99% Invisible has been going for 15 years! I’ve been listening to it since 2015, not quite from the beginning, but quite a long time, and it’s undoubtedly one of the favourite things I listen to or watch.
To celebrate the anniversary, they did a special episode where Roman Mars answers 15 questions from listeners and staff. The answers are all good, but one of them really stood out for me, and I love it. The segment starts about 17:06 minutes in. I’ve transcribed (and lightly edited) the key part of Roman’s answer here. Producer Vivian Le asks, “What’s a design-related hill you’re willing to die on?”
The march to make things more and more efficient makes the world a worse place. I think of this in terms of advertising. The idea that we were going to efficiently measure how effective advertising was through clicks and eyeballs and stuff erased all of the extra money that made all of the journalism and all the pop culture that you cared about in the twentieth century. It made it all possible.
The inefficiency of the advertising system made everything good in this world. I think that the idea that you’re trying to get things to be as efficient as possible is actually a terrible, world-destroying idea. The most efficient restaurant is a ghost kitchen that has no storefront. Because that’s inefficient, because it could be empty sometimes! It’s a ghost kitchen that just ships you a thing, and has an underpaid delivery person that brings it to your door, and you never leave. And this is stripping away all the goodness of the world and of cities.
I think efficiency is absolute garbage. And that is the design-related hill I’m willing to die on. I feel like you should be always allowing for great deals of inefficiency to make a nice-designed city, a nice-designed system and make it work. I really hate the focus on efficiency. Not only does it destroy all these good things, it takes money and gives it to the worst people. Like the platform creators and the tech people, instead of… change and tips and things. It’s not like things are cheaper, or things are better. Just, money is being transferred to the wrong people instead of creators and people who make the world a better place through community and creation.
[…]
You need friction, you need the space of creation. That open freedom of an inefficient system where money sloshes around inside of it. These frictions and inefficiencies are what make everything good about the world. So if you can handle that big abstraction, that is the design-related hill I’m willing to die on.
Roxane Gay, writing in the New York Times about “civility” in discourse (via Kottke; paywalled, but there’s a gift link in his post):
“Calling for civility is about exerting power. It is a way of reminding the powerless that they exist at the will of those in power and should act accordingly. It is a demand for control.”
The context of the essay is the degenerating political environment in the US, but it applies elsewhere as well. In workplaces, it’s not uncommon to see management call for “civility” when they introduce policies that make staff justifiably angry.
The 2025 Ig Nobel awards have just been announced. Someone at work had posted a link to the winner in the Physics category, which is a study of the clumping properties of Cacio e Pepe sauce, and I read the original source article. Apart from the physics involved, and the recipe suggestions, what struck me was how very readable the article is. The introduction and literature review is particularly to the point. As someone who knows a bit about cooking and the science involved, it does a nice job of setting the scene, and situating the current research in an up-to-date body of knowledge.
It reminded me of a recent article by Catherine E. De Vries: “Most Literature Reviews Miss the Point. Don’t Let Yours” (I’m afraid I don’t remember where I came across the article for a “via” link.) When doing my psychology diploma, I always found literature reviews both hard to read and to write. I understood that they had to be there, but I didn’t understand at a gut level why.A good literature review (like the one above) is a joy to read, though, and can sometimes provide the reader with more insight than the main paper itself. De Vries writes:
Too often, the literature review is treated as a box to tick before “real” writing begins. I think that’s a mistake. A literature review isn’t the background, it’s our orientation. It shows where we stand and why our next step matters.
[…]
The entrepreneur Steve Jobs once said: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward.” A literature review is exactly that. We trace ideas backward, not out of nostalgia, but because doing so reveals the logic of where others have been, and what still needs to be built. We begin to see which things repeat, which evidence holds, and which questions remain unanswered.
Our question becomes less a leap of faith, and more an inevitable next step. We don’t invent it. We see it, emerging from the structure we’ve laid bare.
I’m writing this from a cozy room at the MacDonald Inchyra Hotel and Spa in Falkirk because my flight from Edinburgh back to Amsterdam this evening was cancelled. I’ve been re-booked onto an afternoon flight tomorrow afternoon, and I’d rather be home now, but this is fine. Easyjet’s system for managing flight disruptions is pretty good if you remember to use the right browser. Safari on my phone and laptop just didn’t work. Fortunately I had my laptop with me, and I was able to switch to Chrome.
