It is Oscar season, which means the forums devoted to discussions of culture and media are abuzz with predictions about winners and losers in this year’s competition for the limited attention span of the populace. In such discussions, there is always a film that is the darling of critics and commenters alike. Adjectives like stunning and arresting are thrown about like confetti on New Year’s Eve as people explain the choice for this year’s cultural touchstone. 

In the early months of 2024, one film has often come up in these discussions: a film without explosions and noise but whose power seems to rest in its quiet. People seem to love the film due to this degree of subtlety. But what often remains unsaid is how the film implicates all of us in systems we rarely acknowledge, turning the camera away from the characters’ lives and towards the audience, connecting us to manifold harms that we try not to see.

before a first watch, you mostly know what to expect. The film recounts the humdrum days of a Nazi-adjacent family in the last years of World War II. But upon watching the film, one realizes that the family is more “enmeshed” rather than “adjacent," and their days are more militantly boring than coincidentally humdrum. The father of the family is the commandant of Auschwitz, and his home is right outside one of the gates to the concentration camp. Not the most humanistic setting to raise of a family, but the commandant’s wife and children seem happy enough. Even his mother-in-law is wowed by the setting, though she quickly exits the film after being unable to tolerate smoke from the furnaces beyond the gates.

In the most foundational scene of the film, the commandant has just received news that he will be transferred away from their home and to a new city. He tells his wife this news at a summer party and then leaves to think about it alone. His wife, surprised and angry at the suddenness, follows him and eventually finds him near a stream.

She asks for an explanation, but he ultimately says he has no choice and that they all will have to begin packing. He assumes that she and the children will come with him, but she pointedly tells him this will not happen. She says that he will go where he needs to go (that is, to his work) and that she will remain where she needs to be: In their house, raising their family. She tells him that this place represents everything they have ever worked for, represents the fact that they have finally made it. Their home has ample space for their kids. They are within walking distance of a creek and forests where they can all play and be away from the pollution of the city. They have servants who help them with their food and laundry. They have everything.

The father concedes. His wife is right. Their lives  are too good for them to drop everything and leave. And, of course, his wife is thinking of their children,  as a good parent must always do, and of the future they would  inherit if they remain. 

There are other compelling scenes in the film. There are scenes where a pajama-clad man with a serial number stitched to a breast silently cleans boots and organizes stray items. There is the scene where the family receives a collection of clothes and makeup, clearly taken from the new occupants of the camp outside their door, and the mother turns in the mirror to see how her new fur coat fits. The many scenes where one of the family’s Jewish servants steals food from the family and hides it amongst the concentration camp’s tools. The scene where engineers describe the construction of the furnace for burning bodies. The scenes afterwards where people are closing their doors to protect themselves from inhaling the outputs of the furnaces.

But no scene does what the scene by the river does in explaining so much about the characters and—and perhaps all people’s—life motivations and aspirations.

When the mother outlines what is so great about her life at the edge of a concentration camp, the audience cannot help but reflect on the seeming ludicrosity of the claim. What the mother sees is very different from what we see. Removed from her in both time and culture, we recognize a deep horror in everything on which her life is founded. But she only sees her prosperity and the promising future for her children. She only wants a happy life, or maybe merely a successful one, and the larger context of that  life matters so little as to be almost irrelevant.  

When one thinks about the family, one can easily label the father as a Nazi. But was the mother also a Nazi? Was the child? What does it mean to be a Nazi? Why does this question even matter?

In modern vernacular, the word has a particular punch to it, allowing it to do more work than it did 70 years ago. Back then, the word had a formal militaristic meaning, but today, appending the label to a person, either in our present or in our past, thereafter saves us from any deep engagement with the individual’s character. You hear the word, and your mind makes the standard substitution. Bigoted. White Supremacist. Evil.

So when I ask whether the mother or the child (or even the father) was a “Nazi,” what I am asking really is whether they were “Evil,” or less grandiosely, whether they were “bad people.” Did they have direct hands in the evil that  existed around them? This, too, seems like an irrelevant question or at least an ill-defined one, but it is working towards something that I think is the film’s point. 

People today are constantly concerned with whether they are “bad people,” which more formally is a concern with whether their decisions are generally on the side of a moral good. One realizes that when people reflexively disavow racism and sexism and make the default claims of “I am not racist,” or “I am not sexist,” or “I am not homophobic,” what they are truly saying is “I am not a bad person.” They might have the image of 19th century slave holder—whip in hand, determination on his face—and they are doing their best to distance themselves from that image. “I am not like that.” “I am on the right side of history.” But only the future has the power to judge our current rightness, all we can do is attempt to make good decisions given what we know of our present and of our own history.

Still this question of “bad person,” has a personal import in someone’s life. They want to feel good about themselves and their decisions. They want to believe that all the good things that happen in their lives are deserved and all the bad things are anomalous or the conspiracies of an unfair world. But from a wider perspective, the question of “badness” seems more related to the question  of culpability. If something terrible occurs who has responsibility for it? Who is the person or who are the people who could have changed that situation for the better but simply chose not to?

We know that the family in the film is part of something deeply evil. But the question of whether they themselves are evil, is a question about whether they have responsibility over what they are doing. When one considers the youngest boy in the family, one can immediately recognize that he lives in this home due to the direction of his parents. If he gets toys or clothes from the concentration camp and he plays with them or wears them, then his part in the wider evil of the camp is limited. The slightly older son who is shown as a member of the Hitler Youth seems less innocent, but compounding interest is as powerful in a life as it is in the markets. You accept one new marginally evil thing each day and pretty soon you are far from where you started actively contributing to something you would have been aghast to contribute to. So the distance in my mind between the younger boy and the older boy is really one of time.

Both are situated as deeply as they can be in the structure of the world around them, given how long they have been in that structure. They are united by a passive acceptance of the terms of their world and are separated merely by the compounding effects of the years between them. Now, the radical extrapolation is that a similar thing can be said about the distance between the father and his sons.

