Agent Palmer

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.

Are you Canadian? Do you know The Tragically Hip? Odds are the answer to both of those questions is probably the same, but there are some of us from south of the border and from other parts of the globe who know Canadians and have been introduced secondhand to this wonderful Canadian music treasure. Now, a four-part documentary on Amazon Prime tells the story and importance of The Tragically Hip.

My friend Chris Maier, host of the Our Liner Notes podcast, invited me on the podcast to both introduce me to The Tragically Hip and as a tribute to Gord Downie…

There are plenty of films and documentaries about Steve Prefontaine.

I have not watched any of them.

There are also more than a few books on him, and I just read my first, Pre: The Story of America’s Greatest Running Legend by Tom Jordan.

This book may have been written about one campaign, but it is timeless in the way that “the more things change the more they stay the same.”  Too many parts of this book are relevant to all of the subsequent elections since. Even worse, most of this book is remarkably relevant to all of the elections from 2000 onward. The book chronicles author Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’s on-the-ground coverage of the 1972 campaign. It begins with the Democratic primary race,…