Anyone who has been alive through the eleven years since 1980s real estate gossip-column mainstay and reality-television star Donald Trump descended that gaudy golden escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president of the United States is more than aware of his unusual appearance, curious use of language, shameless self-promotion and torturous relationship with the truth. It is hardly hyperbole to argue that American culture over the past decade has, in many respects, taken on elements of that image: a coarsening of public discourse and the normalization of a purely transactional worldview in which wealth and power become primary measures of value.
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More than anything else, the fearless Ali Abbasi-directed The Apprentice (Briarcliff, 2024) functions as a cinematic examination of that worldview and of the conditions and figures that shaped it. It is not surprising, especially when one considers the account offered by his niece and clinical psychologist Mary L. Trump in Too Much and Never Enough (Simon & Schuster, 2020), that much of his psychological architecture is presented as originating with his father, Fred Trump [Martin Donovan]. The film largely concurs. His father's unrelenting cruelty and binary vision of the world, divided between winners and losers, molds Donald [Sebastian Stan], steering him toward real estate as both profession and identity.

There is also little doubt that Donald was affected by the way his father treated his older brother, Fred Trump Jr. [Charlie Carrick], whose desire to become a commercial airline pilot was met with disdain. Fred Jr. ultimately struggled with alcoholism and died young, while the pressure placed upon him to abandon aviation and enter the family business is well documented. The film suggests that standing up to his father represented a significant psychological hurdle for Donald, one he only managed to overcome with the help of an outside force.

That force, and the true crux of the film, is his relationship with arch-conservative lawyer Roy Cohn [Jeremy Strong]. Cohn's maximalist tactics, unrelenting pressure campaigns and morally fluid, if not outright reprehensible, methods had long made him an ideal fixer for powerful figures, going back to his role in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and his subsequent work as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the anti-Communist investigations of the 1950s. By the 1970s and 1980s, the period in which much of the film is set, his client list spanned organized crime figures such as Tony Salerno as well as business, political and cultural elites.

Trump enters this elevated world as a client and evolves into something closer to a mentee. Cohn helps him navigate the legal and political obstacles surrounding his emergence as a Manhattan developer, beginning with the federal housing-discrimination case against the Trump family business and extending into his increasingly ambitious development projects. More importantly, he imparts a simple, brutal operating code: always attack, never concede, treat truth as malleable and always claim victory.

The film suggests that this code, rooted in shamelessness, domination and a disregard for conventional ethics, was Cohn's most lasting influence. His reputation for intimidation and legal aggression is well documented, and the film's inclusion of figures like Roger Stone [Mark Rendall] reinforces the idea of a shared ecosystem built on these principles. What Cohn provides is not just strategy, but a philosophy: that power is self-justifying and that perception can override reality.

It is this worldview that enables Trump, within the film's telling, to displace his father as the dominant force in the family, even before Fred Trump's decline into Alzheimer's disease. The film's broader argument is that this ethos, far from being anomalous, was cultivated, refined and ultimately projected onto a national stage. Whether one accepts that conclusion or not, the film positions this transactional logic as central to understanding both the man and the cultural moment that followed.

Much lip service is routinely paid by politicians, by the press, and by corporate America itself to the self-flattering myth of American capitalism as a meritocracy. The story goes that in a free market, the designer of the better mousetrap will inevitably find his way to market. Barriers may exist, but they are presumed to be neutral, technical, financial, or logistical, rather than deliberately erected by incumbents to protect their position. And, of course, this is a convenient fiction.
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Francis Ford Coppola's Tucker: The Man and His Dream dissects that fiction with surgical clarity through the rise and fall of postwar automotive innovator Preston Tucker, portrayed by Jeff Bridges. Tucker's 1948 sedan was not a marginal improvement. It was a direct threat. Rear-engine design, seat belts, a laminated pop-out windshield, and the now-famous "Cyclops" center headlight represented a leap forward in safety and engineering. Brought to scale, such innovations would have forced Detroit's incumbents into costly, system-wide retooling. The response was not competition, but containment.

Through a combination of industrial pressure and political alignment in Washington, Tucker was drawn into a protracted legal battle built on dubious stock fraud allegations. Whether one views these charges as purely fabricated or conveniently pursued, their effect was the same: delay, distract, and ultimately destroy momentum. In a capital-intensive industry, time is fatal.

What prevents the film from collapsing into cynicism is the community that rallies around Tucker. His wife, Vera [Joan Allen], his financier Abe Karatz [Martin Landau], and his core engineers form a counterweight to the institutional forces arrayed against him. They do not operate from pure profit maximization, but from a shared belief that the product itself, a safer, more forward-thinking automobile, is morally justified. In this sense, the film locates American idealism not in systems, but in people. And yet, idealism is not enough.

The project's collapse is not merely a personal tragedy. It is a market failure with broad consequences. Consumers are denied a superior product, not through lack of demand or technical infeasibility, but through the deliberate actions of those seeking to preserve an inferior status quo. This is the film's most damning implication: that markets can be shaped as much by power as by innovation.

What emerges is not a rejection of capitalism, but a sober recognition of its realpolitik. Entry into a competitive industry, particularly one as capital-intensive and politically entangled as automotive manufacturing, requires more than a better product. It demands navigation of regulatory structures, management of political risk, and, at times, direct engagement with the very forces that claim to be neutral.

The film's bitter irony, voiced almost as a throwaway line during Tucker's trial, is that such protectionism would ultimately hollow out the very industry it sought to defend. By the late 20th century, foreign manufacturers from Japan, Germany, and South Korea would outcompete American automakers on the very axes of safety, efficiency, and engineering that Tucker had once championed.

In that light, Tucker: The Man and His Dream functions as both eulogy and warning. It is a story about innovation stifled, but also about the long-term cost of protecting incumbents from disruption. The myth of meritocracy is not entirely false, but it is conditional, contingent, and easily overridden by concentrated power.

For those operating within this system, the lesson is clear: idealism may inspire entry, but survival requires a clear-eyed understanding of the game as it is actually played.

In today’s algorithmically engineered cultural landscape, where analytics have been personalized, optimized, weaponized and monetized to exploit every nook and cranny of our personal, business and consumer lives, it is almost quaint and surreal to consider a time before an ocean of information was waterboarded down our collective throats, back in the 1990s, when major decisions in risky endeavors, like managing a baseball team, were conducted largely on experience and gut instinct.
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But such is the premise of Bennett Miller’s Moneyball (Columbia, 2011), based on Michael Lewis’s nonfiction book about the introduction of sabermetrics and advanced statistics into the lexicon and decision-making structure of Major League Baseball through Billy Beane [Brad Pitt], general manager of the Oakland Athletics in the early 2000s. As a small-market franchise in a league with no hard salary cap in place, effectively allowing the big fish to utilize the rest of the league as a glorified farm system, the Athletics could not simply outspend financial powerhouses like the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Texas Rangers and Los Angeles Dodgers. Beane was aware that he needed to take a major risk and approach team building from an entirely new angle.

That disruption comes through Yale economics graduate Peter Brand [Jonah Hill], who introduces Beane to a sophisticated system of statistical analysis that scours the league and beyond for undervalued talent and eventually becomes his deputy. In essence, this unique analysis allows them to identify players who get on base. How does not particularly matter. More times on base means more opportunities to score, and finding overlooked players capable of doing so means acquiring those opportunities at a lower cost to a cash-strapped franchise. And it works. The Athletics make the playoffs before losing in the divisional round, but the key point is how much less they spend while still producing a successful season.

The tension in the narrative comes from all of the infrastructural resistance to this novel plan and methodology, which is essentially a case study in change management from the business world. Baseball is a traditional endeavor with a culture steeped in subjective eye tests and more than a century of scouts discerning talent based on feel, intuition and experience, never mind the related coaching infrastructure and institutional hierarchy. All of that accumulated institutional knowledge and individual expertise is suddenly threatened in the name of optimization and the discovery of new efficiencies that might provide a competitive advantage at a lower cost.

Watching Beane and Brand run subterfuge on an uncooperative Art Howe [Philip Seymour Hoffman] by trading players out from under him gets at the very real human element of the whole ruthless enterprise. Teams are composed of people who develop personal bonds, support one another and battle together on the field, so it is counterintuitive to reduce them to the level of widgets and inputs. But that is precisely what happens, and it constitutes the film’s major tension.

The central example is Scott Hatteberg [Chris Pratt], an injured former catcher brought in because of his ability to get on base whom Howe refuses to regularly play at first base. Beane eventually pushes the issue by trading Carlos Peña, effectively opening the position and forcing Howe’s hand. The merciless brutality required to chase such optimization and efficiency can be savage to players and staff, yet ironically built into baseball culture is an understanding that being traded or released is simply part of the business. Beane insists that when it happens, the best policy is to be direct. The details are not important. Tell them what happened, tell them who they can turn to with their new team and move on. That cruelty, intriguingly, has a kind of ritualized release valve built into it.

I do not know how much I buy into the premise of Moneyball, or how much of Oakland’s success in 2002 can really be attributed to the analytics that partially constructed the team. What cannot be argued is that this ethos of locating undervalued personnel through advanced statistical analysis represented a major shift that virtually every professional organization in every sport would eventually chase with vigor, producing an alternate lexicon and methodology for team building and establishing successful internal cultures.

With the current advent of artificial intelligence, capable of constructing insights from enormous quantities of publicly available and proprietary data almost instantaneously upon being queried, this conversation has opened once again in broader business terms. What is the value of human intuition, experience and imagination when machines can identify patterns beyond the capacity of any individual person? It increasingly feels as though we are all participants in a vast social experiment, much as Beane experimented with players like David Justice, Chad Bradford and Scott Hatteberg more than two decades ago. The difference is that this time, none of us is entirely sure whether we are Billy Beane or Scott Hatteberg.

In the dog-eat-dog upper echelons of high finance, there exists an industry-wide ethos of shoot first and ask questions later. Failure to recognize a situation for the liability or opportunity that it presents can result in being left behind by the wolf pack, which, in practical terms, consists of Wall Street investment banks engaged in relentless competition.
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J.C. Chandor's Margin Call (Lionsgate, 2011) confronts this warped perspective not by presenting its characters as cartoonish villains, but as rational actors operating within a rigid system of incentives. They are handsomely rewarded when they correctly identify risk and opportunity, and swiftly discredited when they fail. Morality, in this context, is not the operating variable. Alignment with incentives is.

This reality is articulated by head trader Will Emerson (Paul Bettany), who dismisses the moral judgment of outsiders as irrelevant. They do not participate in the game and therefore cannot understand its rules. CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) takes this logic even further, dismissing the impending crisis as part of a historical cycle. Financial collapses become almost forces of nature: recurring, unpreventable, and therefore conveniently beyond the scope of individual responsibility.

What remains is not a question of prevention, but of timing. The imperative is to recognize the collapse before your competitors do and adjust accordingly. Survival depends on speed, not scruples.

