I’ve been thinking a lot about the opening of The Firm, the movie, not the book that inspired it.

You remember: Tom Cruise is playing Mitch McDeere, a young graduating Harvard law student who’s visiting with various firms to interview for his first real job. He’s a stud of an applicant, and the montage is largely voice-overs of the selling points of each of the offers. Until he meets those attorneys from Memphis.

It’s a fun little scene that starts off the same as the others. Or so it would seem. But as he reaches to pick up the envelope that contains his offer and asks should he open it there, one of the partners tells him, “Unless you can tell us what’s in it. A lawyer worth that offer shouldn’t have to open the envelope.”

What unfolds is a largely unnecessary scene of an impromptu cross-examination, complete with objections and everything. It would have been cooler if he just knew what was in the envelope, but instead, he just took a roundabout way to ask the question without actually asking the question.

It’s all for the purpose of allowing the other partner describe his underhanded ways of coming up with the offer: bribe a clerk to learn what the highest offer was (not entirely sure why a school clerk would even know that, but sure) and added 20%. For the purposes of the film, this serves as the earliest bit of foreshadowing what’s to come (spoiler for the literal premise of the film: the firm = the mob).

Why have I been thinking about the opening moments of this film from the 1990s? Sure, it’s related to my own life (I have a job interview this very afternoon), but it’s more than that.

In part, it’s because of the news of these massive government layoffs. I’m just thinking about not just the expertise being pushed out the door but also the individual lives being disrupted. I have friends who are waiting with bated breath to find out will they have a job? Will they be spared? There can be little comfort in trying to game out the likelihood based on departments; it all seems a bit scattershot at the moment.

I think about how my life has looked for the past few months, after my own layoff, not directly from the government but certainly tied to government actions, and it’s been one of those huge, reorienting life events. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. But I think I’d be more forgiving of the situations if everyone being let go were going to turn out like Mitch McDeere: highly sought after and able to jump from one extravagant offer to the next.

But that’s never been the case for most of us. I’m no Mitch McDeere, never have been, but I’ve been turned down for some jobs for which I thought I’d be a shoo-in. Almost all would have required training and acclimation to the particular ebbs and flows of the position, but the transferable skills have always been there in spades, usually related to communication in some form or fashion.

When those said no, it stung. Maybe even more so than the deafening silence that results from the largely online nature of job applications these days.

I have interviewed so many times now. I have told my story. I have wrestled with those seemingly easy questions, like, “Why do I want this job?” I have taken all the rejections with what I hope resembles grace, but I’d be lying if I said it’s not disorienting to one’s sense of self, that it doesn’t chip away at any sense of competence or peace one may have had with the choices of his work history that led to this point. It’s hard. It’s uncomfortable. It’s draining. It’s maddening.

And I can’t stop thinking about how many of these laid-off government employees are fellow non-McDeeres, just like me. I can’t help but wonder about what their next few months will be like.

I don’t know all of them (or even many of them), but I know enough of this struggle not to wish it on them. I know enough about the differences between government work and that of the private sector to wish their choice to opt for the government route (whether to slow things down, make time for their kids, ensure a little more job security, or actually just because they love the concept of service) was afforded a bit more respect and dignity in this moment.

All versions of being out of work, whether that’s from white-collar or blue-collar, pose their own struggles. Their own indignities. Their own timetables for finding something new. There’s always someone looking; it’s a painful reality and not even remotely anything new under the sun.

But from my own (still searching, still wounded) vantage point, my heart goes out to these workers, those both known and unknown. Here’s hoping they find a soft place to land, and here’s wishing them all the resilience in the world if there are many bumps and bounces off decidedly not soft places to land along the way.

