Without getting ahead of my story, let’s just say that nearly every planet and moon that ever existed in the solar system was consumed by something bigger than itself, and that makes all the difference in the world. Most planets are now inside of a gas giant (Jupiter or Saturn), or inside the Sun; others are inside of Uranus and Neptune. Two or three additional Neptune-mass giants are believed to have existed that were consumed by the Sun or else ejected to roam the galaxy. Diversity is a matter of perspective, of what’s left: we don’t behold any ordinary planets. Almost every planet that ever existed was consumed by something greater; what’s left are the fortunate and the unusual survivors. WHEN THE EARTH HAD TWO MOONS
Given that I have class tomorrow night, it’s good odds my movie-watching for March is completed! My film viewing, like my book-reading, was extremely slow for the first part of the month and then exploded in the second half.
A Simple Favor. 2018. Anna Kendrick! An adorable and earnest single mom (Anna Kendrick) becomes friendsies with Blake Lively, a cynical and charismatic Lady of Business. Then Blake goes missing, and Anna K’s cooking & crafts vlog becomes an odd vector for people getting obsessed with the case and submitting tips. I didn’t know anything about the premise, so it was…er, more racy than expected. It reminded me a bit of Gone Girl – compelling and repellant at the same time – but it turns into a black comedy. The ending was….outrageous. Anna Kendrick continues to be a favorite.
“Secrets are like margarine: easy to spread, bad for the heart.”
Blake Lively: “You are so nice, I have no idea how you’ve lasted this long.” Drunk Anna Kendrick: “I’m not as nice as you think.”
“Let’s sit here and not talk. Let’s sit here and feel lousy and watch the grass grow.”
“CAN I SAY SOMETHING AS THE LADY WITH THE GUN?!”
11.22.63 Okay ,this is a miniseries, not a movie proper, but I watched the entire series through for the second time. I largely enjoyed the film work, acting, and execution, though I suspect some of my enjoyment comes from Sadie Dunhill; between her actor and her character she’s such a lovely character, and the “We did not ask for this room” bit at the end always moves me. I was slightly irritated to realize while watching this that I couldn’t remember the differences between the book and the TV series, aside from the Yellow Card Man who in the series appears to have been a time traveler who found himself trapped after fruitless attempts to change the past himself.
The Irishman, 2019. Why will I happily watch this 3.5 hour movie almost every year but have resisted starting an entire pile of 2-hour movies on account of their being “too long”.? The Irishman is the last in Scorcese’s series of Mob movies, this one tracking the career of Frank Sheeran (Robert de Niro) – an ambitious driver turned fixer associated with the Philadelphia mob bosses Angelo Bruno & Russel Bufalino (Joe Pesci). The movie ultimately turns into a Jimmy Hoffa story, as Hoffa – played by Al Pacino – is disappeared by the mob when he begins chafing at his replacement in the Teamsters Union by Tony Pro, a Teamster captain who was a lot closer to the mob than Hoffa was.
Casino, 1995. Robert DiNiro, Joe Pesci, Frank Vincent, James Woods, Sharon Stone. DeNiro plays Ace Rothstein, who is tapped to manage a mob-owned casino in Las Vegas. His buddy Joe Pesci, a made guy in the Mob who has an unfortunate tendency to mess things up in a violent way, tags along. DeNiro makes things worse by marrying a woman who is obvious trouble and then being fool enough to trust her even after she repeatedly demonstrates she has a bizarre hangup for her former boyfriend, a loser and scam artist. A re-watch for me, but it’s been 20 years. The main thing I enjoyed was seeing Frank Vincent in a minor role; he played my favorite antagonist in The Sopranos, the Shah of Iran AKA Phil Leotardo.
About my Father, 2023. Robert DiNiro plays a Sicilian working-class dad whose son Sebastian is marrying into a hoity-toity WASP family. DiNiro insists on meeting the family before he’ll give Sebastian the family ring used for engagements, and hilarity ensues. While it frequently drifts into the absurd, ultimately it proves to be a sweet story about a father and son. Allegedly based on a true story.
“My dad loves the 4th of July. “ “Why? Because he was in the military?” “No, because it’s the only holiday he didn’t have to buy a gift for.”
