RIP Wendell Berry.

A select writer with his own tag on this blog, he was a rare triple threat in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. I love his novels Hannah Coulter and Jayber Crow as much as Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, his advocacy for the preservation of tangibility, his documentary, and his many poems—like “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” and “A Homecoming”, which we had read during our wedding ceremony:

One faith is bondage. Two are free.
In the trust of old love,
cultivation shows a dark
graceful wilderness at its heart.
Wild in that wilderness, we roam
the distances of our faith,
safe beyond the bounds of what we know.
O love, open.
Show me my country.
Take me home.

Do yourself a favor and dive into any of it.

Typewriters + dictionaries + lexicography = the backwards index.

Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail.

A listening museum of mechanical keyboards and typewriters.

How IKEA furniture lost its color.

Fictional journeys drawn on the real world.

A modern apartment full of ordinary things that once inspired awe. 

Don’t paste the AI and don’t say just hello in chat.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. A delightfully lo-fi sci-fi goof centered around Back to the Future? You know I’d be into it. If there were any justice in the world Matt Johnson would get an Oscar nod for his wonderful, wacky performance. 

The Odyssey. Truly what cinema is for. Zeus’s law requires that I commend movies like this for taking religion and myth seriously in all their weight and weirdness (complimentary). My first time in literal decades seeing a movie in IMAX as I usually don’t care about the format and would rather see a movie more cheaply, but I just had to make sure I saw the entirety of Agamemnon’s helmet and all the other goshdarn epic happenings.

True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color by Kory Stamper. The author of my favorite book of 2017 is back with another one about dictionaries and the ubernerds who make them.

How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell. As a blogger I appreciated learning a lot about the OG blogger/essayist and his era of the French Wars of Religion. Life was already hard enough during that time and then they added brutal religious violence? People, man…

Pressure. While this is not great, it’s a first-ballot Dad Movie Hall of Famer, and I for one welcome the prospect of Band of Brothers alums—in this case Damian Lewis and Andrew Scott—getting back together to reenact World War II stories.

Obsession. I’ve been out of the dating scene since 2012. Knew things were bad out there but didn’t realize this bad…

Toy Story 5. This got me good a few times, probably because I went with my 7 and 3 year olds, the first time in a theater for the latter.

If I Go Will They Miss Me. An achingly intimate movie with a magical-realist take on the universal experience of dads trying to outrun what we see reflected back by the mini versions of ourselves.

Comparing all the previously check-ins, it’s interesting to see which shows have endured and which I merely visited for a limited time. I try to be extra judicious about what/who I spend my audio time with, so that often means being honest about which ones no longer hold my interest.

On the tech side, I sorely miss Google Podcasts for letting me listen on the web. I typically use Podchaser for that now but it’s unreliable.

My Current Lineup

Regular Listens

• Armchair Expert
• The Big Picture
• Filmspotting
• Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
• The Town with Matthew Belloni

Depends on the Subject/Guest

• The Rewatchables
• Good Hang
• Blank Check
• Plain English
• The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast
• Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know
• The Ezra Klein Show

To reduce reading to the practice of empathy is to divorce it of its real power and pleasure: to enjoy the fruits of another person’s creative effort, to think with the writer and their characters, not becoming them, but becoming more fully yourself. But this means that you are there when you are reading; you, the reader, with your feet on the ground, a ground on which racism, misogyny, and extreme poverty are not so easily dispatched. You must read where you are, not in some hypothetical sanitized reading room, but in the dirt. To use reading to step into someone else’s shoes is to leave yourself behind.

Across journalism, criticism, creative writing, and especially among compulsive LinkedIn posters, writers are converging on a set of choices that implicitly resist the trappings of AI-generated prose.

The style mostly takes shape through negation, often of the obvious AI tells, like lists of three, passive voice, not x but y, and em dashes. But it also prizes idiosyncrasy as its overriding principle, tapping into specific first-person anecdotes and eccentric similes that demonstrate the necessary drudgery of writing.

Every time I hear about people changing themselves to appease the new AI paradigm, I think of Michael Bolton’s response in Office Space when asked why he didn’t change his name to avoid being confused for the singer:

I don’t even think these writers are wrong for doing this. Three cheers for linguistic innovation! (An exception: pretentiously writing all in lowercase like Sam Altman, of all people.) I just resent being backed into it by LLMs that hoover up real people’s writing—without compensation or copyright considerations, mind you—and regurgitate it back to us non-robots well enough to make us think we’re now stealing from it.

Oops, I used em dashes. Am I a chatbot??

A few years ago I wrote an essay for Cinema Sugar about how seeing Once in the theater in 2007 completely changed how I viewed movie musicals, and much more. It’s hard to convey how electrifying it was to see “Falling Slowly” or “When Your Mind’s Made Up” unfold before me for the first time, and how vital all of Glen’s music has remained for me ever since.

Let this excerpt from the essay serve as my eulogy for a legendary artist gone far too soon:

Once, directed by John Carney, is fairly easy to describe. An Irish busker (Glen Hansard) meets a young woman (Markéta Irglová) on the streets of Dublin and they grow close as they play music together, discuss their bruised loves, and inspire each other as they enter new phases of life.

But such a tidy description belies the miles-deep emotional undercurrent that runs beneath this story and propels the main characters—who remain unnamed and are credited as Guy and Girl—first toward each other and ultimately onto their individual fates.

Probably because the film’s core of Carney, Hansard, and Irglová are real musicians, they capture both the tedium and thrill of creating meaningful music—and, by extension, art—better than almost anything I’ve seen.

They do so by paying close attention to moments in the songwriting process that are small but significant: assembling snatches of melody, hearing someone add harmony to your song for the first time, finding replacement Discman batteries so you can finish your lyrics, and nailing a song on the first take.

These little euphorias add up. With what Guy and Girl accumulate together, they give each other gifts they couldn’t have imagined before meeting: she helps him record his songs and find the confidence to move forward, while he reignites her passion for playing.

It was goodbye in the best way, with grace and gratitude for what they meant to each other.

What I took with me after seeing Once for the first time was how people can come into each other’s lives, knowing their time together will end, yet still choose to make something wonderful with the moments they have.

That’s what music can do, and what art can do, and what grace can do if we let it. That’s what Glen Hansard’s music did for me.

Rest in peace, Glen. You sang your melody, and you can rest assured knowing we’ll keep singing along.

A freshly molting cicada:

A night heron:

A fox in our backyard:

A yellowjacket stuck between our window and the screen:

A great egret:

A snapping turtle spotted in the section of a creek under a road underpass (the lines are reflections of the ceiling):

A Photinus pyralis, i.e. a good ol’ lightning bug:

Proud of capturing the 3 year old midair right before splashdown:

Windshield bubbles:

Our frontyard lilac in full bloom sandwiching our backyard redbud:

Books on books on books at the library:

Raindrops just hit different in the morning:

Ahhh, ahhhhhh:

Caught this airplane lifting off mid-cloud during my 7 year old’s soccer practice:

Angles and elements of an underpass:

I asked him what the different features were. Check out these specs:

• Ghost button unleashes a ghost from the laptop
• Crossed-out ghosts buttons bring ghosts back in
• DO NOT PUSH button activates his laser hand (i.e. an empty cup from a local ice cream shop that turned into a laser hand during a playdate with his friends)
• Green drips are slime
• Brown thing is rope
• Colored buttons when pressed in different orders activate different powers

He just whipped this together on a whim while listening to a Yoto. Kids, man. Time, space, and materials for the win.

Read my America Month piece at Cinema Sugar celebrating all the reasons why the Nic Cage-est of Nic Cage movies still endures, if only in my heart.

Regular readers of this blog will understand how much of a bullseye this topic is for me as a cinephile and history lover. I wrote about visiting the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum in Springfield, Illinois, all the way back in 2008, which is when I also read the Doris Kearns Goodwin book Team of Rivals the movie is based on. For that reason this essay is nearly two decades in the making, which probably explains why I was able to write it so quickly compared to previous ones.

So I beseech you to read the essay and also check out Cinema Sugar’s list of the Top 76 Movies That Define America that will be rolling out throughout the month leading up to the Fourth of July. I was born for this theme, so look out for even more star-spangled cinematic goodies coming soon!

Last weekend we went to Wild Kratts Live! on stage in Madison. It’s basically an extended, supercharged episode of the show, with Chris and Martin Kratt in various animal costumes and doing silly antics while teaching about creature powers along the way. It was a thrill to be in a large amphitheater packed with kids and grownups who love their work as much as we do, singing along to the theme song and interacting during the show as if it were The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

As for the brothers themselves, we were a little starstruck to see them in person considering they’re in the PBS Host Pantheon along with Fred Rogers, Bob Ross, and Julia Child. Their pure enthusiasm for animals and nature is infectious and honestly inspiring. At their age they most likely wouldn’t be hoofing it on stage in giant animal costumes for an hour and a half in a national tour if they didn’t totally love what they do.

Their enduring power was evident in the huge cheer at the end of the show when they announced 20 new episodes were coming, including one on the family-favorite axolotl. You know we’ll be watching!

Several of my interests in one: Steven Spielberg on The Rewatchables talking 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

Wikipedia as a Windows XP desktop.

Shoutout to the Night Witches, (unfortunately) not an awesome band but an all-female Soviet bomber regiment who attacked the Nazis during World War II.

This Is A Gardening Show. Heard about this new Zach Galifianakis limited series on Netflix from friends, and it’s a delight. Funny, informative, family- friendly. Great hang.

Project Hail Mary. Saw this with some dad friends, which felt appropriate since it’s both very dad-coded but also widely appealing as its box office shows. Deliberately did not read the book because I knew the movie was coming. (One of my controversial opinions apparently.)

Lost and Found in the Cathedral of Cinema. I read this new movie memoir from film critic Jeffrey Overstreet in advance of interviewing him for Cinema Sugar. Extremely up my alley and a pleasure to read.

Late Shift. Reviewed and really dug this new Swiss-German film for Cinema Sugar. Like if The Pitt had a wearier, no-nonsense European cousin.

KPop Demon Hunters. Very late to this mega-phenomenon, but now I’m in. The “How It’s Done” opening was one of the most electrifying movie sequences last year.

A Wizard of Earthsea. Wanted to read a short fantasy novel and this Ursula Le Guin book hit the spot. Just really liked living in this world and her writing.

Chris reflects on the report’s findings about how many websites have and have not been preserved by the Wayback Machine, and the ethics of letting websites “go dark” rather than “static-izing a site and putting it somewhere inexpensive to live as a viewable time capsule”.

It’s a good question, and one I wrestle with a lot, both as a history lover who understands the value of preservation and as a person who is and has been responsible for the fates of various websites. I don’t plan on ever retiring from this website, but if I do a static-ized approach paired with a Wayback Machine snapshot and offline duplicate would probably be its ideal fate.

And yet, I totally understand the impulse to just totally nuke a site. There is a weight to managing them that’s partly financial but mostly psychological. When you’re in the midst of it, you have enough energy to shoulder it. But over time, that weight can turn into a burden as you slowly (or quickly) accumulate more to deal with in life, and just casting it off can sometimes be the best decision. In the words of preeminent philosopher Kenny Rogers, “you got to know when to hold ‘em / know when to fold ‘em”.

Perhaps this is a controversial opinion, but you can’t—and shouldn’t—preserve everything. I wrote about this back in 2013 in response to an article arguing for the right to be forgotten and the ethics of being able to delete digital memories or other assets. No matter the medium humans have used for communication over millennia—oral, cuneiform, paper, electronic—most of it doesn’t survive. We can mourn that loss for all of the illuminating history it would have contained; we can also acknowledge that’s just how it goes. Memento mori.

You know why? Because there’s no such thing as a stupid question.

To be clear, I’m not at all annoyed by the person or by their question. I’m annoyed by the internalized shame that has caused them to think that their lack of knowledge about something means that asking someone about it is a display of stupidity.

And I don’t care what your question is or how simple it supposedly is. Curiosity and humility should be rewarded, not condescended to. So ask away.

Love this deep dive on the color theory behind why so many control rooms were seafoam green.

What happened to movie taglines?

I cannot believe the leaf sheep slug is a real animal. What a world.

The Extrapolated Futures Archive maps real-world scenarios to the sci-fi stories that explore them.

A clock that displays the current time… alphabetically.

Worried about teens today? So were adults in the 1920s.

Two key takeaways:

1. The turkey vulture was ugly AF but had an insane wingspan. The falconers were also impressed by all the turkey vulture facts and terms the 7 year old knew. (Thanks, Wild Kratts!)

2. The Aplomado falcon was a cute lil thing that also looked like he could completely ruin your life:

(This is awkwardly zoomed in and cropped because we weren’t about to get too close to it.)

They also had taxidermied wings and talons from owls and other falcons. I pity all the poor mice, birds, and other creatures that did get their lives ruined by those natural razor blades.

The 7 year old completely lit up seeing these birds in person, as did I. We’ve seen owls up close before and red-tailed hawks from afar in our neighborhood, but there’s nothing like the live experience.

(Requisite reference to Will Forte’s The Falconer series of sketches on Saturday Night Live, which originally aired between 2002-2006—i.e. the exact years I was in high school and thus the perfect age to appreciate.)

Long may Earth (and the bonus Moon Earth) remain in all of our hearts (and the bonus little heart). (Plus some tic-tac-toe games randomly.)

A Real Bug’s Life. This National Geographic miniseries on Disney+ uses macrophotography to capture tiny insects in dramatized settings, supplemented by Awkwafina’s affable narration.

Monsters, Inc. Before ever even seeing the movie, the two year old got absolutely transfixed by a figurine of Mike Wazowski (or as he calls him: “Mike Kadowki”), so we had to watch this and Monsters University. Good stuff!

The Book with No Pictures. The seven year old is back into this great (non)picture book in a big way, something that keeps happening.

Daniel Tiger. Still the toddler’s go-to, to the point where the “Brush Your Teeth with Daniel Tiger” video became part of his bedtime routine to distract him enough to let us brush his teeth.

