In Recovery and Dystopian Science Fiction
When life gets too negative (dystopia) there is always hope - even if "nowhere" in Reality (utopia)
A. Australian tennis player Alexei Popyrin is in recovery. Part of his solution? Reading classic dystopian science fiction and fantasy novels like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): you know, the one that everyone can quote from, but most people forget how it ends. Popyrin has accepted his medical condition and is committed to reading one book a week. This therapeutic modality is called bibliotherapy.
B. When I majored during my BA in cinema studies / film criticism at La Trobe University, auteur theory on key directors was a Big Thing. This occurred in the 1960s in Europe and then migrated to the United States as the Classical Hollywood production system (and the related Hays Code) ended in the late 1960s. New producers and directors emerged. They looked to Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave for creative lessons - such as how to make films with very little money. The New Yorker has profiled the French New Wave this week. If you have a city council library subscription to the free Kanopy streaming platform, they have lots of French New Wave films available to view for free. You can now save the student loans I paid off for my BA and become a “Film Bro” or “Film Gal” at your leisure.
C. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Human Factors Engineering.
D. The popular channel Gary’s Economics has done a 36-minute guest interview on Punters Politics about Australia’s economy. TL;DR: things are pretty catastrophic and will only likely get worse. One reason is that comparator countries like Norway have a sovereign wealth fund that “value captures” most of its exports and has a social democratic redistributivist social system. Australia instead has a minerals and mining-driven “resources curse” (see: University of Sydney). Stevenson’s book The Trading Game (London: Penguin, 2024) is now a bestselling execution trader memoir.
E. Cory Doctorow (Craphound; Pluralistic) spoke at Cloudfest 25 about enshittification (how and why digital platforms and internet services get worse and companies still profit). Verso Books publishes Doctorow’s new book on 14th October 2025.
F. For dog lovers like me, Good Boy (2025) will be the scariest movie of the year (trailer).