The Dive, 9/1/24
Your monthly compilation of what's what on global politics, American society, and an assortment of odds and ends
Quote of the Month
"Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns. What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys, Tho' the deep heart of existence beat for ever like a boy's? Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore, And the individual withers, and the world is more and more. Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast, Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest." - Alfed, Lord Tennyson, "Locksley Hall"
What I’m Reading:
1. What Ukraine’s Kursk offensive can tell us about strategy
Why you should read it: Former Australian army general Mick Ryan writes for Engelsberg Ideas that Ukraine’s surprise offensive into Russia’s Kursk region demonstrates the timid strategic thinking of America and its allies.
“The Ukrainian attack into Kursk in Russia, now into its third week, was a tactical and operational surprise for the Russians… The Ukrainians have also surprised their supporters in the West. This was in large part because Ukraine deliberately withheld details of the Kursk attack to preserve operational security, maximise its chances of achieving surprise and shock against the Russians, guard against the inflated expectations of the failed 2023 counteroffensive and avoid second guessing by talkative, risk-adverse bureaucrats in the West.”
“The status quo of the war before the offensive was not sustainable for Ukraine. It is incurring unacceptable humanitarian and strategic costs. Appreciating that NATO strategy for supporting Ukraine is unlikely to shift beyond its ‘defend Ukraine’ approach; that no significant shift in US policy is likely before next year; and that Putin retains his aspiration to exterminate its sovereignty and culture, Ukraine knew that it was the only actor that could change the status quo in the war. The surprise attack into Kursk, with its political, strategic and military objectives, is the result… Another factor that partially explains Ukraine’s strategic and battlefield surprise is that Western politicians and bureaucrats, having assumed a posture of ‘strategic slumber’ since the end of the Cold War, can no longer imagine such battlefield and strategic audacity. From the perspective of western politics, it is very risky behaviour, and certainly would not poll well. None of the challenges faced by the West in the past 30 years, even the wars spawned by 9/11, have required the mobilisation of people, industry and new ideas – or the taking of massive strategic risks.”
Why it matters: “The strategic timidity that has produced a lack of imagination in the the West’s national security community has brewed over decades; it was on display in Afghanistan. Very few countries involved were willing to commit significant resources to the campaign. Almost all had significant caveats on the employment of their forces… The West’s strategic timidity prevents it from imagining, let alone conducting, the kind of audacious, high risk and high reward actions that Ukraine is taking in Kursk. The Kursk offensive, which is yet to draw Russian forces from its advance in the Donbas, may well fail to achieve some of its objectives. If so, it won’t be because the Ukrainians didn’t try. Western politicians and bureaucrats have much to learn from the strategic audacity shown by Ukraine in recent weeks. Let us hope they have the character, humility, and risk-tolerance to do so.”
2. Why China is starting a new trade war
Why you should read it: Wall Street Journal reporters Lingling Wei and Jason Douglas observe that China is “cranking up its massive export engine again” and pushing its surplus production on the world—sparking a trade war in the process.
“Beijing’s solution to a weak Chinese economy—putting the country’s factory sector on steroids—is squeezing businesses around the world and raising the specter of a new global trade war… Behind it all is a bold but risky calculation by Beijing that investing more in manufacturing can restore the country’s economic vitality and build up its industrial resilience without triggering so much international pushback that it threatens China’s future… Chinese leader Xi Jinping ordered officials to double down on the country’s state-led manufacturing model, with billions of dollars in fresh subsidies and credit. He used a slogan to make sure officials got the message: ‘Establish the new before breaking the old’” or xian li hou po in Chinese.”
“China has added capacity to produce some 40 million vehicles a year, even though it sells only around 22 million at home. It’s on track to make around 750 gigawatts of solar cells this year, despite only needing 220 gigawatts domestically in 2023. And it is expected to account for 80% of the world’s new supply this year in basic chemicals such as ethylene and propylene, used to make garbage bags, toys and cosmetics—even though prices in China have been falling for 19 months, a sign of oversupply… Overall Chinese export volumes, stripping out the effect of exchange-rate movements, are up 10% since the end of 2021, versus 1.5% for world exports in total. China’s steel exports jumped 36% last year from a year earlier… By doubling down on manufacturing when it already produces close to a third of global factory output, China is effectively asking the rest of the world not to expand its share of production, but to reduce it, said Michael Pettis, a professor of finance at Peking University who has written extensively on imbalances in global trade.”