Ada Twist, Scientist. As kids shows go, this Netflix one based on the “Questioneers” book series by Andrea Beaty is better than the average if only because of its emphasis on science, imagination, and teamwork. The seven year old recently said he wants to be a scientist when he grows up, and books/shows like this are probably a big part why.

I cannot emphasize this enough. 

Whenever there’s a new movie coming out that’s based on a book, people will think “Oh, I gotta read that so I’m ready for the movie.”

Why? Ready for what? Knowing all the characters and important story beats and plot twists ahead of time doesn’t make you ready for anything except disappointment. 

The movie is never the same as the book. Whether it’s better or worse or something in between, either way it’s a completely different art form that did not get your full attention because you were constantly comparing it to the book. 

When you save the book for after the movie, it’s like getting an extended director’s cut that includes so much more material, and lets you dive into that world even deeper with characters and details that weren’t captured on screen. Sometimes that experience will cause some whiplash or dissonance with what you saw in the movie, but remember: it’s different by design. Embrace that and lean in!

Ultimately, you should read and watch whatever you want, whenever you want. Period. Just beware of what you gain and lose with these book-to-movie adaptations.

Update: turned this take into a Reel, which people had *thoughts* about:

Love this deep dive on the origins of The Beatles’ “I Feel Fine”.

Certified musical legend Alan Mencken breaks down his ‘90s Disney movie hits. 

Lots of fun and goofy designs in this 1956 Fun With Your Typewriter book.

Really cool online tool to generate slipcovers for VHS, Blockbuster cases, and other physical media. 

The Song of LinkedIn.

A trace fossil of a leaf in winter:

Are those lights in the sky UFOs? Mufasa? Reflections of the lamppost light from my camera? We’ll never know:

A brief respite between snowball fights:

One of their favorite chores is cleaning the windows:

The entrance overhang at a nearby library is very edgy:

Finding his place among the pines:

My view while fetching the ball during driveway soccer:

Because I’m a psycho, I’ve slowly been accumulating a list of all the books I could find that fall into this category. Some are written by people involved with the film’s production, while others are by journalists or critics. I’ve read several of them but far from all, so this list is aspirational as much as informational.

See below for what I’ve gathered thus far, listed alphabetically by film title. I also created a list on Letterboxd and will update both as I discover more. Let me know if I’m missing any!

[Updated August 2026]

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) — Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Michael Benson

Airplane! (1980) — Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! by David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams

All About Eve (1950) — All About All About Eve: The Complete Behind-the-Scenes Story of the Bitchiest Film Ever Made! by Sam Staggs

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) — Kind of a Big Deal: How Anchorman Stayed Classy and Became the Most Iconic Comedy of the Twenty-First Century by Saul Austerlitz

Animal House (1980) — Fat, Drunk, and Stupid: The Inside Story Behind the Making of Animal House by Matty Simmons

Back to the Future (1985) — We Don’t Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy by Caseen Gaines

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) — Making The Best Years of Our Lives: The Hollywood Classic That Inspired a Nation by Alison Macor

Blade Runner (1982) — Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner by Paul M. Sammon

The Blues Brothers (1980) — The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of An American Film Classic by Daniel De Visé

The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) — The Devil’s Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco by Julie Salamon

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) — They Kill People: Bonnie and Clyde, a Hollywood Revolution, and America’s Obsession with Guns and Outlaws by Kirk Ellis

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) — Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman by Sam Wasson

Bull Durham (1988) — The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, and a Hit by Ron Shelton

Caddyshack (1980) — Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story by Chris Nashawaty

Casablanca (1942) — Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca—Bogart, Bergman, and World War II by Aljean Harmetz and We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie by Noah Isenberg

Chinatown (1974) — The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood by Sam Wasson

A Christmas Story (1983) — A Christmas Story: Behind the Scenes of a Holiday Classic by Caseen Gaines

Clueless (1995) — As If!: The Oral History of Clueless by Jen Chaney

Dazed and Confused (1993) — Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused by Melissa Maerz

The Dirty Dozen (1967) — Killin’ Generals: The Making of The Dirty Dozen, the Most Iconic WWII Movie of All Time by Dwayne Epstein

Double Indemnity (1944) — From the Moment They Met It Was Murder: Double Indemnity and the Rise of Film Noir by Alain Silver & James Ursini

Dune (1984) — A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune: An Oral History by Max Evry

E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982) — Stranded on Earth: How Night Skies Became E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial by Max Evry

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) — Ferris Bueller…You’re My Hero: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Day Off by Jason Klamm

Giant (1956) — Giant Love: Edna Ferber, Her Best-Selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film by Julie Goldsmith Gilbert

The Godfather (1972) — Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli: The Epic Story of the Making of The Godfather by Mark Seal

Gone with the Wind (1939) — Frankly, My Dear: “Gone with the Wind” Revisited by Molly Haskell

GoodFellas (1990) — Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas by Glenn Kenny

Heaven’s Gate (1980) — Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists by Steven Bach

High Noon (1952) — High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of An American Classic by Glenn Frankel

Imitation of Life (1959) — Born to Be Hurt: The Untold Story of Imitation of Life by Sam Staggs

It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) — Comedy is a Grim Business: The Making of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World by James Curtis

John Wick (2014) — They Shouldn’t Have Killed His Dog: The Complete Uncensored Ass-Kicking Oral History of John Wick, Gun Fu, and the New Age of Action by Edward Gross & Mark A. Altman

King Kong (1933) — The Making of King Kong: The Story Behind a Film Classic by Orville Goldner and George Turner

A League of Their Own (1992) — No Crying in Baseball: The Inside Story of A League of Their Own: Big Stars, Dugout Drama, and a Home Run for Hollywood by Erin Carlson

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) — Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan

Major League (1989) — The Making of Major League: A Juuuust a Bit Inside Look at the Classic Baseball Comedy by Jonathan Knight

Mary Poppins (1964) — Making Mary Poppins: The Sherman Brothers, Walt Disney, and the Creation of the Classic Film by Todd James Pierce

Mean Girls (2004) — So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (and Why We’re Still So Obsessed With It) by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

Midnight Cowboy (1969) — Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic by Glenn Frankel

Mikey and Nicky (1976) — Hollywood Renegade: Elaine May, Mikey and Nicky, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Todd Berliner

Mommie Dearest (1981) — With Love, Mommie Dearest: The Making of An Unintentional Camp Classic by A. Ashley Hoff

Night of the Living Dead (1968) — Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World by Daniel Kraus

On the Waterfront (1954) — A City Full of Hawks: On the Waterfront Seventy Years Later—Still the Great American Contender by Stephen Rebello

Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985) — Inside Pee-wee’s Playhouse: The Untold, Unauthorized, and Unpredictable Story of a Pop Phenomenon by Caseen Gaines

The Pride of the Yankees (1942) — The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper, and the Making of a Classic by Richard Sandomir

Psycho (1960) — Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho by Stephen Rebello

Rear Window (1954) — Rear Window: The Making of a Hitchcock Masterpiece in the Hollywood Golden Age by Jennifer O’Callaghan and Hitchcock’s Rear Window: The Well-Made Film by John Fawell

The Room (2003) — The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made by Greg Sestero & Tom Bissell

Saturday Night Fever (1977) — Fever: The Complete History of Saturday Night Fever by Margo Donohue

Scarface (1983) — The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface by Glenn Kenny

Scream (1996) — Your Favorite Scary Movie: How the Scream Films Rewrote the Rules of Horror by Ashley Cullins

The Searchers (1956) — The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel

Shaun of the Dead (2004) — You’ve Got Red on You: How Shaun of the Dead Was Brought to Life by Clark Collis

Singin’ in the Rain (1952) — Singin’ in the Rain: The Making of an American Masterpiece by Earl J. Hess & Pratibha A. Dabholkar

The Sound of Music (1965) — The Sound of Music Story: How a Beguiling Young Novice, a Handsome Austrian Captain, and Ten Singing von Trapp Children Inspired the Most Beloved Film of All Time by Tom Santopietro

Spartacus (1960) — I Am Spartacus!: Making a Film, Breaking the Blacklist by Kirk Douglas

Strangers on a Train (1951) — Criss-Cross: The Making of Hitchcock’s Dazzling, Subversive Masterpiece Strangers on a Train by Stephen Rebello

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) — When Blanche Met Brando: The Scandalous Story of “A Streetcar Named Desire” by Sam Staggs

Sunset Boulevard (1950) — Ready for My Close-Up: The Making of Sunset Boulevard and the Dark Side of the Hollywood Dream by David M. Lubin and Close-up on Sunset Boulevard: Billy Wilder, Norma Desmond, and the Dark Hollywood Dream by Sam Staggs

Valley of the Dolls (1967) — Dolls! Dolls! Dolls! Deep Inside Valley of the Dolls, the Most Beloved Bad Book and Movie of All Time by Stephen Rebello

The Way We Were (1973) — The Way They Were: How Epic Battles and Bruised Egos Brought a Classic Hollywood Love Story to the Screen by Robert Hofler

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) — Cocktails With George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Philip Gefter

The Women (1939) — Jungle Red! The Making of MGM’s The Women by Illeana Douglas

“This is one of my favorite Bluey episodes,” my seven year old said. Dude, same, I thought. It’s not only one of the best episodes of Bluey but also one of the finest shortform stories of the decade. (Not a surprise that as of this writing it has nearly 53 million views on YouTube.)

It’s apparent why the physical humor and distinct visual style would appeal to a seven and two year old (they particularly loved the kids kicking Bandit in their sleep). For parents, though, it’s an absolute heart-punch. And the heavy use of Gustav Holst’s “Jupiter” theme throughout makes it all the more epic.

(Check JustWatch to see if and where they are available to stream, or your local library for the DVD/Blu-ray. See this list on Letterboxd.)

20. An Autumn Summer

There’s just no way I wasn’t gonna go for this, a sincere coming-of-age story with timeless and universal themes at its center like friendship, love, and taking the next step at the precipice of adulthood. Kudos to director Jared Isaac and cinematographer Brandon Somerhalder for so lovingly capturing summer in the Northwoods of the upper Midwest, where the lakes and forests and sand dunes play host to the kind of playful and probing conversations that only a group of eighteen year olds untainted by cynicism can hold.

19. Blue Moon

Ethan Hawke is an all-time talker, whether as a podcast guest, motivational speaker, or at the helm of a Richard Linklater movie as he’s been many times—including here in one of his best performances as the renowned Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart. More of a filmed play than cinematic achievement, this is a showcase of great writing and great actors who bring it to life.

18. Eephus

On top of being a great fall movie, baseball movie, and hangout movie, Carson Lund’s indie about the last game being played at a rec stadium by an amateur league before its destruction is a touching tribute to the things we hold onto. I know Interstellar already beat it to death, but the Dylan Thomas poem “Do not go gentle into that good night” is an excellent readalike.

17. Bugonia

Essentially a two-hander between Emma Stone as a pharma executive who may or may not be an alien and Jesse Plemons as a conspiracy theorist who kidnaps her, Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest has a few images/moments I’ll be thinking about for a long time. And while I’m eager for Stone and Lanthimos to find new creative partners after four straight movies together, there’s no denying their complete commitment to a kind of acidic absurdity that’s unique in contemporary cinema.

16. Presence

Steven Soderbergh described the conceit of this low-budget haunted-house thriller—one of two films he released this year—as “the camera is the ghost.” It’s a high-concept, solid-execution kind of movie, which I’ll take any day of the week. Also a great double feature with Here, another unjustly maligned single-house story.

15. Marty Supreme

Basically a sports movie (in a good way) set in 1950s New York City with ‘80s music, Josh Safdie’s electrifying, quasi-nonfictional saga of table tennis hustler Marty Mauser triggered the disconcerting feeling of half-hating and half-rooting for a narcissist who creates a lot of wreckage on his quest—but also a lot of fist-pump moments.

14. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

We’re in a rather challenging phase of parenthood at the moment, so this visceral, Safdie-esque anxiety dream of a movie from writer-director Mary Bronstein (who’s married to Marty Supreme co-writer Ronald Bronstein) starring Rose Byrne as a beleaguered mother really spoke to me. (As did the various men featured throughout, but in a “well, at least I’m not that bad” kind of way.)

13. Wake Up Dead Man

Rian Johnson’s latest Benoit Blanc mystery returns to the gothic roots of Knives Out with another elaborate whodunit, this time with Josh O’Connor as a former boxer turned Catholic priest at the center. During the press tour Johnson revealed insights from his evangelical past that not only made me appreciate him even more as a writer and filmmaker, but also explain why this was a shoo-in for my Best 21st Century Religion Movies list.

12. It Was Just An Accident

In this Jafar Panahi film that’s part morality play, part screwball comedy, part skin-tingling thriller, a makeshift group of former Iranian political prisoners wrestle with whether to exact revenge on their captor. How each ensnared person deals with this dilemma is how all of us would. Somehow this was my first Panahi picture, but it won’t be the last.

11. The Assessment

It’s been a minute since a movie gave me as many belly laughs of recognition as chills up my spine like this one did. Set in a dystopian near-future when reproduction is strictly regulated by the state and prospective parents must pass an immersive seven-day assessment, Fleur Fortuné’s directorial debut establishes a rather Villeneuvean tone and aesthetic early on—sleek, serious, slightly sci-fi—only to puncture it with very relatable vignettes depicting the harsh realities of child-rearing, while also addressing the pain of wanting to raise a child but being unable to do so. 

10. A Little Prayer

Twenty years after his feature debut Junebug scored an Oscar nomination for Amy Adams, writer/director Angus MacLachlan revisits similar ground here with a quiet, unpretentious dramedy tightly focused on the domestic travails of a small-town family reckoning with each other and themselves. Jane Levy gives a quiet knockout of a performance as the unassuming daughter-in-law, whose endearing relationship with David Strathairn’s patriarch forms the emotional anchor of the film. 

9. The Naked Gun

Cheers to a movie that knows exactly what it is and how to be that for just the right amount of time—in this case a joke-a-minute reboot of the classic Leslie Nielsen spoof from Lonely Islander Akiva Schaffer. Casting Liam Neeson was an inspired choice given his ability to blend gruff gravitas with solid comedy chops. I still giggle about random bits months later. 

8. The Summer Book

Writer-director Charlie McDowell beautifully captures the spirit of Swedish-Finnish author (and Moomin creator) Tove Jansson’s autobiographical novel, which is not an easy feat given the book’s languorous vibe and sparse plot. If you’re willing to dive in and surrender to its gentle, deliberately paced wavelength, you’ll be rewarded with a moving, nature-drenched meditation on loss, parenting, and coming of age before you’re ready to.

7. Sinners

This has several A+, capital-C Cinematic sequences that had me thinking “Here we go, hell yeah.” It’s always a pleasure to watch an exciting original story told within genre traditions by a talented auteur with a point of view and brought to vibrant life with visual panache by a kickass cast and crew. How blessed we are to be alive at the same exact time stories like this are channeled through conjurers of the cinematic arts like Ryan Coogler.

6. The Testament of Ann Lee

A biopic has to try really hard to avoid the pitfalls of the genre for me to enjoy it. While this technically does fit the bill as a cradle-to-grave story of the founder of the Shakers movement, any stumble it makes just subsumes itself into an ecstatic communal dance of a film—the likes of which I’ve just never seen (or heard) before. Amanda Seyfried FTW.

5. The Condor Daughter

A discovery from the Chicago International Film Festival, this story of an Andean midwife’s apprentice caught between following her indigenous traditions and pursuing her dreams in the big city knocked with me out with its stunning natural-light cinematography, incisive cultural commentary, and captivating stillness.

4. Weapons

I’m typically a matinee guy but I stayed up past my bedtime to go see this in a theater, and I’m glad I did because we were all in this thing together. (I’ll never forget experiencing that nighttime car scene. IYKYK.) The confidence with which writer-director Zach Cregger both establishes a world and propels us through it is such a thrill to behold. And it’s why this former horror scaredy cat now has season tickets to whatever screwed-up stories Cregger comes up with next.

3. Black Bag

“Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender in a Steven Soderbergh spy thriller” is all I needed to know before wanting to see Black Bag, which not only lives up to the potential of that combination but elevates beyond it thanks to its stylistic choices and delightfully twisty story. It’s a dinner-party-worthy meal of a movie with delicious, edge-of-your-seat drama.

2. Train Dreams

My word if this kaleidoscopic fable of the life of an early 20th century logger isn’t a gosh-darn movie. There’s just nothing like seeing real humans walking amongst real trees with real sunlight and firelight on their faces, experiencing real joys and tragedies and the fleeting moments in between of feeling connected to it all. Shame it’s destined for the Netflix abyss and not the biggest screens possible.

1. One Battle After Another

The more I think about Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest saga the more I love it. Synthesizing the ambitious scope of There Will Be Blood with the propulsive dramedy of Punch-Drunk Love—the two other PTA films I love that also have crazy-good scores, lead performances, and supporting casts among other things—One Battle After Another feels both set out of time and fiercely of the current moment. To quote Bob: Life, man. Life! (Double feature that comes to mind: Anora, a similarly ambitious, distinctively three-act saga with chases and violence and slapstick comedy and a scrappy rebel just trying to survive against brutal systemic forces. “American Girl” indeed.)

Still haven’t seen: Sentimental Value, Hamnet, Frankenstein, The Secret Agent

This is just one of countless examples of me dropping quotes and cultural references my boys (and usually my wife) don’t understand. It’s to the point where once my seven year old realizes I’ve quoted something yet again, he’ll roll his eyes and say, “Papa with his quotes…” Such is the plight of a movie-addled dad. Though I prefer to think of this skill less as brainrot and more as brainripe.

(Bonus: When the two year old grabs a banana I call him Mr. Bananagrabber.)

Been loving Marcin Winchary’s thoughtful design takes lately, like Flickr’s inspiring URL scheme and the software versions of molly guards and Moylan Arrows. 

Times New Resistance is a Times New Roman impersonator font that “autocorrects the autocrats.”

These 11th-century paper flowers, sealed in a Chinese cave, are a marvel of preservation.

Speaking of beautiful old art: check out this 3,500-year-old drawing of a sparrow.

Speaking of more beautiful art: an Indonesian cave painting from 67,000 years ago.

It’s hard for me to imagine how D-Day did not end in utter catastrophe — I struggle to comprehend how it even got underway; and I still can’t quite believe that movies come together the way they do. …

Maybe my fascination has something to do with the fact that these large collaborative projects are so completely unlike what I do. I once said to a film director I know that I don’t see how movies ever get made, and he replied that in making a movie he has “so much help” from smart and skilled people — he doesn’t understand how I can just sit in a room and write books. But when I’m sitting in a room writing a book I am not accountable to or answerable to anyone else: I only have to manage Me.

He cites two anecdotes about General Dwight Eisenhower and director Sidney Lumet that encapsulate the seemingly impossible complexity of these jobs and show how some people are just better fit for them than others. Read the whole post.

There’s a certain way you put a sentence together to get the idea across; you can fuck with that, but at a certain point you fuck with it so much the idea is lost. That applies to almost any form.

When I’m on set or thinking about a story, making sure that the audience is engaged and that I’m also excited, I have to fight through the sensation of, “Oh my god, another fucking over-the-shoulder shot.” I have to push through that and go, “You’re building a sentence. Getting upset when you have to shoot an over-the-shoulder shot is like getting upset at using the word ‘and’ or ‘the’ in a sentence. It has to be done. It’s part of the grammar.”

• The Secret/Private Life of
• [X] in an Age of [Y]
• A Traveler’s Guide to
• The Race to
• A History of the World in
• How [X] Explains [Y]

What else should be on the list?

There’s a scene from Band of Brothers I’ve been thinking about a lot these days. It’s from the penultimate episode (“Why We Fight”) which finds Easy Company en route to Berchtesgaden in April 1945. Private Webster (played by Eoin Bailey) beholds the thousands of surrendered German POWs marching the other way in defeat and has a (NSFW) moment of clarity and indignation:

Key quote:

Dragging our asses half way around the world, interrupting our lives, for what? You ignorant servile scum, what the f*** are we doing here?!

Perhaps you can see why this might ring true as I consider current events set in motion at the direction of the current president of the United States, including but not limited to a radicalized, extralegal police force laying siege to American cities, kidnapping and murdering people.

Hearing from friends who live in Minneapolis, for example, I imagine they could deeply relate to Webster’s exasperation and exhaustion at having their lives cruelly interrupted by fascists who seek only to denigrate and destroy. And they’re not dragging their asses to the streets to protest or hold candlelight vigils in the frigid cold for slain citizens because it’s fun and a great use of free time.

What are we doing here?

You know who else is wondering the same thing? Santa Clara’s own Batman:

A man wearing a Batman costume spoke at the Santa Clara City Council to criticize a lack of action against the federal immigration crackdown.

“What the f*** are we doing here? Seriously, you have had months to prepare for this upcoming event. I don’t give a damn if this is out of decorum. People are dying on our streets every single day in this country because we allow this federal government to walk all over you. Look me in the eye. Can any one of you go home to your children and tell them that you did everything you could to protect their classmates? To protect their grandparents? I don’t think you can.”

Thank you, Batman. And no thanks whatsoever to all the ignorant, servile politicians doing the bidding of the geriatric malignant narcissist dementia patient and wannabe mafioso currently occupying the White House who is not long for this earth. What a waste.

Another related lesson courtesy of the Dark Knight: Terror will lose.

Make something heavy. 

Pop songs in Renaissance and Baroque style.

Great longread from Bilge Ebiri on Terrence Malick and his influential filmmaking style. 

“What if you held a tree long enough for it to grow around your hand?”

You know I’m here for a Tangible Media Collection.

Which HTML element are you?

If these don’t epitomize six-year-old boys, I don’t know what does.

Continuing the trend of the last few years, this is a “books I managed to read” list rather than a curated selection of favorites as my reading hit an all-time low. I could blame any number of attention grabbers in my life, but ultimately I’m just not In My Reading Era like I used to be.

Still, here are the titles that tickled my fancy in 2025, with links to anything I wrote about them.

Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green

Lost in the Stream: How Algorithms Redefined the Way Movies Are Made and Watched by Jeff Rauseo

Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari

Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession by Craig Childs

The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads by Ammon Shea

Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering by Malcolm Gladwell

The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War by Erik Larson

The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett Graff

Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive by Eliot Stein

Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams & Jerry Zucker

Poetry is a kind of test case, a training ground for understanding what “expert knowledge” brings to the table. Mercor’s bet is that the same process that trains a model to write better poetry can train it to do better legal drafts, better medical diagnoses, better financial analyses. The core assumption is that professional judgment (a lawyer deciding how to frame an argument) and aesthetic judgment (a poet deciding how to break a line) are computationally similar problems. Both require the model to navigate an “unbounded” decision space where there is no single “correct” answer, only “better” or “worse” ones based on expert consensus.

Suddenly the “they should have sent a poet” line from Contact takes on a whole new meaning.

This is a victory for the humanities I guess? Perhaps a Pyrrhic one though.

My view from the end of all things 2025:

Joined my buddy Nicole Kidman at AMC for a 9:15am showing of Marty Supreme. Don’t think I’ve ever done such an early showtime before, but it’s a great way to start the day.

Here’s a snapshot of what this year looked like for me:

• Honestly, just keeping up with everything between two active boys, my day job, a part-time job I added in the fall, and everything else life is throwing at us has been a lot. I’m grateful for everything we have and the joys of this particular stage, and I’m eager to see how the next stage will look.
• This blog turned 19 years old. Thanks for reading, whoever and wherever you are. Some favorite posts I wrote this year:
  • In dark times, be a steward
  • My top 10 concert moments
  • The seven year etch, or why am I paper resistant?
  • A creative childhood? It’s about time
  • I got a problem with ‘little kids, little problems’
  • Every day is helmet day!
  • Take a look, it’s in the Book Notes
  • Book reviews of Shift Happens and The Only Plane in the Sky
  • more Recent Views, Media of the Moment, and Critters of the Moment
• Did fun stuff as a family:
  • went to Shedd Aquarium with friends
  • attended Pizza Night gatherings with our friend group
  • brought the boys on their first train ride
  • saw a bunch of cool stuff at the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford
  • took trips to Michigan and Wisconsin to see family
  • went trick-or-treating as a Minecraft family
• Our house got a new washer and dryer, new flooring, and a few new windows
• Noted some choice quotes from our 6 year old, including:
  • “I am never going to bring ‘I want to eat peppers’ into my words.”
  • “What do you call a Cybertruck that’s driving? A road-bot.”
  • “Whew, I’m out of breath. When I’m talking about something I love I just get carried away.”
  • “I love willow trees. They’re just hanging down like a lazy turtle.”
• Wrote some stuff for Cinema Sugar, including:
  • an essay about Palm Springs and religion
  • a ranking of the best minor characters in Back to the Future
  • a review of Whiplash Live in Concert
• Acquired Criterion Blu-rays of Citizen Kane and Punch-Drunk Love, and a Knives Out SteelBook
• Read 11 books and watched 35 new movies

Size of Life is another banger from Neal.fun, one of the best places on the internet.

Shoutout to ROMAN and other obscure Excel functions.

Unfortunately, I have to side with Marco Rubio in the Times New Roman/Calibri font war.

In praise of the prescient and “punishing digitopia” of Spielberg’s Minority Report.

The real reasons you’re not reading.

• In many ways our two boys were the ideal ages for it. The six year old has done it enough times to know what’s coming and anticipate the different elements, and the two year old is like a joyful, bright-eyed little elf who’s down for anything.
• Introducing them to the season’s traditions and iconography was a trip. The lore is so deep that it’s like catching up a new viewer of a plot-heavy TV series at season six—at some point you’re like “just go with it” and luckily they have no problem with that.
• One evening we went to a local park with a big walkable light display, which had a Santa and Nativity Scene and trains and a spinning penguin and a bunch of other seasonal regulars. That combination of completely different characters and mythologies is fascinating and honestly awesome. It’s a melting-pot holiday season and I’m here for it.
• We saw a community production of A Christmas Carol that used the original Dickens language, which meant it was trickier for the boys to follow (though having seen The Muppet Christmas Carol already definitely helped) but also a richer experience—especially thanks to the haunting audiovisual effects during the Ghost Marley sequence.
• As a teenager I was all “Christmastime is so phony and corporate” and now I’m like “haul out the holly, baby!” Yet once the 26th arrives, I can’t wait to get the tree and decorations back in storage to reclaim space in our small house. (Christmas music is still allowed until New Year’s Eve, capped off with “Auld Lang Syne” of course.)
• I didn’t have much time to watch many Christmas movies that I’d normally get to, including It’s A Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve, but one I did rewatch that’ll continue to be part of the rotation for years to come is The Holdovers.

Blogging has been, for me, an unalloyed success. It has connected me to people, given me a place to develop my thoughts, made some of my work on the internet – a place always decaying and forgetting – a little more permanent. I absolutely recommend everyone do it.

I know why most people don’t do it: not enough time and too much fear of publishing ‘bad writing.’ Maybe ‘nothing to write about,’ too, though this never seems that real to me, given how the average person I meet has interesting thoughts and ideas to share.

I second this sentiment. Next year will be my 20th blogging anniversary (!!), and at least for the way I approach it—as a personal, generalist, and low-stakes log of what occupies my interest and attention at the moment—it’s something you should be able to slide in between everything else in your life. That’s to me what makes it a fun and sustainable hobby.

It feels like people think writing a blog post equates to building an ornate wooden desk: something that requires intense dedication and specialized skills and a huge time commitment. But really it’s more like whittling a stick: dash off a few (key)strokes, make your point, and you’re done. Then whittle another one. That’s it.