One might think that the man who is actively seeking the creation of the furnace is "worse" than the boy playing in the dirt behind the ill-begotten home. Or that  the man who is the commandant of a death camp is more culpable than the boy who "just" wears the swastika on his arm. But I would say their actions only seem to belie the similarity. All the people in the family have agency. They can make decisions that run counter to the many small decisions we see them make each day. It would simply be incredibly difficult for them to do so given the system that exists around them. The youngest boy could tell the parents that he doesn’t want the clothes. The boy in the Hitler youth could renounce his position and renounce his family. Both children are certainly less deep in this system than are their parents. Assuming they had the awareness to do so so—which is a big assumption, arguably 

 assumption—the children could decide not to participate, and they could run away much more easily than their father, commandant and all, ever could. And yet we consider the father as more responsible for the world around them because he is older and should know better.

This argument is not meant to demote the seeming responsibility of the father. Instead the intention is to elevate the seeming irresponsibility of everyone who finds themselves in a point in history where evils are happening which they simply choose to ignore. An individual's agency is always more easily channeled in ways that support or work within—rather than oppose—the system in which he finds himself. Whether such a person sees himself as good or bad does not matter.   It might help them sleep at night but it doesn’t engage with the problems that exist outside their passivity.

One of the first things one notices about the film is that it seems intentionally uneventful. There is no by-the-numbers rising action, and large parts of the film have an odd languishing quality that requires concentration for engagement. If I hadn’t been trapped in a movie theater and forced to sit and watch it all, I would have stopped midway to revive my attention by scrolling through Instagram.

The scenes come as though they are the requested still shots of a landscape painter. Here is the family at a lake. Here is the family eating dinner. Here are the parents sleeping on two different beds. Why make a film about such ordinary acts? The purpose is to suggest these people are incredibly ordinary. But the larger context of what they are engaged in is very abnormal. And, of course, it is the larger context that is important and is what should be paid attention to, though it rarely is.

This pairing of apparent normalcy with a background of horror harkens to Hannah Arendt’s infamous work 

. The parallels are so clear that one could see the movie as a fictional rendering of Arendt’s thesis. In the work, Arendt profiles Adolf Eichmann, the German operational strategist who is  known as the architect of the Holocaust. She watches Eichmann in the court room during his defense and   notes how queerly pedestrian he seemed, especially when he recounted crimes. There was so much bureaucracy and so much logistics in this effort to murder millions of people. And it seemed that he worked primarily with a view towards his career. At one point, she is surprised to hear him seemingly pouting about not being adequately recognized for how good of a job he did.

“Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. . . . It was precisely this... which enabled him to sit for months on end facing a German Jew who was conducting the police interrogation, pouring out his heart to the man and explaining again and again how it was that he reached only the rank of lieutenant colonel in the SS and that it had not been his fault that he was not promoted.” (The Banality of Evil: Eichmann in Jerusalem)

The reactions to Arendt's book were mixed. People did not want to see evil as "banal," and they found it offensive that she had suggested as much. Millions of people died in the Holocaust. How could that even approach what is considered banal? People  wanted to see evil as extreme and out of place, like some brightly colored snake in the Amazon that announces its danger from 10 paces away. Considering evil like this does two things. First, it gives the viewer a sense of intellectual superiority over those who commit evil. “What they were doing was clearly wrong. How could they not see it? How twisted can they be?” Second, it saves the viewer from introspecting about the actual subtlety of evil that could possibly exist in their own  life.

But one could admit that Arendt’s thesis, although possibly sound, failed the modern test that demands that the idea, at least on the surface, not be objectionable lest the cursory reader (which is admittedly most of us) dismiss it on the look of its face alone.

Fortunately, Arendt had a student who could fill in the gaps left by her teacher. Elizabeth Minnich had watched the reactions to her mentor’s book, noting what people had misunderstood about it and recognizing the truth that Arendt wanted to convey. So she decided to write an addendum. Minnich’s book reversed Arendt’s two words and was titled 

, which Minnich felt was a more accurate summary of what Arendt was reaching for. Minnich claimed that people had gotten Arendt wrong. It wasn’t so much that evil itself was banal, but that living a banal life in corrupt systems leads to evil. Especially when one’s goal is simply to make a better life for oneself in the evil system that exists. That, in her view, is the quickest way down the path of sin.

“I have learned that when systems are turned bad, when the extraordinary becomes ordinary, it does not take a Hitler, an Idi Amin, a Jeffrey Dahmer, a Charles Manson, or any other unusual sort to become a perpetrator. It just takes a practiced conventionality...an ability to go along thoughtlessly—by which I mean without paying attention, reflecting, questioning—to play the game as careerists everywhere do, hoping to win if, by unquestioned rules, one plays it well.” (The Evil of Banality: On The Life and Death Importance of Thinking)

For Minnich, it is the unthinking complicity that constitutes the evil. And this unthinking complicity is, by definition, banal, given how easy it is, given that it constitutes a person merging themself with the background and seemingly disappearing within it rather than attempting to stand out or imagine something better.

In the movie, we see the truth in Minnich’s framing in multiple ways. There is the father’s disappointment in not getting a desired promotion. There is the mother’s demand that they remain in their beautiful house where she walks through the expansive manifestation of her success each day. There is the mother-in-law who marvels at the great success that her daughter has achieved. These are people who want fairly basic things. Things that people today also generally want.

Of course, there is no mention of Jewish people in this framing of familial ambition, and this omission is an accurate rendering of the world of the family.  The people upon whom an oppressive system is based are always in the periphery when the storytellers of that system recount its salient historical points. So in the film, what is hidden from view reveals what is most important, and what one plainly sees  are the superficial concerns of people who do not realize (mostly because they cannot be bothered to care) on whose backs their status and safety rests.  

There is a contest in this film between Arendt’s and Minnich’s framings of “evil” and “banality.” The most obvious framing stems from Arendt’s claim about evil being banal. The film shows that evil need not be ostentatious and flagrant. It could exist in the simple moments of people who live within evil systems. But a more subtle framing is one derived from Minnich’s reworking. Namely, the pedestrian concerns of people in evil systems constitute the evil itself, i.e., the idea that being banal—unthinking, regimented, and easily controlled—is a conduit towards evil.

