Palm Springs debuted on Hulu in July of 2020, in a time with little competition, because we weren’t allowed to go to movie theaters. But more surprising, even in normal times this might be my favorite movie of the year.

(Though Da 5 Bloods is also a huge achievement and definitely a must-see. Seriously, don’t skip it because it’s an hour longer and “serious” or you think it feels like homework — it’s a powerful, beautiful film.)

Why Palm Springs works so well is even more interesting. At first glance, it’s just a rehash of the Groundhog Day formula, but with a more modern sense of humor and a more straightforward romantic comedy setup. And since Groundhog Day is basically a perfect movie, of course its spiritual successor also works. But what does it do to deserve so much credit? Three huge, crucial story changes:

ONE: EDITING

This is the nerdiest structural critique, but also the bravest choice the movie makes. The original Groundhog Day runs about 1 hour 40 minutes, but takes the first full 18 minutes setting up the character and his predicament before Phil wakes up in his first time loop. We then spend the middle of the movie watching him figure out the “rules” of this world, and experiment with different ways to get out. Only after all that does he commit to a path of personal growth.

Palm Springs skips over the entire first two sections of Groundhog Day, dropping us in with a character already deep into his endlessly repeating purgatory. Nyles is past his ‘figuring out how it all works’ phase, so the movie kicks off with his general acceptance of being stuck, and what that means for him on both a practical and existential level.

He’s making the best of what his life has become, built some simple rules for how not to be an awful person in that world, but he’s lost any sense of meaning or purpose beyond that. This way, we get to spend the whole movie on his journey of emotional growth, when we get to the second big change that makes all the difference in the world.

TWO: COMPANIONSHIP

The biggest game-changer in this script is the introduction of other characters into the same repeating loop. Not only does this unlock a lot more potential for fun that the movie makes great use of, it opens up totally new emotional territory to explore. In a lot of ways, this is actually Sarah’s movie, with Nyles playing the mentor/companion as she goes through phases of denial, negotiation, and acceptance before coming out the other side and forcing both of them to grow and change.

Now, this isn’t a story of a man getting one day just right so he can earn redemption, which has always had a sort of creepy stalker implication in Groundhog Day, since our protagonist’s whole goal is to effectively trick the woman he desires into loving him back.

Instead, Palm Springs is a story about what it means to share a life with someone, even if that life, like most lives, is going to be a lot of the same thing over and over again. And the ability to make peace with that is beautiful in a whole new way from the original.

THREE: SETTING

The least consequential, but this update allows for whole new shades to the idea of getting stuck on repeat. A destination wedding in Palm Springs sounds pretty fun. In normal circumstances, this would be something you look forward to, and almost certainly post to your Instagram to make people jealous. It’s lounging and drinking and catered food with a picturesque backdrop. Who wouldn’t want more days like that?

But again, the movie both exposes how empty all that ultimately is, and pushes its characters to go beyond what we’re supposed to want out of life to find something deeper than the gram-worthy lifestyle that only looks good on the surface. Even the most idyllic, indulgent days lose their luster eventually, and at a certain point you want something more.

So even though Palm Springs pays great homage to its inspiration, with a few key changes it delivers a fresh, funny, and affecting look at how we spend our days and who we want to spend them with — which brings us back to questions we can ask ourselves about our own lives.

If you could choose one day of your life to live on loop,
which day would you choose, and why?

Where would you be, which people would you be with,
and why would you choose them?

How long could you spend living that same day, and
what would be the biggest reason that you wanted out?

Fast Company cites an interesting new way to think about why you like the music you like:

A new study out of Columbia Business School and Bar-Ilan University in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology shows that you prefer the music of artists with personalities similar to your own. In other words, you like yourself.

Researchers studied the public personas of the most famous 50 musicians in the Western world, including Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Whitney Houston, The Rolling Stones, Beyoncé, Coldplay, Dave Matthews Band, Maroon 5, Taylor Swift, and Ozzy Osbourne. In two studies of over 80,000 participants, they found that the personalities of the musicians correlate with those of their fans. A third study of 4,995 participants showed that fans’ personalities predict their musical preferences as much as other strong predictors like gender, age, and features of the music.

Which not only explains some of the most-played albums in my music library (Weezer, Decemberists, Run the Jewels), but raises the question if this same finding would apply to books, movies, TV shows, etc.

Which of your favorite artists do you have, or think you have, the most in common with, personality-wise?

How does that factor into your love of their work?

How much of that connection is true to them as real people, or a result of the image they project as artists? How much is the real you, or the image of yourself you’d like to project?