This is the film's central moral rupture: they know exactly what they are doing. They know the assets they hold are toxic. They know that dumping them onto the market will devastate their counterparties. And they proceed anyway. The consequences do not disappear. They are simply displaced onto people who have no participation in, or control over, the decisions that shape their lives.
I was one of those people.

I graduated from Teachers College at Columbia University in 2008 with a degree in English Education, expecting to begin a career in the New York City public school system. Instead, the financial crisis devastated the job market. Hiring contracted, older teachers delayed retirement, and the natural turnover that creates opportunity slowed dramatically.

The alternative I chose was the Peace Corps, a decision that was as much about outwaiting a frozen job market as it was about service. It became a pivot point that redirected my entire career. I eventually entered the international teaching circuit, working in Albania, Venezuela, Japan, and Myanmar. What began as a temporary detour became a permanent reconfiguration.

My trajectory cannot be reduced to the decisions of any single banker or financial institution. But it was shaped by the downstream effects of a system that rewarded short-term gains while allowing risk to be passed onto others. The externalities of those decisions were not abstractions. They were careers, homes, family trajectories, and entire lives reconfigured or derailed.
Mine was one of them.

What Margin Call provides is not outrage, but clarity. It functions as an ethical X-ray of a system in which moral responsibility is displaced by incentive alignment, and survival depends not on preventing collapse, but on recognizing it first and passing its consequences onto others.

The people on the other end may never know who made those decisions.

But they live with them.

There is something almost cult-like about certain strains of American corporate culture. I learned this firsthand growing up on an oil company compound in West Africa that was largely populated by American expatriates from Texas and Louisiana. People were generally outwardly pleasant, embodying a form of Southern hospitality, yet beneath that courtesy I often sensed a deep mistrust of the surrounding African society. It was a dynamic my family noticed, as did many of my friends and schoolmates who lived outside the compound. Those within that insular community, however, often seemed unwilling or unable to recognize it. Looking back, the experience frequently felt less like a neighborhood than a closed system that reinforced its own beliefs, values and expectations.
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The Sydney Pollack-directed corporate thriller The Firm (Paramount, 1993), based upon the novel by John Grisham, is similarly concerned with the relationship between material wealth, security, community and a distinctly American form of entrapment. Recent Harvard Law graduate Mitch McDeere [Tom Cruise] and his schoolteacher wife Abby [Jeanne Tripplehorn] have mutually sacrificed much in the hope that his status as a top-five law student will secure them a lucrative future. That dream appears to come true when Mitch accepts an offer from the boutique Memphis law firm Bendini, Lambert & Locke, which offers him a salary twenty percent higher than any competing firm, a Mercedes-Benz and a low-interest mortgage on a home in an idyllic suburban neighborhood. From the outset, however, the arrangement seems almost too perfect to be true.

Before long, Mitch begins to realize that his assigned mentor Avery Tolar [Gene Hackman] and the senior partners, Oliver Lambert [Hal Holbrook] and Royce McKnight [Jerry Hardin], are all participants in the same secretive cabal. The firm's primary client is the Chicago Mafia, a fact carefully withheld from new partners until they have become financially, professionally and familially dependent upon the organization. By the time the truth is revealed, their homes, careers, spouses and children have effectively become leverage to ensure their compliance. Attorneys who attempt to leave are closely monitored by the firm's private security apparatus before mysteriously dying under highly suspicious circumstances. To complicate matters further, FBI agent Wayne Tarrance [Ed Harris] views Mitch as the ideal insider to coerce into violating attorney-client privilege in order to destroy both the firm and its Mafia clients. Mitch thus finds himself trapped between two powerful institutions, each demanding his loyalty for its own purposes.

What makes the film particularly satisfying is that Mitch escapes through legal ingenuity rather than violence or deception. He discovers that the firm has systematically over-billed its clients, including the Mafia, and convinces them to authorize the release of their billing records so he can recover the money they were overcharged. In doing so, he never betrays attorney-client privilege because the disclosure occurs with the clients' consent. As Mitch explains, privileged information is like cargo on a ship that never reaches port without the clients' permission. The solution is entirely consistent with the sort of legal loophole that defines so many of John Grisham's stories, where victory is achieved not through brute force but through a superior understanding of the mechanics of the law itself.

What lingered with me, however, was not the legal strategy but the film's intense portrait of learned helplessness. Once people become sufficiently invested in a system, they begin to believe they have no alternative but to remain within it. Golden handcuffs, social expectations, professional status and fear of losing everything can become as effective a prison as physical confinement. For some, material wealth becomes the trap. For others, it is the perceived necessity of work itself. The specifics vary from person to person, but the larger lesson of The Firm is that liberation begins by recognizing the forces that bind us. Only then can we begin the difficult work of pursuing genuine self-determination.

Arbitrage is a foundational financial concept that occurs when an investor profits from a discrepancy in value between two markets. If a foreign market deems a currency, stock, product or company to be worth more than a domestic market, a trader can exploit that difference by buying in one place and selling in another. Viewed more broadly, however, arbitrage can describe any situation in which an individual profits from a gap between two systems of value. Just as a trader capitalizes on differences in market pricing, a skilled operator may leverage information, relationships or influence in one arena to gain advantages in another. The Nicholas Jarecki-directed financial thriller Arbitrage (Lionsgate, 2012) examines a man who has built his entire life around exploiting such discrepancies.
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The film follows senior hedge fund manager Robert Miller [Richard Gere], an industry titan of high finance who finds himself being squeezed from multiple directions as he approaches retirement. His daughter Brooke Miller [Brit Marling], who works at his firm, discovers that he has engaged in accounting fraud after a failed investment required him to hide losses through off-the-books financing. At the same time, Detective Michael Bryer [Tim Roth] begins investigating Robert's possible involvement in the death of his mistress, French art dealer Julie Côte [Laetitia Casta], who dies in a fiery automobile accident. As the truth threatens to emerge, Robert is forced to rely upon friends, business associates and even his wife Ellen [Susan Sarandon], setting in motion a series of revelations that could cost him his family, his fortune, his status and his freedom.

The narrative unfolds as a succession of cascading crises. Each problem Robert solves merely reveals another hidden liability waiting beneath it. Financial exposure gives way to criminal exposure, which gives way to familial exposure, which gives way to reputational exposure. The result resembles a cascading chain of consequences in which survival depends less upon achieving victory than upon postponing catastrophe. Every conversation, every favor and every lie functions as a temporary patch on a system that is rapidly falling apart.

Arbitrage presents high finance as a world in which the stakes have become almost existential in nature. The film suggests that elite financial culture rewards the appearance of uninterrupted success so completely that admitting failure becomes more dangerous than doubling down on deception. The investor class envisions constant growth, and any interruption to that expectation can threaten careers, reputations and fortunes. The psychological profile required to compartmentalize such pressure and continue functioning as a husband, father and executive is something most people would find difficult to comprehend. Whether one finds Robert admirable or reprehensible, it is easy to understand why he feels trapped by the system he helped create.

This dynamic extends to his personal life. Whether Julie functions as an emotional refuge or merely another compartment in Robert's increasingly fragmented existence remains open to interpretation. She appears to provide a space in which he can escape the expectations of his family, investors and colleagues, yet the relationship also becomes another liability created by his need to maintain separate realities.

Robert's life is defined by information asymmetry. His investors know only part of the story. His family knows only part of the story. Detective Bryer knows only part of the story. Robert's power derives from being the only person who sees the entire picture, and the film's tension emerges from watching that advantage slowly erode. In many respects, the fraud itself functions as an arbitrage strategy, allowing Robert to profit from the gap between his firm's actual condition and the healthier version of it perceived by investors.

Ironically, the least powerful member of Robert's inner circle may possess the greatest leverage. Once Brooke discovers the fraud, she becomes one of the few people capable of destroying everything her father has built. In a film about the exploitation of information gaps, Brooke suddenly possesses information whose value exceeds any financial asset on Robert's balance sheet. The film repeatedly demonstrates that leverage does not necessarily flow from wealth or status. Detective Bryer seeks legal leverage through evidence. Ellen acquires personal leverage through the discovery of the affair. Business partners gain financial leverage through Robert's desperation. Even individuals of modest means can exert tremendous influence once they possess information that Robert would prefer to keep hidden. The hunter slowly becomes the hunted.

Gere's performance is crucial to the film's success. He projects the calm confidence of a man who has spent decades solving problems that would overwhelm most people. Even when Robert's world is clearly coming apart, Gere never allows him to appear panicked for long. That composure helps explain why investors, family members and business associates continue to place their trust in him despite growing evidence that such trust is misplaced.

What I loved most about Arbitrage is its refusal to provide definitive closure. Several key documents are never visually confirmed as signed or notarized, leaving the audience uncertain about Robert's ultimate fate. Has everything finally collapsed? Will he face prison for fraud, manslaughter or other crimes? Or has he once again found a way to survive? The film deliberately refuses to answer these questions.

The ending suggests that Robert still possesses one final arbitrage opportunity: the gap between what others know and what they can prove. Whether that gap remains open long enough to save him is left entirely to the audience's imagination. It is a choose-your-own-adventure conclusion that allows Robert a degree of agency even as the walls appear to be closing in around him. That residual leverage, that possibility of one last discrepancy to exploit, feels entirely consistent with the world the film has created.

Arbitrage ultimately suggests that a life built upon information asymmetries, moral compromises and carefully managed appearances can endure far longer than it should. The only question is whether the correction has merely been delayed.

As much as America likes to bill itself as a meritocracy, the reality, particularly in finance, tells a different story. Access to information, speed and technology remains heavily concentrated among institutional players, leaving retail investors, dismissively labeled “dumb money,” at a considerable structural disadvantage. This asymmetry has enabled well-capitalized firms to compound wealth through sophisticated proprietary algorithms that enable highly speculative, automated strategies, while ordinary workers and investors continue to labor in an economy that rarely delivers stability, let alone meaningful upward mobility.

For decades, the game has felt rigged. Regardless of which political party holds power, the economic superstructure consistently favors a financial elite operating in a version of America fundamentally removed from that of the broader public. This shared frustration has manifested in massive populist movements across the political spectrum, from Occupy Wall Street on the left to the Tea Party movement and Make America Great Again on the right, each, in its own way, expressing distrust of an economic system perceived as fundamentally unfair.

In January 2021, that diffuse discontent coalesced into a highly unexpected form of collective action: the surge in GameStop. Online communities, most notably r/WallStreetBets on Reddit, along with YouTube personalities like Keith Gill, a.k.a. “Roaring Kitty” [Paul Dano], encouraged retail investors to buy and hold the stock. The target was hedge funds that had taken large short positions, effectively betting on the company’s decline. Instead, the stock's rapid ascent triggered a short squeeze, forcing those funds to cover their positions at massive losses.

Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money (Columbia, 2023) recounts this episode as a moment when the traditional power dynamic between retail and institutional investors was, if only temporarily, disrupted. Central to this story is Robinhood, the commission-free platform that lowered the barrier to entry for millions. While marketed as a democratizing force, Robinhood’s business model, particularly payment for order flow, raised questions about who ultimately benefits from this newly accessible system.

When GameStop’s price surged, Robinhood faced significant collateral requirements from clearinghouses, forcing it to secure billions in emergency funding. In response, the platform restricted trading on certain volatile stocks at the peak of retail momentum, a move that prevented many users from acting at critical moments. The decision was widely criticized and dealt a lasting blow to the platform's reputation, reinforcing suspicions that even “democratized” systems remain subject to the same structural constraints and power imbalances.

What remains most striking about the episode is that many retail investors held their positions despite extraordinary gains. Classical economic theory would predict rational profit-taking: buy low, sell high. Instead, participants framed their actions as a form of protest, prioritizing collective defiance over individual profit. The objective was not simply wealth accumulation, but retribution against a financial system perceived as predatory, one that profits from the decline of companies and, by extension, the livelihoods tied to them.
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That so many held the line, in this film including students, nurses, retail workers and even GameStop employees, even briefly, represents a rare instance of populist coordination in a domain typically dominated by institutional logic. Whether viewed as market irrationality or a genuine expression of class consciousness, the GameStop episode stands as a reminder that markets are not purely mechanistic systems. They are also social arenas, shaped by narrative, identity and, occasionally, collective will.

There exists a strain within the financial industry—one that operates at the outer edge of American capitalism—that feels fundamentally at odds with the boilerplate ethos of meritocracy, collaboration, fair play and the American Dream. It is a domain where the language of value creation often masks a more predatory reality: one in which extraction, not production, becomes the primary objective. Over time, the “greed is good” mantra popularized by the fictional Gordon Gekko has hardened from provocation into practice—less a philosophy than a functional operating system for certain corners of the market.
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The real-life Jordan Belfort, as deftly portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in the Martin Scorsese-directed The Wolf of Wall Street (Paramount, 2013), serves not simply as an outlier, but as a logical product of a specific incentive structure. Under the tutelage of Mark Hanna [Matthew McConaughey], Belfort learns that the business is not about providing value to clients, but about maximizing commission through continuous persuasion. The stock itself is incidental; the transaction is everything. Success is measured not by long-term performance, but by the broker’s ability to maintain control of the client—to keep them on the line, always reaching for the next idea.

After being discarded during an economic downturn, Belfort stumbles into the world of penny stocks—a low-status, high-margin corner of the market defined by information asymmetry and minimal oversight. Here, he identifies his true innovation: not the product itself, but the application of blue-chip sales intensity to fundamentally inferior assets. With Stratton Oakmont, he scales this model using a sales force unencumbered by formal training or professional ethics, recruited not for expertise but for aggression and obedience. The result is a highly efficient machine built on persuasion, volume and velocity.

Their competitive advantage is as simple as it is damning: they extract maximum value from clients by selling assets of minimal underlying worth—hollowing out wealth one account at a time while maintaining the illusion of legitimate market participation. It is a business model that thrives in conditions where opacity, commission structures and unequal access to quality information align to make exploitation not an aberration, but a rational strategy.
The film itself lingers—deliberately—on the excesses this system enables: an escalating cycle of drug use, prostitution, corporate spectacle and grotesque displays of wealth. But these are not merely indulgences; they are signals. They function as public-facing proof of success, reinforcing the perception that the system is working as intended. In this way, visible wealth becomes a form of legitimacy, detached from its source and largely immune to scrutiny.

Over time, this dynamic extends beyond the firm itself. The public, conditioned to equate wealth with competence, grants authority to those who display it most conspicuously. Financial success—real or performed—becomes a launchpad for cultural influence and, eventually, political power, as seen in figures like Donald Trump. The transformation is not accidental; it is structural. A system that rewards the appearance of success will inevitably elevate those most skilled at projecting it.

The true danger, however, lies not in the existence of figures like Belfort, but in the conditions that make them logical. When incentive structures prioritize short-term gain over long-term value, when complexity obscures accountability, and when culture confuses wealth with worth, the line between value creation and value extraction begins to dissolve. In such an environment, the Stratton Oakmont model is not an anomaly—it is a blueprint for replication.

This is not merely a quirk of capitalism. It is a structural bias: a system that confers credibility on wealth first, and asks questions about its origins only after the damage is done.

In the upper echelons of prestigious corporate law firms, one of the most valuable, and least publicly acknowledged, roles is that of the fixer. Not a litigator or dealmaker, but a crisis manager operating outside the formal boundaries of process and disclosure, tasked with delivering immediate results for clients who expect nothing less and pay handsomely to ensure it.

In Michael Clayton (Warner Bros, 2007), Michael Clayton [George Clooney] embodies this function with clinical precision. Trained as both a lawyer and a former policeman, he operates in a gray zone where legal protocol and street level pragmatism overlap, an undocumented world governed less by procedure than by relationships, discretion and implied threats. He is a liaison in the truest sense, able to navigate institutional power and informal coercion with equal fluency, manipulating both to serve his client’s end.

But this position comes at a cost. The very nature of his work, ephemeral, off the books and designed to leave no trace, precludes the accumulation of lasting equity. Years spent solving other people’s problems have left Clayton with little to show for it beyond a salary and a reputation built on silence and discretion. That imbalance is made concrete through a failed restaurant investment and a group of impatient creditors, situating him at the film’s outset as a man deeply entangled in financial obligations he can no longer easily manage.

What is most revealing, however, is not that such a role exists, but that powerful corporations continue to rely on it despite possessing vast institutional mechanisms to shape outcomes through legal, regulatory and public channels. The fixer is not a substitute for these tools, but a supplement, deployed when time is compressed, exposure risk is existential and conventional methods prove insufficient. Their necessity does not signal strength, but structural vulnerability.

This tension is personified by agrochemical executive Karen Crowder [Tilda Swinton], who finds herself confronted with a crisis that cannot be contained through standard means. Her top litigator, Arthur Eden [Tom Wilkinson], has gone rogue, seeking to expose the company’s knowing cover up of a product linked to deadly toxic exposure among farmers. For the law firm, led by Marty Bach [Sydney Pollack], the timing could not be worse: a pending merger hangs in the balance, its market value directly threatened by the revelation of liability on this scale.

Eden, however, is not an easily managed variable. He is dangerous not because he is unstable, but because he is lucid and morally resolved. A brilliant trial lawyer who understands the system intimately, he has chosen to reject it, making any attempt to discredit or contain him inherently unreliable. Even his public breakdown, stripping naked during a videotaped deposition, fails to undermine his credibility in any meaningful way. He remains, at his core, a formidable adversary and a profound threat.

What Michael Clayton ultimately illuminates is the unsustainable logic of maintaining a compromised system. Once a business is built upon a foundation of moral and legal liability, it requires increasing levels of intelligence, coordination and ethical compromise simply to preserve the status quo. The expertise required to contain the damage, to manage perception, silence dissent and delay consequence, begins to outweigh the value of the enterprise itself.

And yet, history suggests that such systems rarely choose reinvention over maintenance. The incentives, financial, legal and structural, favor continuity, even when the underlying product or practice has become a liability. The result is a self perpetuating cycle in which risk is not eliminated, but managed, deferred, redistributed and, when necessary, buried.

In that context, the fixer is not an aberration, but an inevitability.

Alongside Rounders (Miramax, 1998), Boiler Room (New Line, 2000) was the most often quoted film by business majors I encountered at Rutgers University in the mid 2000s. To them, the exploitative ethos of both was essentially akin to gospel for these cretins.
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But where Rounders romanticizes intellectual mastery, rooted in probability, combinatorics and real time decision making, Boiler Room dismisses that framework entirely. It presents a zero sum vision of capitalism driven by greed, power and brute force, with no room for nuance or finesse. This is not a world of systems to be mastered, but of people to be exploited. Words become weapons, sharpened and deployed to strike before one is struck in return. It is a purely transactional environment divided between haves and have nots, not unlike Viking raids on the North Atlantic coast.

I was an English major, and this never appealed to me. Now, with an MBA years later, it still doesn’t. Even with formal business training, the appeal of this world remains elusive, which may well be the point.

In the United States, masculinity is often measured through wealth, status and conspicuous display: the bank account, the car, the suit. Community oriented cooperation, by contrast, is frequently dismissed as weak or “feminine.” Boiler Room captures this ethos perfectly through its young cast, Vin Diesel, Ben Affleck, Scott Caan, Nicky Katt, Tom Everett Scott and Jamie Kennedy, who embody a fraternal, hypercompetitive energy rooted in dominance and performance.

The standout, however, is Giovanni Ribisi as Seth Davis, a talented but undisciplined young broker desperate for legitimacy and the approval of his father, Judge Marty Davis. His arc, from ingenue to liar to reluctant reformer, serves as the film’s only moral throughline. His attempt to extract himself from an illegitimate “chop shop” brokerage firm reveals the perverse incentives that sustain such systems, even as they inflict broader social harm.

In today’s environment, this discussion can feel almost quaint, but that does not diminish its relevance. If anything, it sharpens it. Boiler Room ultimately functions as a cautionary tale about excessive greed and the quiet, systemic damage it inflicts on society.

Business, particularly the technological sector that deals in hardware, is one of the most volatile, high-stakes industries imaginable and not for the faint of heart. Which is precisely why it is so intriguing that a Canadian company, founded by a mild-mannered cohort of engineers who grew up together in suburban Waterloo, just outside Toronto, managed to produce the definitive mobile device of the mid-2000s just before the introduction of the Apple iPhone in 2007.
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Given how deeply inculcated we are in 2026 with all things phone-enabled, including artificial intelligence prompts, social media addiction and a seemingly limitless Internet of Everything that has fundamentally reshaped how we organize ourselves culturally, socially, economically and politically, it now feels almost quaint to recall the halcyon days prior to that transformation. What the film BlackBerry (Elevation, 2023) captures is the human cost of operating at the highest levels of Western capitalism, as embodied by the brief ascent of Research In Motion and its failure to sustain the market dominance of its once-revolutionary BlackBerry device. People often forget that Barack Obama vigorously fought the Defense Department to retain a highly modified version of his “CrackBerry,” so central was the device to his daily functioning at the height of its cultural and political relevance.

Where BlackBerry truly innovated was in its secure data infrastructure, particularly its ability to send encrypted messages over proprietary networks, a capability that competing devices could not match at the time. While rivals relied on lucrative carrier-based messaging plans, BlackBerry effectively bypassed that model. Combined with push email and a built-in QWERTY keyboard, a crucial feature for power users, the device became both a functional tool and a status symbol among the business and political elite. From Wall Street to Washington, and into the halls of global power, the BlackBerry was synonymous with access, speed and control.

