The past decade has brought the world a lot of political and economic chaos, but in its defense, that same span of time has also given us the Paddington Bear movies. With those two London-set adventures, a mix of animation (Paddington) and live action (everyone else), director Paul King created a loopy world all his own, as cozy and visually pleasing as a dollhouse. The Paddington films were also refreshingly gentle, with moral messages that emerged not from preachy dialogue but from their ursine protagonist's unassuming goodness. And Ben Whishaw's voice performance as the unfailingly polite, naively bumbling bear is one of the all-time great matches between actor and animated character, up there with Tom Hanks' Woody in the Toy Story films: Whishaw quite simply is Paddington, and the completeness and believability of his characterization would have set the films apart even without their droll scripts and all-in supporting casts. The third film in the series, Paddington in Peru, ran a high risk of becoming a shark-jumping sequel, with King and his co-writers now replaced by first-time feature director Dougal Wilson and a new writing team consisting of Mark Burton, Jon Foster, and James Lamont.

It's not just in politics where otherwise smart people consistently talk past one another. People debating whether humans have free will also have this tendency. Neuroscientist and free-will skeptic Sam Harris has dueled philosopher and free-will defender Daniel Dennett for years and once invited him onto his podcast with the express purpose of finally having a meeting of minds. They flew right past each other yet again. Christian List, a philosopher at the London School of Economics who specializes in how humans make decisions, has a new book, Why Free Will Is Real, that tries to bridge the gap. List is one of a youngish generation of thinkers, such as cosmologist Sean Carroll and philosopher Jenann Ismael, who dissolve the old dichotomies on free will and think that a nuanced reading of physics poses no contradiction for it.