In July of 2020, Harper’s Magazine published an open letter on “Justice and Open Debate”, signed by over a hundred writers, journalists, and thinkers — including big names such as Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, and JK Rowling.

The letter itself is only three paragraphs long, and speaks mostly in broad strokes, arguing that we as a society must protect the right to discuss any idea, even those we disagree with, and particularly warns against punishing those who raise ideas that are unfashionable or supposedly dangerous with the loss of jobs or reputation. 

It goes on to say that even so-called “caustic counter-speech” must be aired and defeated in the public sphere, and a culture of limiting our freedom to debate them openly can be just as dangerous as the caustic ideas themselves.

The argument itself is so unspecific, it’s sort of hard to argue against on principle. “Free speech, we like it!”

But the response has shown that’s exactly the problem: in making such a broad argument, it comes off as naive and totally unhelpful. In a time where people without a voice are finding it in new ways, it feels out of touch. As a veiled swipe against “cancel culture” it seems to miss the point that free speech is exactly what’s being deployed, finally, to hold powerful people and gatekeepers to account for their words and actions.

That in reality, “cancel culture” should more honestly be thought of as “consequence culture”. Sometimes when you use your freedom to say things, everyone else uses their freedom to say you’re out of line.

This all comes just weeks after another Big Internet Discussion that sprung up following an editorial, written by Senator Tom Cotton and published in the New York Times Opinion section, arguing for the deployment of the military against protestors. 

In the blowback that followed, editor James Bennet resigned from the Times. He was not fired, fined or punished. But he did resign, probably under pressure. Which is important to the ensuing discussion around whether consequences like this are ultimately damaging to free speech in a broader sense.

In an interview with WNYC’s On The Media, Vox writer David Roberts discussed his response, in which he outlines how the farthest right thinkers are no longer operating within the bounds of good faith debate, particularly when it comes to free speech. (See video for excerpt.)

This is a helpful distinction: when we’re talking about what speech is “acceptable,” we aren’t usually talking about the concept of free speech in an absolute sense. We’re more often talking about which ideas get the benefit of certain platforms to amplify them.

Think of two extremes: in one world, everyone gets their own prime-time TV show. That’s crazy and impossible, because there aren’t time slots and studio spaces to make that real. Someone, somewhere, has to choose.

On another extreme: a guy in a park screaming that all left-handed people are witches who should be shot into the sun. Now, this guy is just a guy, given no resources or platform by anyone. But even so, if he did this day after day, his community would probably choose to keep him out of that park, eventually. His crazy, violent speech is baseless, disruptive, and harmful to the public good.

Neither extreme is realistic, but illustrates that either extreme is not the real point: not everyone gets unfettered access to a large audience, and not every idea is up for good faith discussion in public.

So what we’re really talking about are the basic rules we agree upon for public debate. And under those rules, for example, we might decide that lying conspiracy peddlers don’t get to have Twitter accounts because they spread misinformation, which hurts everyone. Or that White Supremacists aren’t appropriate to interview on live TV because their fundamental position runs counter to our shared ideals of equality, and so at their very core, they don’t deserve unfiltered distribution.

And especially when we’re talking about publication or broadcast, we can’t forget all the ideas that never get their turn on the stage to begin with, because the powers behind those platforms traditionally favor certain views or voices.

So, maybe it’s time to consider what the world could be like if there were a core set of principles that outline what’s suitable for public debate — either basic requirements, or possibly a few select restrictions.

Imagine the five rules for good faith public debate; 
what might they be?

How and where should they be applied, and what spaces, if any, deserve to be free of any and all restrictions?

How would applying rules like this make public discourse better, or potentially worse?

Like most people in the sports-starved world of 2020, I devoured every episode of ESPN’s 10-part series, The Last Dance, as they aired over the course of five weeks. 

Especially if you grew up in the 90’s (like I did), and extra-specially if you spent those years in the greater Chicago area (like I also did), this was a glorious nostalgia-bomb that beautifully captured the thrill of witnessing one of the most exciting dynasties in sports history.

But after the thrill of all those championships fades, and the more I think about the story of Michael Jordan — Michael Jordan the man, the human being at the heart of this documentary — the more I’m amazed. Both that this series exists, and by its message about what it takes to be the best at something.

To give it credit, the series admirably highlights the contributions of players like Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, and Steve Kerr, legendary coach Phil Jackson, and even maligned GM and strange little man, Jerry Krause, who in their own ways all propelled the Bulls to their historic dominance. This show knows, and says explicitly, that you can’t achieve greatness alone.