Yet the very features that made it dominant also constrained its evolution. The arrival of the Apple iPhone redefined the category around touch interfaces, software ecosystems and user experience, areas where BlackBerry was both structurally and culturally unprepared to compete. What had been a tool for elites became, almost overnight, an outmoded artifact in a market that now privileged intuition and versatility over security and efficiency.

Long before that inflection point, however, Research In Motion was defined by an internal clash of cultures. Originally an outsourced manufacturer of modems, a cutthroat business they were ill-suited for, the company was led by engineers Mike Lazaridis [Jay Baruchel] and Doug Fregin [Matt Johnson], who emerged from a carefree, non-aggressive hacker ethos rooted as much in nerd culture as in technical mastery. For them, the company was less a competitive enterprise than a collaborative extension of friendship, a place to solve problems and, incidentally, make money.

That dynamic shifted dramatically with the arrival of Jim Balsillie [Glenn Howerton], a recently fired, highly aggressive Harvard MBA who was installed as co-CEO. Where Lazaridis and Fregin brought vision and engineering depth, Balsillie brought dealmaking, leverage and a cold-blooded willingness to operate fearlessly in the gray areas of corporate competition. In blunt terms, the company stopped being exploited by larger players and began asserting power over them. Central to Balsillie’s decision to join was Lazaridis’s concept for a multifunctional, always-connected device, the prototype that would become the BlackBerry.

What makes the company’s arc so compelling is that it was never secure. At no point was there a true moment of stability, only a series of temporary advantages won through constant maneuvering. Hostile takeover threats, government scrutiny and relentless competition were permanent conditions. Lazaridis responded by attempting to professionalize operations, hiring more traditional management and aggressively recruiting engineering talent from firms like Google and Microsoft, at times through legally questionable means.

For a time, this hybrid model, part idealistic engineering culture and part ruthless corporate strategy, worked. But when regulatory pressure and the competitive force of Apple converged, the foundation gave way. Neither Lazaridis nor Balsillie faced criminal consequences, a familiar outcome in the corrupt world of high-level white-collar misconduct, but the company itself could not survive the shift.

In the end, the story of BlackBerry is not simply one of failure, but of the extreme conditions required to compete at the highest levels of global capitalism. Without the right combination of technical innovation and legally ambiguous aggression that defined its rise, Research In Motion might never have reached the summit at all. But those same forces also made its fall inevitable. That is the paradox of playing the game at that altitude.

The figure of Mark Zuckerberg has become the defining technological archetype of my generation, a figure split between idealism and extraction. To some, he embodies the white-hat hacker ethos: the belief that society’s most intractable problems can be solved through code, through the right application that has yet to be conceived. It is from this deluded mindset that Facebook’s infamous internal mantra, “Move fast and break things,” emerged, rooted in the conviction that engineers, by virtue of their abilities, should guide society forward.
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To others, he represents something far more calculated: the logical endpoint of Silicon Valley’s value system, an industry that treats every structure, including democracy, not as something to preserve, but as a market inefficiency to be exploited. His public posturing in recent years, including his curiously supplicatory tone toward Donald Trump, has only reinforced this perception. His recent lame attempt to recast himself as an “alpha male” figure through aesthetic posturing rather than substance only highlights the fundamental inauthenticity of that transformation.

David Fincher’s The Social Network (Columbia, 2010) cuts cleanly against that mythology. It presents not an invulnerable titan of industry, but a deeply fractured individual, someone who channels social humiliation, status anxiety and an inability to process rejection into the creation of a system designed to mediate human interaction exclusively on his terms. This system does not merely protect him from society; it reconfigures society in his image.

At Harvard University, Mark Zuckerberg [Jesse Eisenberg] exists in a paradox: granted status, privilege and identity by the institution, yet unable to navigate its social hierarchies. His fixation on exclusivity, particularly the final clubs, reveals a deeper preoccupation with belonging and rejection. When his friend and co-founder, Eduardo Saverin [Andrew Garfield], gains entry into the Phoenix-S.K. Club, the power dynamic between them quietly shifts. More than anything, the film is about the disintegration of that relationship and what it reveals about Zuckerberg’s calculating, perpetually aggrieved psyche.

The idea of a “facebook” itself was hardly revolutionary. At Northfield Mount Hermon, where I attended, and peer institutions like Phillips Exeter Academy or Choate Rosemary Hall, printed “facebooks” served as internal phone, email and dorm directories for students and faculty alike, a guide to the analog networks that facilitated communication within closed, elite ecosystems. The digital version was less an invention than an evolution.

At Harvard, identical twins and varsity crew rowers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss [both played by Armie Hammer] conceived a similar platform in HarvardConnection, built around verified university identity. Zuckerberg, following the viral success and controversy of his Facemash project, took that core concept from the Winklevoss twins and launched TheFacebook within weeks. This was less about theft than about velocity. His defining advantage was not invention, but execution at a scale and speed others could not match.

The film's legal deposition-driven structure, pitting Zuckerberg against both Saverin and the Winklevoss twins, turns memory into a battleground. The past is not recounted; it is litigated. What emerges is a figure already hardened by success, for whom personal loyalty has been fully subsumed by strategic calculation.

And yet, the central irony remains unmoved. Despite his status as the world’s youngest billionaire, Zuckerberg is fundamentally isolated, unable to form meaningful human connections even as he builds a platform designed to scale them globally. He did not solve human connection; he industrialized its simulation.

The film's final image, him refreshing a Facebook page, waiting for a former girlfriend to accept his friend request, is quietly devastating. It reduces a world-historical figure to something small, anxious and desperate.

Sadly, the real-world consequences are anything but.

For much of the developing world, Facebook is not simply a platform; it is the de facto internet. In my own experience working and living in Myanmar, unverified and unchecked falsehoods about Muslim aggression against Buddhists spread rapidly through Facebook, instigating real-world violence. In such environments, Facebook functioned less like a platform and more like an unregulated broadcast system, one optimized for engagement, not truth.

“Move fast and break things,” indeed.

Few private citizens in modern history have had such a profound, and at times damaging, impact on global society as Mark Zuckerberg. Whether meaningful accountability ever arrives remains uncertain, but the consequences of his creation are no longer in doubt.

Films rarely capture the true logic of franchising—the transformation of a single successful business model into a replicable, scalable system of control. More often than not, this form of retail capitalism is the end product of a leveraged strategic maneuver executed on a national—if not global—scale. These are fast-paced, high-stakes bets, driven by serial entrepreneurs intent on total dominance. The John Lee Hancock-directed The Founder (Weinstein Company, 2016) is such a film.
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And such a figure is the diabolically ruthless businessman Ray Kroc [Michael Keaton].

Kroc, a failed salesman from rural Illinois, struck paydirt with McDonald's—a local business he franchised from the San Bernardino burger stand run by Richard McDonald [Nick Offerman] and Maurice McDonald [John Carroll Lynch]. Initially, he struggles to turn a profit despite making inroads across Midwestern states like Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota. The model does not work in his favor—he is losing franchisees.

Enter Harry J. Sonneborn [B.J. Novak], a shrewd business advisor who fundamentally redefines the enterprise. He shifts the strategy away from pure franchising and toward real estate—owning the land and leasing it to franchisees. This move does not simply improve the business; it transforms it. McDonald's ceases to be a restaurant company and becomes a real estate empire disguised as one. It also consolidates Kroc's leverage against the McDonald brothers, with whom his relationship has become increasingly adversarial, while creating a stream of recurring revenue that can fund endless expansion. This is the moment McDonald's 2.0 is truly born.

Up to this point, Kroc is just another hustler—a salesman trying to will a breakthrough into existence. But this consolidation of economic power produces not confidence but delusion: a retroactive myth in which he casts himself not as an opportunist, but as the origin. Most notably, he begins to believe—and assert—falsely that he is the "founder" of McDonald's.

In reality, he was a franchise operator working under the true founders, the McDonald brothers—a position he held only until he could dismantle it. He ultimately breaks with them in spectacular fashion, reneging on verbal royalty promises he knows they cannot afford to legally enforce.

His personal life reflects the same logic. He callously discards his devoted wife, Ethel [Laura Dern]—who supported him through years of failed, half-baked, get-rich-quick schemes, often embarrassingly through her family's connections—for Joan Smith [Linda Cardellini], the wife of a Minneapolis franchisee. He treats his marriage according to the same principle that guides his business: discard, replace, optimize.

All financial ambition and no sense of identity or life outside work, Kroc emerges as an avatar of the most soulless extreme of American capitalism—a system rooted more in spectacle and power than in substance or value. He fundamentally misinterprets the original vision of the McDonald brothers. For them, efficiency was a means to preserve quality—to ensure consistency, speed and reliability without sacrificing the customer experience. For Kroc, efficiency becomes the end itself—and quality a casualty.

He sees cost-cutting—instant milkshake mixes, standardization at all costs—as a natural extension of their model. In doing so, he undermines the very principle they held sacred. Unswerved, Kroc buys the McDonald brothers out and ultimately drives their original San Bernardino location out of business. The cycle of dominance and erasure is complete.

At one point, Kroc tells Maurice that business is war—a zero-sum game in which he fully intends to win. This is not just rhetoric; it is a moral framework in which all relationships are reduced to competition and all outcomes to victory or erasure. In his warped view, to show restraint or common decency is to invite defeat—to be a sucker.

The tragedy is that Maurice sees business entirely differently. For him, the joy of McDonald's lies in community—in working alongside his brother, innovating together and building something meaningful. His identity is rooted in that shared experience.

For Kroc, however, McDonald's is a bid for immortality. He envisions the Golden Arches spread across the archetypal American landscape with the same frequency as courthouses and churches. And for that vision, there is no one Kroc will not betray.

Given the ubiquity of McDonald's today—a global symbol of American capitalism—its ascent feels less like an aberration than a logical outcome. In a culture that rewards spectacle, dominance and self-mythology, Kroc is not an exception, but a perfectly fitting result.

Glengarry Glen Ross (New Line, 1992) is not merely a film about salesmen; it is a study in incentive architecture and the moral distortions that flow from it. Directed by James Foley and written by David Mamet, the 1992 adaptation of Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play exposes a closed system in which human value is reduced to performance metrics. The office is not simply a workplace. It is a tournament economy, a rank-ordered elimination structure in which dignity is comparative and survival is contingent.
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The film opens with the arrival of Blake [Alec Baldwin], a corporate enforcer sent to “motivate” a struggling real estate office. His speech, delivered with smug ferocity, functions as the film's theological declaration. Humanity is bifurcated into winners and losers. A new Cadillac is for closers. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is termination. This is not a bonus structure; it is a doctrine of salvation and excommunication. The sales board becomes a book of judgment. The leads become sacraments withheld from the unworthy.
This is not motivation. It is ideological conditioning.

