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Before diving into this week’s Mailbag, let’s talk television. Against my better judgment, I’ve become a fan of the new HBO Max show “Lanterns,” and it’s reminding me why I kind of hate TV. Is the show good? It seems good to me. At least, the three episodes that have aired are good. At least, they seem good. But are they actually good? The truth is that I have no idea. When you read a novel or watch a movie and you decide that it’s good, part of the goodness of the scenes or chapters that come at the beginning is how they relate to the overall story. And more to the point, if someone else tells you that “Moby Dick” is great, then when you come across something in the beginning that seems intriguing, you have reason to believe that the intriguing vibe isn’t just a vibe.
Other people who have actually read the end of the book say that it’s good.
But it’s not just that I haven’t seen the end of “Lanterns” and you haven’t seen it and none of the critics or podcasters talking about it have seen it — there literally is no end for anyone to see. An ending hasn’t been filmed. It hasn’t been written. It doesn’t exist. All this intrigue and vibes and setup and flashback could mean nothing. I was really happy to sit out watching “The Americans” while a lot of people I knew were singing its praises, then fire up the first episode after the final one aired and people were still saying it was great. And it is indeed great! I can tell you that because I know how it ends and it really all hangs together.
Michael Tolhurst: I am sort of curious. Have you investigated the housing stock and regulatory framework for housing in the Austro Hungarian Empire? Could the challenges of the Empire been solved by more market rate housing in growing industrial urban zones for national minorities to improve their economic standing and have more commitment to a joint polity? (Or, another way to put it, does the housing theory of everything really generalize *to everything*?) Is there an exciting alternate history genre waiting to be launched based on counterfactual housing policy?
I am only slightly knowledgeable about this, but I have looked into it a little because there is an obsession throughout the worldwide left with the successful public housing program that was inaugurated in the “Red Vienna” days of the 1920s and continues today in Austria. I think there are a lot of problems with the way this is usually invoked, and part of that involves dropping the historical context.