He also mentions removing analytics, which is key. If you’re in it for the likes or views or revenue, then it’s a hustle, not a hobby, and you’re bound to abandon it or get burned out.

Christmas music. ‘Tis the season! Some newer albums I’ve been enjoying: Happy Golden Days by The Arcadian Wild, Sleigher by Ben Folds, and Family Christmas Album Vol. II by The Oh Hellos.

Homestar Runner. I didn’t realize this web series was still around, but browsing the website was a blast from my high-school past when this became an early-2000s pre-social media viral phenomenon. Episode #4 of Teen Girl Squad contains two quotes that remain with me to this day: “Y’all are so wack.” “Wiggidy-wack?” “Nope, just regular type”. And: “Grood. I mean good. And great. Great and good.”

Little Old You by The Okee Dokee Brothers. A new Okee Dokee Brothers album is like a national holiday in our household, so we’re very much enjoying this new one. Favorite track so far: “Apple of My Eye”

Death By Lightning. This Netflix miniseries adaptation of Candace Millard’s Death of the Republic (one of the best books of the 2010s) is textbook Chad, and also kind of a silly melodrama. If I didn’t know its context and backstory I would have so many questions about this stranger-than-fiction saga.

Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee. I can’t remember which blogger recommended it, but this book is a fascinating history of Apple’s place in the global economy over the last 30 years. I’d forgetten how much the one-two punch of the iPod and iTunes for Windows skyrocketed Apple into the stratosphere. RIP to my beloved 3rd generation iPod Classic

Forward by The Swell Season. I’m enjoying this new album from Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, which feels like a spiritual sequel to Once.

How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner.

How Marlon Brando changed acting.

Red sprites FTW.

How to fix a typewriter and your life.

1. Clear out gutters
2. Methodically blow leaves from around the yard perimeter into the middle area, dealing with wind along the way
3. Initial mow to mulch the leaves
4. Blow and rake again into a smaller area
5. Start bagging
6. Continually rake into a smaller area in between bagging until done
7. Drag heavy bags to the side of the house to await garbage day
8. Put away equipment

For my boys:

1. Run and jump through leaf piles
2. See #1

We’ll call this game… Dadgeball.

Let me tell you: there are few greater thrills for a dad than when your kid is finally old enough for full-force throws. I mean we were really whipping it at them and they looooved it. They couldn’t get enough of trying to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge their way around the jungle gym.

“Oh, you’re really not holding back,” said one mom.

Effin’ A, Cotton. Effin’ A!

Don’t think I’ve ever seen it in person before, so that was neat.

Also neat? (Stay with me here…) If you zoom in on the top photo you’ll see the star Vega at dead center, which was way brighter in person. In the 1997 movie Contact, Vega was where the mysterious alien radio signal was coming from. And in the 2000 movie Frequency, the Northern Lights were the catalyst for the mysterious time-traveling radio signal.

Ipso facto, whether it’s aliens or geomagnetism or something else wonderfully mysterious, whatever is going on tonight should serve as the basis of a crossover sequel to both of these great movies.

• Beardy
• C-Co
• C-Squared
• Chacho
• Chadder
• Chaddy
• Chaddy Bad
• Chaddington Bear
• Chadicles
• Chadilocks
• Chadly
• Chadster
• Chadston
• Chadwick Barnes
• Chadwick Wellington
• Cochise
• Comello Yellow
• Commish
• Fuzz / Fuzz Buzz
• Red Scare
• Simba
• Snifkin
• Yukon

Rather than let them languish in my Notes app, I figured I’d fling them out into the internet for anyone to claim and use. (I’ll probably keep adding to this as I encounter more.) Enjoy!

• Double Edged Brownies
• Bigass Cherries
• Janky Knobs
• Chocolate Situations
• Elegant Neck
• Mucky Thud
• Sleepish Fits
• The Yonder Colors
• Tiny & The Carpenter’s Wife (somehow I remember this is a very obscure direct quote from the novel My Ántonia by Willa Cather)
• Owl Dogs
• Buckthorn & the Invasive Species
• Inspiring Sandwiches
• Punkass Mist
• Bagel Czar
• Letters of an Unknown Alphabet
• Patron with the Bird
• Serious Cheeks (something I said about our firstborn as a baby, who had some seriously chunky cheeks)
• Static Wizards
• Mama Hooks
• Minimal Pillows

As a Class of 2010 graduate, I can confirm: the best time to be in college was 2006-2010.

Approaching our work as art can change our worlds.

Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke is an “incredible informational product that is 100% EXEMPT FROM DONALD TRUMP’S STUPID TARIFFS!”

A dad turned his favorite albums into playable trading cards for his kids. (Related from The Onion: Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out Of Touch With Her Generation)

A Minecraft Movie. We watched this a few weeks ago as a special treat and the Minecraft-obsessed six year old was completely locked in. (To be clear, he’s never played the actual game but has absorbed a lot about it from books and his friends.)

Books. The two year old’s current favorites: Stir Crack Whisk Bake: A Little Book About Little Cakes, Spooky Celebrations Around the World by Matt Ralphs & Veronica Kotyk, Daniel Tiger’s Potty Time, and more. The 6 year old’s current favorites: pretty much just Hilo graphic novel series.

Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. Just like his brother at this age, the two year old has become a regular in the ‘Hood—both through the show itself and the Tonies and Yotos.

But it was rather comical how quickly they went back and forth, because it’s not like a straight-shot through the desert—the roads are constantly winding through the rolling woodlands and farmlands of the Midwest. So it had the effect of “Do Not Pass, Pass With Care, Do Not Pass, Pass With Care…” And on and on and on.

Perhaps there’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but regardless it fits nicely alongside “take your time, hurry up” and “hurry up and wait” as a catchy contradiction.

Caught this ornate fountain sculpture in Middleton, WI, in the perfect morning light:

Specters of autumn at our local park:

Will never get enough of the two year old’s chubby hands:

And the two year old will never get enough of playing fetch with his fur cousin:

Spotted this heart-shaped root on my sister-in-law’s land:

The six year old loves being in the wilds of nature but also loves making orderly piles:

A rare trampoline adventure for the boys:

We’ve all seen the LinkedIn exhortations: learn the right skills before the machines take your job, invest in the right companies before automation hollows out the market, anticipate the right policies before artificial intelligence rearranges the political order. Etc.

But the more we live in that posture of anxious fortification, the more absurd it feels. Every week there’s a new prediction, every week there’s some new vision. A Greek chorus of confident forecasters seem to dominate every social platform, declaring that AI will erase half of all jobs by 2030, or 2040, or it will create more jobs than it destroys, or it’ll go bust and we’ll all move on, or AGI will arrive…

We keep repeating the same hubris. We keep praying to the oracle of prediction, hoping we’ll be spared the storm. But the storm always comes. And it never looks like the forecast.

Read the whole piece.

1. Spotlight:

This is when you focus on “immediate actions,” like, “I’m going to walk into the kitchen and make a coffee.” You want to find your glasses. You want to see what’s in the fridge. You want to finish reading this chapter of my book. It’s called the spotlight because as I explained earlier—it involves narrowing down your focus. If your spotlight gets distracted or disrupted, you are prevented from carrying out near-term actions like these.

2. Starlight:

This is the focus you can apply to your “longer-term goals—projects over time.” You want to write a book. You want to set up a business. You want to be a good parent. It’s called the starlight because when you feel lost, you look up to the stars, and you remember the direction you are traveling in. If you become distracted from your starlight, he said, you “lose sight of the longer-term goals.” You start to forget where you are headed.

3. Daylight:

This is the form of focus that makes it possible for you to know what your longer-term goals are in the first place. How do you know you want to write a book? How do you know you want to set up a business? How do you know what it means to be a good parent? Without being able to reflect and think clearly, you won’t be able to figure these things out.

He gave it this name because it’s only when a scene is flooded with daylight that you can see the things around you most clearly. If you get so distracted that you lose your sense of the daylight, James says, “In many ways you may not even be able to figure out who you are, what you wanted to do, [or] where you want to go.” …

You can only find your starlight and your daylight if you have sustained periods of reflection, mind-wandering, and deep thought. James has come to believe that our attention crisis is depriving us of all three of these forms of focus. We are losing our light.

I’ve been to many concerts in my life. But I noticed the ones I remember most keenly have a specific song or moment that locked into my consciousness. Here, in chronological order with their venue and specific date (thanks internet!), are the ones that have stuck with me the most.

“The City, The Airport” by Loney Dear

The Metro. Chicago. April 13, 2007. My former bandmate and I had a connection with Matt and Seth of Anathallo (see below), and they invited us to go see Low. We arrived during the opener, a Swedish group called Loney Dear, as they were playing this propulsive bop. I found Low’s show to be slow and forgettable, but I’ll never forget Loney Dear.

“On the Safest Ledge” by Copeland

The Bottom Lounge. Chicago. October 30, 2008. I went with my friend Whitney to see one of my favorite bands at the time (and one I’ve been writing about since this blog’s beginning). You Are My Sunshine has just come out and I was really steeped in Eat, Sleep, Repeat so getting to see them live was a real treat, and this particular song was absolutely electric.

“Why Can’t It Be Christmastime All Year?” by Rosie Thomas

Schuba’s Tavern. Chicago. December 7, 2008. This was a Christmas-themed show, with Rosie and her bandmates dressed in ugly holiday sweaters and pajamas and playing festive tunes—including this bouncy original that’s become a staple in my annual Yuletide listening. I emerged from this concert into the unrivaled winter wonderland vibes of Christmastime in Chicago with its snow and cold and twinkling lights.

“All the First Pages” by Anathallo

The Union. Naperville. February 20, 2009. This is what inspired me to do this list. I’d seen them before, but this particular song played by an eight-piece group packed snugly onto a small stage in an intimate venue with a standing-room-only crowd… well, let’s just say when the bridge explodes into the final chorus, it felt like the roof blew open and confetti was flying everywhere. Transcendent.

“You Should’ve Seen the Other Guy” by Nathaniel Rateliff

The Pabst Theater. Milwaukee. May 25, 2010. About to graduate from college, I drove up to Milwaukee with my friends Steve, Tim, and Andrea to see The Tallest Man On Earth. He was a great show in itself, but Rateliff and his band (not yet “& the Night Sweats”) were a wonderful surprise as the opening act. I could feel his primal yell in this chorus even from the nosebleeds.

“Hey Jude” by Paul McCartney

Wrigley Field. Chicago. August 1, 2011. Technically I didn’t go to this concert; my friend Brian and I just joined the crowds gathered right outside the stadium to listen to legendary music reverberating out into Wrigleyville. But that didn’t matter—it was basically a free Beatles show, and singing this song live with thousands of people is an experience I’ll never forget. (The photo at top captures our freeloaders’ view—the big white light is the giant screen in the stadium.)

“Emmylou” by First Aid Kit

Lincoln Hall. Chicago. April 6, 2012. My now-wife and I had just started dating when we went to see this Swedish duo who had blown up with the release of The Lion’s Roar, so it’s no wonder hearing this buoyant song about love and winter and music stuck with me. Just as good: watching Emmylou Harris tear up hearing it live.

“She Lit A Fire” by Lord Huron

The House Cafe. DeKalb. July 23, 2013. Their album Lonesome Dreams had been my personal soundtrack the previous winter, so it was a thrill to see them live—with a bonus of my friend Kevin Prchal as the opener. As with First Aid Kit, this song’s lyrics (“she lit a fire, and now she’s in my every thought”) spoke directly to my burgeoning feelings for my soon-to-be-fiancée.

“Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)” by Billy Joel

Wrigley Field. Chicago. August 11, 2017. Back at Wrigley with my sister to see one of our mutual favorites as an early birthday outing, we’d planned to hang outside like at the McCartney show but then out of curiosity checked the box office when we arrived. Tickets weren’t exorbitant, so my sister decided to spring for them and we went in, this final song from Turnstiles leading off the show as we found our seats for what became a magical evening.

“Send My Love (To Your New Lover)” by I’m With Her

Thalia Hall. Chicago. January 6, 2018. We didn’t know it at the time, but this ended up being the last concert my wife and I went to together before our first child was born. And while their original songs were delightful, their a cappella cover of this Adele song was so unexpected and brought the house down.

That is until I thought to check if I could borrow it through interlibrary loan, and sure enough I could. (Libraries to the rescue, baby. As always.) The only catch was I had to read it at the library instead of bringing it home, presumably to prevent a pricy book from disappearing. Which was fine: I just brought my six year old along and he perused his favorite graphic novels while I dove into this wonderful work of art, history, and typewriter glory.

It’s hard to overstate just how beautiful the book is, both as an object and how the content is laid out. Everything is thoughtfully designed, all the way down to the footnote symbols:

The book’s two volumes focus on the two major epochs in keyboard history: the origins and development of typewriters, and the keyboard’s advancement into computers and smartphones. (There’s also a bonus making-of booklet wherein Winchary goes into greater detail about the project’s conception and implementation.) Along the way there’s some really great writing on the burgeoning business of typewriters in the late 19th century, the QWERTY vs. Dvorak drama, and other delightful details die-hard typists will dig.

I appreciated this bit of context-setting on Christopher Latham Sholes, one of the inventors of the typewriter:

Sholes worked in a relative vacuum of technology. There were no tall buildings, and the few business offices that existed were coarse. Weller described them as having “rough, bare floors, box wood stoves, sawdust cuspidors and Windsor chairs and smoke-blackened walls.” The most complex object in most people’s homes was a manual sewing machine. The main source of entertainment at home was typically a piano; home radios were still half a century away, with television to follow twenty-five years after them. The telegraph allowed the flow of Morse code across continents, having crossed the Atlantic a few years earlier. But the first successful test of a telephone was nine years away, the Edison lightbulb another twelve, and electrification of cities and factories decades ahead.

