qualities we elevate—affluence, beauty, and status—are not correlated with happiness as we might suppose. What we actually need is to feel competent, authentic and connected. We need community and purpose, but we reduce the role of both and elevate the role of authority and hierarchy, often seeing our place in the world in relation to others, comparing our ranks or social status or resumes.
Tribes have a sense of equality. While there may be a leader, the tribe exists for the individuals, a commitment as strong as the individual’s commitment to the collective. Food is not just shared in the ritual of mealtime, but it is shared as a common possession—no single person will go hungry alone. Nobody will be left behind.
It’s counterintuitive to think of a military unit this way. We typically think of the military as defined by rank. But for a unit in the heat of combat, while the roles might be critical, there is no special benefit afforded to a higher rank. Especially in the kind of combat Junger covered—a group of soldiers under fire in the mountains of Afghanistan.
And when Junger applies the term “tribe,” he is using the more primitive sense of the word. People with common interests or passions—Boston Red Sox fans, magicians, LARPers—are not tribes. There needs to be more than a common interest. The bonds of a true tribe are welded with the heat of an existential threat.
Thus, it’s often in moments of catastrophe that tribal behavior emerges. People struggling for survival after an earthquake, like soldiers dug into a hillside, often display tribal behaviors and improvised social structures that tend to be more egalitarian.
The oft-noted but little-understood irony is that many people, once they have survived these harrowing, life-threatening situations, actually crave certain aspects of them. A part of them wants to return to war, or strangely misses something about the moment of disaster. It is a paradox that they often struggle to understand, because the moment they crave was often one of great loss or trauma as well.
Junger focuses on the experience of soldiers, including the aftermath of combat, the difficulties of accurately diagnosing and coping with PTSD, and other related issues. He wanders off for a few pages of fist-shaking against modern values, political polarization, etc. And he over-romanticizes pre-American tribal life, focusing only on the elements that created coherent tribes and none of the downsides. But both of these criticisms are minor, as his real goal is to understand why we can’t, in a modern, peaceful society, deliver on these core human needs. What are we missing in our cultural values and structures?
“Acting in a tribal way simply means being willing to make a substantive sacrifice for your community,” Junger writes. He asks why we feel less obligated to do that in our day-to-day lives.
Tribe is meditative than Junger’s other books, which ask big questions but lean more toward journalism. It asks provocative ideas about community and purpose, if it feels short on answers.
But I also couldn’t help but think about the application to political tribalism. Specifically the difference between an interest group (e.g. Boston Red Sox fans, people who want lower taxes) and a tribe, as Junger defines it. When you consider that a tribe is united not just by common interest but by existential threat, the role that fear plays becomes apparent.
This is the dark side of the tribal mentality. Yes, sacrificing for the common good sounds noble, but where we draw the lines around “common” matters. If I tell you that the other team isn’t just an opponent but The Enemy, that they are out to destroy us and our way of life (existential threat) and thus our common goal is to destroy them first (uniting purpose), then we have a tribe. But we have the element of tribalism that Junger leaves out of his idealized depiction of pre-American life, which included (among all its virtues) war and violence between the tribes.
The allure of a tribe is clear. A tribe gives us purpose, community and identity. Yes, it can be a beneficial side-effect of war, as in the cohesion of a military unit in combat. But if we weaponize fear, fuel it with the histrionics of the media and the politicians, and elevate everything to an existential threat from some Other group, then the “tribal ideal” can also be a fulcrum for war.
Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions by Todd Rose
In a survey of Americans of all political stripes, respondents ranked climate change as the #3 most urgent problem facing the world. Yet, when asked how they believed other Americans would rank its importance, the average answer was #33. So we care about climate change ourselves, but we believe nobody else really does.
This disparity is a small but clear example of the main theme of this book. On many issues, Americans hold one belief themselves—the one they believe to be morally right—yet believe other people don’t share the same view. And if you ask them specifically about what people on the “other side” think—the other political party, the other state, the other type of people—the disparity increases by multiples.
Why does it matter? Because it’s creating an “epidemic of mistrust,” a belief that not only are other people different in their beliefs from us, but that they we can’t rely on them to act morally. In 1997, 64% of Americans felt “a good deal of trust” in their fellow citizens. By 2020, that figure had nearly halved.
That mistrust is driving political polarization. It’s pushing Americans toward political extremism. And it’s causing a rise in the acceptance of, if not outright support for, authoritarianism. It’s eroding the foundation of American society.