License to Wed, 2007. I’m fairly sure I watched this twenty years ago, because I don’t miss anything Robin Williams related. The story is simple: Jon Krasinksi and Mandy Moore want to get married, but Mandy’s family has a tradition of getting married at St. Augustine’s, which is pastored by Father Frank (Robin Williams). The supporting cast has a LOT of people from The Office, including Angela Kinsey and Brian Baumgartner, so I’m guessing it was filmed between Office seasons. The movie bounds from sweet to silly to sacrilegious: it’s a fairly awful depiction of a Catholic priest, from his acceptance of cohabitation before marriage to the fact that he’s wearing gold vestments when it’s plainly not Easter or something comparable. Prop departments, take notice: green vestments are always safest unless you’re telling a Christmas story. Considering that the story is supposed to be about weddings in a religious context, I thought it very peculiar that the theology of marriage was absolutely absent. It’s not surprising given the amount of slapstick humor – this is not a serious film – but still noticeable to me.
Jobs, 2013. Another rewatch: I can’t remember when I first watched this, but during this re-watch all I could think of was “Wow, the Fassbender version is SO much better”. I periodically binge on clips from the Fassbender version because his performance of Jobs is so complex, especially when he’s butting heads with Seth Rogan’s unexpectedly good Steve Wozniak. Anyway, this is a biopic of Steve Jobs featuring Ashton Kutcher, covering Apple from its garage creation to the launch of the iPod, which turned Apple from a struggling tech company into a behemoth.
Two for the Money, 2005. Pacino & McConaughey? Alright, alright, alright! Matt plays a high school football star whose future career in pro ball is blitzed by an injury; while he waits for healing and his attempt to enter the draft again, he starts handicapping sports betting and proves to have quite a knack for it. Al Pacino, who borrows from his Milton in The Devil’s Advocate, is a professional handicapper whose firm gamblers pay for leads; he hires on McConaughey and soon the two are raking in the money – but then McConaughey’s gift seems to disappear. I watched this for the lead actors and that was about the only reason to watch it.
BlackBerry, 2023. This proved to be an all-around interesting movie about the rise and fall of Blackberry, though in my background reading I see that it took liberties with its characters. We see a couple of nerd-engineers who have found a genius idea failing to pitch it successfully, then being bailed out by an corporate insider who is not a techie but who knows how to pitch an idea and run a company. He drives them to greatness, but then his new interests (buying sports teams) and the unexpected arrival of the iPhone enter the picture. I gotta say, I loved the late 1990s/early 2000s nerd culture, from the DOOM t-shirts to the company LAN party paying Command and Conquer. I also read Losing the Signal, a history of the rise and fall of BlackBerry shortly after this, and let me say – the movie took a LOT of liberties with the characters. The corpo was familiar with the field, for instance, and he was not fired for delivering someone else’s pitch; his company was bought out by another and he was made redundant. The book also goes into far more detail on how BlackBerry struggled to adapt to the iphone and its infrastructure: the BlackBerry team weren’t caught by surprise by the iPhone, but the product they’d created was simply too different (in terms of its security architecture) to allow for an easy pivot to the iPhone’s data-driven approach.
Blast from the Past, 1999. A rewatch with the lady-friend. This is an old favorite and one I’ve rewatched many times over the years. A wealthy but eccentric engineer builds a fallout shelter for himself and his pregnant wife: in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, they retreat into it just in case things go southwards. As it happens, one thing does go southward: a jet, which plows into their house and sets off the containment measures. 35 years later, the engineer’s son emerges into a very changed world and hilarity ensues. “Adam” is basically an Ozzie and Harriet kind of guy in a Seinfield world, so most of the humor comes from the dissonance – but so does its charm, because Adam is a sweet guy who makes a couple of friends who don’t know what to make of someone who is so un-cynical. It’s clearly been a while since I watched this, since I was startled to see Nathan Fillon from Firefly and to recognize Sissy Spacek as the mother.
