The Court, The Retweat, and The Bear: Giving AF is the Common Thread

What Television, Twitter 1.0, and the Delaware Court of Chancery Have in Common

If you are going to be annoyed by the fact that this insanely personal and even marginally-inappropriately-so post is cluttering up your Inbox, you should just delete it now. Or maybe you should go ahead and unsubscribe. If you can’t handle receiving a single email in your inbox that could possibly touch on a topic that isn’t related to a topic that you haven’t already decided that you are interested in, you might simply lack the intellectual curiosity needed to be the kind of person who is going to be interested in the kind of things that I have to say.

I don’t say this to trigger you, although I assume that by now, a handful of you are already having some sort of episode — furiously penning some responsive missive to me that I look forward to reading (perhaps we are more alike than you care to admit), but here’s the deal: I tell you this because I am going to write about a bunch of wacky shit and if you can’t be fcked to simply delete an email that doesn’t resonate with you, I just think it’s probably better for your blood pressure and overall health that you figure that out sooner rather than later. I truly want what’s best for everyone in this situation.

Despite the clear (and incredibly repetitive) prefatory warnings included with all of my work concerning its stylistic choices, and the reasons therefore, and even when I explicitly say that “[y]ou actually do not need to comment on [all] that, if you can believe it,” and further note that “[s]ome of you apparently find that very hard to believe,” well, some of you find it apparently impossible to resist because I still get emails with préci[ou]s comments like the following screenshot:

I suppose it’s to be expected. Due to countless hours of hard work, and years of training and skill, I have certain information that people want, and they want it like Burger King-style — their way, right away, Burger King, now. But you know what the thing is? Too fcking bad. Because if I hate my life, I am not going to keep doing what I’m doing. I have to love what I’m doing to keep doing it. I have tried the other way. It doesn’t stick.

Well, people really don’t like that. I suspect there’s a subset of people who also really just don’t like that I’m enjoying myself, but that’s probably a more niche problem. I think the bigger problem is that the information I have is not widely available, it’s sought-after, and people want it in their desired format. Sorry, bro. You can take what you get, or you can not. That’s the beauty of choice under capitalism. If capitalism doesn’t give you sufficient choices, I suppose you’ll have to take that rare case up with capitalism.

But let me give this whole précis thing a shot here, just so you can see how stupid it is. This post is going to about the following topics:

• a television show called The Bear;

• my mother’s death and my own mortality consciousness;

• the Delaware Court of Chancery;

• Elon Musk;

• the webthing formerly-known-as-Twitter;

• life in general;

• the importance of giving a fuck;

• what it means to give a fuck;

• art, work, meaning, and my philosophy on life.

Is this ridiculous yet? Can you just let me write, and read along if you so choose? Can we just enjoy the process of writing and reading for what they are? Can everything not be commoditized and reductive? Please? I seriously doubt it, but I’ll keep trying. To the extent this post says anything relevant to the AMC case in a way that someone following it for some abjectly crass financial reasons might be concerned, you can see an update on the litigation position and all relevant information here. Please don’t debase yourself with reading about my life and my views on art and meaning for such trivial ends. This post is personal to me. It probably has nothing to do with anything that you care about for any self-interested reasons of your own. I wrote it for entirely self-interested reasons of my own — to express my feelings about life, and art, and the world. Please do me a favor and skip it, okay? It’ll provide those of you who don’t like my other analyses some very personal bases on which to disregard my analysis. Bollocks for you.

This whole thing is actually dead simple. If you want to read what I have to write, you can. If you don’t want to read what I have to write, you don’t have to. If you can afford to pay for my work, I request that you do. If you cannot, you can may request forbearance. These principles seem very straightforward, actually. Not complicated. Stop making them complicated. Thank you.

