There's a certain kind of style that I find instantly off-putting. I see it in the ways that certain writers write, and in the sounds of certain musicians, and in the ways that plenty of people post on social media. It comes up a lot in interior design and architecture, particularly where Airbnbs and influencer-friendly shows and resta...

I think a lot about Yo-Yo Ma and Gene Weingarten. Yo-Yo Ma is hands-down the most famous classical musician on the planet, and for good reason. He was a child prodigy, born to musician parents, and he was given every possible opportunity in life. He studied at Juilliard and then Harvard. He recorded perhaps the definitive version of Ba...

1. While it would be reductive to make grand, sweeping statements about what separates poetry from prose, a rule of thumb I've always found useful is this: prose uses language to give form to its subject matter, whereas poetry uses language to melt away its subject matter's form. Poetry marinates in uncertainty, and in words whose inte...

I find that there are exactly two ways that new ideas occur to me: instantly, or painstakingly. The instant ideas just feel right. I know there's an insight there, or I know that a creative concept would be compelling and fun. Yes, there are ways to tease it out, ways to explore it, ways to riff on it. If I want to turn those thoughts ...

[The following post contains spoilers for Avatar: Fire and Ash, unlike my previous post about Avatar: Fire and Ash. You will excuse me for being thorough.] The tragedy and the menace of Miles Quaritch is that he genuinely thinks he's happy. He's not dissatisfied with his life in the Marines: while he occasionally butts heads with super...

ONE There's something genuinely interesting about making a movie whose message, on some level, is a low-key "fuck the patriarchy"—this movie really does not respect men trying to take authority, which is true of most if not all James Cameron movies—while simultaneously making its protagonist a guy who is absolutely convinced that he ou...

To be righteous is to stand behind a cause that you think is right. It's to do what you think should be done, regardless of what other people might think of you. It's to say what ought to be said, for no other reason than because someone needs to say it. To be self-righteous is to believe that everything you say and do supports that ca...

I can be frustrated with people. I get restless with them. Dissatisfied. I start itching for things I can't find in a particular individual, or a particular group. It often feels like I either have to suppress parts of myself to get along with them, or I have to risk being so loud or excessive or just plain weird that I wonder whether ...

It's hard not to take things at face value. Whether you throw yourself into the world or you live inside your own head, you can't help but perceive the world around you as it appears to be. It is, of course, impossible to separate our perception of people from those people's attempts to be perceived. Everyone you see has some relations...

When I was maybe seven or eight years old, the kid across the street from me told me he could draw. Without missing a beat, I started excitedly telling him about the comic series we could create together: a multi-issue, epic saga, long and comprehensive and just grandiose as all hell. (I did not use those exact words.) My reaction to d...

Does anybody remember the app Branch? Ha ha, just kidding. Of course you don't. Twelve years ago, one of my favorite bloggers posted a link to a conversation happening somewhere else. The participants were all names that I knew, but the medium was unfamiliar to me. It was halfway between a comment section and a roundtable blog post: co...

The paradox of social media, I think, is that it's not worth using unless you're actively and somewhat successfully making things on it. At the same time, making content for social media is an enervating and soul-deadening process. It's a lose-lose situation. Using social media as a content consumer is about as miserable a waste of tim...

I: The Past Once upon a time, in its early days, Twitter was described as the "ambient Internet." Forums were a crowded social space—the closest mid-00s Internet came to the Internet as we know it now. Blogs were for focused, measured discussion. Twitter, by contrast, was a peaceful place: a place where you could marinate in the faint,...

A week and a half ago, without much forethought and for no particular reason, I said goodbye to my last social media account. It's never been unusual for me to leave social media behind, but generally I'm leaving one place for another. This time, I left explicitly because there was nowhere left for me to go. (The only places you'll fin...

It's daunting to try and explain why Cardiacs is my favorite band—why, no matter what I listen to and what I experience and what I explore, there is a hard line separating Cardiacs from everything else, all the geniuses, all the virtuosos, all the astonishing joys that music has to offer.¹ It's even more daunting to try and make sense ...

The educational philosopher Kieran Egan developed a concept which he called "learning in depth." The idea is simple: a student is given a single subject at the start of their schooling. Throughout their primary education, they will continually research that subject, discovering new ways to approach it and different ways to broaden thei...

You can describe Disco Elysium in three equally-accurate ways: 1. It is a political game. 2. It is a game about politics. 3. It uses politics as a game mechanic. The smartest thing about Disco Elysium is how cleanly it delineates these, and demonstrates that they are by no means one and the same. In fact, it is only successful as a pol...

You'd be forgiven for not noticing that last Friday was a potentially watershed moment for gaming culture. Specifically, it was the release of Alex Kisiel's feature-length Minecraft Civilization, two years in the making, which documents the rise and fall of nation-states in a thousand-player multiplayer Minecraft server. Kisiel, who go...

Jonathan Ive, best known as Apple's chief designer over its "iMac, iPod, iPhone, Apple Watch" era, has announced that he'll be building a new tech product for OpenAI, along with a team of extraordinary hardware and software developers. Suffice it to say that I feel... conflicted... about the announcement. On the one hand, Ive is an inc...

Slight-to-moderate spoilers of Netflix's series Sirens to follow. ______________ The quiet brilliance of Molly Smith Metzler's Sirens is that it offers two possible interpretations for virtually everything its characters do. If you read a given action or a given statement only one way, rest assured: there's another way of seeing it tha...

In 2016, I volunteered for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, despite not being a big fan of Hillary Clinton herself. That sort of statement can be controversial in and of itself, among both Clinton fans and Clinton detractors, so I should be clearer: I thought that Clinton was ideologically inconsistent, politically unsavvy, and...

THE VERDICT: At first, it seemed disappointingly close to being excellent. Then it turned disappointing just how far from excellence it really was. THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT: Leigh Bardugo is clearly a skillful writer. She knows how to construct a compelling sentence. She knows how to sequence a twisty plot, how to construct a myste...

The following contains spoilers for the original series finale of Twin Peaks, "Beyond Life and Death." It also spoils who Laura Palmer's killer was, which—in my opinion—is a terrible waste of a fantastically-constructed mystery. If you've never seen Twin Peaks and are looking to kill some time reading about a 30-year-old show, this ess...

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 the way it continually grew more convoluted than it already was (in ways that were often fun). Its non-readers knew it mostly for being so bafflingly long and confusing that any attempt to explain what it was fe...

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...