Agent Palmer

For those unaware, A Complete Unknown is a 2024 film based on the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald. They both focus on the events leading up to the evening of July 25, 1965, when Bob Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival backed by an electric band. If you don’t know why that seems worthy of an entire movie or book, then it’s likely you are under the age of 50. The good news is…

I was too young to experience the Late Night Wars. They were well over – or at least not as hostile – by the time I was able to stay up late enough to watch any of the Late Night offerings, but I did choose a side. I was a Letterman guy.  At the time, I just preferred Letterman to Leno. Since then, I’ve enjoyed his post-Late Night era Netflix series “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman.”…

I enjoy baseball, and I enjoy spy and espionage books, films and series. It would seem, then, that The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg was bound to not only interest me, but intrigue and entertain me as well. I would argue that sociologists and psychologists would also enjoy this book, as the curious case of Moe Berg is more than what it seems.

Despite the research completed here by author Nicholas Dawidoff and other books written about him, the constant in this book is what we don’t know.

Daniel Lang was a journalist and author for The New Yorker, and From Hiroshima to the Moon is a collection of his stories for the magazine about the birth of the atomic age and the space age, as written at the time of their origins. 

Lang is an on-the-ground journalist. These stories from the front lines of atomic scientists and rocketry geniuses are not only unique to other histories you may have encountered, but these are raw.

If you’re ever in need of some inspiration, documentaries can be a good place to find some. Art and artist documentaries often carry the weight of the inspiration that inspired those artists and their works.

And so here are five I’ve recently watched that may be worth your time if you’re in need of a little inspiration.