Thus the film gives us multiple perspectives from which to understand how our own lives might intersect with extensive harm. This is a reality that Americans should be familiar with, but it is also one that they routinely reject. There is an incessant desire to distance ourselves from the worse aspects of our past even though we feel quite fine accepting the profitable elements of that legacy.

Should we have empathy for the plight of the commandant’s wife? Should we feel sad about the prospect of her losing the success she feels she deserves? More generally, should we see her as expanding into more dimensions than her status as the wife of a future war criminal suggests? Maybe we should. Such a patient understanding of circumstance is precisely what we grant  to George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, people whose life stories were so grand and foundational to this country’s development that it seems quite wrong for their ownership of other people to eclipse all that they had accomplished. Surely, if we can humanize Jefferson, who likely applied as skilled of an analytical mindset to the construction of his slave plantation as he did to the logic of the constitution, we can humanize at least the wife in the film and likely even her husband.

Reflexively, this suggestion seems deeply wrong, and my guess is that it has to do with education in America. No American would attempt to humanize Eichmann to the extent that Robert E Lee has been humanized in  history. And likening George Washington to Hitler would be blasphemous. This is because the way we are educated focuses primarily on the triumphs of the founding fathers, all the incredible good that they did, and the deep intelligence they applied to the construction of a political democracy which we now inherit. But the consequence of this patient humanization is that in addition to the political democracy of the founders, we have also inherited many of the assumptions that underlie it. 

So the people today who are constantly concerned with whether other are “evil” or“bad people”-- whether someone is “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” etc.,--are missing the point. Our society is deeply unequal. There is poverty that is endemic. There is an implicit social and economic hierarchy amongst people that is repeatedly reflected back at us through media. And all of the narratives behind these reflections are often claimed to not exist in some weird collective attempt to gaslight the public into believing their world is more equitable than it truly is. The question about goodness or badness  in such a society is myopic. The more relevant question is whether you are working to succeed in society according to the terms  it has laid out for you or whether you’re working to interrogate  those terms  in an effort to understand the true extent of their harm.  

This is the question that the German family answered in one way, and the way they answered it legitimizes our moral judgment of them. Not merely that they were doing bad things but that their sense of good or bad was entirely blinkered and twisted by their desire to succeed in an evil system and that they did not recognize the evil in the system because it gave them access to the basic things most people claim to want in life: economic prosperity for themselves and their future progeny.

Today, the people who claim that American society is not deeply unequal—who claim that it is not racist or sexist or that no social hierarchies exist that are potential impediments to success—are very much like the people in the family. It is not that  such people have direct hands in murder. Instead, such people are accepting at face value a system that gives them access to opportunity and success despite the system being based on eliminating opportunity and success from other people. They are willing to play the game according to the rules that they have been told to exist. And as long as their life stories don’t represent obvious contradictions to the philosophies behind those rules—philosophies of equality and justice—they are willing to believe that their success is well founded, that they are good people in honorable systems.

is only about the administration of the Holocaust or about some family whose life has been so enmeshed in the structure of this evil as to be totally lost. But, in fact, I think the film is really about us today and about how we all are very much like the people in the family.

So I  lean towards Minnich’s framing even though it is more disturbing. She seems to say that if we are of sufficiently high socioeconomic status and we work to increase that status in systems that perpetuate evil, then even if we seemingly do not have a direct hand in evil—we do not shoot the bullet, we do not deny the individual health care, we do not remove money from a school system—we are complicit in the evil in a way that helps reinforce it. This seems like a radical claim. It makes responsibility so diffuse that it  places it in the realm of meaninglessness. If all of us within a system are responsible for the evils of the system, then doesn’t that mean no one is truly responsible? Surely, someone must have more responsibility than everyone else; otherwise, there is no real recourse for action.

I think of a man in Alabama in 1960s America. There are "race riots" in the cities around him  caused by  people who march through the streets, disrupting traffic and interfering with his daily commute. Some of these people are demanding that schools be integrated, which he knows will be a drag on the school system, taking resources away from his children. He doesn’t want any of this. He just wants to live a peaceful life in the space he has carved out for himself. His society provided him with a reasonable path toward success, and he has only just achieved a fraction of it. How could he have any allegiance to people who say his success is based on a corrupt system?

When politicians promise to maintain school segregation, he votes for them. When a black family moves to his neighborhood, he considers moving, citing lower property values. When he hears about Johnson’s Affirmative Action programs, he thinks about the jobs that are now harder for him to get. In each case, the man’s focus is on his economic prosperity and that of his family. Though this man alone might seem inconsequential in the functioning of his larger system, his power is derived from the many people who think the way he does, the large numbers of people who also just want economic prosperity and thus calcify systems that unequally dole out opportunities for that prosperity.    

Today, the modern manifestations of the “Man from Alabama” exists  in the discussions of a color-blind society.   It also exists in the shallowing of economic opportunity that makes the intelligent scores of youth endeavor to work for companies whose wealth is already grand and whose ultimate effects on society are not unambiguously positive. And it exists in the immigrants who come to America  and merely want to succeed in the land of economic opportunity.

Indeed, arguably the  greatest danger in immigrants coming to this country is not that they will take jobs away from so-called “true Americans” or that they will change some essential and intangible “American-ness” that no one can describe but which people constantly connect to  Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen. Rather,  the danger is that they will not change anything at all, that in an attempt to "succeed" by short-sighted metrics, immigrants  will learn to embody and propagate the hierarchical framings of people and potential that have made this country so destabilizingly unequal. They will see what they need to do in order to be professionally successful, and that includes what they will need to ignore about economic inequality and pillaging, and they will strive to fulfill the apparent requirements of success. Their lives will be boring in that they will be typical, but such lives would also be implicated in extensive harms because their primary goal was to succeed within  an  inequitable system. 

