Maybe I’m not the one to say, but… fighting? I’ve always liked the brawl scene between Hugh Grant and Colin Firth in Bridget Jones’s Diary, because they do fight like middle-aged white-collar workers—apparently they didn’t choreograph the scene, because they wanted to fight badly. At the climax of the fight, they smash through a restaurant’s front window, and instead of getting up and dusting themselves off and making a snappy Bruce Willis comeback, they wince and groan in pain—because, y’know, broken glass hurts.

I’m not writing this because I’ve been in such fights or want to, but because in the few fights I have seen in my life, they were short and graceless and un-fun and didn’t look like The Matrix at all.


Nightclubs. In movies, you can have extended conversations with girls as you dance with them, or call to them from across the floor, or interact with others. In real nightclubs, on the dance floor the music is the volume of a revved jet engine and no one can hear anything you say unless you screech it in monosyllables three times directly into their ear. If you’re a great dancer, in real nightclubs everyone does not move to the edge to cheer you and your partner on. Nightclubs are always “packed with good looking girls” in movies and on nights when you are not there, never when you are. Real nightclubs suck.

We basically “cured” most people of cystic fibrosis in the last five years. It is the most miraculous medical breakthrough I can think of, comparable only to insulin treatment for diabetics or the triple cocktail for HIV patients in the 90s. In the span of five years, thousands of cystic fibrosis patients saw their projected lifespans go up to normal. The treatments don’t work on every CF mutation, but they are incredible. The Atlantic published an article last year that made me sob.