Cornell mathematician Steve Strogatz cried on The Daily as he told Rachel Abrams that chasing a proof feels like courtship, a slow seduction of a muse who resists, almost yields, then holds out for one more night. Now the AI labs have ended the chase: An OpenAI system disproved Erdős Problem 90, an 80-year-old puzzle about dots on a plane, with alien, nested halos of points that demand something like ten to the two millionth power dots. Ten thousand agents grinding for 80 hours found a Navier-Stokes blowup that checks out numerically and that no human fully understands. Then came a dump of 722 unreviewed papers, including a quasi-Riemann result that clears zeros from a quarter of the critical strip.

Mookie flies solo on the 79th episode of Bald and Bloviating, and lays out why the mathematicians feel robbed. Chatbots that once couldn't count the R's in strawberry now hold the entire corpus of mathematics in one mind and chase thousands of proof strategies at once, around the clock. Terry Tao compares mathematicians to marathon runners, and Mookie pictures a Humvee roaring past at mile twenty, planting a flag at the finish line, and selling the photos ahead of a trillion-dollar IPO. By Strogatz's logic, limitless machine proofs turn the seduction into Pornhub: cheap, abundant, transactional, and empty.

Then Mookie flips the frame. Daniel Litt imagines walking into a Library of Babel with the proofs of Hodge and Riemann sitting on open shelves, and choosing joy over grief. Andrew Wiles described discovery as groping through a dark mansion until you find the light switch and spot the next door. Every proof the machines hand over lights a room and reveals another, and Gödel suggests the mansion never ends. The Marquis de Sade supplies the kicker: the libertine builds tolerance and craves stranger thrills, so a solved Riemann hypothesis won't sate anyone. It raises the baseline and makes the muse kinkier.

The episode also wrestles with the hard parts. OpenAI behaves like a crass, credit-stealing plutocrat, and Mookie says so, then compares the carnage to Starship destroying its own launch pad on the way to orbit. Physicists traded heroes for team science at the Large Hadron Collider decades ago, while string theory shows where human stubbornness alone can lead. Nobody understands every part of the thermostat on the wall, yet it works. Tao worries that understanding falls as the technology climbs, and Mookie answers with a priesthood of geeks, the vinyl collectors of mathematics, who will keep the nuts and bolts alive. The printing press scared the scribes too.

Mookie closes with a confession about hitting his own math ceiling in college, practical advice for Strogatz (feed the quasi-Riemann paper into your own AI and take it apart), and a teaser for coming rants on Pinker, Nietzsche, and the alignment problem. The machines pulled the rug. They also rolled out a red carpet. Kink up, mathematicians.

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An Oscar-worthy Tom Cruise shines in a movie that dug its own grave, but why?

Today on Bald and Bloviating, Mookie Spitz takes on Digger, the Alejandro González Iñárritu satire starring Tom Cruise as an eccentric Arctic oil tycoon. The film bombed on opening weekend after months of hype, and critics split between five-star raves and "crazy" dismissals. Mookie sat through all two hours and nine minutes in a theater to find out what went wrong, and his answer cuts against the "crazy" label: every frame was intentional, but the choices sank the movie.

Mookie starts with what works. Iñárritu's choreography, cinematography, and blocking still dazzle, and Cruise transforms into a wrinkled, tufted-hair tycoon so completely that the international movie star becomes unrecognizable. The tribunal monologue, where Cruise flips a hostile room into a cheering crowd, lands among the best moments in cinema in Mookie's book.

Then comes the autopsy. Mookie measures Digger against Dr. Strangelove, where Peter Sellers' calm characters anchor the chaos around one wildly over-the-top scientist and Kubrick keeps real stakes ticking in the background. Iñárritu cranks every character and every scene to the same excruciating volume, stacks a Birdman-style meta layer on top, and hammers a climate message without earning it. Even the studio, in a first Mookie has never seen, quoted the negative reviews in its own promos to entice those curious as to how much the film sucks.

In essence, Mookie identifies a few key ways the film went off the rails:

• Cruise is terrific, but Iñárritu buries him under an ocean of equally over-the-top caricatures
• Casting John Goodman as the president, for example, wrecked the calm-versus-chaos contrast that makes satire work
• The meta-meta movie about a play in a movie sub-sub-plot is pointless, unearned layering that bloats the runtime
• The climate sermon running throughout the film never earns its message or allows a counterpoint
• Digger is so cringey and annoying that the movie will never become a cult classic like Rocky Horror

Mookie closes with a time machine cheat sheet for Iñárritu and a warning for every veteran talent: do not lean on your earlier success. He would rather rant about a fascinating failure than gloat over a hit, because failure teaches the most. Also sadly, Mookie hopes Tom Cruise doesn't sour from playing these risky, character-driven roles as a result of this flop.

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Mookie flies solo with a rant sparked by getting blocked by a friend of seventeen years and turning around to block someone else right back. He builds out a full philosophy of blocking, treating it as a clean, dignified way to end something that would otherwise just fade out, more like jettisoning a spent rocket stage than picking a fight.

He digs into why people get pickier about their circle as they age, what a block communicates that ghosting or a slow fade never quite says, and why he thinks the healthiest response to being blocked is celebration rather than rumination. Mookie pulls in Nietzsche, a Chris Rock bit, and Jorge Luis Borges' "The Aleph" along the way.

The rant turns serious when Mookie brings up a former colleague, a brilliant creative director he called the Professor, who spent his final years in total isolation writing a book only he could love and died by suicide not long after Mookie moved to California. Mookie uses his story as the cautionary edge of his own philosophy. Cutting off people who drain you is healthy. Cutting yourself off from everyone who could catch you is not. The difference, he argues, comes down to whether you can look in the mirror and still like what looks back.

If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text, 24/7.

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