There’s also this passage from the chapter on touch typing about the equivalent terms for “hunt and peck” in different countries, which, as a hunt-and-peck typist myself, I found delightful and even inspiring:

The Dutch call it “poking.” In Portuguese, it’s “key-per-key typing.” Germans have the most complicated word, of course: Adlersuchsystem, which translates as “an eagle search system,” imagining an eagle circling above the keys, striking from up high once in a while. In Hebrew it’s not uncommon to refer to casual typing as “doctor’s typing,” and in Slovak as “the police method,” singling out the professions apparently unable to learn touch typing. In Colombia, touch typing comes with a beautiful term, mecanografia, which for simple typing mutates into the colloquial chuzografia: “poke-o-graphy.” Some languages recognize even non-touch-typing technique as something to admire. Brazil’s catar milho can be translated as “collecting corn.” The Swedish call it pekfingervalsen – or, the index finger waltz. And then there’s the Japanese 雨だれタイピング、which means “raindrop typing.”

(See the rest of my notes and quotes.)

I doff my cap to Winchary’s dedication and care for every aspect of this endeavor, and am simply grateful for its existence. Consult WorldCat and your local library to see if it’s nearby or could be delivered to you. It’s definitely worth the postage.

“It’s a head stop, papa,” he said. “Like a head start but we’re still stopped.”

What a genius term! Here’s hoping he continues to pursue word nerdery like his old man.

The Naked Gun (2025). Cheers to a movie that knows exactly what it is and how to be that for just the right amount of time. Still giggling about random bits from this days later.

Weapons. I’m typically a matinee guy but I stayed up past my bedtime to go see this in a theater, and I’m glad I did. We were in whatever you call this thing together.

A Little Prayer. The kind of movie that inspires you to listen more intently to the birds singing outside your window in the morning, or linger longer at a park bench. ‘Twas a pleasure chatting with the writer/director Angus MacLachlan about this movie, Jane Levy’s knockout performance, and more.

Lost in the Stream: How Algorithms Redefined the Way Movies Are Made and Watched by Jeff Rauseo. Wrote a review of this over at Cinema Sugar.

The Assessment. It’s been a minute since a movie gave me as many belly laughs of recognition as chills up my spine like this one did. 

Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell’s acquired a bit of a divisive reputation, but he remains a great writer with unique and insightful perspectives. Not to mention a great podcast guest.

Eephus. Gonna be a great autumnal rewatch. 

Sinners. This has several A+, capital-C Cinema sequences that had me thinking “Here we go, hell yeah.” It also had a lot of stitching around them that perhaps a rewatch will feel more seamless but on the first go seemed to stick out a little. Overall though, an absolute pleasure to see an original film by an amazing auteur and inspired creative team.

I think I might have found the most Chad thing on the internet: a database of the most obscure words in movies.

This is hardcore but also admirable: “I deleted my second brain.”

Shoutout to these guys who hated Comcast so much they built their own ISP.

Can’t wait for this iceberg-based Arrival sequel.

Happy 30th anniversary to Apollo 13, a celebration of competence.

When despair for the world grows in me

It’s the opening line of the Wendell Berry poem “The Peace of Wild Things”. I’m sure there were many reasons it surfaced from my subconscious (*gestures at everything*), but regardless I was grateful it did because brought to mind the rest of the poem, which was one of the first I memorized.

Then it dawned on me: Poetry is artificial intelligence.

What is poetry if not a large language model comprised of vast amounts of text created by humans about every conceivable topic? And what is a poem if not a response to a specific prompt that can be summoned for whatever question or trouble you have?

I’m being cheeky, but the power of the arts and humanities is no joke. They’re reliable companions that can enrich our lives and help us understand and contextualize and prophesy if we just ask them to.

• The boys were chasing the little rainbows coming from our window prism
• I made a reference to the Muppets song “Rainbow Connection” 
• I decided to put the version from the 2011 movie The Muppets on the speaker
• Which led to playing “Mah Na Mah Na” and discovering it absolutely crushes with 2 year olds especially—just the perfect amount of silliness and melodic bounce
• Which then led to playing the chicken version of “Forget You” from the same soundtrack followed by the original (non-chicken, censored) Cee Lo Green version and rediscovering it absolutely crushes with 37 year old dads—just the perfect soul-pop bop

A tree frog:

A milkweed tiger moth:

An oriental beetle:

A zebra spider:

An ovenbird just chillin’ on our front porch:

A great blue heron:

Teenagers, I get it—they’re too cool for school and have undeveloped prefrontal cortexes, so they’re dumb by design. And motorcyclists without helmets? They clearly have a death wish. Good luck to them.

But grownups? Especially parents riding with their kids who are also without helmets? What are you doing?

Are you afraid of looking dorky? Because when I see someone without a helmet, I don’t think “Whoa, that person looks totally rad.” I think, “I hope their health insurance is good enough to cover the hospital bills coming their way.”

And if you’re thinking, “Why do I need a helmet when I’m not on the road? I’m just going on a leisurely ride through the park.” Good question—do you know how many times I’ve been biking on a bike path and had a squirrel or bird zoom past and force me to suddenly swerve away? Or witnessed another biker get T-boned by a car despite riding on the sidewalk? Not zero!

If you wear a seatbelt in a car, you should wear a helmet on a bike.

But don’t just listen to me. Listen to the “Every Day is Helmet Day” PSA that aired nonstop throughout the mid-’90s in the Madison area and remains burned into my brain:

We owe our electric age to scientists who were crazy, ignorant, or both. In his book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Richard Feynman writes that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” I used to hate this quote for its entreaty to conspiratorial thinking. After all, if scientists automatically distrusted every expert opinion, how would truths coalesce? How would knowledge accumulate over time? Wouldn’t we all just claim our own private reality in the face of expertise? But it’s the following lines from Feynman that make his point clear. “When someone says ‘science teaches such and such’, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it.” In other words, science is the opposite of blind faith. It is a reflexive skepticism toward received wisdoms or arguments from authority. It is the conviction that our own experiments, if carefully constructed, can reveal once-obscured truths. Science is a special kind of faith—a belief before evidence that the previous generation’s “truths” are, at best, half-truths, with half-lives, which will one day pass away and make room for the next generation of even more useful half-truths.

Life finding a way through a tennis court:

Exploring the ice rink at our local sports complex:

Angles at my parents’ house:

Summiting the little hill at my childhood park:

More angles and shadows at the library:

The six year old just kickin’ a brick wall while we waited for the splash pad to open:

Reaching, always reaching:

Originally published at Cinema Sugar.

What do you do when you encounter the impossible? Something that doesn’t compute with your understanding of reality and drastically challenges your worldview?

You can ignore or deny it, confident the existing story you tell yourself can render any mystery or inconsistency meaningless to your everyday life. You can resent it and lash out in anger, yearning for the time before this thing crashed into your conscience and caused irrevocable change. You can also lean into it, treating it not as a threat but as a thread that needs just the slightest tug to unravel. 

On my journey away from the religion of my youth, I did all three pretty much at the same time. And not only that, but I saw those very same dynamics play out among the three core characters in Max Barbakow’s 2020 film Palm Springs—a terrific time-loop comedy (and one of the best movies of the 21st century) with a lot on its mind. 

A magical combo of humor and humanity

There are many reasons I fell for Palm Springs when I first saw it. The rock-solid execution of a smart, cohesive script. The magical combination of goofy comedy, heartfelt drama, mind-shifting philosophy, and a soupçon of sci-fi. The kickass cast with great chemistry keeping a high concept grounded in humanity, all within a 90-minute runtime. 

Its obvious inspiration is Groundhog Day, which has Bill Murray’s Phil repeating the same day over and over again until he learns to be a better person, falls in love, and then manages to escape the loop for reasons just as mysterious as how he got stuck in the first place. But Palm Springs takes this concept deeper in two ways. 

First, there’s more people in the loop. Nyles (Andy Samberg) has been stuck for a long time when we first meet him as the underdressed, overserved, and clearly jaded boyfriend of a bridesmaid at a Palm Springs resort wedding. Then there’s Sarah (Cristin Milioti), the equally jaded maid of honor who hits it off with Nyles but accidentally follows him through the loop’s mysterious portal. And there’s also Roy (J.K. Simmons), another wedding guest Nyles had clumsily invited into the loop while under the influence. How these three deal with each other and their circumstances is the core of the movie, and a pleasure to watch unfold.

The other way Palm Springs sets itself apart is how it treats the time loop. More than just a setting for the characters’ self-discovery or catalyst for conflict, it becomes a force unto itself—something that both teaches and torments the film’s triumvirate of trapped time travelers, and ultimately gives them meaning even as they attempt to escape it. 

In other words: the time loop is a religion. 

On suffering existence

In the book Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious, the writer David Dark explores one etymology of the word religion (fitting there isn’t One True Meaning of the word), which comes from the Latin religare, meaning “to bind fast” or tie together. Dark uses this understanding to interpret religion as a “controlling story”—something we bind or devote ourselves to that provides boundaries to our beliefs and gives our earthly existence greater meaning.

That’s what Christianity was for me. Growing up in a conservative Christian household, I went to church regularly and lived out the staples of a Christian upbringing: weekly youth group, summer camp, Bible studies, mission trips, See You At The Pole (Google it), True Love Waits (don’t Google it). 

I didn’t do all of this reluctantly—I was a true believer. From childhood all the way through adolescence, college, and into my mid-twenties, the Jesus story provided the foundation of how I understood the world and myself. It was the lens through which I saw and interpreted the things I loved doing like reading, writing, listening to and making music, and watching movies. Even as I wrestled with the inconsistencies of the Bible and grew frustrated with the hypocrisies of religious figures and church doctrine, I maintained an earnest devotion to the notion that faith superseded all other earthly forces and permeated everything we understand about existence. 

For Nyles, Sarah, and Roy, the time loop has in effect become their religion, their controlling story. Not only because they’re literally controlled by its parameters and seemingly powerless to escape, but also in a larger sense in that they all come to discover a kind of teleological understanding of the loop and the meaning they’ve derived from it. Nyles shares his with Sarah in one exchange:

NYLES: I don’t know what it is. It could be life, it could be death. It might be a dream. I might be imagining you, you might be imagining me. It could be purgatory or a glitch in the simulation that we’re both in. I don’t know. So I decided a while ago to sort of give up and stop trying to make sense of things altogether, because the only way to really live in this is to embrace the fact that nothing matters.

SARAH: Well, then what’s the point of living?

NYLES: Well, we kind of have no choice but to live, so I think your best bet is just to learn how to suffer existence.

Each of them suffer their existence in different ways, all of which felt exquisitely familiar to me because I lived out all of them during my long journey out of my original controlling story. 

Nyles has surrendered to his circumstances, comfortable in the literal and metaphorical pool he’s been swimming in for so long that he doesn’t even remember his life from before, or fathom the possibility of leaving his present one. Likewise, I’d grown so familiar with the beats and boundaries of my controlling story that the thought of forming a new one felt inconceivable, even dangerous. 

In contrast to Nyles, Roy feels tormented by his circumstances and takes out his anger on Nyles as retribution for trapping him in an ever-presence he can’t escape. And while I wasn’t perpetrating vengeful acts of violence like Roy, I often felt disturbed by the destabilizing effects such deep-seated change had on my worldview and resented losing the comforts a controlling story provides. “I’m not going to see my kids grow up,” Roy later laments to Nyles at his home in Irvine, revealing that his anger was just grief in disguise—his way of dealing with the pain of being severed from his own life and concept of reality. Yet now, awash in contentment with his fate, Roy implores Nyles to seek out a similar peace: “You gotta find your Irvine.”

Sarah, meanwhile, is wracked with guilt over a haunting mistake she now has to relive over and over again, and despite coming to enjoy her time in the loop with Nyles she eventually hits a breaking point and resolves to figure out the mechanics of the time loop (which she later determines is “a box of energy”) in order to escape it. Similarly, as I grew more claustrophobic within my own metaphysical box, I ultimately found a way beyond it through curiosity. I entered a period of voracious reading, when I was drawn to books about psychology, science, human history, and other topics that spoke to the big-picture questions I was pondering. Slowly but surely, the discoveries I was making gave me new lenses to look through and see what had been there the whole time, like the Benjamin Franklin spectacles in National Treasure. 

I wasn’t trying to destroy my existing worldview, and there wasn’t one particular thing that pushed me over the edge. Just a long series of small nudges that only when I looked back after a long while had accumulated into a big distance from where I’d started: a book here, a revelatory podcast there, the small epiphanies and paradoxes compounded slowly over years until they proved too overwhelming to ignore. 

A nonsensical new story

There’s an idea in cognitive science that human consciousness is merely a story the brain tells itself. Humans are meaning-making machines—we crave relief from the chaos of existence and will find or create meaning however we can as a way to make sense of the nonsensical. 

Palm Springs features three people who lived a nonsensical new story together, day after day, trying and failing and giving up and trying again to find meaning in the messiness. It’s the kind of movie that inspires me as a work of art and as a cri de coeur for a better, more wholehearted life. 

(It’s a cruel irony indeed that a movie about purgatory remains caught in a different kind of purgatory, where “streaming exclusives” can’t break free from their digital dungeons into the freedom of physical media. #ReleaseThePalmSpringsBluray!)

We all have a controlling story. It could be ancient (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) or au courant (hello Peloton partisans, Bitcoin bros, and Disney Adults). Mine has changed, and yours probably has too. It has to, or else I don’t think you’re really living. 

Ideally you have someone who can change with you too. I was fortunate to have a life partner throughout this journey who had shared a similar controlling story yet was just as ready as I was to, like Nyles and Sarah, take a scary step into a new one together. 

“At least you have each other,” Roy tells Nyles about Sarah’s entry into the loop. “Nothing worse than going through this shit alone.”

Dark makes a similar conclusion in his book: “People come to consciousness in relationship. This is the phenomenon—oh, how it enlivens a heart!—of shared meaning.”

I’ve found my Irvine. 

That’s me at our local No Kings rally back in June. It’s the energy I’m bringing to Fourth of July this year, what with the United States government having been taken over by orcs, goblins, and all manner of Mordor-worthy villainy. May we the people soon topple their treachery and an Aragorn-esque leader one day unite the forces of good against such reckless hate.

