Three Fun Things for April 21, 2024
A spy series to listen to, the algorithmic future of medicine, and a 2022 miniseries about WeWork
By Erica C. Barnett
1 After recommending the Apple TV series Slow Horses, I’ve been making my way through the books that inspired the show—the Slough House series by Mick Herron, about a group of MI5 rejects consigned to drudge work in a nondescript office building in London. (Action ensues). I highly recommend the audio version: The narrator, Gerald Doyle, gives each character a distinct and convincing presence every character, from the icily posh Diana Tavener, “second desk” at MI5 for most of the series, to the whiskey-swilling, flatulent Jackson Lamb, a former top operative who now commands the slow horses, the half-affectionate sobriquet for Slough House’s inhabitants. Doyle’s huffy pronunciation of “his GIRLfriend,” referring to a woman preying on the insecurity of a tech-savvy slow horse who imagines he’s God’s gift to women, is priceless.
Slough House is designed to drive its inhabitants to quit through endless, daily drudgery, but they keep ending up in the middle of the action. Herron’s plots are twisty and complex, full of ambiguous morality and unclear motivations. Le Carré-esque? Maybe, but the books have a 21st-century, post-Brexit edge. And they are very, very funny. In one book, a bumbling Tory prime minister orchestrates his own downfall by thinking he can outwit not only the idiots in his own party but the head of MI5, with deadly results. In another, the recovering alcoholic who serves as Lamb’s right hand woman gets kidnapped, but rescuing her requires uncovering a secret history that leads to a bloodpath. Herron’s plots are kinetic, complex, and original, and the books are impossible to put down—or stop listening to.
2. When I was in treatment, one of the counselors came in and handed out envelopes and pre-filled forms that we were supposed to sign and address to our doctors for inclusion in our medical file. The forms said, in short, that we were addicts and should not, under any circumstances, be prescribed opiates, benzodiazepines, or other potentially addictive medications for pain or any other purpose.
I wouldn’t sign it. But now, a decade later, I no longer need to. As Maia Szalivitz reports in the New York Times, doctors can now base their prescribing decisions on opaque algorithms that purportedly predict people’s risk of drug dependency. (Yes, I concede that this is not so much a “fun thing” as an “interesting” or “alarming” one.) According to Szalavitz, most Americans now have the equivalent of a controlled substance credit score—a rating, determined by proprietary algorithms that “use machine learning techniques to try to help doctors reduce the odds that patients will become addicted to these medications,” that can tell your doctor or pharmacist how likely you (supposedly) are to develop an addiction in your lifetime.
Physicians and pharmacists are already using the scores to deny or refuse to fill opioid prescriptions. Szalavitz describes people who couldn’t get pain medication for endometriosis, or buprenorphine for an existing opiate addiction. It’s easy to see this logic being extended to other prescriptions, such as ADHD medication or birth control. This isn’t the dystopian future—it’s already here.
2. “WeCrashed,” Apple TV
I mostly knew Jared Leto as an insufferable Method actor, the worst Joker, a gross sexist who may have criminally targeted teenage girls online, and the guy who showed up at the Met Gala wearing a very stupid cat costume. Also, he may have started a cult? Point is: Leto is beyond problematic, and if you’d asked me to assess his acting (based on nothing but his dumb White Jesus persona), I’d say it’s probably not very good.
Well, burn on me: Jared Leto is (very) probably a bad person, but he is not a bad actor—at least not in this eight-part miniseries about the rise and fall of WeWork, the shared workspace company that briefly tried to take over the world. Maybe it’s because of certain similarities between the two men (again: Possible cult leader), but Leto instantly embodies the slick, egotistical salesman behind WeWork; you understand exactly why people fell for this guy, and why—when his bad financial choices and mania for expansion caught up with him—people felt duped and betrayed.
But the series is also, oddly, a love story. Anne Hathaway plays Neumann’s wife, Rebekah Paltrow, a dilettante wannabe actress and businesswoman who wafts through life in a cloud of unexamined privilege. As the two get further and further into their world-building delusions—eventually starting an educational “practice,” called WeGrow, so their kids don’t have to go to conventional private school—the pair transform into true movie villains. Maybe Adam Neumann was the Joker Leto was meant to play all along.