The system is engineered around manufactured scarcity. “Premium leads” are not distributed equitably; they are hoarded and deployed as disciplinary tools. The firm could create stability. It chooses volatility. Scarcity intensifies competition. Competition fractures solidarity. Fractured men cannot organize against the structure that starves them. The incentive design is precise: isolate, rank, humiliate, repeat.

Masculinity is weaponized to ensure compliance. Economic failure is framed not as market fluctuation but as a deficiency of character. Fear becomes shame. Precarity becomes evidence of unmanliness. Blake’s monologue transforms sales performance into a test of virility, ensuring that the men police themselves. Their identities are at stake. To lose is not merely to miss a quota; it is to be exposed as lesser.

The office staff, Dave Moss [Ed Harris], George Aaronow [Alan Arkin], Shelley “The Machine” Levene [Jack Lemmon] and the top closer Ricky Roma [Al Pacino], are each trapped within this zero-sum framework. They are given “leads,” human beings reduced to index cards purchased from a marketing firm. The office demands a return on investment per lead. Conscience is not a line item. Humanity is an externality.

Levene is not merely desperate; he is obsolete. He represents an older sales mythology: handshakes, personal charm, the performance of trust. He believes charisma can still substitute for structure. But the corporate machine has shifted toward data, lead grading and metric-based worth. His fabricated stories of past triumphs are attempts to resurrect a version of capitalism that no longer exists. His theft of the Glengarry leads is not a radical break; it is a panicked effort to reclaim a world that has already abandoned him.

Roma, by contrast, is the system perfected. He sells not property but possibility. His courtship of James Lingk [Jonathan Pryce] at a Chinese restaurant begins with philosophy: risk, chance, the courage to act. He creates intimacy from nothing, transforms hesitation into depth and reframes impulse as authenticity. By the time the contract appears, the sale feels like friendship. This is not simply telesales; it is the commodification of intimacy.

Roma does not resent the structure. He does not long for a past era. He has internalized the logic of the tournament. He believes in momentum, not morality. Levene suffers because he remembers dignity. Roma thrives because he has dissolved it.

Even the conspiracy to steal the leads follows the system’s logic. If survival is tied to performance metrics, then ethics become strategic variables. When closing is salvation, theft is merely an alternative path to grace. Structures do not reward behavior; they manufacture identity.

The police interrogation provides no moral restoration. Law enforcement is procedural, bored, administrative. There is no cathartic reckoning. There is only paperwork. The machine continues. The sales board remains. The metrics are still tallied.

The most damning aspect of Glengarry Glen Ross is its refusal to offer transcendence. The system produces only casualties at different ranks. What lingers is the recognition that incentives shape character, and that when return on investment is the primary measure, humanity becomes an externality to be discarded.

Glengarry Glen Ross is not about real estate. It is about a culture that confuses productivity with virtue, aggression with strength and rank with worth. It is about what happens when economic metrics displace moral measure, and how, under such conditions, the erosion of others inevitably becomes the erosion of the self.

Damn the incentives, indeed.

Christopher Wilcha’s Flipside (Deep Cut, 2023) is an autobiographical documentary dealing primarily with the brutal implications of individual impermanence and the literal and figurative baggage we accumulate along the way. Constructed partly from footage salvaged from several incomplete documentary projects stretching back some twenty years, the film becomes a meta-narrative about that very subject, making use of professional material that had burdened Wilcha with persistent feelings of guilt and shame over having repeatedly failed to provide his subjects with a finished product.
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That idea of the finished product is important because Flipside functions as something of a sequel to Wilcha’s earlier autobiographical documentary The Target Shoots First (Cowboy Pictures, 1999), which chronicled his youthful experience of “selling out” by taking a corporate marketing job. Following that film, Wilcha hoped to pursue long-form documentary work, but real life intervened and he instead developed a successful career directing commercials and corporate campaigns while intermittently pursuing projects involving photographer Herman Leonard, writer Starlee Kine, television writer David Milch and This American Life host Ira Glass. Many of those projects were never completed, leaving Wilcha with a growing archive of footage representing everything he believed he had failed to accomplish.

Flipside initially appears to offer an opportunity to correct one of those failures. Wilcha returns to Flipside Records, the New Jersey record store where he worked as a teenager, convinced that his professional experience might help revitalize the struggling business. When he returns years later, however, the store looks considerably worse for wear and faces competition from Station 1 Books and Records within walking distance. More importantly, the owner of Flipside is not particularly interested in Wilcha’s ideas for changing the store.
Wilcha gradually realizes that he has projected his own conception of failure onto somebody else’s life. He sees an antiquated record store desperately requiring modernization, exposure and better business practices, while its owner is largely content to let the place remain what it has always been. The supposedly failed business begins to mirror Wilcha’s supposedly failed documentaries because in both cases the designation of failure depends upon an expectation that the thing in question was supposed to become something else.

Flipside Records consequently becomes a metaphor for the baggage we accumulate throughout our lives. Experiences acquire momentum and gradually harden into narratives about who we are, what we should have accomplished and where we supposedly went wrong. Wilcha’s footage of Leonard approaching the end of his life with terminal cancer and Milch profoundly diminished by Alzheimer’s after a frantic, work-centered career forces him to confront his own mortality and reconsider the importance he has assigned to professional completion. Careers end, bodies deteriorate and projects remain unfinished regardless of how carefully we imagine our lives unfolding.

That realization is visualized when Wilcha clears out his childhood belongings and sells some of his record collection to Station 1 rather than Flipside because he believes the records are more likely to circulate back into the community there. Instead of preserving every object and unfinished project simply because it once mattered to him, he begins accepting that letting something go does not invalidate the experience attached to it. Flipside itself becomes the ultimate expression of that realization, transforming the abandoned material he regarded as evidence of failure into a deliberately imperfect film about the impossibility of completing every version of yourself you once imagined becoming. I think he succeeded.

On a personal level, this was an extremely weird film to watch because I have been to both Flipside Records and Station 1 Books and Records in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. I learned about Flipside a few years ago and drove roughly an hour to visit, only to be disappointed by the intensely claustrophobic store, lack of service, elevated prices and, frankly, the smell. The place felt like an unloved and forgotten anachronism that refused to make the experience particularly easy for the customer.

On a subsequent trip I noticed Station 1 by chance and have been going there ever since. I know Dan and Joe, who exemplify the friendly, helpful and no-bullshit demeanor I appreciate in a well-run independent record store. I have experienced the same quality at other lovingly curated New Jersey shops like Vinyl Addiction, Jack’s Music Shoppe, Lofidelic, Revilla Grooves & Gear and Princeton Record Exchange. My sense is that a public-facing business dependent upon customers spending disposable income needs to build some kind of community through knowledge, accessibility and basic friendly customer service.

Flipside was always an anomaly for me in that regard, which is why I have not been back in years. Discovering afterward that someone had made an entire documentary partly concerned with whether this exact store could or even should be changed was surreal. My instinct is still to hope the attention might encourage the owner to modernize the place, but that would probably mean missing Wilcha’s point. Maybe Flipside does not want to become the record store I think it should be.

That realization extends beyond the store. Wilcha spent years treating unfinished films as evidence of professional failure because they had not become what he originally intended. Flipside finds value instead in the experiences, relationships and fragments left behind. The resulting film is janky, personal and imperfect, which is precisely why it works. Rather than resolving the accumulated baggage of his life, Wilcha finally figures out how to live with it.

Within the guitar world there are certain much-beloved independent retailers, many now long gone, whose reputations far exceeded the physical dimensions of their stores. That short list includes the former Manny’s Music on 48th Street in Manhattan, the late and underrated Mandolin Brothers on Staten Island, the long-standing Gruhn Guitars in Nashville and Norman’s Rare Guitars in Tarzana, outside Los Angeles. It is increasingly a dying breed, and Norman’s Rare Guitars Documentary (101 Exit Media, 2024) attempts to document the life and cultural impact of entrepreneur and Miami transplant Norman Harris on the American vintage guitar market.
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With Harris being such a beloved figure, the film is more than a little hagiographic. You should just know that going into it. Not to be overly picky either, but the editing and sound design are questionable in places, with attempts at manufacturing energy through music that occasionally overwhelm what the interviewees are actually saying. What nevertheless emerges is a compelling portrait of Harris’s particular combination of skills: an extraordinary eye for quality inventory, decades of accumulated knowledge and an ability to authentically share his enthusiasm for guitars with virtually anyone who walks through the door, irrespective of playing ability, professional status, fame or walk of life. Everyone is welcome and come as you are seems to be the prevailing ethos.

I am fortunate to have a pair of independent guitar stores of that ilk near me in New Jersey, Russo Music in Asbury Park and Relic Music in Red Bank. Both have knowledgeable staffs who are helpful, personable and give off zero elitist vibes. They genuinely seem to enjoy talking about guitars and music with customers, which is exactly what a specialist store should provide. The product may bring you through the door, but the experience and accumulated trust are what bring you back.

Harris has certainly attracted an extraordinary clientele over the years, including George Harrison, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, Eddie Van Halen, Kurt Cobain, Robbie Robertson, Slash, Ronnie Wood, Dave Grohl, John Frusciante, Billie Joe Armstrong, Lenny Kravitz, Melissa Etheridge and countless others. But the more significant accomplishment is the community he built around the store, a considerable portion of which now exists far beyond Tarzana through the Norman’s Rare Guitars YouTube channel.

I remember discovering the store through that channel when former manager Mark Agnesi was involved with the “Guitar of the Day” series, which showcased choice vintage instruments while providing an almost educational history of the guitar business and the evolution of famous Fender, Gibson, Martin, Guild and Gretsch models. Yes, they were undoubtedly attempting to move product, but the videos also provided an insightful public service by educating potential customers about instruments they might otherwise never encounter. In doing so, Norman’s helped create more knowledgeable guitar consumers and arguably benefited the vintage guitar industry beyond the walls of its own store.

Harris similarly used the channel to showcase up-and-coming musicians, inviting young artists and songwriters to perform in the store and placing them before an audience of guitar players around the world. There was obviously promotional value for Norman’s in producing compelling online content, but the exposure also reflected the larger ethos of the store. If you shared Harris’s passion for guitars and music, you were effectively part of the community.

A surprising amount of the documentary also confronts Harris’s mortality. During filming he receives a serious cancer diagnosis, undergoes surgery and faces a lengthy recovery, inevitably raising questions about what happens to a business so closely associated with the personality, knowledge and reputation of one individual. That question feels particularly significant because it parallels the larger uncertainty facing independent specialty retail in the digital age.

Part of me is cynical enough to believe that a retail store in the San Fernando Valley should be increasingly irrelevant in a world of enormous online marketplaces and retailers offering seemingly limitless inventories. A guitar can be located, purchased and shipped across the country without the buyer ever interacting with another human being. But what cannot be so easily replicated is decades of accumulated expertise, personal curation and the trust involved in believing that the person selling you an instrument actually understands what is sitting in front of them.

