Doom is the prefix du jour. Doomscrolling, doomposting, doomsplaining, doomspreading, doomgooing, and doomliving dominate discourse. (Ok, I made the last two up.) Doom joins other recent meme morphemes—the suffixes -maxxing, -pilled, and -slop—in giving our discussions about a contemporary life an overtly negative cast. Doomspending, in particular, has become synonymous with the declining fortunes of young Americans.
I have come to realise that looking for inspiration is not the best way to find it. I’ve also learned that inspiration doesn’t always have to come from an external input. Some people say, “I have to travel or go to an exhibition or read.” Yes, I can read a book and feel inspired, but I can also just be alone. You could lock me up in a cage, I think, and maybe the most amount of inspiration would come then.
OPERATIONS: I need to get some overdue stuff out the door and then sit and think for several hours STATUS: Desperately wanted to get out of the house today, but work isn’t going to let me READING:THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+) DRINK:Flint Vineyard Charmat Rose
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
I needed a new belt in a shade of brown, to match the brown straps on two watches I’ve recently bought. Just for the hell of it, I added “vintage” to the search string on eBay, simply to see if it threw up anything interesting. This showed up, a Sergio Cerruti Roma leather piece. It’s from the 1990s.
Vintage. 1990s.
I need to go and lie down.
OPERATIONS: yesterday was an utter clusterfuck, so today is all scripting STATUS:
Made an ice cream base using 300ml of coconut cream, as I’m still trying to create dark chocolate Bounty ice cream. Missed it last night – touched it with cacao to bring the dark up, and covered the coconut. Experiments will continue. Tonight I will be essaying a cherry sorbet.
READING: THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+) LAST WATCHED: rewatched MEGALOPOLIS
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
A couple of days after it reached town, I went to see the film adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel PROJECT HAIL MARY, directed by Lord & Miller and written by Drew Goddard. Goddard wrote the screenplay for the other Weir adaptation, THE MARTIAN, directed by Ridley Scott, in which Matt Damon once again has to be expensively rescued from something. (Someone once calculated that, in total, it would have cost some $900 billion to rescue Matt Damon from shit all those times.) Weir wrote another novel after THE MARTIAN, entitled ARTEMIS, which didn’t seem to be as well-received. And so it seems he went back to the good well for PROJECT HAIL MARY, which is about another brilliant guy abandoned in space.
Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spaceship eleven light years from Earth with no memory of how he got there or why. Most of his memory comes back during the first act.
Ryland Grace was once a molecular biologist, but, after a poorly received paper on how alien life wouldn’t necessarily need water, he quit and become a middle-school teacher. In that role, he has to explain to kids how the discovery of star-eating cells discovered on the sun means they’ll all be dead in thirty years. And that’s when the head of an international project to save the world shows up at his school to draft him, having read his paper.
The cells are all over our region of the galaxy – aside from one star eleven light years away. Once they discover those cells output a huge amount of energy, there’s only one option left – use them to power a mission to that star, find out why that star is uninfected, and send the cure home on small probes. And there’s only enough main-mission fuel for a one way trip.
Not long after Ryland Grace gets there, he discovers he’s not actually alone – there’s an alien spacecraft nearby, from another infected star. It too only has one occupant. First contact, at the end of the world – for two worlds.
I don’t want to go the spoiler route – even though the book has been out for years and the film is an extremely faithful adaptation – so everything I’ve just said is in fact in the first act. It’s a big, long, packed film.
THE MARTIAN is, of course, competence porn in a Heinlein style. There’s some of that to HAIL MARY the novel, but this time it is undercut by the revelations about past events, and that’s maintained in the film. Also maintained, however, is one of my favourite things about the book – two smart beings in first contact solving mutually intelligible speech in a matter of weeks. It works very enjoyably on screen, and they even throw in a new joke or two.
One of the oddnesses about the book is that Grace presents as a little autistic and asexual. There’s a brief mention of a college girlfriend called Linda, but only in terms of the fact that she brought a lot of untidy crap into his neat little apartment, which is in itself something of a signal. He’s not great at making connections. In the book, I got the sense that he was really only comfortable around kids. This may just be me, but I spent the book feeling like there was something off about Grace. The problem the film had to solve was, basically, that Grace was being played by Ryan Gosling. Drew Goddard’s main fix is two lines of dialogue, tying into an overall slight reframing of Grace as conflict-averse, still childlike but also playful and personable in a faintly awkward and insecure way that fits with Gosling. That fix is masterful in its wise simplicity.