The pandemic came, for me, at exactly the wrong time. I’m not sure it came at the right time for anyone, but for me, the years of collective societal focus on our mortality and health concerns coincided with the moment in time when I officially outlived my mother’s lifespan. If you are quick with calculations, or can just intuit the math here, you’ll soon figure that this means that my Mom died when I was very young, and also when she was quite young. It was a sad, tragic thing at the time — she was (as I am now) in her prime, far too young to die. She was vibrant and very much alive before she was no longer those things, and to a fifteen year-old, this sudden state change had the effect of imbuing my whole world with a kind of permanent sense of transience that I have never been able to shake off. The only thing I’ve ever been able to be entirely sure of is that nothing lasts.

I suppose it would have been easier — to use language weirdly and loosely and bizarrely — if she had died suddenly in an accident or from some external cause. But she died of the same breast cancer that had killed her mother, and if I had been old enough for her to be honest about it with me, I think she would have admitted she always thought was going to kill her, too. There’s nothing like growing up with a multi-generational target on your back, let me tell you. Why am I telling you this, anyway? Oh, yes. That’s right. There is a point to all this, I promise. I grew up with a mortality consciousness that had few rivals. I spent my teenage years longing to reach the age of maturity not so that I could drink alcohol legally, but so that perhaps they would let me get a mammogram. Finally, advancements in genetic testing started to make meaningful progress. Maybe I could actually find out if I was in for the kind of death sentence my mother had lived with for all of her truncated life.

I became a health nut, nerding out on plant-based this, and exercise that. Reduce sugar intake, increase leafy greens. More whole foods, less processed junk. I didn’t drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes after college. I participated in a longitudinal study about the impact of daily exercise on breast cancer in high-risk cohorts. I joined FORCE (Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered) and went to their annual conference. I was quite certain that I carried the BRCA genetic mutation, and finally got insurance to approve the test. When I got the results back that I was an “uninformed negative,” I was dumbfounded. (Although I don’t carry any known genetic mutation, that fact can’t fully “inform” my risk profile because my mother and grandmother both died well before the advent of genetic testing, so there’s no way to be sure that their cancers were caused by known genetic mutations, so as to say for sure that my risk profile is more akin to gen pop.) I still get biannual MRIs and mammogram/sonogram combos, see the best breast surgeon in the area, and do all the things that my mother refused to do after watching her own mother be broken and maimed by radiation treatment in the 1970s. I have prepared myself and learned from her mistakes.

What I wasn’t prepared for was how hard it would be to outlive her. I had only ever really done “back-of-the-napkin” math about how old she was when she died. I’m not a huge birthday/anniversary/dates kind of person, so I wasn’t one of those people who had things nailed down to a years/months/days kind of timeline. I had a general sense back in 2019 that I was getting close to approaching the age that she was when she had died, because my doctors were always asking how old she was when she died, and I would give them an approximate age, and I was right about at that age. Sometime during the pandemic, I finally decided to do the actual maths. And it turned out that my back-of-the-napkin math about how old she had been when she died had been off by a couple of years, so I had been consistently wrong on all those intake forms throughout the years, and I still had a couple of years to go. And I don’t know what it was about that miscalculation, but in conjunction with the entire world kind of joining in with the type of mortality consciousness and health consciousness that I have lived with my entire life — the kind of “is it a muscle cramp or am I dying of cancer?” — it really and truly sort of fucked me up.

All the memes about “is it the cold/flu/COVID” — all those things that people were experiencing for a while at the beginning of the pandemic, when people were at home with nothing to do but stare at death counters, and hospital statistics, and worrying about other people getting sick? It was like everyone was like me all of a sudden. I have lived my entire life worrying about my own health and the health of everyone that I love. It’s fucking exhausting, and for a moment, during the pandemic, everyone was face-down in the muck with me. And there was something kind of comforting about that. But then, when it stopped, and people got over it, and the world moved on, and then I actually did cross that threshold of surpassing my mother’s lifespan, and that also coincided almost perfectly with Elon Musk blowing up the Twitter deal and throwing my life into an entirely wild, new direction. It seems like some sick shit, in a way, but when I do something, I go for it, so at some point, I decided to calculate exactly how old my mother was when she died, and precisely how that mapped onto my own life. I calculated to the day when it would have been: May 7, 2022. So, right after I passed the most traumatic goalpost of my life, Elon Musk started the slow-motion train wreck that is still causing an epileptic seizure-inducing disaster to this day, at 1355 Market St., which was also coincident with a lot of you getting a lot more interested in what The Chancery Daily had to say about corporate law and the Delaware Court of Chancery; when what I liked to nerd out about became something that you all liked to nerd out about, too. And that was really cool, and fun, and absolutely all-consuming.

