Paris to the Moon is a love letter, exquisite and heartfelt. It is not one that a pining star-crossed lover writes, but one a soldier writes to family back home. The Paris of lovers is well-trodden. Paris to the Moon describes the Paris of a writer with a young family. Gopnik’s penchant for adorning unremarkable happenings with remarkable witticism makes the book lovely. In the midst of absurdities and abstractions, swimming pools and schools, gyms and dinner plates (mellow and varnished like an old violin), never-ending dossiers, parks and pregnancy, politics and futbol, Adam Gopnik, all the while failing miserably to prevent his son from learning about Barney, reflects on our forlorn life away from home, even as we are having…
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Here are some films and podcast episodes that I liked in 2018. Sights (Film, TV, etc.) Bladerunner 2049 was a thought provoking movie and a well-deserved sequel to Bladerunner. Love per Square Foot was a cheerful and peppy urban love story set in Bombay. NetFlix has made a movie that Bollywood has forgotten how to make. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell made by BBC boasts high production and some great acting by all the principal characters. The TV series is less-nuanced than Susannah Clarke’s book by the same name, i.e., the TV series is darker and misses the whimsical funny elements in the book, that are understandably harder to translate to screen. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (season 1) is great…
Leave a CommentDuring the holiday travels, one of the vexing things that you might have come across is people in a hurry, those who hurtle by at excessive speed on airport escalators, as you stand. Conversely, you might be the one trying to get back to your boarding area but blocked by a slow traveler carrying an unmanageable volume of luggage bags, more than what one ought to carry on enjoyable trips. In this article, I return to one of my favorite Operations topics in social behavior. Should people stand left (or right, depending on the country) in moving escalators, so that people in a hurry can walk by? Is that efficient? It turns out not. It is better for everyone if we do…
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Leave a CommentBad Blood by John Carreyrou was the most unputdownable book that I read in 2018. The book reveals that the truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. Reading the astounding details on Theranos, once a revered Silicon valley unicorn and a health care startup, I had to constantly remind myself that many narrated incidents did take place, and the names are real people that walk among us in flesh and blood today. The indelicate machinations of the principal actors in the book are comparable to the over-the-top villainy that we read in airport thrillers and potboilers. Some of them are composites of miscreants in Robin Cook’s medical thrillers and John Grisham’s legal thrillers.1 The victims carry the quiet fatalism of the…
Leave a CommentHappy Thanksgiving, dear readers! In the modern consumer mythology, Thanksgiving – a uniquely American celebration – is a day for Turkey and Football, usually starring the underwhelming Cowboys who coincide with the decline of the NFL. But, all traditions are fluid in America, as we always welcome and add new changes. Now, there is the dreaded Turkey Drop, where college freshers “drop” their high school sweethearts. There is the much-derided Tofurkey which has become a vegetarian thanksgiving tradition. Even the resistance is upended into tradition. Those naysayers who devotedly, every year, circulate Wednesday Addams videos, proclaiming their iconoclasm, only join and expand the tribes of people who celebrate Thanksgiving in their own way. Because Addams Family — a whimsical thanksgiving movie —…
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I was in Japan this summer and met some wonderful Wharton alumni. Of course, fulfilling a childhood dream, I also had a chance to take the Shinkansen (Bullet train) a few times. Of course, in these days of disrepair of public transport systems such as the MTA and Amtrak, Shinkansen is an engineering marvel. But more than the engineering feat, what is impressive (of course, as an operations prof) was the nearly flawless operations of the Shinkansen. Shinkansen bullet trains leave south from train tracks in Tokyo every 7-9 minutes. This frequency is nothing short of amazing. If you consider the fact that the Hakari express takes 3 hours to get to Shin-Osaka station outside Osaka, there are 20-26 trains…
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