(Yes, Tolkien nerds, I’m aware “Forth Eorlingas” is a Rohirrim rallying cry and thus not an Aragorn thing, but I couldn’t turn down the title pun.)

In recent years, millennials, the former hip young things that once seemed so cutting edge when cast side-by-side with the out-of-touch baby boomers and the rather nondescript generation X, have become, well, a bit cringe. …

But, I’ll confess, being part of a generation that felt so progressive compared with its predecessors, bridging the gap between analogue and digital, felt significant, essential, and yes, bloody cool, actually. It’s a shock, then, to wake up one morning and realise you’ve been usurped.

The first thing I thought of while reading this? June George from Mean Girls:

I can’t for the life of me track it down, but there was a tweet long ago that stuck with me that said basically: cool doesn’t exist, it’s a made-up concept that makes people act dumb and it’s pointless to chase after.

Just be yourself, like what you like, and forget about trying to impress strangers on the internet or IRL—especially people younger than you.

‘Cause you know what’s cool? A billion dollars Not obsessing about what’s cool, what’s cringe, or whatever the latest Gen Z slang is. Embrace the freedom that aging and earnestness provide.

While doing the mundane, we lose ourselves in process and place. The mundane roots us in the present, stubbornly refusing the demands of clock or calendar. It will take as much time as it requires. And so we pull at a thread of argument, uproot weed after weed, or sweep every nook and cranny until the room is clean. We sink into a new experience of time and place, in which everything diminishes but the now and here. Ironically (and sometimes, maddeningly) we may have to do it all again: Sit down to rewrite, hone, edit, and polish. Return to the nasty weeds that pop up day after day. Tackle the dust and grime of another week.

Yes, the mundane is not always pretty. What these experiences shape is not always a finished product that we can hold up and boast about. Sometimes, yes. But not always. What is always true is that these processes are shaping and honing us. They are showing us who we are, how to be, and what it means to think and live. The work of the mundane tethers us to place, to our bodies, to the people we love and live with, and—perhaps in a way I never realized before AI—to our minds themselves.

If the mundane elements of our lives show us who we are, how to be, and what it means to think and live, then what will become of us when we outsource that being, thinking, and living to AI or other ideologies? We sacrifice those essential elements of existence and become their opposite: nothing.

And as it becomes ever more evident that relying on AI degrades your critical thinking skills and cognitive abilities, putting your mind to work matters even more. But why? Olmstead nails it here:

Because it’s the process of slogging through an argument—feeling out its contours and edges, remolding and reshaping them like a potter—that teaches us how to think. Strong arguments do not spring fully formed from the mind. They simmer and stew. They emerge half-formed, and have to be reshaped. Essays materialize when you start to write, and realize you did not yet know what you thought. In the process of verbalizing thoughts, there is room to grow, stretch, and challenge the mind. There is even room to change your mind. AI short circuits this opportunity—in giving us what we ask for, it in fact steals opportunities for growth. It cheats the process of becoming that the mundane offers.

This really spoke to me in relation to writing specifically, whether for this blog or Cinema Sugar. Some writers bemoan the writing process itself, slow and tedious and frustrating as it can be. “I love having written something” goes the trite phrase. And it’s indeed satisfying to finally arrive at the end product. But I also love being in the weeds of the thing. Thinking and rethinking, writing and rewriting, arranging and rearranging, rinse and repeat—that time spent with my hands in the metaphorical dirt, in the mundane, is where the real magic happens.

“Artificial intelligence” is not a technology. A chef’s knife is a technology, as are the practices around its use in the kitchen. A tank is a technology, as are the ways a tank is deployed in war. Both can kill, but one cannot meaningfully talk about a technology that encompasses both Sherman and santoku; the affordances, practices, and intentions are far too different to be brought into useful conversation. Likewise, in the hysterical gold rush to hoover up whatever money they can, the technocrats have labeled any and all manner of engineering practices as “AI” and riddled their products with sparkle emojis, to the extent that what we mean when we say AI is, from a technology standpoint, no longer meaningful. AI seems to be, at every moment, everything from an algorithm of the kind that has been in use for half a century, to bullshit generators that clutter up our information systems, to the promised arrival of a new consciousness—a prophesied god who will either savage us or save us or, somehow, both at the same time. There exists no coherent notion of what AI is or could be, and no meaningful effort to coalesce around a set of practices, because to do so would be to reduce the opportunity for grift.

So what is it? An ideology:

… A system of ideas that has swept up not only the tech industry but huge parts of government on both sides of the aisle, a supermajority of everyone with assets in the millions and up, and a seemingly growing sector of the journalism class. The ideology itself is nothing new—it is the age-old system of supremacy, granting care and comfort to some while relegating others to servitude and penury—but the wrappings have been updated for the late capital, late digital age, a gaudy new cloak for today’s would-be emperors. Engaging with AI as a technology is to play the fool—it’s to observe the reflective surface of the thing without taking note of the way it sends roots deep down into the ground, breaking up bedrock, poisoning the soil, reaching far and wide to capture, uproot, strangle, and steal everything within its reach. It’s to stand aboveground and pontificate about the marvels of this bright new magic, to be dazzled by all its flickering, glittering glory, its smooth mirages and six-fingered messiahs, its apparent obsequiousness in response to all your commands, right up until the point when a sinkhole opens up and swallows you whole.

Dug this history of album art.

Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” sung by 331 different movies.

TFW you go fishing and find a 152-year-old shipwreck.

“The American lawn is a thing, and it is American, deeply American,” Paul Robbins, an expert in environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of the book “Lawn People,” told me. “There becomes a kind of local social pressure to make sure you’re not letting down the neighborhood — you’re keeping up the property values. Those then become morally normative.”

This devotion has turned the U.S. into the undisputed global superpower of lawns. Around 40 million acres of lawn, an area almost as large as the state of Georgia, carpets the nation. Lawn grass occupies more area than corn. Each year, enough water to fill Chesapeake Bay is hurled collectively onto American lawns, along with more than 80 million pounds of pesticides, in order to maintain the sanitized, carpet-like turf. In aggregate, this vast expanse of manicured grass rivals the area of America’s celebrated national parks.

The typical suburban lawn is zealously mown, raked and bombarded with chemicals. Flowering plants that would typically appear in an untended meadow are sparse. For insects, reptiles, birds and many other creatures, these places are hostile no-go zones. Closely cut grass is neither habitat nor food for most insects.

Most of the houses around us are zealously mowed and bombarded with chemicals by landscaping companies, but not ours. We’ve surrendered to the dandelions, Creeping Charlie, wild violets, burdock, and other weeds because we simply don’t have the time or energy to fight them, nor the desire to use pesticides. Luckily our neighborhood isn’t fancy enough for that to matter much (though shoutout to the empty-nester two doors down who dotes on his pristine, carpet-like turf).

Would I love my lawn and garden areas to be as pristine as his? Absolutely. But the cosmetic appeal is rather fleeting compared to the costs in time, money, wasteful water use, and/or chemical exposure. I’d also love to transform at least part of our sizable lawn into a biodiverse garden, but that too takes an immense amount of work and dedication that we just don’t have in this time of life. So a weedy, grassy yard it is!

“Little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems.”

Setting the condescension aside, the idea is that all the challenging aspects of parenting babies and young children—e.g. diaper changes, loss of sleep, tantrums, potting training, keeping them from accidentally killing themselves—aren’t actually challenging compared to what parents of older kids and teenagers have to deal with like adolescent attitude, busy schedules, college applications, and tricky conversations about sex, drugs, technology, and so on.

Respectfully, this is a mound of malarkey.

Untruer words were never spoken

Obviously I’m slightly biased as the parent of young children. But as a former teenager myself, I’m clear-eyed about the challenges of that phase even if I haven’t yet been on the other side of it. So when I hear an older parent trot out that trite un-truism (which happened to me recently on two separate work calls), I’m inclined to diagnose them with early-onset gramnesia.

Which is understandable. If you’ve been out of this phase for a while, it’s easy to forget what the day-to-day is like. You can look back fondly on the cute pictures and innocent personalities without also feeling the toll of the daily grind that facilitates them. But for us currently in that stage, it’s a big problem if a nap gets skipped or a tantrum derails an outing or a car ride turns traumatic with a screaming toddler. Because all of those things directly affect our everyday life and psychological state.

Just go to any playground and look at the parents. While the ones with older kids (say, ages five and up) are reading or on their phones or otherwise checked out from the action, I am trailing my freshly minted two year old to make sure he doesn’t pick up garbage, try to put said garbage in his mouth, get bowled over by the bigger kids running around, or fall off a high spot on the playground. And this isn’t even overprotective helicopter parenting—it’s just life with a toddler. A joy and adventure, yes, but also constant.

Which is why I teared up at this reel from Oh Crap! author Jamie Glowacki, which validates what I already know to be true: that parenting almost always gets easier the more they age.

If you think little kid problems are small or insignificant compared to yours, then I hate to break it to you but in the grand scheme of things, no one besides you is concerned with your teen’s college search or team practice schedule or social media use.

Being a parent is hard. Period. Different stages present different joys and challenges—not big or small, just different. And if you ever want to gripe about them, no matter the age of your kids, I will validate your feelings and in solidarity send a or, more likely, a Katniss Everdreen salute. Because we parents always need the odds in our favor.

When I consider the geniuses of that era—or any, really, before the last ten years or so—I think of time. Talented children, until the incursion of the smartphone and immersive videos games, had much of it.

One big reason for this:

Children could only be enchanted by gizmos and gadgets for so long. The television was stationary, rooted in the living room, and it might have only featured a few channels, depending on the decade. Movies, similarly, were confined to physical theaters. Even in my own childhood, in the 1990s and 2000s, video gaming was largely a social activity. I brought my friend over to play Nintendo Wii or we went to his house to battle in a Dragon Ball Z video game on the PlayStation 2. Unique among my peers, I didn’t own a video game console until I was a teenager, and this meant, to my benefit, I had a childhood free of such seductions.

I too did not own a video game console growing up, except a Game Boy (on which I did spend many maddening hours trying and failing to conquer the Toy Story game). That lack was something I lamented at the time but am grateful for today, because it meant video games weren’t constantly commandeering my time and attention. Instead they were a special occasion, something to be enjoyed with others. I have fond memories having a Halo party with my youth group friends and playing Ready 2 Rumble Boxing with my uncles on a PlayStation rented from Blockbuster.

Barkin spotlights Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys as an example of the kind of genius who had an abundance of time to be able to develop his talent. Then he asks what the Brian Wilsons of 2025 do with their weekends:

Brian was a preternaturally gifted child who deconstructed vocal harmonies on the radio and spent hours over his piano. A child today with such genius might tinker around with music but devote far more of his days to Minecraft, Fortnite, and MrBeast. The child might drown in a sludge bath of AI. The same could be true of the budding novelists, poets, and painters. All of these technologies are arrayed against dreams and imagination. The content—the YouTube, the video games, the TikTok videos—does all the imagining for you. The brain devolves into a vessel for passive consumption.

And that consumption happens (literally) right before their eyes:

For all the obsessing modern parents do over the fates of their children, they’re happy to toss out an iPad or a smartphone or a Nintendo Switch and let their boys and girls melt, slowly, in the blue light. A person close to me once suggested that wardens should start giving prisoners iPhones because there’s nothing that will more rapidly pacify an unruly and restless population. If iPhones were teleported back in time to the twentieth century, would we have a twentieth century? 

Pacify, yes, but only temporarily since once you turn it off it’s like trying to quash a prison riot.

A while back we severely curtailed our now six year old’s screen time after finally getting sick of how it was negatively affecting his mood and behavior (and thus everyone else in the house)—not to mention time spent on creative endeavors. What used to happen almost every day after lunch plus some evenings is now maybe an hour on the weekend, and sometime none at all. No iPad, no more YouTube or garbage shows, the N64 every once in a while. Putting the TV away was a big help in removing the temptation, but just as important was holding firm on the boundary. It didn’t take long for him to accept the new normal and find other things to do like coloring/crafts, reading, and listening to Yotos.

Barkin’s post is about kids, but it’s just as applicable to us grownups too. I would benefit immensely from the same screen time limits imposed on my children—not because I’m a nascent genius but because I don’t want to melt in the blue light or drown in a sludge bath of AI either. I too want time enough at last.

Tia Keobounpheng’s really cool and colorful weavings inspired by geometry and Finnish/Sami heritage.

I want this 1961 National Library Week poster.

Want to de-junkify your Google search results? Just add &udm14 to the URL.

A handy tool to compare the true size of countries.

One of those contractors was a local handyman who brought in his wife to help with the multi-day project. Their kids are grown but they enjoyed interacting with our young’uns.

In a moment when the boys were being particularly rambunctious, I asked if she missed this phase of having young kids.

“I’m glad we lived it,” she said.

In the moment I took that to be a polite way of saying “I’m grateful we went through it but also that it’s over.” Which was probably accurate to an extent. But I see it now as a richer sentiment: to be glad you got to experience something even though it was challenging, and that you really lived it—not just suffered through.

It was yes-and parenting in the wild, and very much appreciated.

We did a gymnastics party for our now 6 year old’s birthday, which his little brother definitely also enjoyed:

2025 America in one star-spangled shot at our local library — gloomy and fractured, with stark contrasts and a cloudy forecast:

Happened to catch this sunsetting light casting shadows from two different windows into our entryway:

Love how Mr. 1 Year Old looks like a gunslinger strolling into a sidewalk showdown with his brother:

Taking in an amphibious view at Shedd Aquarium:

Admiring the Shedd’s dolphins with my own little water lover:

Warming up for soccer class:

Black Bag. Felt great to see an honest-to-god movie in the theater with a delightfully twisty plot and inspired casting that made me feel as warm and fuzzy as the film’s lighting. Wouldn’t be surprised to find this on my best-of-2025 list. 

