I finally saw Eddington.
SPOILER ALERT
(WARNING: Light spoilers ahead! If you haven’t seen Eddington yet and you plan to, use your own judgment in deciding whether to read this next bit. I won’t get upset if you skip to the next part of the newsletter.)
I saw Eddington late Sunday night with my friend Gaby and a very new friend of hers. An insane experience. We spent the whole movie whispering to each other that we were losing our goddamn minds. I thought it was hilarious that we were watching this movie with this guy neither of us knew very well and then it turned out to be this weird intimate experience where we all basically had a mental breakdown together—that’s New York for you!
When we came out of the movie theater it was late, and the streets of Manhattan were basically empty. I felt like I could run a marathon fueled purely by my anxiety. At the time I thought I didn’t like it, but a few days later it’s grown on me a bit. I think I like a lot of different things about the movie but it just doesn’t come together for me.
Here’s what it’s not: a centrist movie, a movie making fun of the Black Lives Matter movement, a horseshoe theory movie. I don’t know what Ari Aster’s politics are and I’m sure he has some terrible opinions, but they’re not really relevant here. It is really uncomfortable watching him take shots at the (mostly white) teenagers protesting police violence in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, but I think we should all be honest with ourselves that this is what white people sound like. And whether or not they’re sincere about their commitment to anti-racism, they are still eventually proven right. What Sheriff Joe Cross claims is “not a here problem”, as if racist policing and state violence only exists in Minneapolis, does eventually come home to roost. Who is looking out for Lodge, the homeless man who literally brings the plague into the town? Certainly not the state.
If this movie is about anything it’s this: everyone across the political spectrum has a little piece of the truth and not much else, and in 2020 that little piece of the truth was amplified and distorted through algorithmic silos, garden-variety American alienation, and the crazy-making loneliness of the pandemic, until we all lived in totally different realities mediated by the screens we’re all addicted to. I agree with Aster that people who I share a political worldview with are not saved by the righteousness of it. If you look at crazy people and you think to yourself that you could never be like that, I think that’s probably the surest sign that you are susceptible to paranoia and delusions of your own.
The movie is bookended by a focus on the SolidGoldMagikarp data center, yet to be built in the beginning of the movie and unveiled by the end. All of that paranoia, delusion, violence, destruction all for the data center to be built as if nothing had happened. It’s heavily implied that the corporation fomented the destruction of the last act (Antifa private jet???) to achieve their own ends. I think Aster’s trying to say that nothing ultimately matters except for the corporations extracting everything from us. How very Marxist of him.
On the New Yorker podcast Critics at Large, hosts Alexandra Schwartz, Vinson Cunningham and Naomi Fry discussed Eddington in the context of “the American berserk”, a phrase from the novel American Pastoral by Philip Roth. If you haven’t read it, here’s the gist: Seymour Levov, nicknamed “the Swede”, is a Jewish former high school football star who has the perfect all-American life; owns a successful glove factory inherited from his dad, beauty queen wife, adorable daughter, house in rural New Jersey, could pass for a WASP. Then the 60s rolls around and his daughter, now a teenager, commits an act of political violence protesting the war in Vietnam that destroys his family and his sanity. What Roth calls the “indigenous American berserk” is the idea that spectacular violence is intrinsic to American life, that we’re all a crisis or two from losing our minds because it’s baked into the society we live in. Well, we know that’s true. Donald Trump is president.
I read American Pastoral for the first time earlier this year. I liked it but I felt a similar sense of vertigo to Eddington. They have completely different tones; Eddington covers a lot of ground, while American Pastoral is entirely in the mind of the narrator, a stand-in for Roth, speculating on the inner life of the Swede. Unlike Eddington, American Pastoral is firmly liberal in its sensibilities. Roth is firmly against political violence and a believer in institutions, and he spends the entire novel bemoaning what could have been. Being in Philip Roth’s head is exhausting. So is living in America, or being on the internet. Aster, on the other hand, doesn’t try to appeal to anyone’s sense of decency or morality. He knows America is fucked and he doesn’t think there’s any going back.
I think maybe Eddington was made too soon. We’re still living in the crises brought about by 2020 and the dust hasn’t settled, so it’s hard to determine what to make of it just yet. If everything is a distraction from the fact that Big Tech rules our lives and extracts from us at every opportunity, that implies that tech companies don’t have an ideology beyond pure profit. That’s not true; they are ideologically right-wingers. Peter Thiel and his compatriots got to define what tech is and who it’s for, for at least the next couple of decades. I’m sure when they began production on this movie a couple of years ago that seemed less obvious, but in 2025 we all saw Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and Sundar Pichai at the Trump inauguration.
It’s hard to make a movie about America right now because reality is stranger than any fiction you could come up with. Still, I think Eddington did a good job of capturing just how bad one feels all the time. It’s basically a two and a half hour long psychotic episode. A nice distraction from the ongoing psychosis of everything around us!
AI Super PACs are gearing up to spend hundreds of millions next year. The crypto industry spent over $130 million on the 2024 election, outspending virtually every other corporate interest group. It worked—they elected 269 pro-crypto members of Congress, more than twice the number of crypto skeptics in Congress. Now the AI industry wants to massively upend the scale of campaign finance spending yet again. I think progressives should figure out how to compete against that kind of spending NOW. We can’t afford another cycle where big money buys up everything and the left acts all self-righteous about it.
New York has lead in the water. Good news: you can get a lead testing kit for free. Bad news: It’s unclear that will make much of a difference.
Blackbird Spyplane did important investigative journalism into J.Crew’s new, apparently AI-generated ad campaign. Insane insane insane thing for them to do. Isn’t the point of preppy style how human and physical it is—untucked shirts, breezy linens accepting of wrinkles, worn-in boat shoes, all that? J.Crew obviously has the money to spend on high-quality creative direction and it’s bizarre that they would go this route when they have the cultural cachet to to build interesting things. I need someone to explain to me like I’m five years old what an “AI photographer” is.
We might see an end to obesity in the next few decades. Once these pills are fully on the market, I’d like to see some stats on how popular GLP-1s are among people who were at a healthy weight originally. If I owned any shares in fast food companies I’d probably short them soon. (Don’t take stock advice from me, I don’t have any money.)
The NFL is concerned about prediction markets blowing up. "If we are gambling, then I think you're basically calling the entire financial market gambling." You’re almost there, man. Now that Donald Trump Jr.’s VC firm is investing millions into Polymarket, I wonder if this will become another cultural rift in the MAGA coalition.
Free Greenland!!!! Obviously I don’t think the US has any business in Greenland, but the end of this story suggests that maybe the Danish status quo wasn’t so great for Greenlanders either….