• The Theory of Everything:

  biopic of Stephen Hawking, focusing on his first marriage to Jane Wilde as a student until the divorce. Flaws include the standard Hollywood portrayal of geeks and some lamentably missed opportunities for explaining the ideas involved in Hawking's life-work - for example, in explaining Hawking radiation, which is probably one of the easiest and most interesting possible ideas in 20th century cosmology to explain in a few seconds for laymen, the director instead decides to cut back and forth between Hawking's lecture and an incoherent pub discussion of same. I also have to wonder if debates about God were really as central to their lives as the movie made them, as they felt shoe-horned in; physicists tend to only bring up God in a Noble Lie way, for funding. What is good - perhaps even great - about the movie, is (a) the remarkable job Eddie Redmayne does in acting out the physical deterioration of Hawking, so uncannily well that my suspension of disbelief became absolute and I totally forgot that he was not really Hawking himself, and (b) the decay of the Hawkings' marriage and eventual divorce, which is an unexpected topic to focus on but made sense once I learned it was based on Jane Wilde's memoirs. I was not sure it was worth watching in the early part showing the romance, but once Hawking's ALS enters the plot, then it became gripping for me.

Why we fight - A speech by late AIDS activist Vito Russo. Text transcript available here. It reminds me of the character, but not the content of Reagan's A time for choosing speech [link to text transcript].

• exhaust yourself
• abstain from motivation porn
• be appropriately engaged