I know there is no causation here, obviously. I know that none of this is about me. I know that I am a small, insignificant, minuscule creature on this magnificent planet. But, to me, my story is pretty central. And as I mentioned, you are under no obligation to read it.

The reason that I’m telling you all of this is because I want you to understand what I am about to tell you, about what I believe about life. I want you to understand that what I personally believe about life comes — for me — from the fact that I don’t really know how to do anything else. It comes from the fact that if I do anything else, I will most likely spend a decent amount of time per day worrying about ridiculous shit like how many days my mother lived, and whether or not that slight pain in my chest is COVID or cancer or some other weird third thing. Go ahead and judge me for that, I’m sure you have no character flaws. I’m telling you all this preface so you know that there is a reason that I choose to live the way that I do, and that I’m not telling you about those choices to moralize to you about how you should do the same. I’m telling you because for me, the alternative is a kind of discomfort that I’d prefer not to live in everyday. And choosing to live the way that I do is quite blissful actually, and I very much love my life, so it really works out. I don’t think it’s this way for everyone. I think that there are people for whom choosing to live the way I do comes from totally different place. I don’t know — I only know my own origin story. I share mine with you so you can see that I’m not trying to proselytize about how my way is better. This isn’t a homiletic wherein I’m telling you how to be; this isn’t proscriptive, it’s just an explanation for why I am the way that I am. I don’t actually think that it’s per se better or worse than many other ways of being in any categorical sense. Everyone has complex choices to make about the moments that they have on Earth, and far be it from me to render negative judgment on the vast majority of those, save a scant hyper-public, highly-influential few who I think merit a check on their behavior since it is so impactful on the rest of ours. But no, I’m not telling you this to proscribe “good” behavior. Not by any means.

I’m telling you this because I most certainly have hypochondriac tendencies and mortality consciousness like it’s nobody’s business, but there are things that make it better. Not numbing out because alcohol and substances are not things that a health nut does. Exercise, sure. But there are only so many hours in the day I can dedicate to the Peloton or walking the neighborhood or running the track. One of the things that makes it better is focusing on something that I love that allows me to get into a flow state. There are two categories of those things in my life: my work (writ large) and my family. I could — and I have — written a lot on how I think people should or shouldn’t use other people to fulfill themselves. Suffice it to say here that I think focusing on other people to find or fulfill one’s purpose is a dangerous game, and one that takes restraint, cooperation, and deep mastery of communication so as not to become unintentionally suffocating or smothering. But work? When it is the right work? When it is work that allows me to access a flow state? When it is work broadly defined, that fulfills me on a creative and intellectual level — when it can preoccupy my mind, keep the worries at bay, when I enjoy for its ends, but also for its own sake? For me, I choose for this to be what the art of living is all about. Because: 1.) I have to choose something, 2.) it’s a fairly random choice, 3.) even if I don’t consciously choose, just like Rush said, I am choosing, 4.) it’s all quite meaningless in its own way, anyway, 5.) there’s something beautifully meaningful about the meaninglessness of it all. Most importantly, when it’s work that I can put my whole self into? That’s the real deal. Because my whole self? You want to know what my whole self is all about?

Enter, The Bear.