Another Simple Favor, 2025. Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively return as besties-most-likely-to-murder-one-another. If you haven’t watched A Simple Favor, close your eyes and hum if you don’t want spoilers. Blake Lively is out of prison – the prison Anna put her in last time – and is getting married. She’s invited Anna to said wedding. Why? Who knows?! This has the same perverse energy as the first movie – where beauty and funny and menace are all mixed together, where teases and flirts and threats are NOT far apart. As with the first movie, there’s a delicious plot twist that puts things on their head. The cinematography is quite well done, though I can’t give specifics without spoiling a bit. Anna Kendrick is ever adorable, and Blake Lively excels as the attractive but dangerous femme fatale. She shows a lot of acting range here, but again no specifics because of spoilers.
“You’re going to watch your [book] sales and followers soar as you maid-of-honor the woman who tried to murder you! Did I mention it was in Capri? ….if I do try to murder you, it will make an amazing sequel.”
“What did she say to you to convince you to come to this farce?” “Oh….a little emotional blackmail, potential lawsuit, dangling my livelihood over my head. You know, just girlfriend stuff.” “Well. Here’s to murderous girlfriends and murderous exes.”
Mrs. Doubtfire, 1993. Robin Williams plays an irresponsible but loving father who is divorced by Sally Field; after learning that she’s looking to hire a housekeeper (rather than let him spend time with the kids in the afternoons), he decides to ….be an elderly pseudo-Scottish housekeeper! Lots of physical comedy and emotional drama ensues. This is a rewatch for me: I know I watched it in the 1990s on VHS, and at least one time thereafter, but it’s been a long time – like, I don’t think I’ve seen it in my adult life. Portions of the film are MUCH funnier because I understand the film references, from “I’m ready for my close-up!” to the montage where Robin Williams is channeling Tom Cruise in Risky Business.
The Public, 2018. Emilio Estevez is a humble librarian working in Cinncinati’s main library downtown. When a large group of homeless people refuse to leave the library and began barricading the doors, Estevez stays behind. Although at first I thought he was doing this to keep an eye on them and try to meditate the inevitable police situation, as the movie progresses we learn Estevez’ character was once homeless himself, and found sobriety and hope through the library. An interesting movie for class discussion. I had some doubts about how accurately libraries are shown here: there’s no constant din of people’s cellphones, and his homeless people are all very well groomed and read books while they’re occupying the library, as opposed to talking to the voices in their head. To the degree that mental illness shows up here, it borders on being fun eccentricism instead of deeply unsettling and dangerous. I used to have to regularly confiscate hedgetrimmers from a patron who later murdered a woman in a bookstore, so I don’t have the same rosy perspective as say, a comfortable screenwriter.
In my Hail to the Chief series, I am embarking on a Trilogy of Unknowns: Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, and Chester A. Arthur. The only one I’d recognize in a lineup is Arthur because of his wonderful lambchops: they know how to style facial hair back then! Hayes, on first reading , is remarkably like Grover Cleveland, at least one moves past the military record. While Cleveland had no apparent interest in the War, Hayes was a zealous Unionist who served as an officer in the war, taking credit for helping to create the Battle of South Mountain and being wounded in the process. Where they converge is that Hayes became a successful attorney, and on seeking public office, rose to the role of Governor and was known for his dedication to clean government and solid money. Despite this, though, he entered into office under a storm of scandal: because Reconstruction was already fading fast away, there were disputes over who had truly won three states, and particularly who had won Florida. Deciding the vote ultimately came down to a commission, which voted entirely on party lines: the newly appointed President Hayes now had to execute the responsibilities of his office while knowing half the country viewed him as entirely illegitimate. John Quincy Adams labored under similar circumstances, his own election having been decided in the House of Representatives. Hayes applied his principles by being a stick;er for the gold standard, and on ending the spoils system that allowed political offices to be given out as a reward for electoral support, rather than merit. Although he sometimes catches flack for “ending Reconstruction”, the author points out that most of the South had already been ‘redeemed’ by the Bourbons, and that the last three were fast on the way. The North had lost interest in occupying and managing the South, but Hayes did his best to safeguard the new rights of black Americans and to bring the country together again. This biography delivers a strong impression of him as a man of principle, even sticking to his early declaration to only serve one term so that his actions in office would not be predicated on the desire to be popular, only to do the right thing.
(My punny title comes from the fact that Hayes was a huge fan of proto-baseball, and was playing it well before there were standard rules. This was alas, not mentioned here.)
Imagine, dear reader, that you encountered an obviously abandoned composition notebook in a cafe or library, and picked it up to find an invitation to tell your darkest secrets and fears. What would you say? That’s the premise of The Authenticity Project, in which an aging artist’s idea to confess his loneliness starts a chain reaction and creates a tight community from a group of relative strangers: the book passes from hand to hand, moving as far as Thailand before returning to England’s green and pleasant hills. The result is a book that’s a wonderfully sweet story about human connection, but not one that’s saccarine: the book brings people together, but it also creates its own drama, and even without it people are good causing drama all on their own. This was my introduction to Clare Pooley, and I suspect she may be for me a Rachel Joyce-like author on whom I binge.
Although the cast of this book increases steadily as the months wear on, our principle characters are Julian and Monica, both of whom live in the same neighborhood of London. Julian is an aging artist who used to consort with all the high-fashion creators of the day, and has a house filled with outrageous outfits: Monica is an accomplished but frustrated cafe owner, a woman with a background in law and business who instead chose to create a place for people to enjoy good coffee and company in a homey cafe with its own library. Julian confesses his loneliness, and Monica her desire for a husband and family despite being raised to be an archfeminist: she cites the Pankhursts as readily as Christians do Jesus. When Julian leaves the notebook with his confessions about being a poor husband to his late wife, Monica is inspired: she approaches him and asks if he would be willing to teach art classes in her cafe on a weekly basis. This is the nucleus of a community that grows throughout the book; each character brings their own failures and dashed hopes, but they also bring with them a desire to help the other lives they encounter in the book. There are complications, however; two people begin drawing close, but then the woman recoils when she realizes the man knows ‘all about her’ through the book, and another man has deep-seated addictions that he’s not quite finished battling. They will affect both him and the people who have grown attached to him as the book wears on.
This is an incredibly sweet story about found-family and community, and the author nicely balances stress and drama as she tells it. The only fly in the soup is that it might not have happened if people hadn’t so readily provided their real names; the London neighborhood this is set in is cozy enough that people can figure out who the writer are with context. However, Pooley is still able to maintain the tension between reality and appearances even within that context — most tellingly, in one scene where a frustrated young mother spies a couple dancing in a cafe, and yearns for what they want. In reality, the situation is far more complicated, and it makes the tension even more interesting for the reader who is growing to realize that even what’s confessed in the notebook may not be the True Story. I shall definitely be reading more of Ms. Pooley!
Quotations
Julian didn’t avoid the bad memories. If anything, he encouraged them. They were his penance.
Sometimes, Riley wished he’d never found The Authenticity Project. He didn’t like knowing other people’s secrets—it felt like prying. Yet, once he’d read their stories, he hadn’t been able to forget about Julian, Monica, and Hazard. It was like being partway through a novel, becoming invested in the characters, then leaving it on a train before you reached the end.
Govern well thy appetite, lest Sin surprise thee, and her black attendant, Death!
Like Dante’s Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost is a key bit of Christian literature which has shaped people’s understanding of Bible stories in an indirect way; that is, Milton and Dante’s interpretation of Biblical events and places has become our understanding of said events and places, even though they’re extra-biblical. I’ve frequently encountered choice quotes from it over the years and have wanted to properly dig in to it. I should note that this will be a mixed-media review: while I did read the physical book, I also listened to the BBC-4 dramatization of it which gave certain characters powerful expression (Ian McDiarmid as Satan is perfect casting) and others….not. Jesus and Adam sounded rather dainty. God, thankfully, is not: as a matter of fact, when I was lying in bed and listening, I could definitely see his lines being delivered by Aslan.)
