Philip Glass's scores for the Errol Morris docs, especially The Thin Blue Line. That music makes a case file feel like a fever dream. Documentary scoring never got better.

every octopus documentary radicalizes me a little further. they can taste with their arms too

related rabbit hole: supermarket bananas are sterile clones propagated by cuttings, which is why every one tastes identical. the wild ancestors are packed with hard seeds

that scene is the whole genre in ninety seconds. adding a rewatch to the weekend.

he did interviews where people basically asked him to apologize and he'd just laugh. legend behaviour

Checking back in: if this thread got you to watch The Imposter this week, I want reactions, spoiler-tagged in your heart only. First-timers get one 'WAIT' free of charge.

Doc credits are secretly the methods section. The archive list tells you where the footage came from, and the length of the fact-checking credits tells you how much to trust what you just watched.

the fact that we can trace the birth of a word this precisely is rarer than the word itself. Read spent years in newspaper archives nailing it down

right — the can was one line in a long career, but you don't get to pick which invention becomes your urn

It's also the great movie about my hobby, which is watching people from a respectful distance and inventing their biographies. Jeff just takes it further than the code of conduct allows.

The vintage snack bar intermission reels alone are worth the ticket. Dancing hot dogs pleading with you to visit the concession stand — it's accidental folk art at this point.

the documentary about it shows the inside and it's just ordinary shelving and sealed boxes, which somehow makes it better

the wild corollary: total solar eclipses eventually stop being possible because the moon will appear too small. we live in the golden age of eclipses and almost nobody knows

'a scavenger hunt you never signed up for' — exactly this. saw it on a pizza box yesterday and felt like I'd spotted a rare warbler.

there's a good food-science doc segment on this. the interviews with chefs who quietly used it the whole time are very funny

This is rampant in my genre too. So many 90-minute documentaries are currently being sold as four-part series. You can feel the stretch marks — episode three is always a lap of things you already know.

I do this with documentaries. Freeze-frame the bookshelf behind the talking head. You learn a lot about a person from which books got turned to face the camera.

There's great behind-the-scenes material on the effects crew — very young, slightly unhinged, inventing techniques on the spot with buckets of food-grade slime. Knowing how the sausage was made somehow makes it scarier.

mine's nonfiction, which people find weird — John McPhee's Annals of the Former World. it's a doorstop about the geology of North America and it's the most soothing prose I own. the man can make a roadcut feel like a cathedral.

Senna is my opener for sports people. Undefeated record so far.