Why it matters: “The U.S. is in some ways one of the least-affected countries, because it has high tariffs on many Chinese goods that help shield U.S. workers. But Washington’s goal of expanding U.S. manufacturing can’t be achieved if overproduction in China continues, and some industries—especially renewable energy—are feeling pressure… The risk for Xi is that unlike the first “China Shock” in the early 2000s, when cheap Chinese manufacturing wiped out an estimated two million jobs in the U.S. but also benefited Western consumers, the latest push could trigger so many protectionist measures that China winds up with few sizable markets to sell to.”
3. How Joe Biden spurred an American manufacturing renaissance
Why you should read it: Financial Times reporters Amanda Chu and Alexandra Wright outline how President Biden’s industrial policies have breathed new life into America’s manufacturing industries.
“The Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips and Science Act together offer more than $400bn in tax credits, grants, and loans to revitalise the country’s industrial heartlands and rival Beijing… The two laws have catalysed manufacturing investment, spurring a fierce contest between states to attract corporations eager to build factories and take advantage of the often uncapped federal support. US Census data shows that spending on construction for manufacturing sits at record highs, and the FT estimates that large-scale manufacturing commitments surpassed $225bn in the first year.”
“But as the two-year anniversary arrives for the legislation, many of these factories face roadblocks linked to deteriorating market conditions, overproduction in China, and a lack of policy certainty in a high stakes election year… A tough macroeconomic backdrop of high interest rates and inflation, combined with the collapse in global pricing for these particular technologies, has clouded investor interest to back manufacturing projects, even with the longer term certainty and incentives offered by the two laws. The IRA offers a 10-year window for tax credits, and the Chips Act awards generous funds to selected applicants as well as a tax credit for projects that break ground before 2027… Approximately 47 per cent of the large-scale manufacturing projects announced in the first year of the IRA and Chips Act are on track or operational, the FT found… Delays also do not necessarily translate to major setbacks to production. The chipmaker Micron pushed back construction on its $20bn semiconductor fabrication plant in New York due to environmental permitting challenges related to an endangered bat species, but the company has moved up its target date for production by three years. Ryan McMahon, chief executive of Onondaga County, where Micron is located, calls the project ‘a huge comeback story for a rustbelt community.’”
Why it matters: “Uncertainty over the IRA’s future at a political level has also stalled progress on projects. While the vast majority of the IRA’s manufacturing dollars have flowed to Republican-controlled districts and states, the IRA received no Republican support in Congress and former president Donald Trump has vowed on the campaign trail to ‘terminate’ it… The delays themselves add a layer of political risk. The slower arrival of manufacturing jobs will make it harder for the Democratic presumptive nominee and Vice-President Kamala Harris to sell her administration’s economic agenda to voters in the November election, where support from rustbelt states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin will be decisive in securing a victory.”
4. Why predictions of AI doom resemble the movies more than reality
Why you should read it: At his Substack on artificial intelligence issues, writer Tim Lee notes that the prophets of inevitable AI doom cannot come up with scenarios that don’t resemble dumbed-down cinematic depictions of intellectual breakthroughs like the cracking of German codes during World War II.
“Stories about the existential risk from AI exhibit some of the same cognitive biases you see in Hollywood movies. Doomers expect an AI system to achieve artificial general intelligence, start improving its own design, and quickly transform itself into a superintelligence. Then they fear it could take over the world and kill all human beings… The problem is that many doomer scenarios feel oversimplified in a movie-like way. Movies tend to involve fewer characters and simpler plotlines than real historical events. The fate of the world sometimes hinges on a handful of crucial decisions by a movie’s main character. This is rarely true in the real world.”
“In stories of AI doom, the Hollywood-style turning point is the moment when an AI system achieves ‘artificial general intelligence’ and begins a ‘fast takeoff’ toward superintelligence… In reality, the process of recursive self-improvement has already started: companies like Meta make heavy use of [large language models] to help them build the next iteration of LLMs… So when it comes to filtering and augmenting training data, AI systems are already doing a lot of the work to build their successors. I expect this to become increasingly true over time. But it will be many years—if ever—before companies stop hiring human beings to oversee the process… I don’t think there will be any clear-cut moment when AIs “take over” this job from human programmers. And even if this did happen, it wouldn’t necessarily lead to a sudden increase in productivity because AIs will already be doing most of the work prior to that point.”
