Essay: "Avon contra Stinger - Part One"

Spoiler alert! The Wire is the best show ever and this blog post assumes you’ve watched all five season.

When you rewatch great television, what was unpredictable seems inevitable. That’s the hindsight bias. When try to predict the future, we’re bombarded with information, some of it pointing one direction, some in others. When we look back and try to explain the past, the information that pointed towards what actually happened looms very large. That’s why we’re so good at forgetting how bad we are at making predictions.

Review: "Harakiri"

As you probably know, harakiri (or seppuku) is a gruesome form of ritual suicide. It was practiced by the samurai in Japan and was perceived as an honorable death, preferable to being executed, or continuing to live in dishonor. The samurai would sit down, cross-legged, and disembowel himself with a knife or his short sword (his wakisashi). Another samurai (the second) decapitates him with a katana (the long sword of a samurai) once the messier work is done.