The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson. Turns out there was a lot of drama leading up to the Civil War…

Lincoln. Rewatched this after finishing The Demon of Unrest as a kind of Civil War bookend. Daniel Day-Lewis’s win for Best Actor might be the most deserving Oscar ever awarded.

The Pitt. Been watching this Max series that’s an unofficial ER reboot and my hat is off to anyone who chooses to become and remain an emergency nurse.

A Complete Unknown. I’m not a dyed-in-the-wool Dylan fan like many white dudes around my age and above, so perhaps that’s why I didn’t fall for this as hard as others, Chalamet’s excellent performance aside.

Parasite. Yes this is dramatic and tragic and twisted and all that, but it’s also so damn funny. “Leave it—free fumigation.”

Mary Poppins Returns. No one can touch Julie Andrews’ singing voice, but Emily Blunt really nails the other Poppins vibes.

When you choose to write with a typewriter, you are quixotically, nobly flying in the face of the assumption that good = fast, efficient, perfect, and productive. Type your gloriously imperfect, expending ineffiencient time and energy — and declare that you still care about human work, and that the process of creation and understanding still matters more to you than the slick products of the machines. …

As for authoritarianism, it is happy to use digital technology to watch us, punish us, and entice us. A soft totalitarianism, with hard pain for those who aren’t pacified by easy consumption and pointless posturing, is becoming the new model of political control. …

Again, typewriters offer one humble but real form of resistance. As in the days of samizdat behind the Iron Curtain, even in “the land of the free” there is a need to find words without compromising with the digital systems that are increasingly under tyrannical control.

Tyrannies have always failed to contain lovers and writers. We must love to write, and write what we love — with the writing tools that we love.

Read his whole piece, read the Typewriter Manifesto, then get typing.

I saved a couple passages that I enjoyed for various reasons. Here’s one featuring General Winfield Scott, who was in charge of defending D.C. and the Capitol building during the contested electoral count process in February 1861:

The throng outside grew annoyed at being barred from entry and began firing off obscenities like grapeshot. If words could kill, one observer wrote, “the amount of profanity launched forth against the guards would have completely annihilated them.” Much of this tirade was aimed at General Scott. It had no effect. He vowed that anyone who obstructed the count would be “lashed to the muzzle of a twelve-pounder and fired out of the window of the Capitol.” Scott would then “manure the hills of Arlington with the fragments of his body.”

Love that FAFO energy from Scott. There was also this bit about President Buchanan’s Secretary of War John Floyd:

By now the war secretary had become a deeply controversial figure and an embarrassment to President Buchanan, which was saying something, since the administration itself was widely considered to be an embarrassment. Floyd was deemed by many to be a paragon of corruption, and a traitor to boot.

He had become embroiled in a financial scandal dating to 1858 that resulted in $870,000 in federal funds—equivalent to over thirty-two million in twenty-first-century dollars—being looted from the U.S. Treasury and the Department of Interior.

An embarrassing, corrupt administration with a controversial cabinet member looting federal funds? History doesn’t repeat itself at all…

And this exchange between General Beauregard and Major Whiting, who was scrambling to prepare the Confederate contingent surrounding Fort Sumter:

The island’s batteries had been ordered to be “in readiness,” Whiting wrote, but all he saw was confusion. “We are ready, perhaps, to open fire, but we are not ready to support it,” he told Beauregard on Thursday, April 11. “For God’s sake have this post inspected by yourself, or some one else competent, before you open fire. I am alone here, as you know, and heretofore have been exclusively occupied with the construction of batteries.” One newly arrived contingent of men was “helter-skelter,” he complained; all were volunteers. “There are no regulars here at all.” Beauregard tried to calm him. “Things always appear worst at first sight when not perfect,” he wrote. “We cannot delay now.”

Some mindful leadership from Beauregard right there. Too bad he was a traitor!

Also wanted to shoutout this quote from Captain Abner Doubleday, who was part of the Union garrison defending Fort Sumter:

Doubleday led the first group to the guns in the casemates that faced the Iron Battery at Cummings Point on Morris Island, due south. “In aiming the first gun fired against the rebellion I had no feeling of self-reproach,” he wrote, “for I fully believed that the contest was inevitable, and was not of our seeking.” As Doubleday saw it, he was fighting for the survival of the United States. “The only alternative was to submit to a powerful oligarchy who were determined to make freedom forever subordinate to slavery.”

Kudos to Doubleday for not obeying in advance.

The result is below. If you squint you can make out his attempt at a smiley face in the lower left corner:

Glad to see MS Paint live on in the next generation…

(Hat-tip to this documentary for the title idea.)

According to research by Neil Patel, 59.2% of traffic to blogs is driven by SEO. It’s the biggest single driver of traffic by far.

Neil found that if your site is 10 or more years old, 44% percentage of the pages on your site could be considered “irrelevant” by search engines. The more irrelevant pages your site has, the more it suffers in search ranking.

In other words, Google doesn’t understand what makes for good publishing on the web.

My question is: irrelevant how, and according to whom? Google’s almighty black box of an algorithm that has already changed in the time it took to write this sentence?

Imagine if your photo library was subjected to the same treatment. “Google thinks this cool photo I took is irrelevant, so I guess I’ll delete it even though it captures a meaningful moment in my life.”

I’ve been blogging for 18 years and not once in that time have I considered the SEO implications of my writing. I don’t even look at view stats. I suppose that could be considered a luxury since my blog is not a business and I don’t have a large enough readership to capitalize on. I’m also fully aware that my full archive of 1,200+ posts to date are important to no one but me.

Google is about now now now. That’s its business, but it’s none of mine. Blogging is about now and then. The experience of capturing what’s on your mind now and making connections with what’s come before.

I echo CJ’s advice: 

Don’t worry about what Google wants. It’ll change tomorrow. As will Google’s dominance.

Post as much or as little as you want. It’s your place.

Post whatever keeps you interested and publishing for the long term.

Post whatever helps you build a stronger connection with your audience.

Looking back at your archives helps you re-discover connections you’ve forgotten. It helps your readers do the same.

I was about to turn 14 at the time. I saw the footage like everyone else and understood it to be a significant event, but I couldn’t have known all the details of the day that the book brings to life all these decades later.

For that reason I’m very grateful to Graff for this monumental work of oral history, which captures the kaleidoscopic nature of the crisis by weaving testimonies from the myriad people affected by the attacks, including:

• people in the World Trade Center and Pentagon who managed to evacuate after the planes crashed (and even some who somehow survived the subsequent collapses)
• firefighters and first responders at Ground Zero
• people desperately waiting to find out whether their loved ones had survived
• transcripts of calls and voicemails from passengers of the hijacked planes
• air traffic controllers managing the unprecedented grounding of all aircraft across the United States
• fighter pilots ordered to intercept Flight 93 and take it down by any means necessary, including crashing into it midair
• Dick Cheney and White House staffers managing the crisis from an underground bunker
• Congressional representatives and staffers scrambling away from the Capitol with reports of more hijacked airplanes on the way
• Staffers with President Bush in Florida when they got news of the attacks, then on Air Force One as they flew between military bases before heading back to D.C.

One recurring motif that really stuck out to me was how often life or death came down to sheer luck, both good and bad.

One man had to leave his desk high up in the World Trade Center to retrieve a guest in the lobby, which allowed him to escape after the crash and avoid certain death. Another woman was standing at the copier instead of her desk when a plane struck and thus survived when all her other office mates nearby perished. And one firefighter fleeing one of the collapsing Twin Towers alongside a colleague turned one way and lived, while his colleague turned the other way and didn’t.

Call it luck or something else—we’re all a split-second away from death, often without knowing it. The Only Plane in the Sky honors those who were unlucky that day, and serves as a sobering reminder for the rest of us about the fragility of life and the extraordinary bravery of ordinary people.

It was given to me by my friend Jason, an artist who founded Geocommunetrics and gave it this unique cover design:

It was tucked in my backpack for most of that time and proved useful here and there for personal and professional notes, checklists, and all the other miscellany these small yet mighty tools are good for.

Why so long though? As much as I’d love to be a dedicated notebook person, I’m just more prone to using Apple Notes and other digital notetaking methods because my phone is always with me or nearby. Plus the ability to keyword search. Keeping a notebook and pencil within the same vicinity, accessibility, and consistency feels like a heavier lift—not to mention handwriting being a more time-consuming than quickly tapping things out.

I say this as someone who deeply believes in analog tech and the preservation of tangibility, whether through typewriters or vinyl or indeed paper. I also understand all the psychological benefits of journaling and handwriting, and every time I look back at what I do manage to get down on paper I’m grateful for having that in my own historical record. But that hasn’t been quite enough for me to get over the cognitive hump of making it a daily practice.

People who use paper consistently while also having a digital job: how do you do it? What methods have you found useful and why?

Drop a digital comment with your thoughts!

This Lonely Island musical medley is a thing of deranged beauty.

Another winner from Beautiful Public Data: Cold War military slides.

Didn’t realize the “junk journaling” I do was a thing.

A gorgeous longread on the “hardest working font in Manhattan.”

This week we said goodbye to our washing machine, which according to its serial number was manufactured nearly 35 years ago in September 1990. For context: Goodfellas had just released in theaters, Saddam Hussein had just invaded Kuwait, and I’d just turned three years old. Time flies.

Its sudden demise has made for a challenging five days without being able to do laundry, but I can’t be mad given how it chugged along far past its expected lifespan. Like its matching dryer (which knock on wood continues to chug along), the washer was the oldest of our home’s old-guard appliances that we’ve been replacing since moving in nearly six years ago. No doubt the new appliances are more energy efficient and all that, but they’re not built to last like these beastly machines of old.

Farewell, you wonderful old Building & Loan Maytag.

Not Xwitter. I already stopped using the platform but only recently did the full delete. Grateful to the new ownership for making it easy to kick the habit after 15 years.

Not Goodreads. Did the full delete of my Goodreads account as well. This might seem counterintuitive for a librarian and bookish person, but over the last few years I noticed myself using it less and less and didn’t feel the need to keep up with its archaic UI as Amazon lets it slowly die.

Letterboxd. On the other hand, it’s a pleasure to use and keep up with what’s happening on Letterboxd among my fellow movie freaks. I’d say it’s the only good social network these days.

Not a random Google Sheets app script. Related to all this book- and movie-logging stuff, I’d been using a random Google App Script for my logbook in Google Sheets that I found online so I could include multiple tags for each book or movie. But I discovered recently that Google (finally!) added native support for multi-select dropdowns and thus was happy to ditch the script.

Here are the 2024 dramas, documentaries, dystopias, debuts, and other delights I dug.

(Check JustWatch to see if and where they are available to stream, or your local library for the DVD/Blu-ray. See this list on Letterboxd.)

20. Molli and Max in the Future

A funny and sometimes wistful sci-fi remix of When Harry Met Sally that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Zosia Mamet and Aristotle Athari are a winning pair and fun hang as the will-they-won’t-they leads.

19. Peacock

Echoing the deliciously deadpan humor of Force Majeure, this debut feature from German filmmaker Bernhard Wenger follows a man so talented at blending into the fictions of his work that when his personal life begins to suffer, his ensuing existential crisis has him questioning his entire reality. It’s a darkly absurd and deliberately paced dramedy that serves as a wake-up call to people pleasers everywhere.

18. Mom & Dad’s Nipple Factory

A really nice discovery thanks to the chance to interview the director Justin Johnson. Spotlighting Johnson’s parents and the secretive prosthetic nipple business they started after his mom’s breast cancer diagnosis, this documentary also reckons with his conservative Christian upbringing in Wisconsin and subsequent religious deconstruction in a wholesome and humane way. Really nice portrait of family, faith, and life’s contradictions.

17. The Greatest Night in Pop

I’d heard “We Are the World” like everyone else, and knew vaguely that it was sung by famous musicians. But until watching this documentary I had no idea about its background or the logistics of making it happen, let alone the insane star wattage it harnessed in one room. Fascinating to watch the dynamics play out among these very different artists and personalities during an all-nighter for the ages.

16. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

We told our six year old we were going to watch the new Wallace & Gromit movie. “I don’t want to,” he said, “they are far too silly.” We still watched it, and guess who was laughing and totally locked in the whole time? Me, that’s who. And also our six year old. Anyway, any Aardman joint should automatically win Best Picture given how insanely difficult it is to make any stop-motion animated feature film, let alone a great one. 

15. Conclave

How Edward Berger turned ecclesiastical proceedings into a pulpy, beautifully shot mystery thriller better than it has rights to be shows just how powerful cinema is as an art form. And watching Ralph Fiennes play a character who’s basically the opposite of his role as Gustave in The Grand Budapest Hotel shows just how compelling powerful actors can be.

14. Rebel Ridge

Jeremy Saulnier knows how to make a damn thriller. In this latest pot-boiler, a former Marine has his bag of cash unjustly seized by local police, instigating his one-man revenge plot where with every slight escalation and provocation the stakes get higher and your heart beats faster. Civil asset forfeiture reform now!

13. Dìdi

I like the Google summary of this: “an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can’t teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love his mom.” As someone who was only a few years older than Dìdi was in the movie, I found much of this both very relatable (hello AIM and MySpace Top 8 and Motion City Soundtrack needle-drops) and also painful to realize how much I saw my own 13-year-old self in Dìdi’s adolescent angst.

12. September 5

A worthy ancestor of Spotlight in how it dramatizes a real-life moment of media ethics and production colliding with a dark chapter in history, in this case the hostage crisis at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. For me the tactility of the period technology—analog phones, walkie-talkies, film cameras, buttons and knobs, typewriters, hand-lettered TV chyrons—made this even better and more thrilling than it would have been if set during our current digital era.

11. Challengers

I rather flippantly called this “your typical sports movie featuring a throuple of sweaty, smirking scumbags swirling into a sadomasochistic, psychosexual spiral.” Which I think is accurate but also doesn’t make clear how fun and funny this movie is in spite of (or rather because of) that. If tennis is a relationship, as Zendaya’s Tashi claims in the movie, then this tennis/relationship movie is worth the commitment.