Paradise Lost is an English poem which recounts both Satan’s exile from Heaven and Man’s fall from Grace. As we learn, the two are related: the book opens with Satan’s rebellion against the Son, and his and his followers’ subsequent falling from Heaven into Hell, where Satan vows to make a kingdom. The creation of Earth allows him opportunity for greater empire, and the temptation is particularly sweet given that God has created new creatures in His own image, creatures whose fall Satan would dearly loved to effect. Although the Son volunteers to leave heaven to frustrate Satan’s plans, readers are subsequently treated to Satan’s frustrated attempts to get into the garden, finally having to possess the body of a snake — a hateful choice, but one made in spite — in order to access the couple. Milton’s narrative adds a lot to the story, because the archangel Raphael explicitly goes to the garden, tells him the account of Creation, and warns Adam that there’s something rotten in the state of Eden. (Then they discuss heliocentrism, which frankly I was not expecting, but Milton evidently met Galileo.) Alas, Eve has the idea of splitting up to get more done, and Satan is able to use his ability to “speak” as a serpent to convince her — amid enormous flattery — that eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil will similarly uplift her. (Given that I first experienced this while listening to McDiarmid, I couldn’t help but think of Palpatine’s similar seduction of Anakin into the Dark Side with the “Have you heard the tale of Darth Plageius the Wise?” scene.) Then she and Adam prove that codependency has a long pedigree and go down together rather than be separated.
This was an impressive work: Milton’s reputation as as an English stylist is well deserved. There were numerous phrases like “devils to adore for deities” that I immediately had to scribble down and think about. Having read CS Lewis’ Preface to Paradise Lost, I knew already Milton is slightly heterodox, especially in his views on the Trinity: I thought it was interesting that he never refers to Jesus, but rather The Son, placing emphasis on that character’s subordinate relationship to The Father. That connects directly to the text, because Satan is resentful that another creature besides himself is being exalted. Ultimately, Satan’s observation that “myself am hell” proves true: his self-obsession drives him from being chief of the angels to being a petty and spiteful spirit possessing a snake crawling in the dirt.
This is also a challenging book to read for a modern reader, rather like Dante, because there’s a lot of culture we may not be familiar with: Milton drinks deeply from classical culture, with allusions a-plenty, and properly understanding what’s going on relies on knowledge of that (or at least, annotations) and some help with medieval cosmology, as there are lots of astrological connections as well. I wound up making use of three versions of the book to find annotations sufficient, and listened to a lecture from Tony Esolen to boot. (He can perform large portions of the poem from memory, and I say perform rather than recite for a reason.) I definitely enjoyed this, but I think the BBC adaptation went a long way to giving it more life: even when I was reading sections rather than listening to them, I could hear Palpatine-Satan.
Eleanor Oliphant has worked at the same firm every year since she graduated college, and she has an unvarying routine of going home and watching tv while eating packaged meals. On weekends, she drinks vodka by the liter, staying pleasantly drunk until she wakes up Monday morning for another week at the firm. She keeps to herself and finds her coworkers as strange as she suspects they find her. One day, though, an old man crumples to the ground while she’s walking outside, and when she’s called over to help by one of her coworkers, she unwittingly sets on a course that will begin recalling her to life from her prison of routine and isolation. So begins a novel with a fascinating lead character who the reader will quickly realize is hiding some serious trauma — from herself and from those around her. Ultimately it’s a story of a woman facing her demons with a little help from her friends.
Because of my fondness for odd characters like Ove and Arthur Entwhistle, this book has become highly recommended to me. There are some faint similarities, in that this is partially a story of a socially withdrawn and introverted personality being drawn out of herself and into the world again. This struck me from the beginning as a more serious read than any of my previous curmudgeon/Sheldon-esque characters, however — in part because Eleanor is very obviously an alcoholic, and she maintains ties with an emotionally abusive mother, with hints of a very bad history between them. The humor is here in abundance, of course; Eleanor not grasping basic social cues, and being so disconnected from ordinary society that she finds it strange and acts as an alien observer. Both this and A Man Called Ove have mentally troubled characters with tragedy weighing on them, but in Eleanor Oliphant the tragedy weighed heavier on me because the character has closed herself off to everything but a few bad habits. Ove at least had his memories of his wife to dwell in.
This was an interesting novel: I didn’t take it to it as enthusiastically as I have others in this ‘genre’, if it can be called a genre; I think part of that was that I hadn’t expected the trauma along with the weird and whimsy.
Quotations:
If [Jane Eyre] has one failing, it’s that there’s insufficient mention of Pilot. You simply can’t have enough dog in a book.
“Can I get you drink?” the man yelled over the top of the next song. […] “No thank you,” I said. “I don’t want to accept a drink from you, because then I would be obliged to purchase one for you in return, and I’m simply not interested in spending two drinks’ worth of time with you.”