The system gave me the choice of at a guest house I’m familiar with in Edinburgh, or this hotel out in Falkirk. The guest house would have been closer and less travel, but it’s also kind of meh; this hotel was over an hour away, but it looked nice. Easyjet put me up in the MacDonald Houston House hotel just outside Livingston in 2018 for a flight cancellation, and it was very pleasant, so I decided to give this one a go. It is definitely a bit out of the way – a 2km walk from Polmont station – but it’s plush and comfortable. It’s been a long week, and I think I’ll sleep well tonight.
Hotel biscuits!
Books
⭐️ Dave Hutchinson – Europe in Autumn, Europe at Midnight, Europe in Winter, Europe at Dawn (the “Fractured Europe” series).
I have a digital subscription to Locus Magazine. I don’t read every issue cover to cover, but I often skim through the book reviews. A few months ago Paul Di Filippo reviewed Where The Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler. I loved Nayler’s book The Mountain In The Sea from 2022, and I’ll pick up this new one sooner or later, but there was a tiny throwaway line towards the end of the review that caught my attention: “Readers who enjoyed Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe books will have already experienced a kind of gonzo, Pynchonesque version of Where the Axe Is Buried.”
I’ve never read any Pynchon, so I don’t know what it was about that sentence that sent me looking for those books. Maybe I’d spotted the name when I was looking at the website of Solaris books after I reading Edward Ashton’s Mickey 17 and Antimatter Blues earlier this year, and was primed to recognize the name? Whatever the case, I bought the first book in the series, Europe in Autumn, and read it while we were on holiday in the Black Forest in May. It starts off as the blurb suggests: in a near-ish future where the European Union has fallen apart and the nations of the continent are crumbling into ever-smaller polities, regular guy Rudy, a chef, finds himself drawn into the shadowy world of the Coureurs des Bois, a secret group dedicated to moving things across all these new borders: documents, packages, people. Gritty cloak-and-dagger spy stuff in a near-future fragmented Central Europe? Sign me up.
But about two thirds of the way through – and I don’t want to spoil this – the book takes a serious left turn, and becomes something else entirely. The bottom drops out of the world in an “oh dang” moment when realization hits. The first book tells a complete story, but it teases more. The second book picks up with a completely different character, but his story and that of chef Rudy are entangled, and a grand arc plays out over the four books in the series. I loved them all – highly recommended.
⭐️ Anthony Horowitz – Marble Hall Murders || Third in the Susan Ryeland series. Some of the novelty of this series has worn off. The “book within a book” device is repeated here, but with a twist. I do enjoy the characters, but it feels like this could be a trilogy that ends.
Films
Black Bag || I’m always up for a tense, tightly scripted, low-key Soderbergh thriller. This didn’t feel like one of his best. It’s meticulous and clever, but there was something sterile about it.
The Gorge || Boy meets girl on opposite sides of a giant, mysterious, scary gorge that under no circumstances are they supposed to descend into. They descend into it. It’s a B-movie, but it’s tense and engaging, and they don’t fuck up the ending.
💩 Longlegs || DAVE. YOU TOLD ME THIS WAS GOOD. I was expecting a kind of existential supernatural dread wedged into a serial killer thriller, but I found it just incredibly slow and dull. Nicolas Cage does Nicolas Cage stuff.
I Saw The TV Glow || This is a very strange film. Fiona and I watched it together. I had hoped for a more conclusive ending, but the film relishes its ambiguity.
⭐️K-Pop Demon Hunters || Wonderful. Simple story, well told. The musical numbers are nothing but bangers, and the animation feels fresh and inventive. Please never make a live-action version of this.
⭐️Wallace and Gromit Vengeance Most Fowl || Fun with gnomes.
💩 The Old Guard 2 || Not fun, no gnomes. Takes all of the excitement and story hooks of the first film, and paints them beige. About 20 minutes before the ending it was obvious that there wasn’t going to be an ending – just a cliffhanger setup for a third film that may or may not ever get made. The cliffhanger wasn’t even very good.
⭐️Uncharted || Surprisingly entertaining! Honestly, I wasn’t expecting this to be any good. I just wanted to watch it because it was on my todo list. Tom Holland as Nathan Drake? Nah. I still don’t buy him as the Nathen Drake of the games, and Mark Wahlberg as Sully is also not great casting. But somehow, just taken on its own terms, this turns out to be a decent adventure film. Big, dumb, physics-ignoring…but a fun romp.
