That was a fairly random question posed to us with great earnestness during a casual conversation with people who don’t quite understand ecology. So, in the ensuing years, whenever one of us in the family wants to insert a non sequitur, we would yell, “But what about the bees?”
You’re welcome for my odd segue to this blog post’s topic.
I read a review of this movie that kept talking about how hilarious this film is. Uh, did we watch the same movie, bruh? I mean, it’s not heavily philosophical, but the inciting incident is an elderly lady committing suicide after scammers swindle her out of her entire savings and the account for a charity she ran. Not exactly haha material.
It’s mostly an action movie in the vein of Mission Impossible with a theme of avenging a wrongful death. So, there’s a lot of fighting and violence (but, gawd, do the baddies deserve it). It’s not, however, even as gory as a typical horror flick. I can’t do gore.
Maybe it’s because scammer assholes are so rampant these days that I don’t find it funny that they’re the bad guys (rather apropos actually)…but I feel like you could be completely lacking empathy if you thought that was a funny premise.
For me, I really enjoyed the movie because it plays out a secret fantasy: that bad people get their comeuppance in a spectacular way. I’ve always had a staunch sense of fairness: that good people should get rewarded and bad people die horrible deaths as befitting their crimes. Life is nothing like that and it drives me completely bonkers.
That is not to say, however, that this movie isn’t entertainingly fun (the fight moves are very cool; I’m a sucker for well-choreographed or filmed/edited fight scenes). But it isn’t just that; it also has a good message–stop screwing over innocent people. And because the bad guys bite it in the end, I also categorize it as a “feel good” movie. Vengeance is a dish best served with lots of butter and salt.🍿I would take take this film over any Hallmark romance or chick flick any day (well, heck, I’d take The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby over those any day, too).
If I were to start rating movies by 🍿, I’d rate this 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿.5 out of 10. Maybe even 9/10 for pure entertainment and revenge satisfaction.
Confession: I don’t really care for WotY picks. When I do choose one, it’s because of group pressure, and I forget what it is by the end of the day.
That said, 2025 has had its rough moments. While it was mostly good (2 book contracts, did lots of art, and received other nice news), there were also disappointments and general anguish about the state of the world.
So, with that in mind, I’ve decided to let the spirit of the word RESILIENCE guide me in 2026.
Just as JL Collins talk about FU money in his excellent book, The Simple Path to Wealth, I am determined to carry some FU currency with me when it comes to…well, everything this year.
And the incomparable Gloria Gaynor will be my guide!
How about you? Do you usually pick a WotY? If so, want to share yours with me in the comments?
As we step over the threshold into the new year and face a myriad of decisions in 2026, you might find this article from Vox useful. The original can be found here, but I’m pasting it below, too, in case you can’t pull it up for some reason.
How to make the hardest choices of your life
Sigal Samuel is a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic.
Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:
I’m soon to be a part of the legal profession. I went to law school to advocate for marginalized populations who seldom have their voices heard — people who are steamrolled by unethical landlords, employers, corporations, etc. I will clerk after law school, and then I’ll encounter my first major fork in the road: whether I pursue employment in a corporate firm or nonprofit/government. Corporate firms, ultimately, serve profitable clients, sometimes to the detriment of marginalized populations. Corporate firms also pay significantly better. Nonprofit or government work serves the populations I want to work for and alongside, but often pays under the area median income.
I’ll be 32 by the time I reach this fork, and I don’t know what to do. I’m extremely fortunate in that I won’t have law school debt — I was on a full ride. Still, I’m not “flush.” I want to buy a house one day, have some kids with my partner, feel financially secure enough to do so. I also want to have a morally congruent career and not enable (what I consider) systems of oppression. What do I do?
Dear Fork in the Road,
Your question reminds me of another would-be lawyer: a very bright American woman named Ruth Chang. When she was graduating from college, she felt torn between two careers: Should she become a philosopher or should she become a lawyer?
She loved the learning that life in a philosophy department would provide. But she’d grown up in an immigrant family, and she worried about ending up unemployed. Lawyering seemed like the financially safe bet. She got out some notepaper, drew a line down the middle, and tried to make a pro/con list that would reveal which was the better option.
But the pro/con list was powerless to help her, because there was no better option. Each option was better in some ways and worse in others, but neither was better overall.
Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column?
