The Soulless Murder of Shagor

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I think part of what's going on is everybody as they age at some point thinks that the world is really terrible. And like, he even tells stories about how terrible the world was back then. But yeah, no, I think if the book has a stance, it's like, this is always been with us. If anything, it might be tied to America, because there's like, Ellis says, this country does bad things to people. That does also give the impression, Oh, wait, this is something if not new, then different from the ordinary thing.

David and Tamler dive into the Coen brothers’ bleak and beautiful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel "No Country for Old Men." What’s the underlying philosophy that animates Anton Chigurh? Does he have a code of any kind, or is he just a ghostly symbol of human brutality and a pitiless indifferent universe? Does he represent a new kind of evil or is Sheriff Bell just getting old? What elements, if any, in the film are more dream than reality?

And speaking of moral decline, a new Nature study claims that we have the illusory belief that people are getting worse - but can they really establish that it’s an illusion?

Mastroianni, A. M., & Gilbert, D. T. (2023). The illusion of moral decline. Nature, 1-8.

Mastroianni blog post about the illusion of moral decline

No Country for Old Men (movie) [wikipedia.org]