Send any comments or questions about the work to 

Those Who Walk Toward Banality

It took ten seconds for Sasha, our beloved hostess, to say something after April had made it known to everyone that she and Sasha’s boyfriend David were not merely coworkers but were closer than anyone had imagined.

When Sasha spoke her voice was high and unfamiliar.

"Excuse me," she said, standing up from the table. Her hand was covering her mouth, a failed attempt to hold in the sobs which were only getting louder. I looked at April expecting her to do something, anything that would make the situation right again, but she said nothing and only looked down at her plate of mashed potatoes. Sasha too seemed to have been looking towards April for some consolation or explanation, for she did not leave the table immediately. She paused to look at her and with April’s head still bowed, Sasha placed her face in her palms and began swaying from side to side.

Sasha skittered off to the bathroom, and as she closed the door behind her, my eyes drifted not to the other guests nor to April, but to the pecan pie I made for this event, a pie which would now most certainly go uneaten. Weeks ago, my mother had given me the recipe, and I promised I would tell her what my friends thought of it. But that was now probably out of the question.

On the morning of the day of this dinner, I had just returned to the apartment I shared with April when she asked me if I “could” take a seat. A ridiculous question under any circumstance, but upon seeing that April’s eyes were still and quiet, I felt compelled to find the nearest chair and sit down. I was on the couch, yards away from a still standing April, with plastic bags awkwardly balancing on my thighs and at my side. Pecans, sugar, corn syrup, and pie crusts. Had I forgotten anything? Was there something I had not seen?

April sat down at the dining room table and she looked at me and I looked at her. Then she looked away and out the window, and my eyes followed her gaze. The sky was cloudless, but its blue was subdued, soft. It really was a beautiful day.

“I’m in love with David.” I think I felt the words before I heard them.

I looked back at her. She was still staring out the window. “What?” I asked.

“David and I have been seeing each other for months,” she added. It was in this second statement that I noted something strange about her tone. She was surely confessing something, but there was no hint of self-reproach, none of the apprehension of an apology, not even the latent defiance of self-righteousness. It was like she was telling me that it will rain today and that I better bring an umbrella.

I was still uselessly holding the bags. Eggs. I had forgotten eggs. How would the pie stay together without them? She looked back at me. ‘Now you say something,’ her eyes seemed to say.

I thought back to when I had first met April. It was years ago, and we were both still graduate students. I was in the Business School’s library and she was sitting a few tables down from me, scribbling furiously in a notepad, immersed deeply in a world no one else could see. I remember marveling at her manifest focus, and her apparent ability to shut out the irrelevant aspects of her environment. It took me a month before I asked her out.

She turned back to me and her eyes narrowed. “What do you think?”

OK, I at last admitted to myself, this is happening. I looked around the room, bare except for a couch, a dining room table, and a TV we never watched. The truth: Things with us had gotten dry. I was teaching Statistical Mechanics and Mathematical Methods courses this semester, and I spent most nights in the office, even sometimes when I didn’t have to. We had been living together for half a year, and I was not handling domesticity well. I still wanted my own space. At some point, April’s texts of “Chicken or steak?” and “When will you be home?” were replaced with “I’ll be staying late tonight,” and “I’ll be at my sister’s this weekend.” Of course, I suspected something. April worked for, and spent most of her time at the office with, David, but I had told myself nothing could happen between them. I mean April, a despiser of all things cliché, could surely never become the secretary who sleeps with her boss.

As I looked at April, I considered whether to mention all the obvious elephants. David was dating Sasha. Sasha was supposedly April’s best friend. We were going to David and Sasha’s Thanksgiving dinner in a few hours.

April stood up. This talk was apparently over. As was our relationship. “I’m telling you now, just so you know why I can’t come visit your family this weekend,” she said. “But I don’t want Sasha to know yet, especially not today. I don’t want to ruin her Thanksgiving.”

Implicit in April’s words were instructions: I won’t say anything to Sasha, so you’re not going to say anything to Sasha. Revenge should have been on my mind, but the entire conversation had stunned me into complicity. I nodded my head, and April, satisfied, went to our room and closed the door. I sat on the couch and breathed in and out, then I released the bags in my hands and went out to buy eggs.

As it turned out, I didn’t need to say anything to Sasha because April told her anyway. At the dinner, we had just finished the main course, and dessert was about to be served when a guest concluded a description of her brother’s new tattoo by pronouncing that she could never imagine getting one. Mostly everyone agreed, but Sasha, with mischief in her eyes, quietly mentioned that David had two tattoos. David was away visiting family, so he couldn’t confirm or deny this claim. But when the guest expressed disbelief, April, so perpetually and unnervingly restrained, experienced what I can only call a lapse. She said it was true, and that David had a star on each inner thigh. It took me a second to understand what had just happened, but Sasha, her mouth open, seemed to have realized it instantly. She knew the answer before I had even intuited the question. How would April know that David had a tattoo on each thigh unless she had also seen what was in between?

By now Sasha had been in the bathroom for five minutes. We could all hear her sobs from down the hall. I heard someone’s chair scrape back. Someone was at last doing something, but that someone was sitting next to me. I looked up to see April standing and looking towards the bathroom.

“What are you doing?” I asked her. She began walking around the table, and I stood up to follow her. I grabbed her wrist before she could get too far away. It was the first time I had touched her in a month.

“I think you’ve done enough,” I said to her. She turned around in an expression of genuine bafflement.

“She needs me right now.” Was she kidding? I looked into her eyes to check whether the sincerity I heard in her words was also in her face. Seeing it clearly and brightly there, I suppressed a chuckle. “I am quite sure you’re the last person she needs ‘right now’.”

At this, April wrested her arm from my grip and squared herself in front of me. I sighed, trying to regain something which looked like composure. I walked to the coat rack and lifted off my jacket. “I think we’ve overstayed our welcome. Let me take you home.”

April folded her arms as if positioning herself for an attack.

“I’ll take a cab,” she said, which I felt was code for “Please, go fuck yourself.” I clenched and opened my hands. At my back, I felt the pressure of many eyes.

