Here are some curated recommendations for your holiday watching/reading/listening. I limit my consumption of media (not books). So, like all lists, this one is also highly subjective. (I have no financial interest in recommending these).
Movies
- Kubo and the two strings. Animated movie (from Laika studios) with a layered and complex narrative. Great for families with kids interested in slightly mature themes (similar to Miyazaki movies). Features a beautiful cover of While My Guitar Gently Weeps by Regina Spektor. On NetFlix.
- Contratiempo. (The Invisible Guest). Spanish Crime Thriller and morality play. On NetFlix.
- Get Out. A brilliant genre-bending film, with the audacity of vision, and taut storytelling. What a directorial debut.
- Wonder woman. All praise well-deserved. A blockbuster movie that lives up to the hype.
- Thithi. The Indian film to watch this year, if you chose to watch one. A wry comedy spanning lives across 4 generations, reflective of phases of life in ancient Indian philosophy. A film that takes a deeply respectful, nuanced view of rural life and traditions. Characters reminded me of folks I knew in my Indian rural childhood. Streaming on Netflix.
Podcast Episodes (some Operations related).
- 8-episodes of the Containers podcast documentary by Alexis Madrigal. I wrote about it here.
- Reid Hoffman talks to Brian Chesky on scaling AirBnB. To scale, do things that don’t scale.
- Ezra Klein interviews Yuval Harari. Yuval Harari is brilliant, and I cannot stop recommending his book Sapiens to everyone. Ezra Klein is most enjoyable when he does non-political discussions (in my view).
- Tyler Cowan interviews Sujatha Gidla. Tyler Cowan handles this interview with gentle earnestness and markedly different fashion from his conversations with other economists. Controversial views are on focus as they discuss the complex effects of casteism on Indian immigrant life, but I also suspect that her views offer a very different perspective for most listeners.
- Kara Swisher interviews Frances Frei on cleaning up Uber. This interview is slightly dated as it happened before Uber hired their new CEO.
- Frances Frei is the Senior Associate Dean for Executive Education and the UPS Foundation Professor of Service Management at the Harvard Business School. She graduated from our own Wharton OID (then OPIM), and has received the highest Wharton MBA Teaching Award.
- Bonus: Bill Simmons interviews Ta-Nehisi Coates. Discussion includes writing, basketball, football, movies, and which season was the best season of The Wire.
Books
See this post for five books that I loved reading in 2017.