Watching & Reading — Kim Hershey

Film2023

The Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer

The most disturbing film I've seen in years, and almost entirely because of what it refuses to show. Glazer keeps the camera on the domestic side of the wall — the garden, the children, the dinner parties — while the sounds from the other side are constant and unremarked upon. The horror is in the normalcy. I kept waiting for a scene that acknowledged what was happening. It never came. That's the point.

Why it's here

I've been thinking about how atrocity becomes ordinary for the people adjacent to it. This film is the best answer to that question I've encountered in any medium.

Film2023

Past Lives

Celine Song

A film about the lives you don't live. Two people who might have been together, meeting as adults after two decades apart, with a third person present who represents the life that actually happened. The ending is devastating in a way that's hard to explain — nothing bad happens. That's what makes it devastating.

Why it's here

Celine Song's script is doing something philosophically interesting about identity and continuity. The person you would have become is not you, but she's not entirely not-you either.

Documentary2019

Fantastic Fungi

Louie Schwartzberg

I watched this because of the mushroom log in my garden and came away with a significantly altered sense of what a forest is. The time-lapse photography is extraordinary. The Paul Stamets sections veer into mysticism in ways I found less convincing, but the underlying science — mycelial networks, wood wide web, decomposition as transformation — is genuinely mind-expanding.

Why it's here

I've been inoculating logs and growing oyster mushrooms for six months. This gave me a much better sense of what I'm actually participating in.

Book2011

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

I resisted this for years because it felt like airport-business-book territory. I was wrong. The System 1 / System 2 framework is a genuine contribution to how I think about thinking. The sections on anchoring, availability bias, and the planning fallacy are particularly useful — not because they tell you how to avoid these biases (you mostly can't), but because they make the biases legible.

Why it's here

I keep coming back to the question of when to trust intuition and when to distrust it. Kahneman has the most rigorous answer I've found.

Book2013

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Part botany, part memoir, part philosophy of reciprocity. Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and the book is about what happens when you take Indigenous ways of knowing seriously as epistemology rather than folklore. The chapter on the grammar of animacy — the idea that English's treatment of plants and animals as 'it' rather than 'who' shapes how we relate to them — has stayed with me.

Why it's here

I've been thinking about attention and observation as practices. This book is the best argument I've read for why the way you name things changes what you're able to see.

Book2022

How Minds Change

David McRaney

McRaney spent years writing about cognitive biases and why people are wrong about things. This book is about the cases where people actually change their minds — deeply, durably, on things that matter. The answer is almost never 'they encountered better evidence.' It's usually something more like: they had a relationship with someone who held the other view, and the relationship made the view feel safe to consider. That's uncomfortable but probably true.

Why it's here

Directly relevant to the essay I've been writing about claims versus arguments. If evidence doesn't change minds, what does? This book has the most honest answer I've found.