Friday, October 9, 2026

Quick one this week as I'm traveling the world searching for the perfect corn dog.

Item 1: a link

Wolmania favorite Max Read's essay for Criterion about how Hollywood anticipated the economic hellscape in which we all fight desperately for the crumbs falling off billionaires' tables:

From a distance—looking down, say, from a penthouse office in a glass-paned downtown skyscraper—the U.S. economy of the 1990s and early 2000s could feel almost boring. Between Black Monday in 1987 and the Global Financial Crisis twenty years later, growth was steady, markets were mostly stable, and inflation was historically low. The “central problem of depression prevention”—that is, the key aim of economic policymaking since the 1930s—“has been solved,” the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas argued in 2003; dissenters to this rosy view of the dismal science were dismissed as cranks and luddites.

Whoops! Not quite two decades on from the Great Moderation, we find ourselves still stumbling through the social, political, and economic hangover it left behind. Rampant deregulation, accelerating deindustrialization, and an increasingly financialized and computerized economy gave us the GFC, and the vastly unequal economy it left in its wake—channeling gains toward capital, speculators, and a small number of professionals, while leaving workers in the lurch—helped birth the reactionary populism now tearing up global trade.

But how could the economists have known? Well, maybe they should have gone to more movies. In the years between Black Monday and the GFC, Hollywood—itself corporatizing, consolidating, and financializing in a surge of mergers and acquisitions—produced a wave of corporate thrillers driven by anxieties about the economic transformations grinding away in the background of steadily growing GDP. Viewed from the C-suite and the private jet, the economy may have looked fine. But seen from the movie-theater seat and the Blockbuster aisle, it was quite clear something sinister was happening.

A number of sinister things, actually.

Item 2: a list

American Babybel Flavors, Ranked:

1. Monterey Jack
2. Cheddar
3. Gouda
4. Original Cheese
5. Mozzarella
6. Reduced Fat Cheese
7. Pro (Protein + Probiotics) Snack Cheese

Item 3: a media recommendation

Item 4: word of the week

Quincunx

My brother was always a picky eater, refusing to touch his dinner if the vegetables were touching the meat. And I'm sorry to admit that I was even worse: I wouldn't eat my food unless the components were arranged in a quincunx. Suffice it to say that college was utterly embarrassing until I finally got comfortable with squares and triangles.

Item 5: an image

See ya!

Thank you for your time and attention. See you in a couple of weeks with my corn dog findings.