A semi-human bath sponge with protruding front teeth! On sale as if it were something completely unremarkable. For my entire life, people have said I’m strange, but really, when I see things like this, I realize I’m actually relatively normal.
Related: Rachel’s Holiday. Substance abuse & unreliable narrator. The Rosie Project.Presumably-on-the-spectrum character begins a project to find a girlfriend.
Ulysses Grant opens with Josiah Bunting III’s rueful observation that Grant is almost always thought of “General Grant”, never president — despite being the only man between Lincoln and Wilson to serve two consecutive terms. Bunting attributes this to both Grant’s military successes, his modest upbringing and demeanor, and the issues that flecked his presidency. By way of repair, Bunting’s own biography focuses the majority of its attention on Grant’s presidency: the Civil War is over and done before the reader has even gotten halfway through. Grant is an easy president to read about, largely because of his modest stillness and humility: his virtues were ordinary and plain, not dramatic. He did not have the charisma and zeal of a Jackson — with their attendant problems — and does not appear to have been a psychologically complex figure like Nixon. He simply was, “Sam Grant”: son of a tanner, a good soldier, a hard worker, and a dedicated servant of his country. As with a few others in this series, Bunting writes with no neutral pen: he plainly admires Grant and refers to him as truly noble.
I have read the memoirs of Grant before, so I was largely familiar with the tracks of Grant’s life. He was a son of the Midwest, growing up along the Ohio. Only a generation before, this area had been the frontier, and even now it was still being developed. Grant shared the spirit of industriousness the age demanded, launching a livery service even as a young lad. Per his father’s wishes, he entered into West Point and proved himself a superb horseman, but despite this was shunted into the infantry. He did well for himself in Mexico, but found serving as a quartermaster in peace interminably dull. After some head-butting with his superiors, Grant resigned to work his and his wife’s farm in a cabin they built together, but struggled and was effectively rescued by the outbreak of war. Grant had a good mind for logistics and a willingness to attack — two factors that served him well. He rose rapidly as the war developed, and by the time General Lee surrendered, had managed to achieve admiration on both sides. After the acrimony of the Johnson presidency, in which the president and Congress sparred over who had authority to conduct Reconstruction and how it should be achieved — Grant was seen as a unifying force. Despite the scandals that men in high office got up to, Bunting views Grant as a man of unimpeachable character, wholly admirable — especially given his commitment to safeguard the rights of freedmen and to enact better policies in regards to Native Americans. This drew fire from the blackguard Sherman, who regarded his old boss as having gone soft. Nothing is said of more prickly issues in Grant’s history, like his order evicting all Jews from Kentucky. (The order, composed to help squelch supplies flowing to the Confederacy through Kentucky merchants, was later countermanded by Lincoln.) Still, it’s hard not to sympathize with a man who did so much, and yet suffered with cancer in his terminal years and still worked through his constant pain in hopes of providing for his family even as poor investments left him nearly penniless.
Bunting is an interesting author who delights in allusions and quotations — World War 2, Korea, and Vietnam are all mentioned — and clearly delights in writing, sometimes striking Fosses into florid territory. As much as I enjoyed reading this, though, it’s hagiographic in tone and I can see myself looking for something more balanced and substantial, like Chernow’s beefy treatment.
Grant had an amused contempt for book learning in soldiers; such people, he said, “always knew what Frederick the Great did at one place, and Napoleon at another. Unfortunately for their plans, the rebels were always thinking of something else.
Despite coming of age as cellphones were becoming ubiquitous, I developed an immediate dislike for them on arrival; I grudgingly bought one in 2005 when I began working, purely to keep in the car for emergencies, and but was not until 2018 when planning a trip to the Grand Canyon that I bought my first ever smartphone, a Galaxy S7. I therefore missed the BlackBerry age, but have retained a curiosity about them and their role in the ‘history of the future’. Losing the Signal was an interesting history of BlackBerry’s rise and fall, one that shed a lot of light on an era I technically lived through, but was largely oblivious to. The author generally includes all parts of the story, from BlackBerry’s personnel, to tech challenges and struggles with telecom carriers.