“Fine,” I said, “Do whatever the hell you want.”

I walked to the door, and the moment I opened it I realized I was forgetting something. I looked at the dinner table. The pie I made for this evening lay untouched next to the carved turkey. That morning, when I returned home from my second trip to the grocery store, I found the apartment empty. On the table, there was a note. “Out for a walk—April.” I thought about the pie. April had promised me we would make it together, but she was gone. I had waited for fifteen minutes, then started without her. Making the pie had been an ordeal. Even with my mother’s explicitly written recipe, I still messed up the filling once and had to make the entire thing again. April returned hours later, with an hour remaining until the dinner, and the pie was lying there on the table, but she said nothing about it.

In Sasha’s eyes, April and I were what we had not, in reality, been for many months: a couple. So the pie would seem like a gift from both me and the best friend who had been sleeping with her boyfriend. Assuredly, Sasha would throw the pie away. I did not like this idea. I walked back to the table and picked it up.

“I’m taking this,” I said to no one in particular and walked through the open door, closing it behind me.

I left Sasha and David’s place and started on the route which led to the subway. But I didn’t want to face the crush of people, the cloistered unkempt spaces of the underground. And the day was still beautiful. I began walking to the esplanade which went on for two miles along the edge of the river in the direction of my apartment. The sun was setting and there were families taking walks with dogs and runners huffing down the path.

I looked closely at the pie cradled in my hands. It was my first attempt at implementing my mother’s recipe. I had spent years failing to visit my childhood home, missing Thanksgiving after Thanksgiving due to work, when my mother finally told me that if I wasn’t going to be able to eat her pecan pie, I should at least try to make it myself. The result looked reasonable enough for a first effort, but it also didn’t look like my mother’s. I hadn’t even tasted it yet because I was saving it for tonight’s dinner.

I transferred the pie to one hand and patted myself down, finding nothing. What did I expect? Who carries plastic forks as a daily accessory anyway? I hesitated for a moment and then stuck three fingers into the pie and pulled out a clump of pecans and filling. I lifted it above my head and lowered it into my mouth. To my surprise, it was delicious. I quickly ate another clump and another. It was quite possibly better than any I had eaten while growing up. I decided the nutty sweetness of the filling almost quelled the disappointment of the day.

Thoughts of April wandered into my mind, and I stopped walking and looked up. The sky, previously so bright and clear, had become a murky reflection of the colored leaves scattered across the road. But I hadn’t stopped for more than a few seconds before I was shoved from behind. My hands launched up and the pie flew from my grasp. It sailed overhead, and my mind suddenly realized this was a two-dimensional projectile motion problem. Given an estimate of both the angle of launch and the pie’s initial speed, I would be able to calculate how fast I would need to run to catch the pie before it hit the ground. But I did not have time to think because the force that shoved me followed through, and I went to the ground seconds before the pie did.

It is true what they say about time seeming to dilate at the precipice of the unexpected. Imprecise writers often tout this as a manifestation of Einstein’s claim that the passage of time is relative, the proverbial instant of happiness juxtaposed with a seemingly unending boredom, both in reality constituting only a few seconds. Of course, this is not so. Relativity claims that the passage of time can indeed be different in different coordinate systems, but this difference has nothing at all to do with perception. The deceleration of time at the moment of a catastrophe, however, is all perception, and as such has nothing at all to do with relativity.

Instead, I have my own hypothesis for why time seems to slow at such moments. Your mind, trying to process how you came so suddenly to such a strange place at a strange time, patiently moves through the seconds, poring over each possibly relevant detail until it reaches an understanding that could never have been developed in the time typically allotted to mundane events. Still, even with time’s deceleration, you all too quickly find yourself at the conclusion of the incident, feeling explicitly what you have always felt implicitly, that you are merely a bystander to a life that is not your own.

After the tackle, I was on my hands and knees. Around me, I heard labored breaths and the soft stampede of many feet. I looked up and around to see about a dozen runners jogging away, down the path. I vaguely noted that after my fall some of them had run around me and others had hurdled over my back. Looking to the front I saw a shirtless man in shorts which were too high and sneakers which were too bright jogging backwards as he looked with scorn upon the pie scattered on the concrete.

"Next time stay off the running path!" he yelled as he turned around and sprinted after his group.

Now, I would like to say that I made a retort so witty and biting that the runner stopped in his tracks and wept quietly to himself as he contemplated his hamster-like existence. I would like to say that I got up and ran after this lanky charlatan of a human being and picked him up and threw him from the edge of the river. I would like to say these things because they make me sound strong, confident, and completely over what happened that day and because they are less shameful than the truth.

In truth, I thought about April and I began to cry. Sobs made all the more uncontrollable by the fact that I did not believe they were happening. When April told me the news of her relationship with David that morning, I told myself I didn’t really care. I believed I had moved on instantly, and to me, this was a sign of maturity and control. Yet here I was, prostrate on the blacktop, shedding tears that were hours, perhaps months, too late to mean anything to anybody.

I looked upon the disassembled pie a few feet in front of me, a pie which hours before was whole and waiting on Sasha’s table to be eaten amongst strangers masquerading as good company, and hours before that merely consisted of a disparate collection of ingredients picked up during the early operating hours at Trader Joe’s. It took minutes to right myself and stand up. I brushed the gravel from my pants and hands, and I looked at the pie again. In the back of my mind, I heard a voice—most likely my mother’s—telling me I should clean up the mess I made.

Pecan Pie

A few years ago, when I was searching for a job as a data scientist, I was contacted by a recruiter from a Well Known Tech Company. He said he had seen my LinkedIn profile and thought I would be a good fit for the machine learning engineer position at the company. We talked about the role and the technical requirements, and the work seemed interesting enough. What remained unremarked upon both by me and, of course, by him was the wider public image of the company, an image that depicted it as more interested in advertising and market share than in ensuring that the already vulnerable populations in the world were not made more so by its products. 

