It is so hot here that Bruce and I have been watching films in the evening when we would ordinarily be outside.

We watched a documentary about the Depression, in which many beloved performers who lived through that time were interviewed, ranging from Jerry Stiller to Phyllis Diller to Mickey Rooney. Ray Bradbury spoke movingly of his experiences, how the hard times changed the way people were with each other for the better. I can’t even look at Bradbury or listen to him without my eyes brimming with tears. I became a writer, and specifically, a science fiction writer, because of the speeches he gave at our library in Redlands while I was growing up.

Bradbury talked about coming west through the Dust Bowl on the train, reading a book he’d picked up before the trip: The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck. He said, “I was reading about it, and traveling through it —

and this, became The Martian Chronicles.

Then we watched the 2001 film, Conspiracy.

Stanley Tucci [Eichmann] and Kenneth Branagh [Heydrich]

It is another hallmark of our time that our greatest actors are asked again and again to portray the Nazi butchers, using their magnificent, humane creative gifts.

Conspiracy (2001) dramatizes the infamous Wannsee Conference, the January, 1942 meeting during which Nazi leaders led by Reinhard “Butcher of Prague” Heydrich, decided upon the details of the “Final Solution” to create the industrial death camp system that soon slaughtered 11 million European Jews and millions of others deemed undesirable by the Third Reich.

Branagh portrays Heydrich much as historical chroniclers describe him: urbane, handsome, brutally-efficient and dominant. Eichmann, as portrayed by Tucci, is emotionally stunted but deeply invested in the quality of his work. He is a man for whom every detail must be perfect, and for whom display or sensation of emotion must be subordinated to his work. In this case, Eichmann’s task was to create the perfect system to transport, kill and dispose of as many people as possible in the shortest time, for the lowest cost. At the time of the Wannsee meeting, the beta test of the gas method of execution had already occurred, with more than 70,000 “undesirables” exterminated using mobile carbon monoxide death vans. Eichmann described this venture to fellow attendees with reserve and quiet pride.