Announcements
Ima be in Miami with @Markus and @Dane this week before I head back to SF
Weekly Shoutout
Our very own @Sophie has released her book: Ask Sophie: The Founder’s Guide to Visas & Green Cards
She’s one of the top immigration lawyers in Silicon Valley and a dear friend of mine (and a recent Newsletter subscriber!). I wish I had been able to work with her for my Greencard but alas we ended up connecting when I already signed with WeGreened — nonetheless I have and will happily refer any of you to her!
One of the things I appreciate the most about her is that beyond being such a phenomenal lawyer, she’s an industry leader in immigration law and actively dedicates so much of her valuable time promoting immigration reform (lobbying for the StartupVisa for example). So many people don’t know just how much work she puts in to help people like me pursue the American Dream!
Food for Thought
Lynn Fisher's Hollywood Age Gap repository collects data on silver screen love interests — with over 880 relationships cataloged from 630 movies — and then calculates the difference in those actors' ages.
Kind of ironic that Harold and Maude is still to this day the movie with the largest age gap ahaha
James Bond leads the way lol
Now let’s look at which male actors show up in age-gap romances most frequently
Now let’s look at directors: female writers and directors disproportionally write more movies about older women dating younger men, and despite having a clear strong preference for older males dating younger females, male directors and writers are more likely to engage in that trope
Before you look at this graph, try to guess which director has made the most movies with large age-gaps….yep, it’s cinema’s favorite neurotic pervert!
How is Scorsese on there?! Taxi Driver? Does that count?
Now here’s the graph that surprised me the most: there are >2x as many older females up to 5 years older than males up to 5 years older…I’m thinking it’s bc of those Milfy comedies?
Crowd Pleasers
Looking at IMDb, it’s clear that the streaming wars did indeed lead to a bubble in quality TV shows — a bubble in the sense that it was unsustainable and it’s now collapsing
First, >500% more bets were made on Prestige TV shows this past decade than in the prior half century
Quantity doesn’t imply quality, but the IMDb data also shows that this century (which makes sense bc The Sopranos and The Wire were in the early 2000s) so far the average series rating is above the historical average
However, it’s useful to keep in mind that this TV show bubble has led to a lot great TV shows not “sticking the landing” and having uneven levels of quality
The story doesn’t end there now, bc now that the bubble is deflating, we are seeing a lot of TV shows getting cancelled (I think HBO is inflated bc of the Warner Bros/Discovery thing)
Mind-Benders
Anti-vaxing conspiracies are uniquely frustrating for me because the germ theory of disease is one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs in history and vaccines are a medical miracle….
At the outset, we have vaccines mostly to thank for the massive drop in infant mortality globally
However, I’ve noticed a somewhat reasonable arguments that makes otherwise reasonable people hesitate on Covid vaccines (if we define them as such) is the speed at which they were developed and tested, which in the past used to drive me crazy bc I was hoping the accelerated vaccine approval would prove how damaging the slowness of the FDA approval process worked #AbolishTheFDA — now I just show this graph of how forcing pharma companies to register their studies prior to using results of trials to go through approval is a game changer that filters out a lot of noise in biotech otherwise
Basically, it’s statistically difficult to use selective results if you register the trial beforehand, which is why most BS medical studies get exposed if the lead researchers are forced to announce every experiment they run as opposed to only announcing the ones that worked!