Instead what we discussed in detail was the interview process. The recruiter explained to me that the first step in the process was a coding test, and that to prepare I should spend some weeks practicing "Leetcode questions." If you have never heard of Leetcode, here is a prototypical question

This problem and many others can be found at 

. Each problem on the site is a programming challenge at a particular difficulty level,  and users can earn points and higher rankings by solving the more difficult problems. Here is one of those harder ones:

Generally, the problems require the user to write an algorithm that achieves a result and satisfies certain test conditions. They are always devoid of any context that justifies them, and thus the focus is insular, entirely defined by the prompt that is given, one might imagine, by some disembodied supervisor. The harder problems often require tricks that might take a while to find on your own, but, if found, could then be applied to many other similar “hard” problems thus rendering them much easier. This is to say, like performance on most tests, performance on these questions  can be improved through practice.

Thus the recruiter told me I should prepare for the interview by going through many rounds of such practice. The Well Known Tech Company had provided lots of material to prepare for this first interview. There was a document  reviewing some of the major background topics in data structures and sorting algorithms. I could schedule a practice coding session. I could even schedule a session to watch someone else complete a coding interview.

So, I dutifully began my prep. Because I had come to data science from physics, I was ignorant of the formal aspects of coding. I wanted to learn these topics carefully, but I was at most a month away from the interview. I could work through an online Data Structures and Algorithms course, but this would take more time than I had. Alternatively, I could spend two hours every night working through Leetcode questions. From reviewing interview prep forums, it seemed that the latter was the generally recommended approach. But faced with these two options, one of which was a more careful study that could have value beyond such interviews, and the other a  more direct preparation for the interview, my mind seemed more interested in understanding the nature of the choice itself.    

What would it mean if I spent the next three weeks using all my after-work hours to prepare for this interview? What would it mean if I chose the  superficial preparation of rushing through programming challenges with one-time tricks over a slower process of learning the topics more methodically? What would it mean if I got a job for which the first bar of the interview process required me to cram programming questions of such limited scope that successful solutions could be used to rank anonymous people on a forum?

These questions brought me back to questions I had asked about my own former education in physics. The insularity of the questions, their integration into the first step of a long process at the end of which was acceptance into a prestigious institution, and the endless hours of preparation required to make it through the first steps of that process. They were all reminiscent of the structure of examinations in physics. Given that similarity, it was clear that the aspects of the interview process that were seemingly external to the subject matter were nevertheless fundamental,  arguably even more so than the content. Namely, one’s willingness to jump through these hoops to even get an opportunity to have the position was an important unstated test of the coding interview.


In essence, you could know nothing about the precise content of the questions and just think about the steps and structure of preparation for the interview, and then you would understand your likely role in the organization, or understand what the organization expects from you: You need to be analytically quick and dedicated and be willing to give hours of your life to be part of something seemingly larger than you which is actually quite small in its existential ambitions. 

Leetcode and all of its sister sites compile coding challenges in the space of data structures and algorithms. People who want recreational practice in these problems use these sites to improve their skills, but these sites have also become a source of questions for coding interviews.

The most compelling argument I have heard for the need to use questions like these in interviews is that, unlike civil or mechanical engineering, software engineering has no generally accepted standard of certification. Thus, if you are a company that wants employees who can write code, you need some way to evaluate candidates’ ability to do so. You may  be disinclined to believe that the coders’ past projects are indicative of future performance since who knows if they coded all the projects they claimed to. So you give these potential employees a programming test, and you use how the candidates construct and discuss their solutions as a rough measure of their proficiency at both coding in particular and problem-solving in general.

This is the stated purpose of Leetcode when used in interviews: Performance on the site’s graded challenges is a proxy for coding ability in a domain where other proxies like degrees and certificates are not wholly trusted. Of course, the “coding ability” that is evaluated is of a narrow problem-solving kind where the primary action of value is analyzing well-defined problems supplied by invisible authority figures. And of course, most candidates and employers acknowledge that Leetcode misses more holistic skills like software architecture, problem finding, and definition. But I would say the content of these coding tests is largely beside the point.

Employers could create a collection of tests that approach more holistically the question of what is a good software engineer, but, if Goodhart’s law is to be believed, performance on any such test could be improved through “grinding” through collections of similar questions, and then these tests would ultimately be evaluating the extent of the previous grind rather than what they originally aimed to probe. One could suppose that all this practice is beneficial to the candidate and that after all of it, she has become a better coder by some definition with at least tangential overlap with the skills required of the job, but what is more certain is that the individual has spent a lot of time training herself to pass through a hoop created by an institution.

Therefore, employers, when selecting for the high performers on these tests are actually selecting for the people who have devoted large parts of their free time to preparing for these tests.

In this way, the test is more of a values filter  than a proficiency one. The larger tech companies, companies whose business interests intersect at best ambiguously with the public interest, need a workforce who will largely uncritically accept and implement the orders of their hierarchical superiors. A reliable way to select for such a workforce is to first require any candidate you consider to take a test that itself requires such extensive preparation that anyone who does well is likely to have spent many after-work hours working through practice questions rather than doing things more deeply valuable to their skillset or more aligned with their interests.

And in truth, this is really what a certain type of employer wants. The latent purpose of these tests is that they provide a clear signal of extensive prior preparation which is indicative, not merely of ability or intelligence, but of devotion, a devotion that amounts to a willingness to accept an external reference point of skill and to take on the ideological neutrality  of a tool.

If you need workers to build something whose societal implications impinge on  issues like algorithmic fairness, economic exploitation, and the further remuneration of an already wealthy elite, then it is truly a benefit (arguably even a requirement) that your workforce not concern itself with the larger meaning of what they are doing. You need them to do the specific job of building the components of the product without being distracted by the social or cultural consequences of the work they do. Selecting for high Leetcode performance selects for such people, people who will devote time and energy to excel according to the myopic standards of their employers while ignoring—or, recognizing but being indifferent to—the wider impact of their work.

In other words, you need employees who have a tendency to be ideologically subservient to their employers, or who believe in the ideological neutrality of their work, thus amounting to the same thing.