I said I was going to talk about a television show, didn’t I? The Bear is going to explain this all, so beautifully, so poetically, in a way that I never could. You’re going to have watch it, to truly understand, but I’m going to try to explain. I can’t really tell if what I’m about to say about the show should be categorized as spoilers, because they are simply little vignettes that can almost be entirely taken out of sequence, out of time. They are timeless moments of dialogue that are absolutely fucking transcendent in their truth. If you’re sensitive to knowing anything about a show before you see it, you should binge-watch both seasons before you read this. But I also think you could probably read this, have no idea what I’m talking about in relationship to the show, then watch the show, and come back later and say, “oh, yeah, that’s what she was talking about” and it would have absolutely no impact on you watching the show. It’s an intensely character-driven show. But I don’t know, I’m not a weird-television-watching person in general. I’m the kind of person who got rid of television back in the early aughts before streaming was a thing, and then admittedly probably spent a few years subtly (or not so subtly, as you can see) bragging about being that kind of person. Now I’m just like every other normal person — because does anyone actually have cable television anymore … is that even a thing, and if it is, do you have to also subscribe to streaming networks, and why is everything so unworkable these days?

Anyway, you’ll have to decide whether you can tolerate hearing a few character interactions from a show without context, because I certainly don’t want to ruin the show for you, because everyone on Earth should watch this show, really. And I’m not one to prescribe television watching to people. But this show will remind you why we need real writers and real actors and not AI and not garbage pumped out of a factory, and why the subtleties are what make everything work, and why the point of this whole piece, if I can ever make it there is that: the work is what matters, the details are what matters, the exacting obsession over putting in the work and getting it just fucking right is what matters. Because the show practices what it preaches, and it absolutely shows.

Because what it all comes down to in the end? What the show is about, what this whole piece is about, what my whole self and life is all about?

Giving a fuck.

So, we’ll get back to The Bear in a second. First, let me explain how this all relates to Elon Musk and Twitter, because to me, it really, really does.

On July 12, 2023, one year to the day after Twitter sued Elon Musk in the Delaware Court of Chancery, I finally deleted my Twitter account.

I suppose now we have to call my ex-Twitter account an X account to be accurate. It was a decision that — if you have been following me for that period of time, you will know — I have been struggling with for the entirety of the period of intervening months since Musk closed the deal and took over Twitter in October of 2022. On all the various platforms and in all the varied attempts to leave Twitter, I have shared reasons for this decision and the struggle therewith. But Elon made enough absolutely awful decisions in a short enough period of time to make the choice sufficiently clear that the one-year anniversary seemed like a perfect ending to a beautiful disaster. I couldn’t be happier that I finally pulled the plug just two days before he started paying out royalty payments to people like Andrew Tate, known rapist and sex trafficker. It’s only gotten worse from there, if you can believe it.

Twitter is relevant to this story in two ways. One, the year that I spent on Twitter educating people about the Delaware Court of Chancery was unlike anything I could have imagined. It was wild and crazy and enlightening and terrifying and so much more. What a decade that year was. And it was probably the only kind of absolutely unrelenting, around-the-clock demanding activity that could have kept me from whatever black hole depression I might have fallen into in the absence of that distraction.

I’ve been telling people lately — somewhat jokingly — that I think I’m in a lot of trouble (in the Ralph Wiggums kind of “I’m in danger” way) because previously when I expressed my workaholic tendencies while working at the law firm or in other roles, I always at least had some rate limiting factor to “protect” me. Either I low key did not enjoy the vibes where I was working, or the people whom I was working for high key wanted to suppress my energy, or I had other things going on at various stages of my family life that demanded to take precedence over work. There were always governors on how much I could get into it. There wasn’t just unmitigated love for what I was doing. There weren’t unsullied good vibes for the people I was doing it with. There wasn’t an atmosphere of complete support and camaraderie and openness and adventure. There weren’t people to cheer me on in my relentless pursuit of excellence, and my commitment to going above and beyond. There wasn’t an absolute absence of killjoys and energy vampires (ok, there are one or two of you who make it through to my email, but they are no longer my coworkers, and randos don’t have the same oomph).

What the fck am I going to do? I was at the 100th Anniversary Women in Law Celebration a few weeks ago, musing on this with several of the most badass women in the Delaware Bar, and I think I figured out the answer. No offense to Sheryl Sandberg, but not exactly in the way she meant it (only because I haven’t read the book, so I really have no idea how she meant it other than in an abjectly literal-metaphorical way), I think I’m going to lean into it. I mean, I think The Bear has given me my answer.