That is ultimately what Norman’s Rare Guitars Documentary is about for me. The guitars themselves are replaceable commodities, even when they happen to be rare and enormously valuable ones. What is considerably more difficult to replace is the human infrastructure surrounding them: the person who knows why one instrument matters, recognizes something unusual when it walks through the door, remembers who might appreciate it and can communicate that enthusiasm without making someone feel like an outsider for not already possessing the same knowledge.

Harris’s eventual mortality therefore becomes an apt analogue for the uncertain future of independent retail itself. An online marketplace can provide access to an extraordinary amount of inventory, but it cannot completely reproduce the accumulated relationships, judgment and community that someone like Harris spent decades building around a physical store. Whether businesses like Norman’s Rare Guitars can preserve those qualities beyond the personalities that created them remains an open question.

Until then, we keep playing and tuning into the Norman’s Rare Guitars YouTube channel.

There is something romantic about outmoded pursuits and niche retail businesses that failed to maintain their market share in today’s ultra-competitive online marketplace. I can remember repeatedly going with my father to Manny’s Music on the “Guitar Row” section of 48th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues and simply taking in the chaotic ambiance of an area that was once a veritable mecca for guitarists worldwide. That entire ecosystem of used, vintage and specialty music stores gradually disappeared under pressure from changing real estate and retail economics as well as online competition from platforms like eBay, Sweetwater, Musician’s Friend and Reverb. With the loss of Manny’s and neighboring institutions, generations of customer relationships and accumulated industry knowledge disappeared with them.
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D.W. Young’s The Booksellers (Blackletter Films, 2019) examines a similar predicament among independent booksellers in New York City, concentrating particularly on the highly specialized antiquarian and rare-book trade. The city had already experienced an earlier version of this contraction with Manhattan’s famous Book Row, which once contained dozens of bookstores clustered around Fourth Avenue and the surrounding streets. Most eventually disappeared, leaving the Strand as its most famous surviving descendant.

The modern pressures are different but the trajectory is familiar. Electronic media and competition from enormous online booksellers and marketplaces have fundamentally altered how people discover and purchase books, while the specialized knowledge possessed by traditional antiquarian dealers has become increasingly difficult to sustain as a business model. The Booksellers consequently depicts an aging generation of dealers alongside younger entrepreneurs attempting to expand the definition of what deserves to be collected, including materials connected to hip-hop, technology and other subjects traditionally overlooked by the rare-book establishment.

That generational transition is probably the most interesting aspect of the film. What constitutes a culturally significant object changes because culture itself changes. A first edition by a canonical novelist may have obvious value to an established collector, but an early hip-hop flyer, underground publication or piece of technological ephemera may document a cultural movement whose historical significance was not recognized when the object was created. The younger booksellers are therefore not necessarily abandoning the tradition so much as reconsidering what belongs within it.

As a former English teacher, however, I find the larger contraction of literary culture depressing. Books and long-form writing no longer seem to occupy the same position within American mass culture that they once did, while the entire ecosystem surrounding them, authors, publishers, critics, bookstores and engaged readers, increasingly competes within a digital environment designed around immediacy and constant distraction. A much-discussed New York Times article about professors encountering college students who struggle to complete entire books struck a nerve for precisely this reason. Whatever combination of educational and technological changes produced that situation, the notion that sustained reading itself might become a comparatively specialized activity is difficult for me not to find alarming.

That concern is also what makes The Booksellers more interesting than a simple exercise in nostalgia. The film is not really arguing that every old bookstore deserves to survive merely because it is old. Businesses change, technologies change and cultural habits change with them. The more consequential question is what happens to the knowledge and relationships housed within those institutions when they disappear.

A rare bookseller does considerably more than possess old books. The good ones understand provenance, printing history, bindings, editions, preservation, literary history and the peculiar interests of individual collectors. Much like an experienced vintage guitar dealer, that expertise has been accumulated through decades of physically handling objects and talking to the people who buy and sell them. An online marketplace can make an extraordinary number of those objects accessible, but accessibility and expertise are not necessarily the same thing.

Maybe that is what I find so melancholy about disappearing places like Book Row or Guitar Row. I am not particularly interested in pretending that the past was inherently better or that technological change can somehow be reversed. I simply wonder what replaces these concentrations of human knowledge once the economic structures supporting them are gone.

Perhaps books themselves will ultimately occupy a different cultural position, and perhaps younger booksellers collecting hip-hop flyers and technological ephemera are already demonstrating what that future might look like. Culture does not stop simply because the institutions through which one generation experienced it disappear.

Still, something is lost when the store disappears along with the person behind the counter who knew exactly what was sitting on the shelf.

Most Oliver Stone films, in my opinion, are constructed in broad strokes and tend to sway toward the tawdry and sensationalist side of spectacle filmmaking rather than serious, well-considered examinations of their subjects. His Wall Street (20th Century Fox, 1987) epitomizes this kind of cinema and is very much about capturing the mood of a particular place and time, in this case the yuppie generation that came of age amid the excess of the 1980s. Former countercultural ideals surrounding community and environmental stewardship had increasingly given way to a more self-interested ethos of wealth accumulation and aggrandizement of the individual ego. For years, the film could seem like a cultural artifact of that particular moment. Its fixation on transactional relationships and zero-sum competition, however, feels considerably less distant today.
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The film follows Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), a junior stockbroker of working-class stock who aspires to enter the financial big leagues alongside his hero, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), a major Wall Street player whose positions can sway entire markets. Through sheer persistence, Fox gets a brief meeting with Gekko and shamelessly discloses insider information concerning his father’s airline. He quickly learns that his value to Gekko depends upon acquiring similar information through any means necessary, including corporate espionage. All of this is, of course, illegal, but it also establishes the film’s larger distinction between the financial economy represented by Gekko and the productive economy represented by Bud’s father, Carl (Martin Sheen), an airline mechanic and union leader.

Gekko readily admits that he produces nothing. His extraordinary wealth comes from buying, selling, acquiring and manipulating ownership itself. Carl, meanwhile, represents people who clock in every day to produce goods, maintain machinery and administer services. The conflict between them is consequently about considerably more than Bud’s corruption. They represent fundamentally different conceptions of what economic value actually means.

Gekko provides the ideological justification with his famous declaration that “greed is good.” Within this worldview, self-interest supposedly rewards innovation, efficiency and productivity while punishing complacency and mediocrity. Embedded within that argument, however, is the assumption of something resembling a meritocracy and a fair playing field. Gekko himself continually demonstrates otherwise. He survives through insider information, manipulation and his ability to tilt circumstances in his favor while competing against other elite operators doing much the same thing. Art, drugs, jets, Upper East Side apartments and women become little more than the spoils of war.

That is what makes the world of Wall Street feel so vacuous. Money is no longer principally a means of building something or even obtaining material comfort. It becomes a mechanism for keeping score. Wealth produces status, status produces access, and access creates opportunities to accumulate still more wealth. There is no obvious endpoint because the accumulation itself has become the purpose.

In that sense, Wall Street represents a broader cultural anxiety about the elevation of individual enrichment over any corresponding obligation to community. Carl’s conception of dignity through productive labor is deliberately old-fashioned, but Stone places it against Gekko’s world to ask what happens when an economy increasingly rewards the ability to extract value rather than create it. Bud’s seduction is therefore not merely financial. Gekko offers him an identity, a hierarchy and a way of measuring his worth entirely through money.

The danger is what remains when that measurement disappears. If individuality is constructed entirely around wealth, status and access, their loss leaves remarkably little underneath. For all of its broad strokes and sensationalism, Wall Street effectively captures the spiritual emptiness at the center of that arrangement. Its characters accumulate endlessly while seeming to build almost nothing capable of sustaining them beyond the next transaction.

That is what ultimately makes the film more than an artifact of the 1980s. The clothes, technology and financial machinery may belong to another era, but the temptation to confuse wealth with value and accumulation with accomplishment certainly does not.

Even though it has been more than 15 years since the financial crisis of 2008 disrupted the world economy, it sometimes seems to have been largely forgotten, at least from what I have encountered among the current flock of MBA candidates over the past few years in business school. I remember it vividly because that economic environment effectively derailed my teaching career straight out of the gate. I graduated from Columbia University in 2008 with an education degree and administrative recommendations from both Brooklyn Tech and later Stuyvesant High School, where I gained experience as a long-term substitute teacher, yet effectively had no shot at a steady gig. Nobody was retiring during a market with that much volatility. I had to pivot, joining the Peace Corps in Albania before teaching internationally in Japan, Venezuela and Myanmar. I never taught stateside again. So I understand intimately the second- and third-order emotional and psychological reverberations of that level of economic disruption.
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Adam McKay’s The Big Short (Paramount, 2015), adapted from Michael Lewis’s book, is basically a cinematic explanation of the crisis itself and the convoluted financial instruments at its core, focusing on several groups of investors who recognized what was happening and aggressively bet against the American housing market. Discussing financial instruments is a deeply in-the-weeds endeavor, but the film adroitly delegates explanations of mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, synthetic CDOs and credit default swaps to intentionally distracting celebrities like Margot Robbie, Anthony Bourdain and Selena Gomez. That those terms meant anything to a majority of viewers by the end is an educational achievement in itself and fundamental to comprehending the scope of the institutional failures behind the crisis. Financial terminology can itself become a form of obfuscation, convincing ordinary people of their supposed unsophistication while allowing the adults in the room to continue operating largely uninterrogated.

One of the central takeaways from The Big Short is the extraordinary groupthink and herd mentality within the banking and finance sectors. The film continually confronts us with institutions so confident in the assumptions underlying the housing market that contrary evidence is dismissed even as a handful of outsiders begin wagering enormous sums against them. Whether the people within those institutions failed to recognize the danger, understood it but underestimated its severity, or simply had incentives to continue participating anyway is ultimately part of the same systemic problem. The machinery rewarded everyone for keeping it running.

That absence of meaningful accountability becomes one of the film’s most bitter conclusions. The Big Short anticipates that the consequences of the collapse will eventually be redirected toward immigrants, poor people and other convenient targets rather than the institutions whose behavior helped produce it. The broader point is less about any particular subsequent political movement than about what happens when an economic catastrophe destroys livelihoods while responsibility for it remains diffuse. People experience the consequences personally even when the financial mechanisms responsible for them remain distant, technical and extraordinarily difficult to understand.

That is perhaps why The Big Short remains so effective. It takes a crisis often described through abstractions like mortgage-backed securities, derivatives, leverage and liquidity and continually returns those abstractions to their human consequences. I know where I was when that machinery broke. I know what it did to the career I thought I was beginning and the entirely different path I subsequently took.

The financial crisis was not an unavoidable natural disaster. It resulted from human decisions, institutional incentives, inadequate oversight and failures to confront risks that were increasingly visible. The tragedy is not simply that it happened, but that the conditions allowing something like it to happen are remarkably easy to forget once the immediate consequences have passed.