Why it matters: “…people envision a future where AI systems serve as scientists, and assume that such a system would need to be highly agentic to do its job. But it seems more likely that we’ll have a science chatbot that helps a human scientist design experiments and analyze the results. It might generate code that instructs robots in automated labs to actually carry out the experiments… [I]t’s not too much to expect a superhuman AI system to explain its recommendations in terms ordinary human beings can understand. This will be particularly important because many high-stakes decisions have both moral and practical dimensions. There are often tradeoffs between performance, cost, safety, and other factors. Human beings are going to want to make those tradeoffs themselves, not go along with whatever a neural network happens to prefer.”
5. How autocrats use hostage-taking as a weapon
Why you should read it: Wall Street Journal reporter Yaroslav Trofimov details the ways in which autocratic regimes like Putin’s Russia and Iran use hostage-taking as a tool of foreign policy.
“Hostage-taking by nation-states—something practiced more often by terrorists and insurgents in the past—has become more and more frequent in recent years. The phenomenon poses a new challenge to Western democracies… The playing field is skewed. Countries with rule of law and independent judiciaries cannot just order tit-for-tat reprisals, grabbing similar hostages in return. They’re also constrained in what they can do to ban travel of their own citizens to adversary nations. Currently, hundreds of citizens of the U.S. and allied democracies are estimated to be held by authoritarian regimes for political reasons, with Russia alone grabbing several Americans in recent months.”
“Iran—whose revolutionary regime started off with the capture of American diplomats in 1979, and then sponsored the kidnappings of Westerners in Lebanon—has led the way in making hostage-taking a feature of modern international statecraft… China and Russia have also increasingly resorted to seizing Western academics, tourists and journalists, including Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich. So have a slew of smaller countries, including adversaries such as North Korea and Venezuela and ostensible U.S. allies such as Turkey—which in 2017 unsuccessfully tried to trade a detained American pastor, Andrew Brunson, for Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who resides in Pennsylvania. Brunson was released the following year, after the Trump administration sanctioned senior Turkish officials and raised tariffs on Turkish exports… The U.S. and other Western nations have tried to mitigate the risk by warning their citizens not to travel to countries where the probability of wrongful detention is high. The State Department has issued such ‘D’ warnings against trips to eight countries: Iran, Russia, China, Eritrea, Venezuela, North Korea, Nicaragua and Myanmar. Yet—unlike during the height of the Cold War, where American passports were marked as not valid for travel to much of the Communist bloc—there are no legal restrictions for such trips, except to North Korea.”
Why it matters: “Only deeper cooperation among democracies, including a joint response to inflict real pain, can deter autocratic regimes from taking more and more Western hostages, said Carla Ferstman, a professor at Essex Law School in the U.K., who has worked on several cases of hostages held by authoritarian governments. ‘This is a new kind of warfare…Iran, or Russia, or whoever else is doing it is going to win unless Western governments collectively put a bar against this practice,’ she said. ‘But now each government thinks they are smarter, that if they make their own little deal they will do better. They don’t.’”
6. Why denial of anti-Israel protestors’ motives is unsustainable
Why you should read it: New York columnist Jonathan Chait contends that it’s become impossible to sane-wash the views of virulently anti-Israel protestors by attributing to them noble motives or concern for Palestinian suffering.
“[Students Allied for Freedom and Equality], like other branches of [Students for Justice in Palestine], takes an eliminationist posture toward Israel. It has employed violent rhetoric preceding Israel’s operation in Gaza. A SAFE rally in January 2023 featured calls of “intifada revolution,” smashing the “Zionist entity,” claims that Israelis ‘water their invasive species with Palestinian blood,” and so on. SAFE celebrated the October 7 attacks. In March, its president wrote on social media, ‘Until my last breath, I will utter death to every single individual who supports the Zionist state. Death and more. Death and worse.’ The group sent masked protesters to the home of a Jewish regent in the middle of the night and vandalized his law office…. Would progressives have taken a cooler view of the demonstrators had they possessed a clearer view of their objectives? Some might. But others would not. Progressives tend to take a romantic view of left-wing protest. Protesters occupy a special category of political actor, freed of any responsibility or agency and judged only as a counterweight against the worst excesses of whatever they oppose. They represent an idealistic impulse and revulsion at the status quo, and since the status quo is unjust, their behavior, by definition, cannot be. All that matters is that their actions are directionally correct.”
