Jasveen

This murder-mystery detective series is hilarious and absurd in the best way. It took me to episode 2 to really get used to the humour and various over the top personalities that really do pay off at the end. The whodunnit storyline had so many twists and turns that I had to binge-watch so I could find out the culprit! The vulgarity may be off-putting to some, but I've lived long enough in Australia to be unfazed - the creative insults and exclamations from Eddie just added to the hilarity. You really do feel for senior sargeant Dulce Collins, the seemingly only 'sane' person in this madcap town. I enjoyed it, and hope there will be a season 2.

I found the Alex Gibney's documentary okay but a bit underwhelming. I'd recommend it if you are looking to get an overview about Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal. But as someone who has read (twice!) John Carreyrou's very excellent book, Bad Blood, I expected an in depth exploration. I did appreciate the segments with Roger Parloff, former Fortune editor who contribute to Elizabeth's mythmaking, and to finally put faces to the brave whistleblowers Tyler Schultz and Erica Cheung. Too much of the documentary was spent on Elizabeth's face as if in a futile attempt to decipher meaning in her unblinking gaze. I wish more time was spent detailing how Walgreen upper management got bamboozled into an agreement with Theranos, the lies and half-truths used for marketing Edison / MiniLab, the terrorising control imposed on Theranos lab staff (by Sunny in particular), how they sidelined then destroyed their best scientist Ian Gibbons, the Richard Fuisz saga, and the wider context of Silicon Valley start-up culture. More probing questions should have been asked of the investors they interviewed - why did anyone think that a Stanford drop-out with a couple of semesters in BioChem engineering could get such a complex system to fit in a small box? There are office photocopier machines bigger than the Edison / MiniLab! I find the Theranos story fascinating. No thanks to Dale Carnegie's 1936 How to Find Friends and Influence People, the 'art' of confident bulls**tting using sales and marketing techniques in every interaction has become so much worse and so unbearably common. Why do we easily succumb to displays of confidence? How do we mitigate against this instinct? These would have been interesting side questions to tackle in the documentary. Elizabeth Holmes spoke of drawing diagrams for a time machine as a child. Theranos was another iteration of that, but on a much grander scale with a mix of rich old dudes, enthralled journalists, enamored business and political leaders, lots of money, hubris, plus a large dash of potentially criminal acts. This story, and many others, remind me to always follow the simple adage - if it's too good to be true ...