We did this to ourselves. Forgetting how is perhaps the surest way to do it again.

I was recently introduced to the comedy The Pentagon Wars (HBO, 1998) through a project management class as part of my MBA coursework. There is a telling sequence near the beginning in which a panel of top Army generals convenes to review a recently prototyped soldier transport vehicle and collectively decides that it needs to be expanded upon, progressively deviating from its original mission of transporting soldiers to the battlefield. This barrage of new requirements is basically a textbook example of what is known in project management as “scope creep,” in which the requirements of a project expand in an uncontrolled manner that risks compromising its original purpose.
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That is essentially the organizing joke of The Pentagon Wars. What begins as a relatively straightforward personnel carrier gradually accumulates weapons, armor and competing requirements until the Bradley Fighting Vehicle becomes something considerably different from its original conception. The film exaggerates and simplifies a complicated development history for comic effect, but the underlying concerns were real. The Bradley underwent substantial changes in requirements during its development, while its vulnerability and operational testing became subjects of congressional and government scrutiny.

The film centers on U.S. Air Force Colonel James G. Burton (Cary Elwes) and his efforts to conduct realistic live-fire testing of the Bradley, which repeatedly brings him into conflict with Army leadership. The central critique is ultimately less about the Bradley itself than the institutional machinery surrounding a major defense program. Careers, budgets and organizational reputations have become invested in the project's success, meaning that questioning the program threatens considerably more than the vehicle. Being a cog in that system for any reason or agenda, however noble, invites the wrath of the entire organism once that person begins interfering with its continued operation.

It seemingly all comes back to misaligned incentives. The people designing, purchasing, testing and approving a weapons system do not necessarily operate according to identical definitions of success. Soldiers need something effective and survivable. Contractors need profitable production. Military leaders have budgets, careers and institutional priorities to consider. Politicians have their own constituencies and strategic concerns. Once enough interests become attached to a major project, abandoning or fundamentally reconsidering it becomes increasingly difficult regardless of how far it has drifted from its original conception.

That is what makes presenting the material as a dark comedy such an ingenious choice. Much like Stanley Kubrick confronting nuclear annihilation through black satire in Dr. Strangelove (Columbia, 1964), The Pentagon Wars recognizes something inherently absurd about enormously consequential institutions becoming trapped by their own internal logic. The joke is funny precisely because the stakes are anything but.

More than two decades after the release of The Pentagon Wars, the film still works as a useful project-management cautionary tale about scope creep, stakeholder management, institutional incentives and the difficulty of terminating or redirecting a project once an organization has invested sufficient money, time and reputation in its success. Whatever liberties the film takes with the actual Bradley program, the underlying lesson extends well beyond military procurement. A project can successfully produce something while still failing to produce what it originally set out to create.

That distinction is probably why I was shown The Pentagon Wars in business school in the first place.

Kim’s Video was a godsend to me during undergrad. I was attempting to write a senior honors thesis on film noir at the time, and my advisor informed me that in order to speak with any confidence or authority on the subject, I needed to watch and analyze at least half of the 500-plus films released during the classic era of roughly 1940 through 1959. For the record, I viewed and took notes on more than 100 over eight months before understandably abandoning that particular ambition and refocusing the entire project on writer-director Billy Wilder. My university had a considerable collection, but nothing compared with the immense inventory at what was arguably the greatest video rental store ever, Mondo Kim’s on St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan’s East Village.
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The place quickly became my personal cinematic mecca because it seemed to have literally every obscure film imaginable. I went there for years, and when I later attended Columbia University in the late 2000s, I became a mainstay at the Kim’s Mediapolis location near campus as well. It honestly felt like a community of film nerds, my tribe. Over the years I worked outside the United States but would still return to that original Kim’s location as something of a pilgrimage. Then it closed, and without being overly hyperbolic, it felt a little like a death in the family. Beyond losing the store itself, there was another obvious question: what happened to all those films?

Kim’s Video (Drafthouse Films, 2023) follows co-director and hyper-cinephile David Redmon as he relentlessly, and sometimes rather shamelessly, attempts to answer that question while also investigating the mysterious figure behind the institution. Yongman Kim was a Korean immigrant and film fanatic who initially operated a dry-cleaning business while trying to support his family and make his way through school in New York City. Renting videotapes began as a sideline before eventually becoming considerably more successful than the original business, leading Kim to concentrate on what became his video and music empire.

By the time the rental business collapsed, Kim had accumulated roughly 55,000 titles, including an extraordinary number of obscure international films that were difficult or impossible to find elsewhere. Their disappearance therefore represented more than the closure of another video store. Streaming services and online piracy may have made enormous quantities of media readily available, but neither guarantees preservation or access to work considered too obscure to attract a substantial audience.

Kim searched for a new caretaker for the collection and eventually settled, somewhat incredibly, on Salemi, a small town in Sicily that promised to preserve the archive and make it publicly accessible. What Redmon discovers years later is a collection languishing under poor conditions amid a complicated local political environment and a long-running effort to redevelop a town still dealing with the consequences of the devastating 1968 Belice earthquake. Redmon eventually locates Kim in South Korea and brings him back to Salemi to see the state of the collection firsthand, with his relentless pressure ultimately contributing to negotiations that allow the collection to return to New York City.

Part history lesson, part detective story and part cinematic sabotage fantasy, Kim’s Video is intriguing but uneven. Redmon continually contextualizes his behavior through references to classic films, effectively turning himself into the protagonist of his own cinephile adventure. I understand the conceit, but I never became particularly invested in him or his motivations. The collection increasingly functions as the object of a quixotic rescue mission when I found myself wanting to know considerably more about the cultural institution that created it in the first place.

For me, the more interesting questions concern Kim’s itself. Who were the people working there? Who shopped there? How did those clerks influence what people watched and listened to? How many filmmakers, writers, musicians and obsessive film nerds discovered something formative because an employee recommended an obscure VHS tape sitting on a shelf? The documentary touches on some of this history but never explores it as deeply as I wanted. It does not even substantially connect Kim’s to Other Music, the similarly influential downtown record store founded by former Kim’s employees only a few blocks away. That lineage suggests something considerably larger than a collection of 55,000 physical objects. Kim’s was part of an ecosystem in which knowledgeable, obsessive people gathered around obscure culture and then passed that knowledge to others.

Maybe my reaction is inevitably shaped by having been one of them. Kim’s mattered to me because it allowed an undergraduate trying to understand film noir to walk into a store and encounter movies that otherwise seemed almost impossible to locate. The collection was extraordinary, and preserving it absolutely matters, but the collection was ultimately a tool. Its cultural significance came from what happened when people interacted with it.

That was the film I thought I was going to see, rather than the strange and admittedly fascinating odyssey of rescuing the physical archive from Sicily. I am glad that story was documented and even happier that the collection survived, but I remain considerably more interested in the community that originally gave those objects meaning. Hopefully somebody eventually makes that documentary. Until then, we have this interesting, entertaining and inconsistent mess.

photo manipulation & text by nacrowe

I think I am like a lot of people in that I am constantly waking up in a modern world I do not entirely recognize and having a difficult time making heads or tails of it, especially when it comes to technology. I am in business school at the moment, and try as I might to comprehend the practical economic implications as they relate to product development, marketing, manufacturing and supply chain concerns, I tend to feel like I am engaged in a perpetual game of catch-up.
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And I do not believe I am alone. Everyone currently seems to be coming to grips with an unknown future populated by the unforeseen consequences of novel technologies like generative artificial intelligence. While driving to work, I listen to various podcasts, including Decoder with Nilay Patel, hosted by The Verge co-founder and editor-in-chief Nilay Patel. He engages in fairly robust and informative discussions with business leaders, technologists and academics about the cultural and economic implications of emerging technologies and their potential downstream effects on both the investor class and working stiffs like me.

I do not look at Patel as some kind of oracle. What I appreciate is his ability to interrogate how the people building, funding and managing these technologies actually think. He consistently pushes executives beyond promotional talking points toward questions about business models, organizational structures, regulation, labor, competition and the practical consequences of their decisions. Even when I disagree with a guest, understanding the assumptions underlying the argument is enormously useful.

Knowing how these people think is half the battle for me in business school. As a former secondary-school teacher, I sometimes have difficulty on an emotional level participating in conversations with peers and professors that can feel disconnected from the ground-level repercussions of the economic decisions being advocated. Discussions about efficiency, restructuring, automation or labor costs can sound perfectly rational within the abstraction of a spreadsheet while feeling considerably more heartless and cutthroat when translated into the lives of actual people.

That tension is probably why I find Decoder so useful. It occupies the increasingly fraught intersection of culture, business and technology without requiring me to accept the worldview of the people being interviewed. Instead, it provides another framework for understanding what they believe, what incentives are driving them and what consequences might follow from the decisions they make.

For someone perpetually trying to catch up with a technological future that seems to arrive faster than I can properly understand it, that is immensely helpful. I recommend Decoder to anyone similarly interested in figuring out where culture, business and technology are headed and, perhaps more importantly, who is making the decisions that might take us there.

Immediately after college, I worked part-time at a local, now-defunct corporate big-box retailer of books, DVDs, CDs and overpriced coffee. I had a coworker there who was the biggest music snob I had ever met. It was funny to me because I had a radio show in college and knew plenty of people who were obsessive about music and the arts, but the prevailing attitude was always one of wanting to share that obsession and learn from other people. This dude was different. It was my first real interaction with someone who seemed to use musical knowledge as a cudgel separating him from everyone else, and the independent Other Music record store in Manhattan’s East Village was his mecca.
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Thinking back on the bands he championed, they were practically a catalogue of artists associated with the store over the years, including Stereolab, Animal Collective, Broadcast, Aphex Twin, the Flaming Lips, Galaxie 500, Fennesz, the Magnetic Fields, Cornelius and Neutral Milk Hotel. I had visited Other Music myself, particularly when heading downtown to Kim’s Video on St. Mark’s Place, although I had no idea at the time that Other Music’s founders had previously worked at Kim’s.

My own experiences there were nothing like those of my insufferable coworker. I went to middle school in Nigeria and was already familiar with artists like Fela Kuti, Femi Kuti, Seun Kuti, Lagbaja and King Sunny Adé, but I remember talking with an Other Music employee who knew considerably more about the subject than I did and directed me toward an obscure Afrobeat compilation that I still own. I did not find the people working there pretentious or snooty in the least. They were just ridiculously well-informed and passionate about sharing their obsession, much like the people I knew at the college radio station.

That distinction is central to what I found so compelling about Other Music (Factory 25, 2019), a documentary about the store’s considerable influence within the greater New York City arts community and the void created by its closure in 2016. What has largely disappeared in the digital economy is not access to music but the face-to-face, tactile and interpersonal experience that once surrounded its discovery. Online communities, forums, streaming platforms and recommendation algorithms can provide almost unlimited access to information and media, but they do not necessarily replicate walking into a physical space and having an actual person enthusiastically tell you about something you have never heard before.

