- How A House of Dynamite, not nominated for any Oscars, is more important and relevant than any of the pictures nominated, and a great movie;
- Trump needs to “feel it in my bones” to make a decision, which is precisely the conservative limitation to learning;
- John Pavlovitz has had it with unbothered people;
- Paul Krugman chats with Heather Cox Richardson.
I appreciate this nod. This is a movie I watched twice in two nights, late last year, as discussed here. It’s important and relevant in a way none of the actual Best Picture nominees are. (Well, One Battle After Another might be just as close, in a different way. But not Sinners, as effective as that film is.) And it’s well-made and suspenseful.
And especially considering the current political situation.
Slate, Ian Prasad Philbrick, 13 Mar 2026: The Oscars Are This Weekend. The Movie We Should All Be Talking About Isn’t Even Nominated.
It starts as a normal day, with a mom bidding her sick kid goodbye before heading to work. A few hours later, the president of the United States is helicoptering away from Washington with a laminated binder on his lap that lays out three escalating options for a retaliatory nuclear strike that could destroy the world—in the words of a military aide, “rare, medium, and well done.” Before the president can decide, the screen cuts to black.
That’s the basic plot of Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, a propulsive thriller distributed by Netflix and available to stream since October. The film depicts what might happen if an unnamed adversary launched a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile at Chicago. A Rashomon-style story divided into three chapters, it shows multiple characters’ perspectives on the same 18-minute window between when U.S. radar first detects the missile and the moments before it hits, weaving together an open-ended morality tale about a collective human failure that could spell collective doom.
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One more example of a running theme here.
AlterNet, Sarah K. Burris, 13 Mar 2026: Trump says war will be over ‘when I feel it in my bones’
Of the many questions President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have faced since the start of the war in Iran, the question of ‘When will it be over?’ looms large. Speaking to Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade on his radio show, Trump gave an answer.
“When I feel it — feel it in my bones,” the 79-year-old president said, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The issue: people who rely on intuitions and gut feelings and feeling things in their bones will never really learn anything. They are hobbled by ancient instincts, and persuaded by circumstances only when they match those of the ancestral environment, and will reject anything that conflicts with those feelings. Even though history has shown, for thousands of years, that most of what humanity has learned about the universe defies those ancient intuitions.
But they are sure they don’t need to learn. Everything important about life is already recorded in their holy books.
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John Pavlovitz is channeling the outrage many of us feel that we don’t see expressed in the mainstream media.
John Pavlovitz, 10 Mar 2026: I’ve Had it With Unbothered People
OK, it’s probably not particularly healthy to have a grievance with an entire species, so let me narrow that down a bit.
I’m having a really hard time with the unbothered people, the “everything is gonna be fine” people, the people who are acting as though they are above those of us who are blowing gaskets, breaking down, and freaking out.
You know who I’m talking about: those friends, family members, coworkers, classmates, and social media acquaintances who tone-police us for surveying the monumental destruction being inflicted upon our fragile Republic and its people and being livid. Those people.
I’ve reached my breaking point with human beings around me who are still averting their eyes, avoiding the news, and anesthetizing themselves on a mind-numbing cocktail of wishful thinking, retail therapy, self-preservation, and American exceptionalism.
I’ve reached the limit of my tolerance for people who have seemingly spent the past year poo-pooing hundreds of atrocities and illegalities, any one of which would be an alarm-tripping red flag for a nation sliding swiftly into fascism.
And I’ve really had it with people who are still criticizing the emotionality of those of us who’ve been told for a decade that we’re overreacting, while we’ve watched every single supposedly impossible prediction come to pass.
Yes, they’re all coming to pass. I try to take a distanced, disinterested view of all this, wondering how this can happen, understanding this as a reflection of the varieties of human nature, and trusting that the institution of the US will survive the current administration. But I’m not sure. It hasn’t happened in previous failed civilizations.
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Paul Krugman chats with Heather Cox Richardson, 11 Mar 2026.
Paul Krugman: Lunch Money with Paul Krugman and Heather Cox Richardson, subtitled “A recording from Paul Krugman and Heather Cox Richardson’s live video”
No transcript. I follow and trust both of these people because they understand things outside the scope of my experience and education. I’ve only watched the first few minutes of this video, but let me quote this:
Richardson: In the period when I started studying history, economics and politics were almost considered the same thing, that is, it was understood that the American people had to understand the economy in order to make good decisions about politics. So in the newspapers, they would explain every financial decision, every tax decision, every kind of decisions they were making about the kind of about the kind of economy they were trying to build. And that changes really dramatically after the depression, because all of a sudden it seems like the politicians, especially on the Republican side, are not actually explaining what they’re doing. They’re trying to hide what they’re doing, until by the time you get to the 1970s, I just don’t understand what they’re trying to do. …
Krugman: That’s afflicted everything right now. I remember a time when you did not sort of assume that everything coming from the administration was a lie. But it seems like a long time ago. I’m even nostalgic for George W. Bush, when at least it seemed to put some care into the lies. …