There’s an angle on the film where it is, in fact, about a person having to grow all the way up.
Goddard’s solves for the adaptation are, in fact, all brilliant. It’s a gold standard class. Even when his fixes are additive, they are only mildly so, visually driven and smooth as silk.
The first five minutes, Grace waking up from his induced coma on the ship, are played for laughs, and that was smart too. In his book ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE, William Goldman talks about the first two or three pages of the script for HARPER. Paul Newman wakes up in the office he lives in, gets ready for the day, goes to make coffee – and the coffee can is empty. He looks in the bin. Sees old coffee grounds in there. Looks down at them with resignation. Puts them in the coffee machine. Finishes getting ready. Pours the coffee. And makes a face like he’s sucked piss off a nettle. Everyone laughs at the face Paul Newman makes. From that point on, you like him. Because we’ve all been there and we can’t help but laugh at the face he pulls. Same thing happens here. Those five minutes get us on Ryan Gosling’s side. It’s a hard science fiction film, the concepts will always be a bit complicated, but now we are going to stick with it because we are on that guy’s side.
It is beautifully shot. Even the frames in that opening funny scene are gorgeously done, eccentric and wonky and fun. The cutting is fantastic, veering from classical to juddering. The big set piece towards the end is almost psychedelic in its colouring. The set design is REALLY clever – at times it almost reminded me of the wonderful interiors in 2010: THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT. A particularly intelligent move was putting controls and screens on ALL the surfaces because the ship is designed to be operated in zero gravity. It is notable how many of the sets are physical. I’ve read that there’s next to no green-screen in this film, and I have to say, it felt like it. It feels like the last of the classically made physical-production big science fiction films.
The alien Rocky, an actual physical puppet by all accounts, moves like a drunken cat. It sees by echolocation and Lord & Miller do flashes of Rocky-vision in ways that remind you they directed the Spider-Verse films. One wonderful touch is that Rocky has “tattoos,” incisions on his rocky form. Every element feels considered.
The big reversal in PROJECT HAIL MARY comes at about the point it did in THE MARTIAN, and broadly has the same effect – it stops the film’s momentum dead, and it has to spin up again. In THE MARTIAN, it spins back up successfully. Not so much here, because it comes after the big effects-heavy set-piece – a set-up you probably shouldn’t think about too hard – and for me the film kind of crept to the end after that. Your mileage will likely vary. You can’t fault Goddard for sticking to the novel’s structure, but the loss of energy is real.
It’s a good film. Like the book, it’s clever, and the filmmakers get a real ride out of it, with a decent number of laughs. (If you read the book, you will be pleased to know that “fist my bump” made it into the film.) I’m still surprised it was released in March, as I think it has summer film written all over it. But nobody’s going to be sad about a big smart well-made blockbuster brightening the spring.
It’s fun. You won’t regret seeing it at all. If you’re a writer, read the book and then watch the film and study Goddard’s choices – you will learn some things. And Lord & Miller and Drew Goddard will get to make anything they fucking want to after this because after this weekend it will have made $160 million in the US alone, the best even opening for a non-franchise film in a March frame. Rough rule of thumb – the studio gets half of domestic box office and a third of foreign. HAIL MARY cost something over 200 mil, I believe. It will earn out in the next few weeks, as it’s only going to drop 42% in the US this weekend.
Bad news: there is already talk of a sequel.
Not out on physical media yet, because it’s on Prime Video (UK) (US+)
(Originally written on my newsletter, 29 March 2026)
Well, the heatwave is here. Today is linen trousers, thin socks and one of the 100% cotton popover tops I get from from a manufacturer in Tibet, which are remarkably durable.
Today begins a much less connected season, in a way. I managed to read the top ends of four newspapers and four news/magazine sites this morning. (If anyone’s keeping up, the current stack is: The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Economist, BBC News, Politico and Foreign Policy.) I am gathering up the print objects that have gone unread so far this year, and last night I started catching up with the Times Literary Supplement and The Wire after I squeezed a litre of organic orange juice. (The Zulay (UK) (US+) is the best squeezer I’ve ever had.)
The honest response to all this, for someone like me, isn’t to write a manifesto. It is to build something small, and then to use it, and then to invite a few other people to use it, and to see what happens. Not a revolution. A tree.
That is what Tuhat is. Tuhat is Finnish for one thousand, and the rule is exactly that — every post must be at least a thousand words. No notes. No threads. No hot takes. No algorithm sorting writers into winners and losers based on how often they post or how spicy their headlines are. You get a page at tuhat.net/u/you, and your readers find you the old fashioned way, through a URL, an RSS feed, or an email subscription you actually own and can export as a CSV.
