Welcome to Issue #037 of Zen in the Art of Fighting

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Five Things Worth Sharing

1. One Good Picture: A Birthday for the Books

My birthday was on Saturday, and aside from the ninety-degree heat, it was a pretty perfect day, balancing mind, body, and spirit, celebrating the completed year and setting the tone for the year ahead:

• Morning: trained jiu-jitsu with friends and got a facial
• Afternoon: scored some tacos in Marietta and visited a gorgeous Hindu temple/campus outside of Atlanta
• Evening: had dinner in Buckhead at a place called Lucian Books and Wine, basically a high-end version of my favorite place in Boston: Trident Booksellers and Cafe​

I still miss the good old days of setting up a Facebook event and gathering a bunch of friends at a bar in Downtown Boston, but as far as birthdays go, this was a pretty good one.

2. Something I'm Writing: A Birthday Card to Myself, For Next Year

Since my sophomore year of college, I've maintained a specific tradition involving birthday cards: I write one to myself for the following year and read all the ones I wrote in the preceding years. It's been a low-effort, high-payoff form of reflection: an easy, tangible, and beautiful way to witness how who I am and what I have wanted has--or hasn't--changed over time.

The trends in the cards between my twenties and my thirties are ones you might expect: I've become more comfortable in my own skin. I still worry a lot, but the things I worry about are more objectively important (e.g. a mortgage payment >> a petty ex-boyfriend). The wish is always the same: to be happy.

For more on this practice and some pictures of the cards themselves: I wrote a small blog post about this ​back in 2020.

3. Something I'm Listening To: "With Great Power: The Rise of Superhero Cinema," a four-part podcast series by The Wall Street Journal

Right now, Marvel's dominance over the box office feels like a fact of life (the latter, for better or worse). This podcast digs into how Marvel got to where it is today, making clear the degree to which that success was far from guaranteed.

I really enjoyed this series. Unlike the sprawl of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this series is short and to the point: four episodes total, between 30-40 minutes each.

A few things I learned and liked:

• Marvel initially got into the movie business to sell more of its toys. This is wild to imagine someone trying to do now, given how much of a budget you need for a superhero movie, let alone any movie.
• Marvel's offscreen drama rivals its onscreen drama. The clash between Kevin Feige and Ike Perlmutter is riveting. Avengers: Infinity War was entertaining, but I'd sooner watch a movie about these two executives going to war in the Disney corporate jungle.
• The story behind the making of Ironman, which the product manager in me loved. X-Men (1994) and Spiderman (2002) had been big successes, but because Marvel had sold the character rights to both, it wasn't able monetize them to their utmost potential. This forced Marvel to look through its opus for B-List and C-List franchises that could be at the center of a movie. Marvel then did focus groups with kids to try to see which heroes from the B- and C-lists might be most successful as a movie: the kids picked Ironman. The podcast speculates that some of the selection of Ironman might have had to do with the popularity of Transformers at the time: kids were into robots and machine-based superheroes. Tony Stark didn't fly too far afield.

​

If you've never seen it, above is Robert Downey Jr.'s screen test for Ironman, which gets mentioned on the podcast. You can see why he electrified the entire casting team.

4. Something I'm Watching: Sound of Freedom​

A movie about the rescue of child sex trafficking victims, this was not a fun movie to watch. It did not start my birthday weekend on anything remotely resembling a light note.

That said, I think it's a serious movie about an important subject, and a movie that's pretty tastefully done--especially considering how easy it would have been to descend into the worst of Hollywood sensationalism. The movie walks the line very gracefully in conveying the horrors of human trafficking without being graphic: in the scenes that come close to showing the worst horrors, you're forced to imagine those horrors for yourself.

​

Putting aside the controversies associated with the movie, I think it was an okay movie. I found the main character a bit wooden and awkward. The wife character felt more like a prop than a person. The delivery of dramatic lines like "God's children are not for sale," made me groan a little: I know that lines like that are supposed to hit hard, but to me, they came off as heavy-handed to the point of undermining themselves. Still, the subject matter of the movie is a worthy one. I'll take another bold, dark social issues movie over another half-baked addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The thing I thought was most genius about the movie: the closing credits. As soon as the credits start rolling, there's a message on the screen at the bottom right corner, showing a digital clock counting down until a "special message" will be revealed to the audience. The "special message" ends up being a call to action to "help turn the movie into a movement" by scanning a QR code and donating money to help buy tickets for others to see it.

I couldn't tell you how many people bought tickets off the call to action, but I think at least 75% of the theater stayed to see the "special message." Well done, marketers.

5. Something I'm Reading: "The Best Days Are Ahead" by Jared Dillian on Substack

While I discovered him through a friend, I think Dillian is best known for writing a Liar's Poker-style memoir of his time at Lehman Brothers and an investment newsletter called The Daily Dirtnap.

The whole of the Substack post is worth reading, but is pretty well summarized by the simple, blunt line: "If you don’t have something to look forward to, you might as well fucking die."

The story from the piece that I enjoyed the most was this one, which happened to be timely reading on my birthday:

Now that's timely birthday reading if I ever saw it.

See you in two weeks,

EZ

PS: Sun's out, tongues out