Wesley Wang is a filmmaker, an 11-time national chess champion, and a sophomore at Harvard. His first significant film, nothing, except everything, a coming-of-age short movie that has won many awards and gone viral on YouTube with 2.7 million views. We talk about Wesley's approach to learning and building his career in film. He treats every film like a startup and constantly improves his skills and products. At Avalanche, one of our theses is that everyone is an entrepreneur or will have to learn to think like one.

Welcome! The Animation Obsessive newsletter returns with another batch of highlights, news items and tidbits. Here’s the slate: Our newsletter goes out every Sunday and Thursday. If you haven’t already, you can sign up for free to receive our Sunday issues right in your inbox, every weekend: All set? Let’s go! Satoshi Kon, one of the best directors ever to work in anime, passed away in August 2010. He was only 46.

“You have to love the hair in order to love the vagina,” Eve Ensler writes in The Vagina Monologues. “You can’t pick the parts you want.” But enough about love. We do pick the parts. We shape, shave, sugar, wax, laser the hair. We surgically slice and snip the labia. We tighten one hole, brighten the other. Which is all to say: I’m researching an article about modern pubic hair norms and expectations, and I want to hear from you!

Arrakis is the most godforsaken shithole planet in the known universe. Its surface may be beautiful from above—endless desert sands of different textures and subtle changes of color, with scattered outcroppings of rock—but actually living there is close to impossible for outsiders and such an immense pain in the ass for even the native Fremen that their asceticism has developed into a kind of religion. It never rains on Arrakis, so the Fremen have designed the “stillsuit,” a form-fitting outfit that preserves and recycles the body’s moisture, filtering sweat and urine into the drinkable water that accumulates in “catchpockets.

Happy Mother’s Day! And when we look at the history of Mother’s Day, we see there’s more there than happiness… The original Mother’s Day Proclamation was written by Julia Ward Howe in 1870. It was a statement of mothers who had lost sons in the North joined with mothers who had lost sons in the South during the Civil War, proclaiming a day once a year for a “general congress of women” to declare the end to war and the creation of peace.