The constraint is the point. A thousand words is enough room to make an argument, tell a story properly, or sit with something difficult without rushing to a punchline. It is also enough friction that nobody publishes here for the dopamine of it. If you don’t have something you genuinely want to say, you won’t bother. That is by design.
John Coulthart:
a further evolution of a form of digital drawing I’ve been developing, a process in which you draw a portion of the picture then copy and paste it to a new layer, distort it slightly using one of Photoshop’s Distort filters, then draw over and around the new section until it blends seamlessly with the rest. This has the effect of creating unpredictable forms that underly the work as a whole, rather like the Surrealist techniques of frottage, grattage, decalcomania and so on. The Surrealist processes were all the product of physical materials but the impulse is the same whatever technique you may use: the introduction of a random element that might evade the conscious input of the artist and the habitual strokes made by the drawing hand.
However bad a writer you think you are, you are not worse than AI. But you still keep letting it do your writing for you, as if I won’t be able to tell. Listen: I can tell. I can always tell. You think I won’t notice, but I will. There’s no hiding from me. If you let AI do your writing I will find out, and I will kill you.
OPERATIONS: am behind. STATUS:
I have taken my FitBit off, because the app was “updated” to Google Health and now it hallucinates bicycles.
I have just taken delivery of two cases of ale from Williams Bros brewery and a case of wine from Flint Vineyard. Flint is a Norfolk vineyard that makes an exceptional sparkling, and William Bros is the home of the Fraoch heather ale and a remarkable summer ale called Birds And Bees.
Four phone calls before noon suggests that this is going to be a difficult day for focus.
READING:THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+) LISTENING: SUPER-HEAVY HAMOAZIAN REVERIE, Urthona LAST WATCHED: SCARFACE (1983), because you always drop the remote when SCARFACE comes on. Also, THE RUNNING MAN (2025), and finished watching THE BOYS, and did two episodes of British period crime show LEGENDS. DRINK: found a 25 year old Lagavulin in the back of the cupboard
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
After all, one did not write a book for other people. Any more than one wrote it for an already existing self. One wrote it, in fact, to renew one’s own self in the process of writing, and creatively go beyond its previous limits. Or in other words: to transcend oneself. Thus it is not for others that each person transcends himself; one writes books and invents machines that were demanded nowhere.
I’ve resigned myself to the idea that I will read fewer books this year, because the ones in my stack are generally long and difficult. It took me several weeks to get through THE VISIONARIES by Wolfram Eilenberger, which is not as well-written as the other book by him I’ve read, TIME OF THE MAGICIANS, and since both books have the same translator, the busted sentences, tangled syntaxes and wild tonal inconsistencies are all on Eilenberger and his original editor.
It is, despite that, full of good stuff.
It follows the lives of four female philosophers – Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Ayn Rand and Simone Weil – in the period 1933-1943, showing their intellectual emergence and comparing and contrasting their lives. They didn’t really know each other: de Beauvoir and Weil met once, and de Beauvoir records that meeting:
I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: “It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry,” she snapped. Our relations ended right there.
Its biggest problem is tonal – it veers between warmly autobiographical, admiring and accepting, critical and faintly shitty (especially in de Beauvoir’s case). But it does, remarkably, make you want to root for the young Ayn Rand. And when he stops reifying Weil’s hallucinations and frowning on de Beauvoir’s love life, he surfaces a ton of wonderful and useful things, and it’s worth the money just for that.
But in Weil’s view the human being is not small enough. Because in comparison with the transcendent infinity with which Dasein faces God, the infinity of the social is only a secondary and derivative substitute, earthbound and hence practically diabolical. Weil joins with Plato in describing this sphere of the social and of social pressure as “the Great Beast”: “Obedience to the Great Beast: that is wherein the social virtues lie.”
…in the Notebooks Weil’s critique of “the great We” goes far beyond this commonplace, and quite fundamentally takes aim against the sphere of the social as the ultimate object of moral action (in whichever form). Even Ayn Rand could not have put it in such extreme terms: “Man is a social animal, and the social element represents evil.”
I have had an incredibly unproductive week so far, at a very bad time in my schedule to be out of juice, so I am taking the long bank holiday weekend to get back on track and reset and prepare. I need to get sixty pages out, reply to a ton of emails and messages, deal with a shedload of life stuff, put the fucking phone down for a while and actually get around to finalising and enacting my small plans for this website.