To the extent that I was aware of BlackBerries in the mid-2000s, it was as cellphones with internet, or at least email. Not until reading this did I appreciate how wildly inaccurate to BlackBerry’s total story that was: BlackBerry originated as a Research in Motion project that wanted to shake up the pager market by introducing two-way paging, or messaging between devices. In a market cluttered by personal assistant devices, BlackBerry succeeded by optimizing one thing very well: portable, secure, emailing. Only later did the BlackBerry begin operating as a cellphone! As someone who is not familiar at all with the high-tech business world of the late 1990s (my idea of high-tech was a GameBoy Pocket), I was amazed that email alone made the BlackBerry its fortune. True, there was an incredible amount of thought given to the user experience, from the aesthetically-pleasing clicky keyboard to the software the devices used. Designers experimented and guessed as to how first-time users might try to navigate a new tool, and the paths that people groped for were readily provided. A lot of the features implemented into the proto-Blackberry’s software, like automatically capitalizing the first words of sentences or anticipating when new sentences might be beginning, were first implemented here. (As was a ‘wheel’ access tool, borrowed from VCRs and more famously adopted by iPods.) Another aspect that BlackBerry managed to bake in was addiction: even when the device was still in development, executives who were equipped with products to test-drive found them too compelling not to look at every few minutes. Mind, this was before social media or YouTube; here the draw was simply email, and yet it was so compelling to have instant information that companies were forced to ask for phone-free meetings, and families began ‘phubbing’ one another when the BlackBerry invaded consumer markets instead of remaining a business-oriented product.
Unfortunately for BlackBerry, when its great challenger and ultimately successor arrived, the company’s CEOs were distracted — by a patent lawsuit, by an SEC investigation, and by one exec’s obsession with buying a hockey team. Perhaps if attention and money hadn’t been tied up in these matters, they would have taken the threat that Apple posed more seriously. After all, RIM’s chief owner-engineer Mike Lazaridis had opened up an iPhone to discover that it was a full-fledged Mac: BlackBerry wasn’t competing against PDAs and ordinary cellphones anymore, it was sailing into new waters entirely. Customers, too, were surprising: they evidently didn’t care that the battery in these iPhones didn’t even last a full working day; they didn’t care that it operated on a previous gen’s network. They could listen to music, and watch grainy videos, and even use a full browser online instead of a stripped-down mobile one. Unfortunately, as optimized as BlackBerries were for the early 2000s — with a minimalist operating system — in the post iPhone world they were past tense. BlackBerry needed to completely overhaul not only its technology and software, but the entire way they thought about the product — and they were too resistant. The iPhone was a toy, surely? Its text messages weren’t even secure! BlackBerry was the only communication service standing during the chaos of 9/11, it wasn’t going anywhere! ….and yet BlackBerry hemorrhaged marketshare and eventually disappeared. Even as they began grudgingly making devices that were more like iPhones, they kept dragging the past with them — from a ‘clickable’ touchscreen to their very last phone still having a physical keyboard.
This proved an interesting book on multiple levels, both in itself and as a comparison against the BlackBerry movie, which is very loosely based on this. (Very loosely: when asked to compare the two, the author Jacquie McNish replied, ‘Well, the facts are very different.’) It’s a fascinating case study in how people and companies can be absolute trail-blazers, and yet for one reason or another — personal biases, the technologies or partnerships they’ve been locked into — plateau and fade even as newcomers continue down a road that was opened for them.
“At a focus group in Sunnyvale, California, one participant grew antagonistic when shown a device announcing emails with a buzzing noise. ‘If this thing buzzes every time I get an email, you’d better ship it with a hammer,’ he warned.”
“‘Remove think points,’ was one of his favorite phrases. ‘I liked teaching people to put themselves in the minds of the users,’ Lazaridis says. ‘I wanted to get to the point where users prefer to use [the device] to send messages than actually power their computers.’ He believed that using the Leapfrog for email should be so instinctive that users would never have to interrupt their train of thought to hunt for a command.”
“On this day, Lexicon’s staff was assigned to test commuter attitudes about mobile devices. When the questions turned to emails, the results surprised them. Email wasn’t a convenience; it was a stress point. Mentioning the word inspired dread about work piling up in inboxes.”