Second, Twitter is relevant to this story because Elon Musk and “X” are — to me — the antithesis of everything that I’m talking about here. For all of his yapping and all of his virtue signaling on this topic, I truly believe that Elon fundamentally lacks the ability to know how to or to “give a fuck” the way that I am defining it here. I have never seen Elon himself output results consistent with this kind of deep work that is both committed to excellence and to people in equal parts and at the same time. To be clear, he talks about striving a lot and about egoic pursuit of blah blah blah, and he seems to have hired people who are capable of certain aspects of working hard and killing one’s self through workaholism, something with which I am quite familiar, though he seems less and less able to retain (or hire) such people, there still are certain of them in his orbit. But he, himself, does not seem to be such a person in many senses. In fact, he appears to be kind of the opposite of this type of person. He seems impetuous, driven to act sporadically instead of consistently, unable to focus and maintain singular effort. He makes acts in ways that are sloppy or that create sloppy results. He doesn’t cut his tape with scissors (this is a Bear reference). But most importantly, he does not seem to give a fuck about people. And, it turns out, that’s all of a piece.

Ok, so back to the TV show. What did The Bear teach me, what do I believe is the greatest virtue in life, what saved me from going insane after I outlived my mother’s lifespan, what do I find most repugnant about Elon Musk, and — new topic — what do I find so refreshing and admirable about the Delaware Court of Chancery and why do I enjoy covering it so much? And also, why do I think that the bros who keep saying that Vice Chancellor Zurn is just going to pop out her opinion in the AMC Entertainment, Inc. case in a matter of hours are kind of missing the point, and are fundamentally still misunderstanding the work that is left to do, and the way that everything works?

It’s really all the same thing. It’s all about giving a fuck. About the work, and about people.

Because that’s what I’ve spent the last year doing. I have spent the last year giving every single possible fuck about what is going on at the Delaware Court of Chancery. And when I mean every single possible one, I seriously mean it. Every day, I know every single item that came in or out of that Court. I know who filed what, everything that the Court said — written and oral, what is going on in every single case, and do you know what? That takes a lot of work. Every single day. And then we summarize all of the written opinions for our publication, and we debrief all of it internally, and we decide which parts to focus on in our daily write-ups, and we obsess over how we are tracking the information, and we fuss over periods and commas, and when our janky IT system removes a space between two words, we debrief it the next day, because it fucking matters to us. And that’s why I cried during the episode about “the Smudge” — because those are my people. People who fucking care. People who give a shit. People who want to take radical responsibility (“Yes, fck me, Chef!”), not for being perfect — because no human beings are — but for attempting perfection. Because there is no giving a fuck about big things without giving a fuck about small things. And there is no giving a fuck about the work without giving a fuck about the people whom you are serving with the work that you do, and the people with whom you are doing it, and people in general, people at large.

And this is what I have been telling you all since day zero that I love and respect so much about Vice Chancellor Zurn. That woman’s work ethic is second to none, and it puts mine to shame, and I know of few people in the world about whom I can honestly say that, and several of them sit on the Delaware Court of Chancery, and the other one founded The Chancery Daily. At a time when the various judiciaries around the country make the news for doing sloppy work, or sprawl across headlines for cutting corners or breaching ethical guidelines, the Court of Chancery stands — in my mind — as far as the bench if concerned as a testament to this virtue. I think of Chancellor McCormick, and how masterfully she leads the Court, and what she demonstrated to the whole world in terms of excellence and impeccability last year in her handling of the Twitter v. Musk case; I think of Vice Chancellors Fioravanti, Will, and Cook and their unrelenting work ethics — each of them consistently prepared for hearings and trials, ready to dive deep into the particularities of the record or the case law in a way that never ceases to amaze me; I think of Vice Chancellor Glasscock and the care that goes into the crafting of his opinions; I think of Vice Chancellor Laster and the coherent narratives that he pens about corporate law with unfailing vigor in each of his Opinions. The care that these jurists give to their jobs is just not normal; to my mind, it’s extraordinary. And look … are there members of the bar who are probably annoyed with various aspects of this diligence, for various reasons? Sure. Do they think they could do it better — “it” being basically anything that you present to them? Of course. To me, though, there’s something honorable in giving a fuck in and of itself. Speaking of In and Of Itself, now that I think about it, the eponymous play might actually correlate with this whole concept, and it was an absolutely fucking spectacular work of art that everyone should watch, and it just so happens to also be streaming on Hulu, for which this Substack has now become an entire unwitting advertisement. But back to the regularly scheduled broadcasting.