Rose implores us to recognize that much—if not most—of what we believe other people believe is inaccurate. That the media, especially the algorithms of social media, exacerbate the issue. That the “loud fringe,” the political extremists who tend to speak the most, yell the loudest, and who get the air time, warp our perceptions of what most people believe. We’re much more alike than different.
Rose also encourages us to recognize our own proclivities and deficiencies:
Herd Mentality. We are all susceptible to conformity bias. It’s a complicated, little understood but powerful drive, deeply rooted in our identity and our survival instinct. At a base level, being a part of a group provides protection. At a psychological level, a group helps us define who we are.
So when we identify with a group, there is a strong urge to align with their values and beliefs. Even if deep down we question them, we often go along anyway, for fear of being shunned by the group and/or losing our identity.
We almost always underestimate the power of herd mentality, and overestimate our ability to resist it, thinking we’d “stand up for what’s right” in the face of social or authoritarian pressure. But history and psychological experiments (e.g. the Stanford Experiment) have shown time and again that we’re not as likely to step out of line as we might think.
Old brains. Recognize that our brains are ill-equipped to contend with the onslaught of information thrown at us every day. Our brains are still wired for survival in a world of physical threats, and what we experience online is largely alien to us, from a biological standpoint. Thus, because the volume of information—much of it misinformation—is so overwhelming, we default to our psychological shortcuts. We have a strong bias toward group thinking, or we rely on old prejudices.
And we are very good at post-rationalizing our decisions, convincing ourselves that we have collected the information, considered the evidence, then made a rational choice. In fact, almost all of our decisions are routed through the mental shortcut machine first, then rationalized afterward.
The crowd is not wise. James Surowieki’s 2004 The Wisdom of the Crowds is often misunderstood to mean that large groups of people make better decisions. What the book actually says—and what it requires—is that an “average” of independent thinkers can have surprisingly accurate collected thinking.
The case study I remember most, which is illustrative of the point, was the search for a lost submarine, the USS Scorpion, in 1968. The problem was given to a group of people with diverse expertise, including naval experts, mathematicians and salvage workers, who worked independently, then sent in their predictions. The independent estimates were averaged, and the Scorpion was found, amazingly, about 200 meters from the predicted site.
This was not group think. This was not everyone in a room working together, influencing the way each other was approaching the problem. It was leveraging the power of independent thinking. This preservation of independence is required. Otherwise, as Rose writes, “the wisdom of the crowd quickly becomes the tyranny of the herd.
This book is about how our understanding of reality can get warped by powerful forces at large scale, until we’ve created mass collective illusions about the way the world is or how it works.
It’s relevant as we head into the 2024 election year, and the propaganda and misinformation machines kick into high gear. I’m not optimistic that the problem is going to get any better. Other countries who sought to influence our election with misinformation campaigns in 2016 and 2020 won’t stop, and with A.I.’s growing capabilities, divisive misinformation will be churned out at an impossible rate.
And people certainly aren’t changing. A recent poll showed that 69% of Republicans still believe Biden’s 2020 win is illegitimate, despite multiple GOP-led investigations finding otherwise. This number has actually increased recently, indicating that it’s driven by ideology, not evidence. And 50% of Americans polled believe that elected officials will overturn the results of an election if their party does not win. 58% of Americans say “they are just a little or not at all confident that elections reflect the public’s will” and 48% of polled Republicans say they have “no confidence at all” that the outcome of the election will reflect the will of the people.
This all speaks exactly to the eroding trust in people and in our representative systems that Collective Illusions is about. It is the divide that endangers our future, the divide that countries funding misinformation campaigns hope to exacerbate. The divide that authoritarians understand and leverage. (As General James Mattis wrote about Trump: “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort.”)
This is not an overtly political book, but it is useful in understanding our current politics. It lies between Kurt Anderson’s Fantasyland or Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies—about American democracy being threatened by magical thinking and collective, willful delusion—and Alan Jacobs’s How to Think, which has a much more empathetic take and encourages connection and openness (I plan to read Arthur Brooks’s Love Your Enemies, which I believe is similar in message).
Collective Illusions contains in its final chapter a few things we can do to combat these forces. The first is to recognize them. The second is to have the courage to be truthful with ourselves, and to consider what we know to be right—divorced from what we think the group thinks is right. And then the hardest part, to speak up. To challenge and disagree.
Much easier said than done. Nonetheless, Collective Illusions is a worthy manual for 2024.
The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by Roger L. Martin
What’s the main idea?
In business (and other aspects in life), we often face choices between two options that seem, on the face, to be opposites. This binary A/B choice is often an illusion, and by applying the right balance of “mastery” and “originality,” we can shift from an either/or decision to a both/and.
Is it compelling?