, Jeff Schmidt outlined the ways salaried professionals are taught during their professional education to subordinate their intrinsic values in favor of values determined by authority figures. Or rather, he argued that these soon-to-be professionals are not taught a particular value system, but that the filters that determine their advancement to higher levels of professionalization select for people whose value systems are so subdued or non-existent that these values can easily be subsumed into the values of the hierarchies that surround them.

The claim is a simple one, if at all dark. The most educated people in a populace are not educated in ways that encourage them to take careful, critical, and holistic views of the world around them and to then assume responsibility for making changes where they deem necessary. They are not educated to recognize their agency apart from the systems that claim they have value. Rather they are taught to fit themselves into existing hierarchies of value, to derive their identities from success within these hierarchies, and, in turn, to define success according to a combination of prestige, professional title, and compensation.

Schmidt argued that qualifying examinations in the sciences were one of the first filters to select potential scientists who matched this ideologically subservient archetype. Leetcode for large tech companies seems to serve the same purpose.

This professional desire to fit into constructed hierarchies of competence and skill rather than to challenge them  is a consequence of our education system which consists more or less entirely of this hierarchical positioning, a positioning in which advancement to a more “prestigious” place requires beating out many other individuals, who are thereafter deemed undeserving. The resulting hierarchy justifies itself because the people who have succeeded within it and thus owe to it some part of their identity and material comforts generally have no incentive to question it. So they replicate it into the future.

Nothing I have written is new. People already recognize there is something amiss about using performance on Leetcode-style questions as a metric of ability. This sense of wrongness is sometimes stated outright but generally must be gleaned from the latent cynicism of comments from Reddit, Hacker News, and Blind.

It's becoming obvious to me that my time is better spent learning to solve these riddles rather than actually becoming a better developer. I have a job search coming up at the end of the year and whilst I've managed to largely avoid companies that ask this type of question, I believe it's seriously constraining my career.

I did 550 problems, 80 hard, 290 medium, rest easy. I can do most mediums in less than 20. Took me half a year and got multiple competing FAANGMULASS 

[tedious acronym for major tech companies] 

offers. You are barely scratching the surface. There are geniuses out there who can study for a month and nail it, I’m definitely not one of them.

I have completed close to 1300 leetcode problems. It started with just being simple interview prep. But after each interview rejection/failure it become second nature to spend 30-60 minutes a day on leetcode. Fast forward several months later, I landed a job at google as an L4 SDE [Level 4 Software Development Engineer] with just 3 YOE [Year's of Experience].

For many this would be a success story. But a couple issues I've seen after spending 1 year at google.

For one I'm severely underperforming. One of my TL's [Tech Leads] for the project I'm working on explicitly has told me the expectations are higher for L4.

And sometimes piercing through the din of cynicism is such a succinct articulation of the situation that it is clear that the supposedly subjugated worker has become self-aware even if they have not yet found ways to make of this awareness a powerful tool. In a HackerNews post titled “Leetcode has taught me that I'm a bad engineer,” a poster bemoaned their recent extensive but fruitless practice in Leetcode.

I used to think this job was a creative one, since writing frameworks and libraries for further use, documenting code and extreme programming made me think that I was building something new and useful.

 Leetcode isn't about fun and challenging things, it's about thinking in one particular way, spitting out solutions using the same exact data structures and jumping through hoops on command without philosophizing or creating anything that can be reused/extended.

Where on Earth did you get an idea that creativity was needed in the first place?


Creativity is not scalable, even dangerous, and big companies strive to scale => they need obidient 

 soldiers, playing by the rules and just smart enough to not f*ck up a critical project.

Hence the Leetcode. It's a perfect way to ensure obidience 

, just enough brains, patience and motivation to risk wasting few month of preparation to the interview for the chance to get in FAANG.

If you want to be creative — "go fund yourself"! :)

What happened to the prospective machine learning engineer position? Unable to motivate myself to spend hours each night working through isolated programming challenges, I ultimately withdrew my application. Perhaps, I told myself, I would be more willing in the future.

Later, during the Great Tech Firings of late 2022 and early 2023, there was a culling of workers at Well Known Tech Company. Purportedly the company had grown too large and could no longer justify its head count. I wondered how I would feel if I were among the throng that had been let go. If I had spent many weeks or months of my life working through exercises whose main purpose was to get me to this place that I was now being ejected from, would I think all of that time spent was worth it?

Many of the employees who had been let go must have asked themselves this question. They probably found a satisfying answer. What is more certain is that after their firings they landed on their feet, likely because where they had just come from would be a benefit to where they would go next. Part of the reason people give so much of themselves to the existentially limited tasks required to be part of a place like Well Known Tech Company is that being part of something prestigious marks them as an accomplished elite who can thereafter use that mark as a proxy for the certifications which do not formally exist in tech.

The bargain is not new and is arguably the way institutional prestige functions in much of this world. But I can't help but think that    one of the reasons the world is so unequal—in capital distribution, in health, in quality of life—and seems to become increasingly more so by the day is that we have defined the standards of success according to how high people climb within systems created by the wealthy and the powerful to augment their wealth and power. Our standards of prestige, status, and wealth are reflective of this, the individual attempting to increase each axis by affiliating with institutions that have more of it than she does. 

Such a world carries its incentives in the same basket in which it carries its problems, mixing the two constantly, unable to separate one from the other lest the whole basket slip from the hand and tumble to the floor. Maybe we could free ourselves from the problems in which corporations with too much power squander the public good for their own ends, but it would likely require us to change the meaning of accomplishment in ways that strip people of the identities they have spent their lives building. The world at large might be in a better state after all this, but who would willingly sacrifice their sense of identity simply to improve the world?

An Education in Leetcode


In those jovial and relaxing moments of conversation when people feel content to contemplate the philosophy of their lives, the observation is often posed that for each year we are alive the next year appears to pass more quickly. My explanation for this observation had been standardized long ago. When we are five years old, a single year comprises 20% of our life and so when a new year comes and goes we seem to have become much older, merely by proportion, than the adults whose years pass like collections of months to us.

