For a decade and counting, I have given some version of this talk to every single person who's agreed to watch Twin Peaks with me, both because I'm an insufferable enthusiast and because I think it's unethical, on some level, to tell someone to watch Twin Peaks without giving them context and a few warnings first. I'm writing it out, n...

The popular not-a-webcomic Homestuck is famous, in a nutshell, for being incomprehensibly complicated. Its fans obsessed over it for becoming continually more convoluted than it already was (but in fun ways). Its non-readers knew it mostly for being so bafflingly long and confusing that any attempt to explain what it was fell flat. But...

I typically don't find artists' statements that interesting, and I typically haven't seen a point in writing one myself. It's hard to sum up The Whole Of Your Passions in a single paragraph, and I figured: why constrain myself unnecessarily? But I tried to write one, once, at the very start of what's turned into a very longform—potenti...

Source: Richard Siken, "Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out" Towards the end of Shadow of the Erdtree, the magnificent new expansion to Hidetaka Miyazaki's fantasy epic Elden Ring—about which I have written here and here—you find yourself in a secluded village. I won't go into detail about it: if you haven't played the game,...

The first Apple Intelligence features debuted at this year's WWDC keynote were genuinely captivating. Designing a semantic protocol to let on-device LLMs conduct complex inter-app operations? Incredibly useful and neat! Building cute little emoji on the fly? What a clever, considerate application of LLMs, taking advantage of their stre...

In preparation for seeing Dune 2 in theaters, at the recommendation of approximately seven thousand people, I watched the first three-fifths of the first Dune film, slowly pretending to be increasingly absorbed with my phone despite nothing happening on my phone, before turning it off, apologizing to my girlfriend, and asking her wheth...

In late 2022, Sight and Sound released its once-a-decade list of the greatest films of all time. The list is voted on by slightly under 2,000 film critics, making it a somewhat more rigorous survey than most, and this decade's was a doozy: thanks, in part, to the inclusion of significantly more women and non-white critics, rankings wer...

The comedian Stewart Lee does a bit where he compares how easy it is for youngsters to get into BDSM now, compared to what their grandparents had to go through. He describes said grandparents sneaking onto farms, stealing empty potato sacks, in order to manufacture gimp masks for themselves. Nowadays, he sneers—half-joking, half-seriou...

I was talking to someone recently who, like many women, made the mistake of finding men attractive and wanting to fall in love with them. I mean, she didn't want to fall in love with them—she was actually kinda hoping that she'd never feel the urge to fall in love again. Because—get this—every time she tried to fall in love, it was wit...

Kittens, babies, and pornography are the most popular content on the Internet because they allow emotionally repressed people opportunities to express feelings without admitting any tenderness or vulnerability in the process. Following in close second is content that induces outrage, resentment, grievance, and despair, for similar reas...

Today, I would like to discuss the new album One-Hit Wonder by Suzuki Matsuo, a duet consisting of Kiyonori Matsuo and Keiichi Suzuki, most famous for being the founder of the legendary Moonriders. You can listen to the whole album here. It would be hard for me to "review" this album, because it wears its joys and sweetnesses on its su...

Somehow, over the span of a decade, I've gone from a Problematic Harry Potter Hater to a Problematic Harry Potter Lover. At no point in that decade have my feelings about Harry Potter changed; I would go as far as to say that I'm not sure I've had an original thought about Harry Potter between 2013 and today. There simply has not been ...

You don't know what the world is, when you're still young. You haven't experienced its many miracles, not enough to know where to look for them. You haven't witnessed its unfathomable cruelties, either. I wasn't ready for Shrek. Specifically, I wasn't ready for John Cale. But I wasn't ready to experience such profound betrayal, either....

Sparks, the band, has been around for over fifty years. Their first album was released in 1972; their newest, the unfairly-well-named The Girl is Crying in Her Latte, releases this month. It has been noted by quite a lot of people that Sparks remains obscenely good, unlike most things that involve men in their seventies trying to do th...

At the start of 2022, I finally coughed up the [large sum of money] needed to take a four-day course on Transcendental Meditation™. I'd been debating doing this for close to fifteen years, yet it still felt uncomfortable—maybe even unethical—to me. TM™ has been criticized for being, not just overpriced, but cultish: maybe even predator...

This one's for the nerds. Prelude (press X to skip) My academic focus, circa 2011, was play theory. I studied the psychology and sociology of play: how does play affect individuals, and how does it influence societies and cultures? I studied the philosophy of play: why is play so famously difficult to precisely define? But my real focu...

In the wake of OpenAI announcing their latest and greatest GPT-4 model, I realized what bugs me the most about AI culture. It's not the technologies we're calling "AI" themselves, which I think are occasionally exciting and frequently very fun. (I find it less exciting than most people seem to, but I value fun more anyway.) No: the thi...

Paolo Sorrentino's The New Pope is a show about fanaticism: specifically, about the kind of passionate devotion that goes past love or even reference to become a dogmatic, unflinching worldview. It follows John Brannox, who reluctantly becomes Pope John Paul III in the wake of his popular predecessor's unexpected near-death. The first ...

Shortly after learning about the death of Tohru Okada, one of the six men who made up the seminal and somewhat unbelievable Moonriders, I learned that he'd released an album only a few years ago that I'd never heard about. To understand how strange this is, you'd need to understand the depths of my Moonriders obsession: I track this ba...

I have been informed, by many enthusiastic practitioners of polyamory—people who date, love, and even marry more than one individual at a time—that quite a number of great works of art can be understood by enlightened modern audiences to be about how superior polyamory is as a way of handling relationships. Hamlet, for example, is no l...

I: Godard It was only by sheer fluke that I wound up watching Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless back-to-back. Pulp Fiction was a whimsical date-night pick, because she hadn't seen it and I likely haven't for a decade; Breathless was in preparation for Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma, which the Philadelphi...

Part of the genius of Groundhog Day is that—to paraphrase Ebert (I think)—Bill Murray plays Phil as somebody who is plausibly above all this. Sure, he's a jerk and a chauvinist, but that first go-around is perfectly tooled to make you sympathetic to his jerkiness, if not the chauvinism stuff. It's not that he's some hotshot TV guy, it'...

Mostly spoiler-free. • The middle hour of The Way of Water consists entirely of a family getting to know a new community they belong to, while also discovering the ecology that that community is defined by. That's the movie in a nutshell: community belonging to its environs, families belonging to community, individuals belonging to fam...

I don't exactly believe in inevitability. There are other worlds in which I became drastically different flavors of person, I'm sure. But sometimes I think about the way that I've gradually shifted, across the course of my life, towards a fascination with the spiritual significance of play, and wonder how much of that end destination s...

I'm going to tell a story about myself in two parts. But for me to tell it, I have to start with the part that has to do with Steve Jobs. Forgive me, and bear with me; there is a reason I'm going here, I promise you. I. Of all my teenage memories, the original iPhone unveiling remains one of the clearest. I cringe every time I say that...

“They look at racist and violent systems and see them as hobby systems, like learning lore in a video game. They have special costumes. They can recite trivia about racist and violent systems but have no grasp of the systems' meaning. Where someone else might go into fashion or community theater, they invent costumes that convey the "g...

For a long time, I struggled with the Buddhist concept that desire leads to suffering. It felt severe to me, harsh, even a little bit inhuman. Sure, I've suffered over desire—haven't we all?—but I didn't want to stop feeling desirous. The people I know who tried to live that austere, meditative life didn't strike me as wise or particul...

I can't stop listening to the new theme to season 2 of The White Lotus, which has been playing on repeat ever since it popped into the iTunes store halfway through Monday. I also keep watching the new intro to The White Lotus, because—in my opinion—it is a glorious masterpiece that deserves to be taught in schools. This might just be t...

I spent a year of my life—specifically, my freshman year in college—fascinated by hipsters from afar. I was at a dull school, wondering how on earth my life was supposed to begin, and I lived close enough to New York City that I could imagine a more exotic life happening just beyond my grasp. I couldn't imagine the world of art, cultur...

She lives in your hotel, but she only leaves her room at night. Her life consists of her bedroom and the hotel kitchen—nothing outside, nothing in between. She doesn't want to talk to you. She doesn't want to talk to anyone. else Heart.Break(), released by Erik Svedang in 2015, is a uniquely lonely game. Most characters in it say very ...