PicoBlog

Ridley Scott has taken a lot of grief from historians, including the ones here in your email. Let’s face it, Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, and Napoleon have at time strayed far from the realms of reality in their storytelling efforts. Now, I’ve never been interested in counting rivets when it comes to looking at films. That’s boring and if there’s one thing I’m worried a casual listener might assume about a podcast called Historians At The Movies, it’s that we sit around nitpicking movies.

Last Sunday, a weight was lifted off the shoulders of Purdue’s men’s basketball program in a public and palpable way. As the final seconds ticked off the clock of the Boilermakers’ 72-66 victory against Tennessee in the Elite Eight, the crowd erupted, making a game played nearly 300 miles away from the school’s West Lafayette, Ind., campus feel as though it was inside Mackey Arena. Zach Edey, the team’s 7-foot-4 star center, rushed to the sideline to wrap his arms around coach Matt Painter in a tight embrace.

The ‘last-mile problem’ refers to the challenge of moving products from the most remote warehouse to the customer’s doorstep. The “last mile” is “the most expensive and time-consuming part of the shipping process,” writes Insider Intelligence. And yet it is absolutely critical to the customer’s satisfaction. It doesn’t matter how good your product is, if you can’t get it to the final user. We have an analogous problem in academia, it seems to me.

OK, so another bunch of filings were released this evening pertaining to the civil litigation between Virginia Roberts and Ghislaine Maxwell. The reason this is so important is because it was the depositions and discovery in this civil suit which was settled in 2017, that wound up being the backbone of later federal criminal indictments for sex crimes against Jeffrey Epstein and later, Ghislaine Maxwell. (Epstein died before going to trial and Maxwell is serving a 20 year sentence).

I first interviewed David for a Psychologists Off the Clock podcast episode soon after his book The Expectation Effect came out. I immediately became a superfan1. David is just out today with his new book, The Laws of Connection:The Scientific Secrets of Building a Strong Social Network. This book is an ode to relationship science accompanied by gripping stories (including David’s own, some of which he shares in our Q&A). The book leaves readers with thirteen principles of connection and an assortment of actionable ideas for relational thriving.

Mitchell Garabedian, credit: Boston GlobeEarly in the 2015 movie Spotlight, the story of the Boston Globe's Pulitzer Prize winning  exposé of the Boston pedophile priest sex abuse scandal, the name Mitchell Garabedian comes up. Garabadian is a small-time lawyer who was representing clients who claim they were molested by Boston area priests. He is suing the Church and making shocking and. to some, wild allegations that Cardinal Bernard Law and the top leaders of the Boston Church knew about it and protected the priests by shuffling them from parish to parish, where they continued to prey on children.

If you’re an early-stage startup founder, do not read The Lean Startup. According to The Lean Startup, the best way to figure out if your product idea is any good is to jump straight into building a prototype. This is terrible advice. Ask any startup accelerator (including Y Combinator), talk to any successful founder, or read literally any other book, and you’ll hear that this is a bad idea. But for some reason — even though everyone agrees on this — The Lean Startup remains one of the most popular books in the word on building new products.

Andrew Sullivan writes, 2023 showed us the mindless grift of Kendi’s scam at BU, the end of affirmative action in the Ivies, the mediocrity of Claudine Gay, and the racial hatred that will always come when certain entire groups of people are deemed oppressors, and others deemed oppressed. This is not about college crazies. It’s about the core foundations of liberal democracy — which DEI and its guiding philosophy of critical race theory specifically aims to destroy.

Hours before his death, Pittsburgh Steelers running back Franco Harris shared the advice that was instrumental in making the greatest play in NFL history. Always go to the ball. On December 23, 1972, with seconds left in the game, Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw fired a bullet to “Frenchy” Fuqua that ricocheted off a Raiders… ncG1vNJzZmiokam%2Fqq%2FKsKCtrKljwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89oq6GdXaGyqK3CsmSonl2ptaZ5yKakmpuloa61sYyrnJydoKm2sLo%3D