Samarth Bhaskar Samarth Bhaskar

What I highlighted the weeks of July 10, 2023

Articles

  • The Long Annoying Tradition of Anti-Patriotism

    Anti-populism, along with its cousin anti-patriotism, is an elite response to demands from below to change a social hierarchy, which is why it’s so pervasive today, at a moment when the public is angry. I saw it all the time when researching corporate power - which is the bedrock of our social hierarchy. It was particularly pronounced during the New Deal. In 1933, upon the ascendance of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for instance, Columbia University Nicholas Murray Butler told incoming freshmen that Totalitarian dictatorships are putting forward “men of far greater intelligence, far stronger character, and far more courage than the system of elections.”

  • Mark F-king Zuckerberg Is Not Your Friend

    We all know how this works. Bots, farms, artificial boosting, algorithms, astroturfing, paying influencers, brands, and celebrities to migrate without saying they were paid. We are not new here. Asking Facebook to not fake engagement and steal data is like asking Canadian goose not to rip anyone’s face off. That is, fundamentally, what it does and what it’s for.

  • Who Employs Your Doctor? Increasingly, a Private Equity Firm.

    “Private equity is like the system on steroids,” said Sherry Glied, the dean of the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University. “Every time there’s an opportunity for making money, P.E. is going to move faster than everyone else. And consolidation is the way to do that.”

  • New to me was this Job Decision Matrix and some other linked resources about career development which resonated with how I've thought about career development recently. Relatedly, this life and parenting philosophy about doing hard things resonated for me, especially for career development.

    The key thing is to really try to decide which bucket is MOST important and which is LEAST important I’m regularly surprised when a mentee hasn’t thought about what kind of people he/she wants to work with.

  • The barely believable after-work activities of young people in 2002 was a fun read to remember some parts of my early career professional life. My version was a bit later, like 2010, and more as an intern and junior analyst rather than NYC media professional who are mostly discussed in this piece. But I remember lots of coffee and bagel runs, long meandering conversations in the company cafeteria over lunch and post-work city outings in DC and Chicago like concerts in the park and happy hours around town.

  • Gokul's S.P.A.D.E. Toolkit was a useful re-discovery as I'm spending more time in a new role as a Series A exec. Working with founders, new incoming execs, adapting to a new culture requires lots of meshing of decision making styles. And this is a good tool toward consensus building.

Music

  • I also discovered two older albums this week that I've been loving:

Movies

  • Biosphere was a pretty good Duplass Bros movie, kind of like "The One I Love" with a relatively simple SciFi-lite setup and a 2nd and 3rd act that escalates the stakes hanging mostly on excellent central performances. The choice of acapella music made it feel closer to "Swiss Army Man" than I imagine the filmmakers intended. Still, something affecting about this, for me, a man with many close male-male friendships.

  • Joy Ride was a riot and a blast to watch in the theater. And when I whispered, "that's Baron Davis, he used to date Laura Dern" to my wife in the theater, that felt like our own personal "that's Chappy" moment to me.

  • Beau Is Afraid was a tough hang. I found the project (Jewish neuroses, guilt and paranoia magnified and explored) admirable but the execution...did not work for me.

TV Shows

The Other Two S1 and S2 were very funny, breezy and had multiple laugh-out-loud lines per episode.

Books

I re-read parts of Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson, still among my favorite short story books ever. The first story, "Nirvana," felt once again very relavant as LLMs have come into the zeitgeist more.

Podcasts

This A24 pod with Julia Louis-Dreyfus & J. Smith-Cameron was a delight. Full of hilarious stories from the sets of Veep and Succession. And an amazing interlude where Kenneth Lonergan shows up and JLD tries to convince him to see the new "Spidyverse" movie and Lonergan talks about Spider-Man as a tragic figure. Great stuff.

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