There’s a pair of scenes in The Bear, which I think sort of sum up this whole concept for me. They are absolutely devoid of meaningful or memorable spoilers, as far as I can tell. But I’ve watched them several times and I can’t not be moved by them every time.

In one, Marcus is preparing one of the dishes he has learned how to make at his special training, and its preparation is insanely intense. It involves using tweezers and a blow-torch and carefully spooning a small scoop of caviar and a piping tool to make tiny little swirling towers of some fancy condiment. It’s painstaking, watching him put it together, and it’s taken him montage after montage of failures (“Again, Chef!”) and tons of trial-and-error to improve his skills to the point where he can even attempt it on his own. But you can see that his dexterity has improved, he’s developing the hand of the master now, he is fluid and facile with his movements, he has a bit of flourish in what he’s doing, he’s no longer as awkward and stilted. Nonetheless, the process is excruciating and exacting to put together a single perfect serving of this test dish. He fires the marzipan to a beautiful seared edge around its immaculate circular rim, and one can imagine all the predicate steps required to get that green color to come to fruition.

And then he inspects it, satisfied.

And then, he just … eats it.

In one, whole, bite.

A couple of chomps and a single gulp, a look into the middle distance as he processes the experience, and a barely perceptible nod of approval.

It’s gone, and that’s life.

Two scenes just before this, Marcus is walking home and he encounters a random man who has fallen off his bike and managed to get tangled up in some construction wire fencing. It’s not clear whether the man is drunk or mentally ill or just non-English speaking, such that their communication difficulties are due to the language barrier between them. But once Marcus stops to help disentangle him from the dangerous situation, the man stops to embrace him gently, picks up his slightly mangled bike, face bleeding, and hops on and rides off into the distance, Marcus’ voice trailing off behind him: “Are you sure you want to get back on that….?”

But that, too, is life.

It’s the scene with the bike that really sets up the scene with the everything-that-you-just-put-your-heart-and-soul-into, you-just-shoved-in-your-mouth-and-disappeared-in-one-bite, that makes the whole thing hit so hard. But in both cases, the scenes haven’t been written about much. Some synopses of the episodes actually leave these two scenes out entirely, choosing to say that the episode ends on the intervening scene, which is admittedly a sweet interaction between Marcus and another main character. But these two scenes tell the story of this show for me.

It is the story of giving a fuck.

Marcus stops to help the man because he gives a fuck, in the sense that he cares deeply for other human beings, even one whom he does not know, with whom he cannot communicate, and whom he will never see again. He hears the man crying out, and he goes to him. He helps him. The man demonstrates his appreciation, but — as is life — he just gets right back on the bike. Because that’s what we do. We ride again, sometimes, even, while we are bleeding from the face. Because, really, what’s the viable other option? To sit out life, to just lay back down, without the razor wire, to just … chill and do nothing? I tried that during the pandemic for a bit, and it did not work for me.

Marcus has put his entire self into learning how to make these intricate dishes, into how to be the best possible chef that he can be, into how to obsess about every single bit of minutiae, because he cares so deeply about his work. Because he gives a fuck. I used to have a neighbor, and when they sold their house, the realtor put on the listing, “shows pride of ownership” and I thought, “what the fuck does that mean?” but now I know. It means they had the systems serviced, they cleaned the gutters, they replaced the roof shingles when they broke, they didn’t let siding rot without repair, they had the foundation checked for cracks, they made repairs and had regular inspections — they gave a fuck. And when Marcus spends all that time just to make that dish, all alone in the kitchen with so many tools and prep bowls and ingredients, to serve no one other than himself, for only his own edification, and then he eats the entire product of his own work — because it was all just for its own sake, only for the sake of his own education, for his betterment, to improve his skill set — in one fell swoop, in one whole bite.

