Another quality of Japanese culture that I admire.

From MH re my Jan. 2 “Predictions” issue: “I’m enjoying your newsletter. I’m glad you took 14 hours to plan your 2026. I started a journal this year with my goals, tasks, and inspirations, and it’s really helpful.”

From RT: “I wanted to share something meaningful with you. I recently translated your English Wikipedia page into Bangla so that people in my country can better understand who you are and learn from your work. Your ideas on business, long-term thinking, and sustainable growth resonate deeply with me. While our contexts may differ, I see a strong alignment in how we both value clarity, realism, and impact over hype. Translating your work felt like a small way of giving back and making thoughtful ideas more accessible to Bangla-speaking readers.”

I’ve been thinking… and I’ve come up with two things that I’d like to run by you. One is an idea about a rating system for the books and movies I review in this blog. The other one, the more important one, is about the future – or non-future – of mainstream media. (Anyone paying attention saw this coming.)

I just read The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith, this month’s selection for the Mules (my book club). Smith is impressively adept at constructing sentences and in selecting le mot juste. In those regards, he merits A+. But good fiction is more than wordsmithing. It’s about creating stories that not only arrest our attention, capture our imagination, and somehow expand our minds and hearts, but do so in a way that is beautiful.

So how do I rate this book?

Aristotle wrote the foundational treatise on literary criticism with the Poetics, where he defines the essential elements that make a piece of literature work. Though his focus was on drama (tragedy, in particular), I’ve always found it very useful in helping me understand what I like and don’t like about the plays, movies, and other visual media I consume, as well as the books I read.

It is less than perfect, however, in helping me explain how much or how little I like them – which means that I’ve had to come up with my own way to evaluate the recommendations I make on this blog.

I came up with a system that I had great hope for at first – a rating based on the work’s “horizontality” and “verticality.”

Horizontality was about how well it created its fictional world (a time, a place, and a culture).

Verticality was about how well it portrayed – through plot, characterization, and dialog – a deep sense of what a human being is and is capable of being.

These analytical tools have not only been helpful to me in writing my recommendations, they have been helpful during book discussions at our Mules meetings, giving us terms we can use to better communicate our ideas and feelings.

Which gets me back to where I started…

How do I rate The Last Painting of Sara de Vos?

After finishing the book, I had two seemingly incompatible feelings about it.

On the one hand, I was much impressed by the author’s skill as a wordsmith. On the other hand, I felt that the story itself, while good, was not great. And that the way it was told – including the action, the plot, the characterization, and the theme – was handsome, but not beautiful.

So as a reader who very much appreciates the poetic aspects of literary fiction (the diction, the syntax, the metrics, etc.), I would have rated the book very highly. But in terms of my experience of the novel as a whole – the overall aesthetics – I would have rated it good, but not great.

The problem stuck in my craw, and I went to bed without a solution. But today, I had an idea – a very simple rating system that has been used successfully for decades. I’m talking about the way they rate ice skating performances at the Olympics. Competitors get two grades: one for technicality and another for beauty.

So now I’m thinking that it might be helpful to introduce this idea to the Mules: that in addition to the other frames of reference we can use to critique the literary fiction we read, we can provide two additional numeric ratings, one for technical and another for aesthetic virtuosity.

I’m thinking this could work.

Let me know what you think.

From KK re my comments about cybersecurity and AI in the Jan. 2 “Predictions” issue: 

“Thanks for bringing up cybersecurity in the blog. I’ve made it my top political issue, moving it ahead of the debt and the environment. The steady stream of reports of data breaches, leaks, ransomware attacks, digital extortion cases, and state-sponsored attacks have led to ‘breach fatigue.’ Today, more than ever, we need to be vigilant!

“And just for the record, AI – or as I call it, machine intelligence – is not humanity’s friend, it’s our competitor!”

My Response: Well put!

An increasingly large percentage of the posts I see these days are deep fakes… even those supposedly coming from national figures. Right now, it’s pretty easy to detect them. It will be more difficult in the future.

Another increasingly large percentage of the posts I see are made by actual humans reading from AI scripts. These, too, are easy to detect – at least for me as a writer who has dabbled with AI.

It’s hard to say what will become of all this in 10 or 15 years. In the meantime, there is going to be a surge of digital deception, disinformation, and outright fraud and scamming going on that will victimize millions of people.

No need for a pest control service if you have a well-trained dog!

(Since you asked: The breed is Patterdale Terrier.)

It’s been a hell of a week! Want to know what I think about what’s happening? Read on…

* The S&P 500 completed one of its best three-year runs ever, rising around 80% from the start of 2023 through Dec. 31, 2025.

Wall Street thinks the party is just getting started, but few expect the good times to keep rolling indefinitely.

* Trump threatened to intervene if Iran cracks down violently on ongoing protests, putting pressure on Tehran as it tries to contain discontent with its economy.

* Gavin Newsom’s wealth tax dilemma: “Wealth taxes are going nowhere in California,” he has insisted. Not so fast. A wealth tax may be going to voters this November.

Read more here.