Another explanation is that when we are young, the world is new to us, and thus almost every additional experience is like being exposed to an aspect of life never before seen. Yet when we grow older, the luster of the world, through repeated inspection, appears faded and we cannot help but see each additional experience, no matter how novel it is to us, as something we’ve seen before.

But here’s an alternative. As we grow older in age and in experience, we become more and more invested in the standard achievement narrative of a life. This is the story that posits life as a journey to some worthy destination, and an individual as the traveler who braves trials and dragons to find the reward at the end of the road. But in such a narrative meaning exists most truly, if not exclusively, at the end of our travels, and each step only has significance in proportion to how much closer it brings us to that end.

Children, who are less exposed to this narrative and consequently do not  battle with it, are given a greater license to see their moments in life just as they are. Thus these moments, not parsed through an exclusively utilitarian rubric, do not pass through them like water, but get stuck to their insides and stay with them. So that in a year they have lived through and held onto hundreds of significant moments, while their adult counterparts jaded and tired, have held onto, if they are lucky, one or two.

To put it simply: children appreciate and thus experience the world more, and adults appreciate the world less.

I am falling into the banal adult habit of romanticizing a childhood I no longer experience. To be complete, I must admit there certainly are demons in childhood that are sometimes only exorcised when those children become adults. Demons of fear, narcissism, and obedience, and these certainly can destroy the life of a child as surely as the child’s more beneficial predilections can save it.

But one must acknowledge that appreciation of where one is right now is largely antithetical to the way most adults conceptualize their lives. It is certainly not the way I, for the longest time, saw myself or my work. Recognizing some gap in life, something hollow and bare or some meaning not supplied, I believed that this gap could be filled through something grand, or at least something that scaled in magnitude to what I perceived was the size of the gap. And since the hole was felt now, I constructed a story which if faithfully followed, would allow me to eliminate it or reduce its size in the future.

And yet the story was not constant, and the solution to the emptiness fluctuated in time so that the gap always remained, and its filling always existed beyond the horizon. And strangely, although I saw quite clearly the lies of consumerist and materialist culture, that is I realized that nothing one could buy would give one so much peace as to feel no need to buy anything again, I did not see the parallel lies in the much less maligned, or even noticed, achievement culture. I 

 see that those who had already achieved so much were often the most hungry for more achievement, but I could not see at all what this fact had to do with life.

The physicist turned financial quantitative analyst Emanuel Derman once said that “Ambition is a constant state of dissatisfaction with the present”. However, so too is depression, and the danger is that one can allow the reality of dissatisfaction to feature so prominently in one’s evaluation of the present that the present turns from merely dissatisfactory to completely intolerable. This usually occurs when one ties one’s sense of contentment too closely to the achievement of certain goals. In such cases, it becomes impossible to appreciate the moments that pave the path to achievement because one is always so focused on achieving.

It is very easy to look at your current life and realize you are not where you want to be. It is also normal to look at your past and realize that all your life you have felt somewhat incomplete and dissatisfied. The natural next step is abdication; if one is always unfulfilled, what is the purpose of seeking anything?

The irony is that people, rather than seeking because they are unfulfilled, may be so unfulfilled because they are so constantly seeking. Perhaps with a world as full as ours, we must entertain the dangerous possibility that any felt emptiness is self-created, arising from the space between where we are now and where we want to be. And this place of where we want to be, as a reflection of our insecurities and the uncritically accepted lessons of our culture, is more of us than of the world. And this possibility is so dangerous because its full investigation will demand that we question the delusions of identity and personality that we believe make us who we are. It has taken me very long to realize this and indeed I am still trying to interrogate this new knowledge, but it seems true: The way I have been taught to see—or less generously, the way I have accepted how to see—the world is actually just an elaborate means of obscuring that world from view.

Thus there is a contest between looking at a life and seeing all that is still missing and looking at a life and seeing all that is already there.

And so comes the lesson I am still learning: Any approach to work or to living that makes you incapable of appreciating the decontextualized moments of your life, the small steps whose larger purpose has yet to be discerned, is a perspective that is wrong no matter how necessary you believe it is to getting you to where you should be.

And here, too, is the goal: To see our experiences through a lens that takes them as ends in of themselves and not simply as means for some alternative present. Seeing the moments of our life for what they contain and not exclusively for what we think they may give us, that is, not for how much closer we think they will bring us to where we believe we must be.

A Constant State of Dissatisfaction

A question asked seemingly needs an answer, and problems posed require solutions. But in filling the gaps in our knowledge, we often move too quickly, allowing our initial sense of a question to dictate the possible answers rather than interrogating the assumptions that led to the question in the first place. As a result, our answers fall to the level of our questions, and our solutions are limited by how we frame our problems. In our hurry we have made a mistake, and the only signal we have for having done so are the edge cases, the situations where the initial answers do not apply.

Physics has a good way to deal with edge cases. It is an approach which reveals the nature of the edge itself and tells us whether the solutions we are familiar with are the only ones that exist. Some of these solutions are clean and easy to understand, but they are only so at the expense of their realism. And we are able to probe that realism through perturbations.

The perturbations frame the edge cases as slight extensions to the cases we believe we understand. By studying such extensions, we can calculate the deviating results well enough and walk away with our previous set of knowledge mostly in tact. For, after all, discovering an island does not require one to re-evaluate the importance of a continent. 

But the most interesting outcomes arise when our calculations fail, when theories of small deviations break down because the thing that we believed to be the edge case is revealed to be the essence of the case itself. Mercury’s precession is not anomalous. There is no missing energy in beta decay. The aether is hard to find because it in fact does not exist. Our previous frameworks are dashed. Our conceptions of the world are forever altered. The principles of work that we used to climb to our current plateau must be relinquished if we are to ever climb higher.

The aim of this online publication is to explore such perturbations in science, in culture, and the academy. We consider the disturbances in the background of what we believe we understand and by pushing the probe far enough we hope to augment that understanding itself.

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An online publication on science, culture, and the academy

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