That, too, is life. Because everything is transient. Everything is consumable. We have to get up tomorrow and do it all over again. We don’t get to create a meaningful life and have that be the end of it. We have to wake up in the morning and choose to make another day for ourselves. And we have to choose to give a fuck, or not. We have to choose to have pride of ownership in our work, we have to choose to care about what we are doing. We have to choose to care to do it right, to do it well, to do it thoroughly, and not half assed. We have to choose to not do slipshod work, to make sure that our “i”s are dotted and our “t”s are crossed.

To me, there’s something beautiful about that kind of zeal and passion as an end in itself. That kind of love of the work for its own sake. Not as an ego goal, not as an objective end. Because one chooses to take pride of ownership in one’s work. Because, you choose to live, you choose to do a job, and you choose to live in society. So, why not do everything with the kind of passion that says, “I give a fck.” To me, that’s what life is all about. And maybe it’s because I really don’t know any other speed. I’m bad at not caring about people. I’m bad at not immersing myself in my work deeply. But when you find a space where you can lean into all of this, with other people who give a fuck about people, and their own work, it’s beautiful.

And The Bear also knows what my immediate response to all of this beauty is going to be. Carmy, the main character is living it right along with me: “I have to remind myself to breathe sometimes,” he admits. “I, um, have to remind myself to, uh...to be present, you know. Remind myself that the sky is not falling, that, um, there is no other shoe, which is incredibly difficult because there is always another shoe.”

And when he tells Claire about this belief — because he is noticing how nice things are with her, with his current situation, she so sweetly, wryly responds by asking him: “do you wanna know a secret?” He says yes, so she tells him.

The secret is: “Nobody's keeping track of shoes.”

Because this show is an enactment of the kind of passion and perfection and work ethic that it exalts, it shows and tells, the virtues of giving a fuck — but not just about work at the exclusion of everything else — also giving a huge fuck about people and about all aspects of the way that we live, but also yes, including first and foremost what we do for work, because the reality is that work is where we spend the bulk of our time and energy with and for people. You can see the love and care and the fucks given in every intimate and fine detail in the set. You can hear it in every pitch-perfect humanity-imbued line of dialogue that is acted with unmatched skill and practiced talent. This show is an absolute gem. Give it all the awards.

Much love,

Chance

P.S. I said the common thread is giving a fuck, which is a reference to where you can find me now that I torched my Twitter account. On Threads. It’s quite amazing that Elon is so terrible that he’s retconned the reputation of Mark Zuckerberg to a certain degree. Because it was Facebook who coined the expression that Musk seems to embody at his companies and in his life: “Move fast and break things.” I remember when Twitter 1.0 folks were sending back their laptops when Musk finally got around to figuring out how to have remote people send them somewhere, and I saw one of these stickers on one. It struck me as very much aligned with the philosophy that I saw in the former company: “Move purposefully and fix things.”

The Bear shows how sometimes you have to operate in an insanely high-speed environment where the tickets are printing faster than you can queue them, kind of like how fast the cases get filed in the Court of Chancery, but there’s also a way in which you can still abide by this philosophy, which I think is part of the transformation that the show demonstrates throughout Seasons 1 and 2 — from Facebook’s version to this one. At first, Carmy just moves fast and breaks things. But he learns that he can go fast by moving purposefully and fixing things. In a sense, Twitter 1.0 never quite got the hang of doing both at the same time, because it’s an insanely hard task and steering Twitter had become like navigating the Ever Given through the Suez Canal. But a big part of learning how to lead and operate in that kind of a dance is to truly give a fuck about both the people with whom you are working, and the people your work is serving, as well as about the work itself. Twitter 1.0 had that part nailed. And I’m one hundred percent sure that in the case of AMC, Vice Chancellor Zurn fully does, in all ways. Every piece of work product she has ever put out in her years on the bench has demonstrated exactly this commitment.