Not really. Martin starts with the analogy of opposable thumbs, and compares our unique ability to apply pressure between our thumb and forefinger to a business leader using two seemingly opposing choices to find a new solution. It’s not a good analogy, more confusing than illuminating. Likewise, I found the central “integrative thinker knowledge system” illustrated in the book (below) to be clunky and not very integrated, ironically.
Much of the book felt this way—familiar concepts, not much to argue against, but a slightly clunkier version of things I’d seen before. Don’t accept false dichotomies. Seek a balance of experience and innovation. Challenge existing models; assess the situation and develop a new model for it. All fine, but nothing struck me as particularly innovative.
But how are the case studies?
The case studies, a result of a series of interviews Martin conducted (including an 8-hour interview of A.G. Lafley), have some interesting nuggets, but they don’t feel cohesive. Some of the stories are underwhelming. A.G. Lafley, challenged with naming a new liquid laundry detergent, bucked the convention of developing a new brand and simply called it Liquid Tide. Not a bad decision, for sure, but not a story that makes you go, Damn. Brilliant!
That said, the individual stories here are the most interesting part. The book falls down in the synthesis. The coinable phrase, based on a simple idea, delivered in an easily repeatable framework, supported by entertaining and insightful case studies, that unlocks a whole new world of possibilities—the Holy Grail of business books—this isn’t it.
What’s the main idea?
Our world is geared toward hyper-specialization—in how we are educated, in how we attack problems, and in how many organizations build themselves and operate. Unfortunately, many problems—especially those that require creative solutions—are best solved by a wide range of thinking and skills. Likewise, many of the most successful people throughout history have a wide range of knowledge they can draw from, not just a highly-specialized skillset.
Is it compelling?
I love this idea. When I was in school for mechanical engineering, I remember the professor of our survey course telling us that we did not want to be a monkey wrench. We wanted to be a ⅝” socket wrench. A monkey wrench is okay at a lot of things. As engineers, we wanted to be very good at one thing. This sounded terrible to me.
When I teach my creative advertising students now, I tell them almost the exact opposite. They need to continually consume art, culture and inspiration from outside of advertising. They need to be writers and designers and thinkers first, interested in art and media and business and psychology and product design and a hundred other things. Then apply that knowledge to advertising. (This is not to say I’m right and my engineering professor was wrong. We need both. I just prefer being the latter.)
How’s the support?
Anecdotal, mainly, but interesting. Epstein tells stories from sports, business, art, history. Famous and obscure modern and historical figures and events. Some of them are very inspiring.
He defines “range” in a range of contexts:
- In our education, we should allow for broad, liberal-arts-style exploration for most people, treating it as discovery and as foundational. Currently 3/4 of grads go onto jobs that are not their major.
- There is long-term benefit to struggling to figure something out, and requiring exploration of possible answers. Teachers who hint their students to the answer may serve the exam, but are hurting them in the long-term. Students are often seeking rules, processes, and lists to memorize (probably because that’s what we incentivize and test for); what they should be learning is how to think, how to interrogate ideas, understand systems and construct mental models.
- We need to incorporate outside thinking, analogies, outside points of view and “non-experts” when trying to solve problems and pressure-test ideas.
- Celebrating grit, or “toughing it out,” can also lock you into a bad path. It’s often better to maintain openness to the idea that the current path is not the right path and flexibility to explore alternatives (in career paths, in business ideas, etc.)
- Experts often become the most entrenched in their thinking, the most blinded to alternative solutions.
In short, effective problem-solving culture balances standard practice and expertise with forces that challenge it (outsiders, outsider ideas, etc.)
How’s the length?
A little long, but I wouldn’t classify as “should have been an article.” The stories are pretty good, and there’s some great trivia.
My favorite, unrelated to the main idea of the book, was that in the early 1700s in Venice, orphans could be dropped off at the Pietá via a scaffetta, a small drawer in the sidewall of the church, large enough only for infants.
I also liked the idea at one company—though I might try it at home—of “Friday Experiments.” Basically carving out time and space to try something new, something at which you are an amateur, every Friday.
Overall?
A good read. And an important idea, though one I already agreed with. Epstein’s point isn’t that we only need generalists. He’s saying that the world is designed for specialization and narrow focus. Strong modern forces—budgets, timelines, the pressure to be productive and squeeze every last ounce of value out of every moment—push us to narrow our thinking, reduce our exploration, and focus our efforts in the name of efficiency. What we are sacrificing could be exponentially more valuable.
We need a broader mix of people. Of ways we approach problems and spend time. A broader range of inspiration. I’m for all of that.
Disco Demolition Night 