💩 💩 Casino Royale (1967) || What the hell did I just watch. Later Bond films are spy action films, with a slice of humour. This is squarely in the genre “1960s sexy (racist, misogynist) slapstick comedy”, that just happens to have spy action as its “setting”. It has more airs and ambitions than a “Carry On” film, but that just makes it so much worse when none of the elements connect, and none of the jokes land. The song “The Look of Love” is the only worthwhile thing in this film.
⭐️Hit Man || Romantic comedy about a mild-mannered teacher who somehow ends up working undercover sting operations for the police, pretending to be a hit-man for hire. Of course he falls for one of his prospective clients, and of course he can’t let her see the “real” him, so he continues to play the hit man persona for her. But what if the cool criminal is the real him, and the mild-mannered teacher persona starts to melt away? This is based on a real story, which is wild. I’m sure the script takes some liberties, but that’s fine. I enjoyed this a lot.
Jerry and Marge Go Large || Having spent time working in the gambling industry, I found this uncomfortable to watch. It’s a fine film – but I’ve still got bruises. Even though I knew how it was going to turn out, watching ordinary people take on risk that may be beyond their means did not make me feel good.
The Amateur || Nerd revenge fantasy. Somewhat unpleasant.
💩 💩 Canary Black || During the opening scene I was convinced that they were doing a “film within a film” thing, and that the (fictional) director would come out and call “cut” at some point during the terrible action sequence, and then the real story would turn out to be about an actor who was also a spy. But no. They were doing this for real. Once I’ve started watching a film, I don’t often turn it off and stop watching. I made an exception for this one.
The Hunt (2020) || Mildly entertaining but very violent “eat the rich” comeuppance slasher flick.
Fantastic 4 (2025) || It was so nice to go and see a Marvel movie that wasn’t a sequel or a prequel or an obvious setup for another movie. The set-up and pay-off were right there in the film. It had gadgets and thrilling adventure and retro-futurist charm. I feel like the final cut may have lost some sub-plots relating to Ben, because his awkward friendship with the school teacher didn’t go anywhere, and didn’t add anything to the story. But overall: a fun popcorn matinee.
The Thursday Murder Club – This was fine, but not great. The assembled cast was amazing, but I can’t help but feel that I would have enjoyed this more with some unknowns in the lead roles, played out over six episodes of a mini-series rather than rushed into a single film. That’s it: it felt rushed.
Episodic Video (“TV”)
I haven’t finished watching season 2 of Peacemaker yet, but I want to take a tiny victory lap that my memory is still (just barely) functioning. The show introduce an adult version of Chris Smith’s (Peacemaker’s) brother Keith, played by David Denman. He looked so familiar, and I was racking my brain for what else I might have seen him in. Looking for his credits in IMDB didn’t shake anything loose… but I had a fleeting memory of him — or an actor that looked like him? — in make-up to make it look like he had rapidly aged. The memory of the scene felt vaguely science-fictional, and let me to think I might find something in TV Tropes, but still nothing. It had been bothering me for a couple of weeks until last night as I was falling asleep it struck me: Fringe. Turns out it wasn’t David Denman, but rather Eric Lange playing a future loyalist security guard who gets rapidly aged in the 5th season episode In Absentia. Is there some similarity there? Maybe? But even if it isn’t there, I’m glad to have that splinter out of my brain at least.
⭐️The Bear seasons 1-3 || I’d put off watching this, because I thought that watching the behind-the-scenes pressure of a struggling restaurant would be too stressful to be enjoyable. But I did enjoy it when I finally got round to it.
⭐️Severance season 2 || Not as shocking as season 1, and it doesn’t explain all of the mysteries yet – got to save some for season 3 – but it builds on the foundations, and raises the tension.
Murderbot season 1 || I read reviews of this calling it “hilarious”. I found it OK. But it didn’t really light my fire.
💩Ironheart season 1 || Weak, forgettable.
⭐️Dept. Q season 1 || I’m not a big fan of the “genius but asshole” protagonist trope. I’ve seen enough of them in real life at work. But the other characters, the story, and the Edinburgh setting were engaging enough to keep me going, and I really enjoyed the mystery. Alexej Manvelov as Akram Salim was a standout.
⭐️Black Dovesseason 1 || Somewhat contrived spy thriller with a touch of black humour to it. Quite good.
⭐️Creature Commandos season 1 || DC does adult superhero animation. This is better than Marvel’s What If…?