The loss of Other Music to changing consumer habits therefore represented considerably more than the disappearance of another retailer. It represented the loss of a community, something demonstrated by the remarkable collection of musicians and artists interviewed in the documentary, including William Basinski, Cornelius, JD Samson, Tunde Adebimpe, Martin Gore, Stuart Braithwaite, Dean Wareham, Ezra Koenig, Matt Berninger, Regina Spektor and members of Animal Collective. These were not simply customers purchasing products. The store participated in the cultural ecosystem that surrounded their work.

Matt Berninger of the National has a particularly poignant observation in the documentary when he argues that as art and popular culture become less challenging, the people consuming them risk becoming worse along with them. That sentiment gets at something important about what Other Music provided. Its owners deliberately positioned the store as an alternative to enormous retailers like Tower Records, Virgin Megastore, J&R Music World, Sam Goody and Best Buy, specializing instead in underground, experimental and esoteric music that might otherwise struggle for attention. That point of differentiation was its business plan, its value proposition and its reason for being.

More importantly, the knowledge contained inside the store was not simply inventory management. The employees knew the music, understood relationships between artists and genres and could translate that knowledge into recommendations for customers. Used properly, expertise like that does not exclude people. It invites them into something. My obnoxious former coworker may have treated obscure musical knowledge as evidence of his own superiority, but that was never my experience with the people actually working at Other Music. They were passionate, curious and extraordinarily knowledgeable, and their enthusiasm made me want to know more.

That is why Other Music increasingly seems less like a conventional retailer to me than a public resource. It represented a concentration of cultural knowledge that could not simply be transferred somewhere else when the lease ended and the shelves disappeared. The music survived, obviously, and in many cases became considerably easier to access online, but the particular network of people, recommendations, conversations and discoveries surrounding it did not.
I remember returning from two years of Peace Corps service in Albania and discovering that Other Music was gone. Years later, it is still a bummer because what disappeared was not merely a place where people bought records. It was a place where people learned about them, argued about them, recommended them and occasionally walked out carrying something they had never known existed.

Such is capitalism, I suppose.

I read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster (Villard, 1997) as part of a business school course dealing with organizational behavior, specifically the complex interpersonal dynamics surrounding leadership and group decision-making. The disastrous 1996 Everest season, in which eight climbers died during the May 10–11 storm, including Adventure Consultants leader Rob Hall and Mountain Madness leader Scott Fischer, provided an extreme case study for examining many of the same hierarchical decision-making problems that occur within considerably less dangerous organizations.
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The story is tragic, but those interpersonal dynamics are fascinating because they are relevant to countless situations involving asymmetrical power. Everest is an environment in which deteriorating weather, exhaustion, hypoxia and relatively minor logistical problems can rapidly become matters of life and death. Clients consequently place enormous trust in experienced guides to assess risks and determine when continuing toward the summit is no longer worth the danger.

Commercialization complicated that relationship. Hall had advertised an extraordinary record of success, while Fischer expressed enormous confidence in the ability of commercial expeditions to get clients up Everest. Some customers possessed considerably less high-altitude experience than traditional elite mountaineers, creating a situation in which people were simultaneously paying enormous sums to reach the summit and depending upon guides to tell them when to abandon that objective.

What occurred on May 10 was not a simple matter of inadequate equipment or one catastrophic decision. There were delays caused by ropes not being fixed in advance, congestion along the route, problems involving supplemental oxygen, communication difficulties and climbers continuing upward beyond established turnaround times. When the weather deteriorated, those accumulated problems became catastrophic. Hall and Fischer were extraordinarily experienced mountaineers, which makes the disaster more rather than less interesting from an organizational perspective. Expertise and previous success can provide essential knowledge, but they can also create confidence that circumstances remain manageable because similar circumstances were successfully managed before.

The uncomfortable question throughout Into Thin Air is where responsibility ultimately resides. How much belongs to guides who possessed superior knowledge and accepted responsibility for paying clients, and how much belongs to customers who voluntarily entered an environment whose risks could never be completely eliminated? It is difficult to assign responsibility neatly because everyone was operating within a system of competing incentives. Clients had invested extraordinary amounts of money, time and physical effort into reaching the summit, while guides had financial and professional incentives connected to successfully getting clients there.

Those pressures interacted with hierarchy. A paying customer may technically retain the ability to turn around at any moment, but that does not mean the relationship between client and professional guide is equal. The entire reason for hiring an expert is that the expert supposedly knows things you do not. Once you have accepted that asymmetry of experience and knowledge, questioning the judgment of the person you hired precisely because you trust that judgment becomes psychologically difficult.

That is where Into Thin Air became particularly relevant to organizational behavior for me. The consequences in an ordinary workplace are obviously nowhere near those encountered above 8,000 meters, but the underlying mechanisms are recognizable. Employees routinely operate within hierarchies in which information, experience, authority, financial dependence and professional reputation are distributed unevenly. When organizational culture discourages information from traveling upward, people can recognize problems without believing they possess the authority or practical ability to stop them.

Business organizations are partly structures for managing uncertainty and risk, which makes suppressing uncomfortable information particularly self-defeating. Leadership does not possess every relevant piece of information simply because it possesses the authority to make the final decision. If people closer to a problem are unwilling to challenge assumptions, or repeatedly discover that raising concerns accomplishes nothing, the organization deprives itself of precisely the information it needs to recognize that a plan is failing.

I find myself thinking about this whenever I consider my former teaching career and my own culpability in acquiescing to administrative decisions that I believed would negatively affect student outcomes. Obviously, nothing I experienced remotely approaches the stakes of Everest, but some of the psychological mechanisms are familiar. Hierarchy, presumed expertise, financial dependence and repeated experience of seeing objections accomplish little can gradually teach someone that resistance is pointless. In retrospect, I can identify decisions I disagreed with and situations in which I might have pushed harder, but determining what I realistically could or should have done differently remains considerably more complicated.

That is what makes Into Thin Air such a consequential book beyond its immediate subject of mountaineering. It is an extreme account of how expertise, hierarchy, ambition, financial incentives, group dynamics and previous success can interact until individually understandable decisions collectively produce an outcome nobody intended. The mountain makes the consequences unusually brutal, but the underlying organizational problem is remarkably familiar.

I remember a few weeks after moving to Yokohama in the summer of 2015 making the much-anticipated short trek over to Shibuya and finding the flagship Tower Records location in all its nine-story glory. It had been nearly a decade since Tower closed its remaining company-owned stores in the United States in 2006, and walking through that enormous building felt like a welcome blast from the past. Almost immediately, however, I realized how much had been lost in the interim. The feeling went beyond nostalgia and approached a strange form of cultural PTSD.
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When I lived in western Massachusetts during my freshman and sophomore years of boarding school, my emotional, spiritual and psychological respite was talking to the knowledgeable clerks at nearby Greenfield Records. The same was true of Dimple Records in Citrus Heights during my senior year in California. These were the places that assisted me in exploring trip-hop, alternative metal, dream pop, bebop jazz, post-punk, ambient music, psychedelia, minimalism, shoegaze, krautrock, death metal and classic hip-hop during the years when I was forming my tastes and, by extension, a significant part of my identity.

I still seek out that experience at independent record stores like Station 1 Books and Records, Vinyl Addiction, Revilla Grooves & Gear and Princeton Record Exchange in New Jersey, as well as Generation Records and Academy Records in New York City. I also remember the void left by departed institutions like Kim’s Video, Bleecker Bob’s, Other Music and especially Vintage Vinyl in Fords, New Jersey, whose 2021 closure eliminated considerably more than an impressive inventory. The community it cultivated largely dissipated along with it.

This is a long-winded way of saying that I understand the void created when an impactful and much-beloved cultural institution like a record store disappears, as happened with San Francisco’s long-standing Aquarius Records in 2016. Founded in 1970, Aquarius existed at the intersection of countless underground and avant-garde musical movements, from progressive rock and krautrock to punk, metal, experimental music and whatever other obscure sounds its employees considered worth hearing. More importantly, they served as cultural ambassadors for that music.

The documentary It Came from Aquarius Records (The Scourge Productions, 2022) traces the history and impact of the store through its various incarnations, locations and succession of owners, including a tradition of employees eventually taking responsibility for the business themselves. The through line is a commitment to independent and obscure artists, culminating in the store’s widely respected email newsletter, whose lovingly written reviews and recommendations reached an audience far beyond San Francisco. In some respects, it functioned like a more personal and considerably less institutional Pitchfork before such a thing existed.

The film begins within the inner orbit of Aquarius, focusing on owners and former employees before expanding outward to the musicians they supported and eventually to record stores around the world that relied upon their recommendations when determining which unfamiliar releases were worth ordering. That progression effectively demonstrates that Aquarius was not simply selling records to whoever happened to walk through the door. It occupied a position within a much larger network through which obscure music was discovered, discussed and circulated.

The problem was that the market shifted.

It Came from Aquarius Records feels like part of a recent tradition of documentaries examining what has been discarded as modern technology makes access to culture increasingly convenient while simultaneously eliminating many of the physical spaces through which people once encountered one another. Yes, at its most basic level Aquarius Records sold highly obscure physical media to a niche audience. That was the business model. Its larger social function, however, was as a community resource and meeting place where like-minded people could discuss music, film, art and ideas with knowledgeable employees capable of introducing them to artists they might otherwise never encounter.

That tangible, eye-to-eye interaction cannot be entirely replicated by an algorithmically generated playlist or artificial intelligence. The technology can identify relationships between artists, provide information and place an almost incomprehensible quantity of recorded music immediately at our disposal. What it cannot completely reproduce is the experience of another person recognizing something in your interests, pulling an album from a shelf and telling you that you need to hear it. The human connection surrounding the recommendation is part of the experience.

The documentary acknowledges but does not spend much time investigating the changing economics and demographics of San Francisco that contributed to Aquarius becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Instead, there is a general acceptance that businesses and neighborhoods change, opportunities emerge elsewhere and eventually institutions run their course. Fair enough, but change is not inherently synonymous with improvement. What survives within a city ultimately says something about what its economy and community are capable of supporting.

That is partly why encountering Tower Records in Japan affected me so strongly. Japan has maintained a substantially healthier market for physical music than the United States, supported by a different combination of consumer habits, retail culture and industry structures. Walking through nine floors of Tower Records in Shibuya after watching so many American record stores disappear demonstrated that technological change does not produce identical cultural outcomes everywhere. Communities still make choices, individually and collectively, about which institutions they value enough to sustain.

Aquarius Records ultimately could not be sustained, but It Came from Aquarius Records demonstrates why its disappearance mattered. The store sold records, but its real product was accumulated knowledge, curiosity and human connection. Once those qualities become dispersed, an online marketplace can replace the inventory considerably more easily than it can replace the institution surrounding it.