“Inevitably, the activism and pedagogy inspired by [left-wing] settler-colonialist theory has frequently slipped over into outright antisemitism. A Stanford lecturer told Jewish students to identify themselves, then ordered them to stand in a corner of the classroom, because ‘this is what Israel does to Palestinians.’ At Columbia, one professor allegedly asked a student with a Jewish name before an exam to explain their views on Israeli’s actions in Gaza, while another complained that the mainstream media ‘is owned by Jews.’ At CUNY, the activist group Not in Our Name instructed its members and followers to undermine a Hillel survey on campus antisemitism, including by answering a question about encountering prejudice against Jews in the negative even if they had experienced it… These sorts of incidents may not represent the typical experience of Jewish students, but they are a predictable result of the climate of opinion fostered by the leading pro-Palestinian activist groups. Their rejection of coexistence between Palestinians and Jews in the Middle East has extended to their vision of domestic politics in the U.S. The protesters’ central goal has been to turn Zionism — which they define, de minimus, as the belief that Israel has a right to exist in any form — into an unacceptable opinion. Their demand that universities boycott Israel is designed to advance this strategy by lending official support to their view that Israel is a unique source of evil in the world… What Democrats and progressives need to decide is whether to treat these groups as noble idealists broadly on the right side of history or as the fanatic adherents of an illiberal and unjust program. In the Middle East, that program calls for endless war until the Jews have been expurgated from a soil on which they unnaturally reside. In the West, it means imposing social norms that make most Jews feel alien and unwelcome.”
Why it matters: “For years, Jews in progressive spaces have long agonized over demands they face to denounce Israel or Zionism as the entry price for their participation. Divestment is a lever intended to spread that cultural norm more broadly through universities and other cultural institutions. The protest method of seizing campus common space and declaring it off limits to ‘Zionists’ is a model for their strategic goal. That persistent demand, more than the sporadic outbursts of overt antisemitic harassment, is the chilling threat that makes Jews fear for their future in the U.S…. The movement could not be any more clear on this point. Its members will not stop harassing and intimidating Jewish people. Nor will they adopt any standard of behavior. When they say they believe they are part of the Palestinian liberation movement, and that the movement is entitled to use any means necessary, that is exactly what they mean.”
7. How Nate Silver lost the plot
Why you should read it: For The Point, Leif Weatherby and Ben Recht review data journalism guru Nate Silver’s new book and find its central conceit of betting reveals “Silver’s true passion: gambling.”
“A revealing look into a hyper-quantified worldview where numbers inform all decisions, it takes us from poker to sports betting to capitalist swashbuckling to battling superintelligent robots. Silver’s thesis is that gambling represents a comprehensive approach to life: a way to decide what to do in literally any situation. If you go by the process. If you make everything into numbers. If you bet the odds. Then you are righteous—even if you lose it all… Yet despite the apparent triumph of his numbers-based techniques, things turned sour for Silver in 2016. He first insisted that Donald Trump would not win the Republican nomination, and then, chastened by his folly, ended up giving him a 29 percent chance of winning the general election. When the results were in, Silver adamantly claimed he was more right than everyone else, pointing to the fact that the Huffington Post, for instance, put Trump’s odds of winning at about 2 percent. But why does it matter if other forecasters were more bullish on Hillary Clinton’s chances? For Silver, this speaks to the way he has often been misunderstood. In [his book] On the Edge, he asserts that his forecasts were never supposed to make the readers of the New York Times feel less anxious; his job, rather, was ‘to handicap the race’ for those who wanted to bet on it. A good election forecast is one where if you’d bet on it, you’d make money… Silver’s logic is thus that if your forecasts are better, you’ll make more money betting. Notice, though, that this defense has nothing to do with accuracy in raw terms—he didn’t predict Trump would actually win—and certainly nothing to do with voting or representative democracy itself. It’s about how you might be able to profit off of democratic elections.”
“Here’s something we learned while reading this book: no amount of empirical evidence is enough to convince Silver that this might be, well, bad. Silver acknowledges that slots are unfair, but concludes that the problem is with the addicts. He manages to find a few ‘Riverian’ slot players who are gaming the bad odds while hiding their expertise from the casinos. Everyone else is doing it wrong. What he can’t seem to see is that the casino owners—whose operations have in recent years become ever more data-driven—are the ultimate Riverians, and that they are not taking any risks at all. Indeed, it’s precisely the opposite: slots guarantee profit to the casino by impoverishing people who play them… On the Edge is a celebration of the community that uses their phones to gamble on everything: to place sports bets, to bet on risky stock options, to bet on cryptocurrencies, to bet on elections… Is this a world that we want to live in? Silver provides lip service to the counterarguments, but his approach excludes them. The methods that Silver introduces in the book largely lead to personal immiseration and addiction. Several recent studies have found that online gambling activity by teenagers is increasing, and that their calls to helplines are up; about 2.5 million adults in the U.S. have a gambling addiction, a number that’s been on the rise since the legalization of sports betting in 2018. A set of multibillion-dollar industries, from casinos to crypto exchanges to AI, complete the feedback loop, facilitating a gamified Bayesianism and parasitically feeding off society.”
Why it matters: “This is the mindset behind the world that Silver played a large role in establishing: one of ubiquitous prediction where everything is bettable. Silver insists that viewing all decisions through this lens of gambling is the underappreciated characteristic of Very Successful People. It is true that, as Silver suggests, quantifying everything, and then betting on the outcome, has become a pervasive and powerful technique, at work in fields from finance to culture to sports to politics. But what Silver willfully ignores is that the successful players in this world aren’t the bettors. They are the bookies and casino owners—the house that never loses.”
8. Why the gay rights movement has outlived its usefulness
Why you should read it: Writer James Kirchick posits in The Atlantic that the gay rights movement’s move into transgender issues has been driven by a need to sustain itself after it had achieved resounding victories on its central causes like gay marriage.
“Founded in 1985 as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the nonprofit originally had the mission of promoting more empathetic media coverage of people with AIDS. Over the years, its remit expanded to countering negative portrayals of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in advertising and entertainment. Today, the proliferation of LGBTQ characters on our screens, largely sympathetic coverage in mainstream media, and the ubiquity of same-sex couples in advertisements and commercials all suggest that GLAAD achieved its mission. The group should have long ago taken the win and dissolved—just as the organization Freedom to Marry announced it would do shortly after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in the summer of 2015... The trouble at GLAAD, however, is more than just a story of individual or organizational corruption. It’s also a story about how—in the years since LGBTQ people earned the right to serve openly in the U.S. military, get married, and not be discriminated against in housing and employment—an entire movement has gone tragically adrift.”
“As gay people have become more fully integrated into the mainstream of American life, prominent activist groups have excelled at perpetuating themselves. The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s leading LGBTQ advocacy organization, issues a highly publicized Corporate Equality Index and, like GLAAD, accepts donations from the businesses it scrutinizes. It and other groups constantly gin up publicity on the faulty premise that life in the United States keeps getting worse for LGBTQ people… Flailing about for relevance since the legalization of same-sex marriage, many gay-rights groups pivoted to a related but fundamentally different cause: transgender rights. Rather than emulate the movement’s past approach—seeking allies across the political spectrum and accepting compromise as a precondition for legal and social progress—they have taken hard-line left-wing positions. LGBTQ groups repeat the mantra ‘the science is settled’ on the extremely complex and fraught subject of youth gender medicine and insist that anyone who questions the provision of puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric children is transphobic. They continue to spread this message even as many European countries have backed away from such treatments after concluding that the evidence supporting them is weak. The reflexive promotion of major medical interventions for minors should be a red flag for gay men and lesbians, considering the research indicating that many gender-distressed and gender-nonconforming children grow up to be gay.”
Why it matters: “Accepting victory, however, can be difficult for people who devote their lives to a cause, and not only for emotional reasons. The impulse among activists, once successful, to keep raising money necessitates that they find things to spend it on… The [gay] community has genuine needs—which do not include helping nonprofit executives enrich themselves and hobnob with celebrities. If there’s a silver lining to the ethical collapse of GLAAD, it’s to shine a bright light on the massive waste of resources spent on organizations that have no reason for being and, in some cases, cause more harm than good.”
9. Why Trump’s Arlington Cemetery desecration is even worse than you think
Why you should read it: The Atlantic columnist Michael Powell explains just why former president Trump’s use of Arlington National Cemetery as a campaign prop is even more disgusting than it appears at first glance.
“For Trump, defiling what is sacred in our civic culture borders on a pastime. Peacefully transferring power to the next president, treating political adversaries with at least rudimentary grace, honoring those soldiers wounded and disfigured in service of our country—Trump long ago walked roughshod over all these norms. Before he tried to overturn a national election, he mocked his opponents in the crudest terms and demeaned dead soldiers as ‘suckers…’ Few spaces in the United States join the sacred and the secular to more moving effect than Arlington National Cemetery, 624 acres set on a bluff overlooking the Potomac River and our nation’s capital. More than 400,000 veterans and their dependents have been laid to rest here, among them nearly 400 Medal of Honor recipients. Rows of matching white tombstones stretch to the end of sight.”
“But the former president outdid himself this week, when he attended a wreath-laying ceremony honoring 13 American soldiers killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the final havoc-marked hours of the American withdrawal. Trump laid three wreaths and put hand over heart; that is a time-honored privilege of presidents. Trump, as is his wont, went further. He walked to a burial site in Section 60 and posed with the family of a fallen soldier, grinning broadly and giving a thumbs-up for his campaign photographer and videographer… This was not a judgment call, or a minor violation of obscure bureaucratic boilerplate. In the regulations governing visitors and behavior at Arlington National Cemetery, many paragraphs lay out what behavior is acceptable and what is not. These read not as suggestions but as commandments. Memorial services are intended to honor the fallen, the regulations note, with a rough eloquence: ‘Partisan activities are inappropriate in Arlington National Cemetery, due to its role as a shrine to all the honored dead of the Armed Forces of the United States and out of respect for the men and women buried there and for their families.’”
Why it matters: “It had the quality of middle-school graffiti, suggesting that Trump viewed the controversy as yet another chance to mock his critics before moving on to the next outrage. For grieving families with loved ones buried in Section 60, moving on is not so easy… This week, all [Gold Star mother Karen Meredith] could do was call out a crude and self-regarding 78-year-old man for failing, in that most sacred of American places, to comport himself with even the roughest facsimile of dignity.”
Odds and Ends
After a glitch-plagued test flight, Boeing’s Starliner crew vehicle will return to Earth on September 6—without its two-astronaut crew, both of whom will stay on the International Space Station until early next year…
How a quartet of sea lions are helping Australian researchers map the ocean floor off the country’s southern coast…
Why Jerusalem’s fortunes wax and wane with the holy city’s ties to the imperial powers of the day…
Archaeologists reveal that Stonehenge’s central Altar Stone came all the way from the far north of Scotland, over 400 miles away from the megalithic monument’s home in England…
Another volcanic eruption in Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula—the sixth since last December alone…
What I’m Listening To
Slash’s version of Steppenwolf’s “The Pusher,” featuring Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes on vocals, from the guitar icon’s new covers album Orgy of the Damned.
“Shine,” a tune from 1990s rockers Collective Soul from the band’s 1993 debut album Hints, Allegations, and Things Left Unsaid.
“Fire,” a funk track by Ohio Players off the 1975 album of the same name.
What I’m Streaming
The Killer, director John Woo’s remake of his 1989 action classic, starring Nathalie Emmanuel (Game of Thrones) as the title character and Omar Sy (Lupin). Woo’s trademark moves are all here: doves taking flight before action scenes, manic shoot-outs in hospitals, and plenty of heroic bloodshed.
Bad Monkey, a dark comedy detective series produced by Bill Lawrence (Scrubs, Ted Lasso) featuring Vince Vaughn as a suspended Florida Keys cop-turned-food inspector working a convoluted case involving a detached arm and, of course, a monkey.
Veteran actor Ed Harris (The Right Stuff, Apollo 13) narrates the six-part documentary series Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War, which explores what happened before and after the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona.
Image of the Month