10. My Old Ass

How many boxes did this check for me? Let me count:
Earnest, bittersweet coming-of-age dramedy
Light magical realism
Frequency and Arrival homage
Includes Little Women motif
Birkenstocks-wearing character named Chad
Can’t wait to see what star Maisy Stella and writer-director Megan Park do next.

9. Here

To paraphrase Doc Brown, the critics crapping on this Robert Zemeckis adaptation of Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel (one of the best books of the 2010s) just weren’t thinking fourth-dimensionally. We live in time, people! You can’t fathom how much has happened throughout human history and prehistory on the very patch of earth you’re standing on now because it’s awesomely unknowable! The movie lovingly portrays the book’s intra-panel time-jumping, its timeless themes of life and death and love and loss, and its deft intertwining of the everyday and eternal—all while rocking an Alan Silvestri score that goes right for the jugular. And I’m here for that.

8. Dune: Part Two

I couldn’t see Dune in theaters so I was happy to be able to see this one on a big screen. It’s a sequel that very much stands on its own as a stunningly rendered experience while simultaneously bearing structural burdens that middle sequels often have. Still, anytime I can see big, weird, tactile, religion-infused spectacle like this is a good time for me.

7. Good One

In stark contrast to the bombast of Dune: Part Two, India Donaldson’s debut feature about a teenaged girl on a hiking trip with her dad and his friend thrives in the smallest gestures and pauses and looks—in what’s said and left unsaid. It’s Reichardt-core to the core: quietly portentous, nature-drenched, and oh so gently damning of parental obtusity.

6. Saturday Night

It’s hard not to be impressed by how Jason Reitman pulled off depicting in real time the 90 minutes before the first episode of SNL in 1975, complete with spot-on portrayals of the original cast and other figures. In that way it’s like the groovy ‘70s love child of Steve Jobs and Birdman. (It’s also a fascinating double feature with September 5, the other 2024 film set backstage of a seismic mid-‘70s television event.) More fables about the beautifully chaotic process of making art, please and thank you!

5. Civil War

One criterion for making my best-of lists is being something I just couldn’t shake. That’s definitely true for Alex Garland’s latest, which depicts a United States embroiled in a violent civil war and a crew of journalists trying to interview the embattled president. I find the criticism about the ideological vagueness of the different political factions to be beside the point—what matters is how different individuals choose to engage with the turmoil, from a young photojournalist compelled to capture frontline combat to a store employee blithely dismissing the conflict altogether. Let’s hope this doesn’t become more prescient than it already is.

4. Nickel Boys

Sure-handed, tough-minded, clear-eyed, and full-hearted, RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel takes cinema’s power as an empathy machine to the extreme with its first-person POV perspective, strapping us along for a turbulent yet touching ride along with two friends weathering life at a Florida boarding school. I found this to be in accidental conversation with the next movie on this list, both being searing 2024 films that dramatize the triumphs and travails of mid-20th century Black life.

3. Soundtrack to a Coup d’État

As a lover of history and jazz, this documentary spotlighting famous ‘50s jazz musicians and their role in the Cold War geopolitics surrounding Congo’s push for independence bebopped me right on the nose. It plays out much like a jazz track, with different people trading solos and the frequent context-setting intertitles like punchy drum riffs and an ensemble of colorful characters making the whole thing sing. As sharp and smooth as a Miles Davis solo, and a revelation for the documentary form.

2. Anora

From Tangerine (a favorite of 2015) to The Florida Project (my #1 of 2017) to Red Rocket (a favorite of 2022) and now this Palme d’Or-winning tale of a Brooklyn sex worker’s misadventures with a Russian oligarch’s son, Sean Baker has become American cinema’s most reliable anthropologist of the restless strivers and scrappy survivors at society’s margins. How this turns from high-flying Cinderella story to shambolic chase movie to gut-wrenching character study feels like a crossover of Scorsese with the Dardenne brothers, but also a continuation of Baker’s characteristically compassionate yet clear-eyed treatment of even his most challenging characters.

1. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

If Fury Road was the New Testament of George Miller’s Mad Max saga, bringing redemption to both the story’s characters and the action genre itself, then Furiosa is its Old Testament: brutal, beguiling, mercurial, and thrillingly epic. Call it a Pentateuch for a new (post-apocalyptic) age. Also really interesting to rewatch this right before another Fury Road rewatch as it provided the backstory to Furiosa’s journey and the events of Fury Road that I didn’t have the first (several) times watching it. In that way Fury Road felt more like the sequel/conclusion to Furiosa than vice versa, and made me appreciate both even more. This whole saga is a really rich text on gender, power, politics, and what we do to survive.

Still haven’t seen: Nosferatu, A Complete Unknown, The Brutalist, All We Imagine As Light, Wicked

Non-2024 movies I watched and enjoyed: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Populaire, Little Children, Green Room, The Thing

Happy 6th birthday to our firstborn! We celebrated by going out to breakfast and then bringing him bowling for the first time. He got second place with a bumper-assisted 85, while I snuck into first place with a well-timed strike at 95. While it had been about a decade since I’ve played, I also have just never been a good bowler. But that’s OK because it’s still a great thing to do for a date of any kind.

I’m happy to report that the state of one of America’s longtime third places was strong, with a bunch of retirees and families at the bowling alley on a weekday morning. Also happy to report the style and amenities were firmly stuck in 1993, including an Addams Family pinball machine:

There’s a maple tree in the meadow
And every winter it’s not making progress 
But in the spring, the tree starts growing away
And once you know
It’s taking so
Long to grow
Then you know
There’s a maple tree close

Twigs in the grass
And down below
You might know
Something slow
It’s a mole. Yes it’s a mole, ohhhh
What do you see under the snow?
Why it’s a mole!
So give it a dole
It’s hard to be a mole

Grammy Award when?

The first is in the sixth episode of season one (“Three Monkeys”). Frank, a laborer who also creates replicas of antique guns for wealthy buyers, is wracked with guilt and resentment after his sister and her kids were murdered by Japan’s secret police while he was being interrogated due to his girlfriend Juliana’s connection with the underground resistance. In distress, he goes to the home of a man named Mark, his sister’s former boss and a fellow closeted Jew who practices in secret with his kids despite Judaism being outlawed.

Mark asks Frank if he’d be OK with them doing a prayer for his sister and her kids. “Losing people is one thing,” Mark says. “Not being allowed to grieve for them, well, that’s another.” He then performs the kaddish, a Jewish mourner’s prayer for the dead, which is intercut with scenes of Juliana’s covert resistance work. In a ramshackle, candlelit apartment, hearing words he doesn’t understand but feels deep in his bones, Frank is finally able mourn his immense loss.

The other moment happens in the following episode (“Truth”), when Frank asks Mark why he chose to have kids despite the danger of being Jewish and continues to risk their lives practicing their faith. Their exchange:

MARK: I don’t plan on dying, Frank. But you can’t live your life in fear. I was back east at the end of the war, in Boston. You had to see it to believe it. Overnight, lynch mobs were murdering Jews because suddenly we were less than human. Those of us who came out in one piece, we buried service weapons underground, well-wrapped in oil, and we vowed revenge. I got a life to lead, got kids to raise. And Hitler and the Nazis—I don’t care how it looks, they won’t last. One thing I realized about my people is we got a different sense of time. These may be dark years, but we’ll survive. We always do. You’ve just got to find something to hold on to.

FRANK: Faith, you mean.

MARK: Yeah, faith.

FRANK: I don’t have any of that.

MARK: Well, what about art? You’re supposed to be an artist. Why are you making fake guns?

FRANK: Because no one wants to buy my art.

MARK: So do it for yourself. Beauty is important, Frank. It gives us hope.

FRANK: I don’t know. I don’t know where it would get me.

MARK: Yeah. Right. You don’t need anybody to keep you down because you got your own little inner fascist right there telling you what you can and cannot do. That’s how you let them win.

I wrote about The Man in the High Castle more generally after it debuted. Though I stopped watching after two seasons, these and other moments stuck with me ever since and resurfaced in my mind recently when I read Eliot Stein’s new book Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive. It’s a travelogue that spotlights artisans and specialists all over the world who have continued practicing their often incredibly arduous crafts, often with great sacrifice, even as modern life has rendered them obsolete.

From the world’s last nightwatchman in Sweden to an Incan rope bridge master in Peru to a rare pasta maker in Sardinia to the makers of first-surface mirrors in India, these dedicated folks have upheld traditions passed down often within a single family for centuries or even longer. How? And why? According to Paola Abraini, the Sardinian grand master of su filindeu pasta:

It’s a matter of principle, of tradition. What I have always said is that as a custodian of this tradition that has been passed down from mother to daughter, I will respect that. My daughters know how much of an undertaking this is for me, but they know how much I love it, so as long as the good Lord gives me health and life, I will continue to make it. I remain hopeful that one of them will one day take it on, but if they can’t, then I will be sad. So many things in this world that once were no longer are.

Stein writes that Abraini’s parting message “felt like a prophecy, a pressing reminder to cherish the beautiful, gentle customs that make the world glimmer while warning us not to blink.”

Guardians in the darkness

Perhaps you can see why learning about these remarkable people brought to mind Mark in The Man in the High Castle, who continued the practices he considered meaningful despite the societal forces allayed against him. He continued to cherish the customs that made his world glimmer and lived out his assertion that beauty is important. Though the traditions documented in the book aren’t outlawed like Judaism in The Man in the High Castle, they require the same dedication to uphold—to hold fast against the entropy of modernity and relentless advance of technology that would try to make them disappear.

The book also helped me reckon with what being a custodian means, which is much more meaningful than my reductive view of it as something akin to a school janitor. Knowing the word custodian comes from the Latin for guardian gives it the weight and nobility it deserves. And here’s the thing: custodians of all kinds keep the world going. Where would we be—what would we be—without the people who handcraft pasta, take out the garbage, clean up messes, build vital bridges, and routinely perform so many more acts of preservation and maintenance and care?

We are all custodians of something or someone, whether in our families, communities, or just our own minds. We must not let the fascists in our government or our inner voice dictate what’s important. Or make us forget that art matters, and that there’s good in this world that’s worth fighting for. (Cue Samwise Gamgee’s speech in Osgiliath.)

Tend to your garden. Make your art. Do not obey in advance. Find something to hold on to and be its custodian in the darkness.

What the next Beatles album could have looked like if they hadn’t broken up.

Title design of Best Picture winners and 20th century sci-fi.

Behind the scenes of Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

Behold the sight and sound of a meteorite strike.

These videos of a landscaper mowing overgrown lawns are extremely satisfying. 

Wikenigma is dedicated to documenting fundamental gaps in human knowledge.

Hometown discovery news: indigenous dugout canoes as old as the Egyptian pyramids.

A quick perusal of my Cool Words list shows 13 instances of this phenomenal phrase, including:

• Brumal: of or relating to winter
• Chthonic: of or relating to the underworld
• Palustrine: of or relating to marshes or fen; marshy
• Venatic: of or relating to hunting

I mean, come on.

You can try this with basically any word related to nature, medicine, or other topics of interest during the Scientific Revolution, when many of these words were first coined or derived from Latin/Greek.

Why write “snake-like” when you could say anguine? Or “skin-like” when cutaneous is sitting right there? And arenaceous sounds a lot cooler than “sandy”.

Most of the adjectives on my list I’ve found in the wild while reading something, but it can also work in the reverse. While writing the post about our window prism, I initially thought to describe the rainbow light as lightning-shaped but then wondered if there was a dedicated adjective for that. I searched “of or relating to lightning” and boom: fulminous (“of, relating to, or resembling thunder and lightning”) or fulgurous (“characteristic of or resembling lightning”). I didn’t end up using them but damned if I didn’t add fulgurous to the Cool Words list.

In early November we visited some friends on their farm in the far exterior of Chicagoland:

Hat-tip to this payphone that’s just hangin’ in there:

Sunset from a different farm:

A song of ice and fog at our local park:

The view from getting gas at Costco:

The sun shone kindly upon my wife’s gluten-free blueberry muffins:

Shadows and signs:

• In 2020 he was the only candidate who could beat Trump. Not Bernie, not Elizabeth Warren. So the fact that he won both the primary and general election was good for America.
• He should not have attempted to run for reelection. We’ll never know whether anyone besides him or Harris could have beaten Trump in 2024 amidst the worldwide anti-incumbent wave, but it would have been nice to have a legit primary to find out. Ironically he did become the “bridge” leader he was considered to be, except instead of bridging towards the next generation of liberal leadership, he was just a rather rickety interlude between two sides of Trumpland.
• On the personal front, the last four years have been thoroughly domestic affairs for us—trying for and having a second kid being the main focus throughout. Related to that was my choice after the 2020 election to step back from posting about politics here (as the politics tag shows), since I went into overdrive during the Trump years. I could go down the line rating Biden’s policies and accomplishments since then ( to supporting Ukraine, exiting Afghanistan, and signing the Electoral Count Act), but that’s moot at this point.
• Enjoy your retirement, I guess (and your Trans Am).

It’s a beast of a page, representing 130+ books and ranging from only a few bullets per book to dozens. But being text-only means it’s pretty lightweight, and I added a Table of Contents and jump links to make navigating it a little easier.

I’ve found the funnest way to experience it is by searching for keywords to see where they pop up in different contexts: try “trees” or “truth” or “books” and see where they lead you. Or just scroll at whim and enjoy the ride through my scattered yet very satisfying survey through the books that have nourished my mind and soul throughout my adult life.

Your city’s government, library, school board, and other institutions are required by law to post their meeting agendas, minutes, and other reports online, and I’ve found that even just skimming them is a great way to see what issues are being discussed and decided on, what different initiatives and changes are coming, and other stuff that’s often boring but also affects my everyday life—good and bad—more than national and global politics do. Don’t worry about reading every document—just know that they’re there and can help you be better informed.