So Chang did what many of us do when facing a hard choice: She chose the safe bet. She became a lawyer. Soon enough, she realized that lawyering was a poor fit for her personality, so she made a U-turn and became — surprise, surprise — a philosopher. And guess what she ended up devoting several years to studying? Hard choices! Choices like hers. Choices like yours. The kind where the pro/con list doesn’t really help, because neither option is better on balance than the other.
Here’s what Chang came to understand about hard choices: It’s a misconception to think they’re hard because of our own ignorance. We shouldn’t think, “There is a superior option, I just can’t know what it is, so the best move is always to go with the safer option.” Instead, Chang says, hard choices are genuinely hard because no best option exists.
But that doesn’t mean they’re both equally good options. If two options are equally good, then you could decide by just flipping a coin, because it really doesn’t matter which you choose. But can you imagine ever choosing your career based on a coin toss? Or flipping a coin to choose whether to live in the city or the country, or whether to marry your current partner or that ex you’ve been pining for?
Of course not! We intuitively sense that that would be absurd, because we’re not simply choosing between equivalent options.
So what’s really going on? In a hard choice, Chang argues, we’re choosing between options that are “on a par” with each other. She explains:
When alternatives are on a par, it may matter very much which you choose. But one alternative isn’t better than the other. Rather, the alternatives are in the same neighborhood of value, in the same league of value, while at the same time being very different in kind of value. That’s why the choice is hard.
To concretize this, think of the difference between lemon sorbet and apple pie. Both taste extremely delicious — they’re in the same league of deliciousness. The kind of deliciousness they deliver, however, is different. It matters which one you choose, because each will give you a very different experience: The lemon sorbet is delicious in a tart and refreshing way, the apple pie in a sweet and comforting way.
Now let’s consider your dilemma, which isn’t really about whether to do nonprofit work or to become a corporate lawyer, but about the values underneath: advocating for marginalized populations on the one hand, and feeling financially secure enough to raise a family on the other. Both of these values are in the same league as each other, because each delivers something of fundamental value to a human life: living in line with moral commitments or feeling a sense of safety and belonging. That means that no matter how long you spend on a pro/con list, the external world isn’t going to supply reasons that tip the scales. Chang continues:
When alternatives are on a par, the reasons given to us — the ones that determine whether we’re making a mistake — are silent as to what to do. It’s here in the space of hard choices that we get to exercise our normative power: the power to create reasons for yourself.
By that, Chang means that you have to put your own agency into the choice. You have to say, “This is what I stand for. I’m the kind of person who’s for X, even if that means I can’t fulfill Y!” And then, through making that hard choice, you become that person.
So ask yourself: Who do you want to be? Do you want to be the kind of person who serves profitable clients, possibly to the detriment of marginalized people, in order to be able to provide generously for a family? Or do you want to advocate for those who most need an advocate, even if it means you can’t afford to own property or send your kids to the best schools?
What is more important to you? Or, to ask this question in a different way: What kind of person would you want your future children to see you as? What legacy do you want to leave?
Only you can make this choice and, by making it, choose who you are to be.
I know this sounds hard — and it is! But it’s good-hard. In fact, it’s one of the most awesome things about the human condition. Because if there was always a best alternative to be found in every choice you faced, you would be rationally compelled to choose that alternative. You would be like a marionette on the fingers of the universe, forced to move this way, not that.
But instead, you’re free — we’re free — and that is a beautiful thing. Because we get the precious opportunity to make hard choices, Chang writes, “It is not facts beyond our agency that determine whether we should lead this kind of life rather than that, but us.”
Bonus: What I’m reading
Chang’s paper “Hard Choices” is a pleasure to read — but if you want an easier entry-point into her philosophy, check out her TED talk or the two cartoons that she says summarize her research interests. I cannot stop thinking about the cartoon showing a person pulling their own marionette strings.
In the AI world, when researchers think about how to teach an AI model to be good, they’ve too often resorted to the idea of inculcating a single ethical theory into the model. So I’m relieved to see that some researchers in the field are finally taking value pluralism seriously. This new paper acknowledges that it’s important to adopt an approach that “does not impose any singular vision of human flourishing but rather seeks to prevent sociotechnical systems from collapsing the diversity of human values into oversimplified metrics.” It even cites our friend Ruth Chang! We love to see it.
Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska has a witty poem, “A Word on Statistics,” that asks how many of us, out of every hundred people, exhibit certain qualities. For example: “those who always know better: fifty-two. Unsure of every step: almost all the rest.” It’s a clever meditation on all the different kinds of people we could choose to become.
I hope all of you are enjoying some sort of holiday break and celebration, be it Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Festivus, Winter Solstice, a late Krampus, etc.
This is one of the pandas in my fabric pattern “Christmas Panda-monium” design. I think they are adorable and plan to use all the pandas in a set of holiday cards, too.
Thank you all for being a part of my blog, such as it is. I’m grateful for your visits, likes, and comments, and I try to drop by your blog to reciprocate.
Even when I was devouring books as a kid–with zero responsibilities besides school–I don’t think I read as much as Deborah Kalb does. Her reading habit puts me to complete shame.
As fast and as widely as she reads, it’s only fitting that she runs an author interview blog wherein she highlights recent books. I love her blog and have been introduced to a lot of terrific books that way (my recent favorite is Collisions by Alec Nevala-Lee).
Either continuing from the book recommendation post from last week or because it seems appropriate to dive into horror in looking back on the year, here’s another short book post wherein I share some of the horror books I read…or attempted to read. (Really, it all started in October when it seemed like a good time to read horror, but then I just kept at it.)
First of all, the three that I really liked and can recommend:
Took me a hot minute to discover that “Scott Carson” is actually the nom de plume of NYT bestselling author Michael Koryta. There’s a reason why he’s a best seller. I regret that I’m late to the fan club, but I will be reading a lot more of his books from now on.
Pretty much ditto Grady Hendrix (except I don’t know his secret identity).
I liked The Sun Down Motel a lot, but not as much as the other two. On a 1-10 scale, I’d rate them as 9, 8.5, and 8 respectively.
Then there was this:
It was highly readable but I think I didn’t get the memo that it’s not a supernatural horror. So that threw me off at the end. Plus, there were parts that were…hmm…I guess the best way to describe them would be “the Chekov guns that were never fired.” I’d give it a 7, maybe.
But this next one…I am so sad to say that it was a DNF for me (did not finish).
In fact, I didn’t get past chapter 3. I wanted so badly to love it because everyone raves about it, and I also really want a diverse horror. But I was so bored reading it. I know that it’s supposed to be an old style slow-build sort of horror, but I couldn’t push through.
I’m going to give it another try, but probably not for a few months.
Got any good horror to recommend me? I prefer the supernatural kind; gore is not my style.
I co-taught a class at Highlights Foundation (remember Highlights Magazine? That’s them) for several years with talented nonfiction author Jen Swanson. The portion I taught was how to write picture book biographies (on the basis that I had one measly picture book bio published…I mean, it did receive a lot of honors, but still…)
I read a lot of PB bios as research on how to write one, of course, but for teaching the course, I had to continue reading many, many of them. What strikes me is that while 90% of them are solid and well-written, only about 5-10% of them are actually unique in style and stand out from the rest.
Someone who consistently writes these top-notch PB bios is, I’m proud to say, a friend of mine. Beth Anderson is a former educator who really gets what it takes to make this format appealing to both kids and adults. I recommend you pop over to her website to see all the books she’s written (and buy them for the kids in your life!)
Here, I want to showcase two of my absolute favorites:
They are extremely clever takes on portions of history I never knew. I love when I learn something new in my readings, but especially when I’m entertained at the same time.
I’m a big fan of Beth’s writing and you will be, too, once you’ve read her books!
…so hard, in fact, that sometimes you just need to be forcibly shoved off the metaphorical ledge like some fledgling bird before you find out that you can fly (or die trying).
I don’t know yet if I will be able to fly or if I die trying, but I made a couple of gifts to thank the person who gave me that push.
A cowl in the KnitPick’s Wonderfluff yarn and a necklace made with glass beads and chips.
No guts, no glory; right?
And if you think those are lovely, handmade gifts, just imagine what I would gift the person who helps me to fly or provides me with the safety net to fall into!
The legendary martial artist would have been 85 today.
Learn more about him and the pivotal moment of his career in WHO SMASHED HOLLYWOOD BARRIERS WITH GUNG FU? BRUCE LEE, a biographical graphic novel for middle graders, written by me, illustrated by Eisner nominee, Ryan Inzana, and published by Penguin Workshop.
