Woodward and Bernstein could never

Thoroughly enjoyed Thursday’s REEL Politics screening of All the President’s Men at the beloved Bytowne.

The film, if you haven’t seen it, portrays the journalistic sprint to cover and understand Watergate. Rewatching it with my 2025 eyes, I was struck by just how much information Woodward and Bernstein surfaced by calling random offices, and how easily they gained (legitimate!) access to different paper records. Nowadays, good luck getting the (official) phone number of someone in government.

The screening included a few panels beforehand, including a pre-recorded interview between Peter Mansbridge and Bob Woodward. When asked if a Watergate could still happen in 2025 (i.e., journalism take down a president), Woodward was emphatic that yes, it was possible. Sir… with all due respect… if the dogged coverage of recent years hasn’t worked so far, what would?

Still, great movie. The energy of a heist film, with the drama of politics. (I mean, I guess it’s technically also a heist film—just one that doesn’t work out well at all for the robbers.)

• Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing, Saving Time) has a newsletter. The most recent issue introduces “context collection” as an antidote to context collapse, before offering a very Odell set of observations and ideas for how to deal with our willingness—nay, eagerness—to cede our attention to screens.
• Erin Boyle argues for why it’s worth making certain kinds of upgrades (and deep cleans, etc) in your living space, even if you rent. (Reminds me of advice from a friend of ours, S, when we were thinking of moving to this house—even if you don’t own it, putting in some money and effort to make a more enjoyable space is well worth it, given how much time you’ll spend there. Can confirm!)
• What’s the arc of a working and non-working life if people more regularly live to 100 years old? Is 65 the magic retirement age it’s long been held to be? Dividing life into four 25-year quarters could be a new model.
• Ingrid Burrington noted a bunch of ways to fix the GIS industry (aka Esri’s dominance), far-fetched though they may be. My favourite? “Just stop teaching desktop GIS and teach geography students programming, it’s all data science anyway.” (via Sean)
• Speaking of data science, some fun data visualizations for the challenge of plotting “traffic fatalities by day of the year”. (There’s a Halloween connection, you’ll see.)
• LLMs don’t have just one characteristic style, but they have loads of little tells—Wikipedia editors have chronicled many of them, with examples, to help combat LLM-generated content on the platform. (via Jason Kottke)
• Two links on living with and maintaining old houses: “Tomobe – Shikii Replacement”; “A year in the new house: the romance of maintenance”.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas