There are two movies ensconced within The Matrix: Resurrections. The one is, as HBO Max describes it, "the long-awaited fourth film in the groundbreaking franchise that redefined a genre." The other is, for lack of better words, The Matrix: Resurrections. As Yet Another Sequel to a movie best known for kung fu, robo-dystopias, and deep...

The most comfortable writing I've ever seen was written in the dialogue box of a video game somewhere, published on a small screen. In game design, particularly in games centered on things that aren't writing, words are purely functional. Every sentence is at once meticulously tuned and somewhat careless; it must be precise, and at the...

Twelve years ago, I had the legendary "feminist" icon Camille Paglia as a professor. This was when she was most famous for her vendetta against Lady Gaga, slightly before she became more famous for calling Revenge of the Sith the greatest work of art in a generation. I took every course she offered. (Not because I have ever agreed with...

Numbered, to preserve the illusion of order and intention. 1. The tragedy of Mike Schur is that he is capable of writing exactly two-and-a-half brilliant seasons of any sitcom, but is doomed to be so popular that he has never once produced a brilliant two-and-a-half-season show. He's the rare writer who'd benefit from being canceled no...

I hate computers. It's a recurring theme that, whenever I write about how exciting and good computers are, I feel the compulsive need to talk also about how absolutely dogshit computers are. Computers are very bad. Perversely, computers are so bad that I am somewhat of an optimist about this day and age: it feels very clear to me that ...

"He's just sooooo insanely smart that he doesn't have patience for my feelings." I've heard this a shocking number of times, almost invariably from a smart-as-fuck person who's convinced that emotional stuntedness is a byproduct of hyperintelligence. Typically, this person also worries that their emotions are proof that they, personall...

I found myself accidentally diving down the rabbit hole of film reviews by Slant Magazine's Jake Cole this afternoon, drinking them in with a fervor. I read his glowing reviews of films I loved and his brutal reviews of films I hated. I read reviews where he saw films wildly differently than I did, in ways that sometimes seemed revelat...

I was born into Judaism; I discovered Dadaism on my own. If you're a traditionalist, the sort who holds that the modern world lost its mind last century and is scrambling through a self-induced hell of chaos and meaninglessness, Dada might easily serve as your Satan stand-in: the art movement that rejected "rationality" and pursued gle...

If you're anything like me, you occasionally use Wikipedia to learn about things you want to know about but don't want to invest any real energy in. And you, too, have discovered the hellish joy of Wikipedia's attempts to explain the plots of various works of fiction. Wikipedia is bad at explaining things. In its attempts to "neutrally...

On a lark, I've been reading Romans 1:26-27. A whole two sentences! I'm an advanced reader, you see. If you are unfamiliar with the New Testament, or (more broadly) unfamiliar with passages from the New Testament that get pulled out to justify hilariously broad claims about how society "ought" to work—you know, the way Charles Manson p...

"I'm sorry that you feel that way." Ah, yes, these mysterious feelings. They pass over us like cloud fronts. Who knows where they come from? Who knows why you're crying and furious and trembling right now? It really is such a shame, that you feel the way you feel. I sure hope this feeling passes soon. Because MAN is it an inconvenience...

Quick* little thought, nothing too serious. Judaism does not have strong opinions on heaven and hell. I'm not enough of a Torah scholar to be sure that heaven is never mentioned as a place where dead people go, but I know that the amount I have read doesn't get much into notions of heaven, and I know for a fact that it leaves hell out ...

Just a couple of days ago, I was talking to a friend about how badly I'd love to get to show Christopher Alexander—who on paper was an architect, and in reality was impossibly more—the things that I've been doing with my life. How much I'd want to try and share the thing that my life revolves around with him, both because I'd have love...

Of all the definitions of poetry and art that I've ever read, it's the architect Christopher Alexander's that I love the most: it is the interdependences of rhythm and concept, the ways in which every word or facet or sensation or idea informs every other, that create vast worlds within impossibly small spaces, capturing the seemingly ...

Part 1 can be found right here. The first thing Elden Ring asked me to choose was what kind of character I wanted to be. I chose to be an astrologer. It was only eighty-odd hours later that I caught a hint of why the stars might matter. Video games have a significant narrative tool which other mediums lack: their uncertainty. Linear st...

Every dancer knows how much their partner matters. More than the rhythm, more than the song, more than the pattern of a dance itself, there is the one with whom you're dancing. Without the dancer, the rest is doesn't matter. And what matters, to each dancer, isn't themselves. It's the dancer with whom they dance. The dancer dances to d...

At the very beginning of Demon's Souls, the game that signaled Hidetaka Miyazaki's rise to perhaps the most important designer of video games on the planet, you are sent to a looming, foreboding castle. You know nothing about this place, save that it is dour and gray, protected by soldiers who are more than capable of taking you down w...

I need a place to dump my thoughts on this slow-moving tragedy, sorry. Ender's Game Still a stone-cold classic. I don't know how many times I've read this one, or when the last time was that I read it, but holy shit is it everything I ever want gripping prose to be. Does any book manage to be this slickly-paced and this emotionally har...

Are you afraid of love? Many people are afraid of being loved. They don't trust that they can be loved. They don't trust when other people say they love them. They're not sure why someone would love them, or what kind of person would want to love them. But that wasn't my question. What I'm asking is: are you afraid of your own love? Ar...

Prelude. I've been thinking about Ayn Rand recently, which is not unusual. I think about her most frequently when friends of mine find themselves struggling with the kinds of thing Ayn Rand wrote about. And the thing I struggle with is that Ayn Rand identified—and not only identified but nailed—a specific dynamic that exists between tw...

The ways that we interpret myths reveal things about ourselves. I go looking to myth for truths, as I think a lot of interpreters do, and sometimes tell myself that what I want more than anything is the truth: the unilateral interpretation of a story that captures every facet, every thread, of a narrative. But that sort of thing is har...

Here's an excerpt from a longer piece I wrote about the New York Times' acquisition of Wordle, and more specifically about why some people are bummed out about it: “It sounds like Wardle is happy on numerous levels with his choice, beyond even just the money, and that's great. ” “On some level, though, it turns Wordle from "a cute, nic...

Written elsewhere, pasted here. Brian Cox has been consistent, in interviews, about saying that he believes Logan truly loves his children, and says such fascinating things about his take on Logan that I find myself believing it, even watching Logan in those horrifying final moments. He's obviously abusive and cruel, but at the same ti...

I've never liked the "attention span" metaphor for describing the problems with technology. It feels like a convenient mistruth—a narrative close enough to the real thing to seem like it's what's wrong. Similarly, I'm sick and tired of "dopamine" being used as a catch-all for feedback loops of any kind. I'm not saying it's not scientif...

The anticipation of sunrise is the anticipation of a world filled in. Colors crawl across the horizon, first richly dark and then jeweled and vibrant, with pale and misty hues counterpointing the drab greys and browns. Listen to the morning birdcalls: the first few drops of sound filling up an empty world. People wake, bleary-eyed, lik...

The first time I watched Succession, HBO's masterpiece about King Lear trying to run Fox News despite his idiot sons, I liked to bother my girlfriend by announcing, whenever Connor Roy showed up on-screen, that "he's rising." If you haven't seen Succession, the joke is that Connor Roy will never rise, that he's delusional and pathetic ...

Ask me who my favorite philosophers are, and I'll say that I have two: Christopher Alexander and Philippe Gaulier. Alexander is better-known: an architect obsessed with answering, in non-trivial ways, the question of what it means for something to "be alive", in a way that makes room not only for human happiness but for waves crashing ...

I walked out of Annette in a daze. Genuinely didn't know what to think of it. I have never struggled with a film as much as I struggled with this one. The fact that it was a musical made it even harder. Musicals are as close to pure entertainment as you get in the arts. That's why I generally can't stand them: I find them cloying, over...

Tim Smith died a year ago yesterday. I wrote this about him then. I was a Headphones Kid when I was young. How could I not be? Books were my favorite form of escape, but books couldn't literally drown out the world. Music could. The banal horrors of being young could be kept at bay for a little while longer, at those times when the wor...

As I think about mass movements and suffocating social circles, as I think about the claustrophobia of a shrinking world, as I fret about the possibility that we will be dominated by all that is banal and obvious, and leave no room for mystery, as I wonder whether it's possible for any agreed-upon social force to gain power without bec...