Today is St Helena’s day, patron saint of archaeologists.
OPERATIONS: ALL THE THINGS STATUS: inbox 175, rss 1000, everything is out of control READING: THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)
By Christmas 1975, the CIA’s optimism about the broad political situation in the Middle East was accompanied by a relatively sanguine view of the threat from terrorism too. The December edition of its monthly summary of international threats ended with an unusual warning. On the night of the 24th of the month, the agency said, a ‘new organisation of uncertain makeup using the name The Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge’ was planning ‘to sabotage the annual courier flight of the Government of the North Pole’. Security precautions were being co-ordinated worldwide and the ‘prime minister [of the North Pole] and chief courier S. Claus had been notified’.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Annoyingly, this is just a quick logging, as I lost yesterday to trying to figure out new accounting software I’ve been told to use which doesn’t seem to want to work for me, inbox is at 160, I have three unopened packages, and I’m a few days behind on work production.
So on Saturday afternoon I went to the Jazz Centre to see blues guitarist Chris Corcoran play.
And on Saturday evening I went to Konsztrukting Soundz, which I’m going to try and note in a separate post at some point, but one of the performers was harpist Rhodri Davies:
Accessions:
Rhodri Davies was selling CDs, and I noticed the Eliane Radigue piece he and his sister played on that I discovered online in January, and grabbed his TELYN RAWN at the same time.
I spent last night looking at cheap vintage watches on eBay. Usually I come up empty – nice things that I don’t necessarily want to spend the asking price on, or broken junk. Turned up some fascinating things in my self-imposed price bracket last night. Expensive watches are nice, but the fun for me is in finding a bargain-priced weird thing I have never seen before that I love. The watch has to say something to me. There’s a terribly beaten-up 80-year-old Swiss watch I have a bid on, just because something about its design spoke to me. And here’s the thing about 80-year-old Swiss watches – they still work.
“Writers are fleeing the Substack Tax” – by which they mean certain very successful paid newsletter operations have noticed Substack takes 10% of subscription fees to run a business that is otherwise free to use
He was called the “Wizard of the Kremlin,” and the “new Rasputin.” At the time, his role was not clearly defined. He would show up in the president’s office when the business of the day was done. It wasn’t the secretaries who’d called him. Maybe the tsar himself had summoned him on his direct line. Or he’d guessed the right time on his own, thanks to his extraordinary talents, which everyone acknowledged without being able to say exactly what they were.
This is a cracking little book. Vladislav Surkov, a businessman and politician with a background in theatre, was Putin’s “grey cardinal” for twenty years, behind some of Russia’s creepiest psyops. da Empoli was so fascinated by this man and the mystique behind him that he created a fictional version, Vadim Baranov, who came from an aristocratic family line, avant-garde theatre and reality tv to help place Putin in power and become the Wizard of the Kremlin.
A BBC journalist had made a documentary arguing that Baranov was the man responsible for bringing the techniques of avant-garde theater into politics.
When you think of it… the first half of the twentieth century was just that: a titanic confrontation between artists. Stalin, Hitler, Churchill. After them came the bureaucrats, because the world needed a rest. But today the artists are back. Look around you. Wherever you look, there is nothing but avant-garde artists who, instead of depicting reality, are busy creating it. Their style is the only thing that has changed. Today, instead of the artists of yesteryear, we have reality-show personalities. But the principle is the same.
This is Baranov’s story, often apparently closely paralleling Surkov’s – and pretty much all the other characters in the book are not fictional, and neither are many of the things that happened, really. Yes, it’s fiction, but it rides alongside the actual facts of twenty years. The framing of the story is gloriously classical: a writer looking for Baranov is conveyed to Baranov’s house in the woods at night, and Baranov tells his story by the fireside.
“Ah, Baranov,” he said, “there you are, the Wizard of the Kremlin, Putin’s Rasputin. Do you know what people are saying about your ‘sovereign democracy’? That it is to democracy what an electric chair is to a chair.”
da Empoli is a political scientist, and he provides an interesting angle on Russia as humiliated by the Yeltsin years, feeling like it was colonised by the West in those years, and Russia as a country of extremes. From one perspective, they even did laissez-faire capitalism bigger than anyone else. It’s funny, scary, completely fascinating and a little melancholy. Recommended without reservation.
There’s a film adaptation coming, with Paul Dano as Baranov and Jude Law as Putin.
THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN, Giuliano da Empoli (UK) (US+)
