I know! It’s insane!

I’m not sure why “his biggest hit was in 1993" is meant to be a damning gotcha. The man started his TV and film career in 1977, had a Grammy award and a front cover of Time by 1979, and is now dead. Is it really a surprise that his heyday was the 80s and and 90s?

I don’t know whether Americans - or even large parts of Britain - know, but Kinnear is one of those guys everyone has been in awe of forever in theatre, particularly Shakespeare, even though TV and cinema viewers largely haven’t heard of him. [I’ve seen him in Hamlet and Othello (as Iago)]. He’s like a young Mark…

IMO, the first one is genuinely good, whereas the second is good if you’re someone who really, really liked the first one.

Sure, but we fans of teleopsis (longevision?) have had to become accustomed to the odd macaronic now and then...

I agree. As a person who lives on the ground, I really like not having vehicles rain down on me from the sky. I have enough trouble with objects that are on the ground already, without having to worry about new objects arriving at speed from the sky.

The last few episodes are great, but the season as a whole lacks direction. S3 has a better overall plot, and S4 is more entertainingly insane.

I thought of the Gus analogy as I was watching - and thinking that if Howard ever does get mad, he wouldn’t be a good guy to cross - and now I’ve just thought: here me out here, but... Howard Hamlin: Future Cartel Lawyer!?

“Toddlers” is right, although “teenagers” might be more accurate: Howard really feels like their parent. The patient, understanding parent who the teenagers keep rebelling against harder and harder because he keeps refusing to be the tyrannical monster they want him to be. Until eventually they push him too far, he…

It would’t surprise me; but I think it may just be that, as with his therapist, they’re just trying to flesh in the world around Howard to make him seem more sympathetic. Kim and Saul are so determined to hurt him, so the showrunners are showing us how vulnerable Howard is, to make clear that Kim is the villain.

It’s conventional for the man to sleep on the couch (/in the guest house), no matter who did what. Even if it wasn’t, Howard is the type of guy to insist on it - as you say, he’s solicitous to a fault.

Well, just for context here, Mazepin and Chadwick have actually raced against one another: he beat her 11 races to 4, despite racing for a team that actually lost to hers (even though Mazepin’s teammate was a guy who went on to F2, whereas Chadwick’s was a teenager who went on to something called ‘GB3').

If a polygraph were less than 50% accurate, it would by definition also be more than 50% accurate. A 100% inaccurate polygraph would be completely reliable, you’d just have to move the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ labels! [50% accuracy is the least accurate you can be with a binary outcome]

If you don’t want people to accuse you of being self-congratulatory and childish, you could start by not lumping in “voting for Trump” with “literally raping children”. You may dislike both things, but there is actually a significant difference between them in moral terms.

Statistically, money really does have little correlation with happiness, once you’re out of extreme poverty. There are studies showing continued increases in happiness with wealth, at least from poverty into the middle class and perhaps beyond, but there are also studies showing the opposite; and more importantly the…

According to World Bank figures, US life expectancy, which did fall a little after 2014, actually rebounded to its highest ever level in 2019. It’s true that in 2020 and 2021 it fell due to covid - but, for context, it’s still over 2 years longer than in 1982 and about 7 years longer than in 1962. It’s 10 years longer…

One curiosity is that throughout history, and certainly in modern history, people have continually been certain that the world is getting worse - only 6% of Americans in 2016 thought things were getting better (still more optimistic than the Germans - only 4% of them thought things were improving). It’s weird how…

And yet many Norwegians emigrate to the US (around 12,000), while virtually no Americans chose to emigrate to Norway (Americans in Norway PLUS their children are still only 10,000, despite America being a hundred times bigger than Norway).

There may be a dozen countries some individuals might prefer (there are certainly at least a dozen countries I’d personally prefer to the US), but there aren’t a dozen countries that are unambiguously better to live in. Yes, the US is 17th in HDI, for instance - but for many if not all of the countries above it, there…

I agree that I’d rather be (and am) living in Europe (or New Zealand) rather than the US - although I don’t think liberal Americans sometimes realise that it’s really a matter of swings and roundabouts rather than clearcut superiority (Americans have many advantages over us, chiefly having a lot more money). But…