“The point was driven home in Atlanta, where BellSouth executives, including CEO Duane Ackerman, were among the first users to receive free Blackberries. Before long, they were so addicted that Ackerman forced them to place their devices on the desk during meetings to ensure nobody was distracted. ‘I think that was kind of the closer,’ says Hightower.”
“BlackBerry messages traveled through RIM’s in-house network, which was plugged directly into the carriers. The unique connection gave RIM a back door to sneak in services carriers wouldn’t allow. In the mid-2000s, RIM began shipping Blackberries secretly loaded with sleeper applications. Carriers and customers had no idea the applications existed until RIM sent an alert to BlackBerry users about a software upgrade. Hidden within the digital transmission was a file that unlocked the applications on the device—a web browser and links to popular instant messaging services. Icons immediately popped onto BlackBerry home screens around the world. By the time carriers realized what was happening, millions of customers were using the internet and exchanging instant messages on their Blackberries.”
Today’s prompt from Long and Short reviews is: what genre do you want to read more of in 2026? My science fiction and historical fiction reading last year were both fairly dismal, so….both.
WHAT have you finished reading recently? Treacherous Alliance, Trita Parsi. A history of Israel, Iranian, and American relations.
WHAT are you reading now? Paradise Lost, John Milton, and Losing the Signal, a history of BlackBerry’s rise and fall.
WHAT are you reading next? After The Confessions, Treacherous Alliance, and Paradise Lost, I think I need something fun. I might commit to Summer of 49 by Robert Halberstam, a baseball history about when DiMaggio and Williams were king. Edit: after getting halfway through and wondering what book I’d read so many of these stories in before, I checked RF and lo! I’ve read this one before.
Today’s TTT is books on our spring TBR. As is my custom, I’m going to look back at my previous quarterly TBR to see how I did. I batted .500, which is great by my standards: I read five of the listed titles. Two of the remainder turned out to be monstrously big, and two of them suffered from my subject obsession (the road to Civil War in 1850s America) finally burning itself out.
Teaser Tuesday
“At a focus group in Sunnyvale, California, one participant grew antagonistic when showed a device announcing e-mails with a buzzing noise. ‘If this thing buzzes every time I get an e-mail, you’d better ship it with a hammer,’ he warned. LOSING THE SIGNAL
So, Spring TBR!
(1) Paradise Lost, John Milton. I am currently a third of the way through this, and sometimes distracting myself by listening to the BBC adaptation which has Ian McDiarmid as Satan. Imagine, if you will, Palpatine growling “All is not Lost — the Unconquerable Will, the study of revenge, immortal hate!“. It’s chilling. I’m enjoying Milton’s writing — “Devils to adore for Deities” is a phrase that has stuck with me all week.
(2) Losing the Signal, a history of the rise and fall of BlackBerry. I’ve had this for a few years, but recently watching a very loose film adaptation of it prompted me to finally begin reading it.
(3) I need to circle back and finish a book Cory Doctorow wrote on why the internet has become progressively worse over the last decade or so.
(4) Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier. April means English Literature month here at RF, and I need to address the two EL titles on my Classics Club list. Mansfield Park is on there, as well…..I keep eying its girth and walking away glum.
(5) Backstage at the Ford Theater, an interesting history that focuses on the actors and stagehands who were present when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. I was making serious progress on this one before getting interrupted.
(6) Black Baseball in Alabama. A new release I’ve not gotten to read yet, despite trying to help the author when he was doing local research. (Turns out a Selma son played for a Harvard team and was nearly recruited by a Boston pro club: in an alternate universe, perhaps people know the name William Clarence Matthews as readily as they know Jackie Robinson in ours.)
(7) GIRLS: Gen Z and the Commodification of Everything, Freya India. One of my favorite substack authors, Freya India of GIRLS, writes on the digital world and the female Gen-Z experience.
(8) Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America, Walter Borneman
(9) When the Earth Had Two Moons. It’s closing on the end of March, I really need to get moving on my science reading for this year. O_O
(10) Something by Annie Jacobsen. She’s written books on nuclear war, the CIA, Area 51, and other topics that, if you brought them up at a dinner party, you would be received with a ‘Oh, would you mind if I stepped to the bathroom for a minute’ and then promptly ghosted.
Reading Freely 