Ars Est Mendacium

I realized something was wrong about halfway through   Napoleon , and it wasn’t a detail I could point to on screen. It was quieter than that. The film was still loud, still busy, still impressively staged, but I had stopped leaning forward. I wasn’t confused by the plot so much as detached from it, as if the movie and I were watching each other from opposite sides of the room, neither quite sure what the other wanted. That feeling never left. This is not a complaint about historical accuracy . That argument misses the point and always has. History on film is interpretation, compression, and emphasis. The question is never whether a film gets every detail right. The question is whether it knows what it is trying to say. This one does not. Is it a love story ? A biopic? A psychological portrait ? A condemnation of war and imperial ambition ? The film gestures toward all of these possibilities, sometimes within the same sequence, then backs away before committing. What remains is not...

I have avoided soufflés for most of my adult life. Not because I dislike them, but because soufflés carry stories. Stories of doors slammed shut, of ovens opened too early, of proud dishes collapsing like punctured balloons while guests politely insist they weren’t that hungry anyway. Soufflés have a reputation for exposing overconfidence. They are the culinary equivalent of saying something brave in a meeting and immediately realizing you misread the room. So naturally, the next recipe in the 1963   Good Housekeeping Cook Book , sitting there without ceremony, offered no warnings. We are still cooking our way through   Susan ’s   section of the book, a part of the volume that speaks in a voice both reassuring and faintly unbothered by your feelings. Susan, whoever she was, writes as if you already know what you’re doing, or at least ought to. There are no motivational asides. No “don’t worry if it looks wrong.” Just instructions, presented as facts. Melt butter. Stir fl...

There is a specific kind of dinner that happens on work trips. It involves a loud room, an aggressively upbeat server, and a menu engineered to impress someone who is not present. You eat well enough, shout your opinions across the table, and leave with the vague sense that you were fed but not actually nourished. This was not that dinner. This was a quiet night. Midweek. No buzz. No scene. Just a handful of Forrester colleagues who had collectively reached the same conclusion, we had no interest in being entertained. We wanted to sit down, eat something serious, and talk like normal people. Which is how we ended up at  Iron Works BBQ , a place that has absolutely no interest in impressing you and is better for it. Iron Works does not announce itself. It doesn’t frame its history on the wall or tell you why it matters. You walk in and immediately understand the tone. Concrete floors. Smoke in the air. Tables that exist to hold food, not laptops. The room feels less like a restauran...

A group of educated men stand around congratulating one another on their cleverness. One of them proposes a challenge. Take a woman marked by her voice, remake her, and return her improved as proof of intellectual superiority . It is framed as intellectual play. As a test of skill. As something harmless enough to be wagered over drinks. What’s notable is how little  My Fair Lady  asks us to question that framing. From its opening moments, the film is remarkably candid about what is happening. This is not a rescue narrative . It is not even, at heart, a story about aspiration. It is an experiment conducted in public, with witnesses, rules, and agreed-upon measures of success. Eliza Doolittle is not invited into a new world. She entered a contest whose terms were set before she understood she was playing. That clarity is why the film remains so uncomfortable when watched without nostalgia, acting as insulation. Higgins never pretends to improve Eliza for her own sake. He "impro...

We do not talk about the justice system the way we talk about other failing systems. We talk about education as strained, healthcare as fragmented, and infrastructure as aging. Justice, by contrast, is still spoken of as if it were intact but misunderstood, principled but misapplied. The language stays reverent even as trust erodes. We ask whether outcomes were fair, rarely whether the structure itself is designed to prefer certain outcomes over others. That is the environment in which  Hard Evidence  now lives, even if it was written decades earlier. When  John Lescroart  published the book, the courtroom thriller was already a familiar form, confident, procedural, reassuring in its insistence that truth would surface if the rules were followed closely enough. What Lescroart quietly questioned was not whether the rules worked, but what they worked for. I gave the book four stars because it resists the reader’s desire for comfort. It opens with the signals of a spe...

Week two arrived with confidence. Possibly misplaced confidence. Same book. Same Susan section. Same belief that by now I had a decent handle on what four potatoes looked like in real life. I did not. Once again, I produced more potato than the recipe had any intention of accommodating. One full, perfectly sliced potato sat on the counter like an uninvited guest. Out here, excess doesn’t linger. The Forrester creatures , those ever-watchful trash pandas of the woods , were thrilled with their unexpected side dish. Somewhere in the trees, a raccoon ate better than planned, which feels aligned with the spirit of a cookbook that assumes adults will quietly handle the consequences of their own math. The real comedy, however, happened at the stove. The recipe offers a casual fork in the road: double boiler or saucepan. As if this were a lifestyle choice. We chose the saucepan, largely out of optimism and a misplaced belief in our ability to multitask. The sauce had other ideas. It thickene...