But the central theme the series keeps returning to is Jordan’s compulsive competitive drive. It shows up in games, in the locker room, how he treats teammates at practice, and in his love of gambling — all the way from big money golf games to quarter-flipping contests with his security guards.

Jordan didn’t just want to win, or like to win. He needed to win, and crucially, to beat everyone else. It’s important to keep in mind, Michael Jordan’s own company helped produce this film. It’s built on archival footage and interviews he willingly participated in, and probably even blessed to a certain extent. That means The Last Dance is not an expose; it’s the story that Jordan, at least in some ways, wanted to tell about himself.

And again and again, that means rewinding to pivotal moments in his career, and not just focusing on what he achieved, or how hard he worked, but why. What motivation did he draw on to push himself harder than anyone else?

More often than not, in his own words, it came down to petty rivalry. Jordan’s desire to prove some doubter wrong, bury some opponent who’d talked trash, or show a world who might consider someone else his equal that he could blow that player out of the water.

THAT’S what seemingly pushed Jordan to all his highest heights. And they were higher than anyone’s.

A charitable way to frame this is that he just cared that much more than any other player. He talks occasionally in classic sports mantras, like wanting to give the audience the show they paid for, or how there’s no point in playing at all if you’re not going to leave everything on the court.

But the show, quite purposefully, is not content to live within those kind of cliches. It goes out of its way to build up these grudges and then connect them to his moments of greatness.

Michael Jordan is compelled to compete above all else. Winning consumes him. Winning is all that matters. He wanted to defeat every opponent, demolish every obstacle, destroy every record.

And once he did, he was finished.

The other, subtler theme of The Last Dance is an undercurrent of sadness. The loneliness of fame. The solitude at the top of the mountain. The stats, the highlight reels, the posters and ads and collectible sneaker line…Michael Jordan changed the world. He left his mark on the universe, no doubt about it.

But this show doesn’t feel like a celebration of greatness. Not entirely. It feels like a reckoning with the cost of a life lived only for competition. After the trophies are kissed, what comes next? Once the records are broken, what do you choose to build?

The series leaves us not with images of what happened afterward — a happy family, charitable works, business success, or lifting up a new generation of players — but, like another story of a man whose only drive was to win at all costs (no, not the 45th president, I’m thinking more Daniel Plainview).

It ends with a man, alone in his castle, wondering what else is left once you’ve supposedly won everything there is to win, and vanquished your last opponent.

And at that point I can’t help but wonder: do I want to “Be Like Mike”? Should any of us? After watching The Last Dance, I’m not so sure.

What about the world we live in makes compulsive competition such a winning trait?

What might the world look like, for better or worse, if more of us were so totally driven by our sense of competitiveness?

What’s a personal flaw of yours, like Jordan’s compulsive competition, that might actually work to your advantage in some situations?

The point of this project has always been to take a look at the news and pop culture of the moment and try to dig a little bit deeper.

To spark conversations about ideas, beyond superficial reactions of: “this movie is good and I like it” or “this article is interesting and I agree with it”, by taking the focus off of opinions and instead asking questions that lead to discussions among friends. Ideally, discussions that reveal something about who we are, and what matters to us. The kind of conversations that maybe even bring us closer to some deeper truths, and to each other.

It seems like that’s the kind of discussion we’re all having right now, about one very big thing: America’s structural racism, and the police violence that’s both a symptom — and a perpetuator — of that racism.

Beyond acknowledging their validity, I’m no expert on this stuff. I’m still very much in listening and learning mode right now. So in this moment, I wanted to share someone else’s discussion. It’s between two people I admire even though I don’t always agree with them, who’ve both proven to have incredible critical minds, and who I know think deeply about the world’s problems and what we can do to fix them.

On the June 3rd, 2020 episode of the Ezra Klein Show, he and author Ta-Nahisi Coates discussed the role of the police in society, and what some alternatives might look like. The whole conversation was strangely hopeful, and though I wouldn’t normally lift such a large chunk verbatim, this exchange gave me a lot to think about — both on how to understand what’s happening today and how to imagine what the future could look like.

Right now feels like a critical moment to really consider ideas like these, and honestly discuss:

What situations have you seen or been in involving police, and how could they have gone differently with a different kind of help?

Instead of dialing 911 and having armed police respond to every problem in our communities, what might an alternative system look like?

What does the world need more of right now, that we could deploy in a nationwide effort, instead of more police forces?