Ten Worth Your Time

1. Bitter Southerner published an essay by a recently (and abruptly) fired USAID worker, and it’s just a simple yet lovely argument for why USAID’s mission was so vital and its decimation so needlessly cruel.
2. With last night’s premiere of a new season of The White Lotus, a certain Sunday-night-HBO itch was scratched. But not quite Succession used to do. Maybe you’ve missed the show, too, but fear not. The real-life drama that gave life to the hit HBO drama just got a massive write-up in The New York Times Magazine. It’s the tale of Rupert Murdoch and his kids and the ongoing battle for who will succeed him after he’s gone. Actually, it’s about quite a lot more than just who takes over leadership; it’s about his ideological devotion to keeping Fox News a specific kind of media company. To that end, he was happy to try some chicanery with the family trust that will determine ownership interests after he dies. All his machinations were laid bare in a probate court in Reno, Nevada, and though the proceedings took place in secret, the Times got ahold of all the juicy details. It’s a long read, but well worth it (and why I’m making it this week’s FREE GIFT article).
3. To read the long NYT Magazine story above is to learn that Rupert have a favorite son and a preferred heir apparent: his oldest son, Lachlan. It was for Lachlan’s benefit that Rupert’s machinations were put in place. That put them both at odds with three other of Rupert’s children—Prudence, Elizabeth, and his younger son, James. The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins spent quite a lot of time with James, getting his view of life as a Murdoch, but not just any Murdoch: He was the disfavored Murdoch, the one who wasn’t a true believer in Fox News’s version of reality. Coppins’s piece (FREE GIFT LINK HERE) is a nice addition to the play-by-play of the NYT Magazine’s piece in that it provides a little psychology from a usually mum subject of constant speculation and fascination: James himself.
4. The breakneck pace of the news coming out of the Trump Administration is hard to keep up with, but it’s a wild fact that it pushes so much out of view and, in many cases therefore, out of mind. One example is, for those of us not living in L.A., the wildfires that devastated the city. It feels like forever ago that was where all of our attention was directed, but now, it’s been shunted aside for those of us not directly affected by the fires. I enjoyed this piece in WIRED that looked at the creator of the free app that did so much good during the fires when information was lacking and clear direction was needed: Watch Duty’s John Mills. The guy has a kooky, outsider bent to him, but in a way that seems probably not out of place for a tech type in California. But his passionate stance that, if his free app staffed largely by volunteers is the most indispensable source of information in such emergencies, then something is very, very wrong.
5. Speaking of fire, I loved this piece from High Country News that took readers inside the process and teams behind controlled burns, the little brother to raging wildfires. It feels like such a counterintuitive policy on its face: Set things on fire to prevent fires at a later date. But this piece explains just how different the two types of fires are and the dedicated work that’s required to manage these necessary blazes. I found myself wishing I could pick up a drip torch and help out.
6. Jon Krakauer on Medium going absolutely HAM on some rando YouTuber who was intent on clout chasing by impugning Krakauer’s personal account of the disastrous 1996 Mt. Everest ascent that resulted in numerous casualties, which he documented first in a massive story for Outside and later as the smash-hit book, Into Thin Air,was the feud I didn’t know I needed. What makes it even better is that Krakauer was so dedicated to confronting each and every inaccuracy he saw in the troll’s videos that he wrote eight (!) separate posts on Medium to rebut him. If it were a flashier conflict, this would be our new Kendrick-smiling-during-Super-Bowl-performance meme: Krakauer just scrolling through the wreckage after strafing this poor schmuck on eight different occasions.
7. The New Yorker turned 100 years old last week. I hope to do more blogging about this (as my own little effort not to let the anniversary just come and go to be quickly forgotten), but as a starter, here’s the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, talking about its inception and what still lies ahead for arguably the best journalistic institute left in the country.
8. Here’s another New-York-publication-centric story: Andrea Long Chu, writing for New York magazine, assesses the legacy of Pamela Paul, recently departed from The New York Times. The piece is sharp and pointed, and it’s a fun exercise to see a smart and talented writers try to encapsulate all that annoys them in another writer’s work. Let’s just say this: Chu doesn’t miss.
9. It wouldn’t be one of these newsletters if I didn’t have some bummer of a story related to AI. This week it’s from The Walrus as it looks into the use of AI in dating services and apps. It’s a deeper story than just that rickety concept because its focus is in India, and, naturally, India’s long-established culture of arranged marriages plays a huge role in the story. As a result, I felt like I learned a lot more about dating and relationships in India and perhaps not quite so much about the woes of AI in finding that perfect match. But the ways the technology is being rolled out is supposedly to make the process better for those seeking a partner, which is just a doubling-down of what dating apps without AI were trying to do: It’s all supposed to make the search so much easier. And of course there are tons of success stories out there and happy relationships that came from a random app-matching rather than a random conversation with a stranger on the neighboring stool at a bar, but this optimization effort from AI feels about as far away from genuine human connection as you can get.
10. This recap of a particularly crazy time in magazine history (specifically men’s magazine history) that was beset by a proliferation of what’s collectively termed the “horny profile” is a really funny piece of writing (h/t to the wonderful Caroline Crampton and her newsletter for pointing me to this story). It scorches a period of time a bit too late to be considered the heyday of men’s magazine journalism, but rather a period that was defined by struggling and scrapping by magazine’s to find their way back to those halcyon days. By and large, as Anna Merlan recounts for Flaming Hydra, they failed, perhaps in no small part to the weird approach they took to writing features of beautiful women in a newer, more tightly controlled celebrity existence. Merlan’s piece grabs large chunks of slobbering prose to make her point, and the men writing those old pieces do not come out looking great. Don’t get me wrong: I love the men’s magazines taking all the heat here, and I love a period of those magazines that were mostly just before most of these examples, but I must concede where there were misses, they were often my a wide margin in a way that suggests maybe it’s not just OK but preferable that magazines have moved on from strategies of old.

More From Me

Over on my blog, I’ve been writing about various topics of interest to me.

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Twin Peaks Completion

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The Morning News x Field Notes Presents Tournament of Books 2025

Whale Nibbles on Kayaker. Again.

2025 National Magazine Award Nominees Announced

Writers and Novelists Read 'The Great Gatsby' to Celebrate Its 100th Birthday

Culture Diary

Here’s a collection of what I’ve been consuming in the past week.

The legend for my list was stolen from Steven Soderbergh, where ALL CAPS represents a movie, Sentence Case is a TV show, ALL CAPS ITALICS is a short film, Italics is a book, and bold is a live performance or show. A number in parentheses after a TV show highlights how many episodes I watched. An asterisk after an entry means it’s a rewatch. The source of the movie or show, whether streaming service, physical media, or in theaters, is shown in parentheses as well.

2/10:

2/11: Severance, S2 (2) (AppleTV+); THE ANDERSON TAPES (Criterion Channel); Landman (2) (Paramount+)

2/12: The White Lotus, S2 (3)(Max)

2/13: The White Lotus, S2 (3)(Max)

2/14: Common Side Effects (2)(Max); The White Lotus, S2 (Max)

2/15: OCEAN’S 12 (Blu-ray); UNSTOPPABLE (Max)

2/16: Severance, S2 (AppleTV+); IN THE HEART OF THE SEA (Netflix); The Simpsons, S1 (2)(Disney+); BODY DOUBLE (Criterion Channel); The White Lotus, S3 (Max)