I'm sure that will be wonderful!

Opening night!

This is nice, of course, but it does feel a little like, When in doubt, bring Shakespeare into it.

I'm having fun reading these, but the truth is, if you read it, you weren't too young for it.

BP Nom Ranking:
Messy/Great (Probably. Maybe.):
Secret Agent
OBAA
Sinners

Some Good Stuff There:
Marty Supreme
Sentimental Value
Bugonia

It's a Good Thing I Haven't Read It:
Train Dreams

I'm a Hater, Sorry:
Frankenstein
Hamnet

C'mon:
F1

Opening night!

you can make plenty of cases for other movies in other categories but there is absolutely no way Ludwig Goransson deserves a third Oscar before Jonny Greenwood wins one

Two* people are dead because of Republican senators like Ron Johnson, my miserably evil senator from Wisconsin, who have spewed lies and propaganda for political caché, while giving up their legislative power to rein in the anti-democratic and anti-human agenda of Trump et al.

(Far more than two)

What a beautiful theater!

"What are you trying to say?"
"Okay, just write that."

No offense to the Italians, but we could use a ménage à trois or a drag queen Renaissance painting somewhere in here.
#Olympics2026

hindsight is 20/20 but maybe selecting university presidents on their willingness to debase themselves for private donor money is related to the current difficulties in defending academia from fascism

Easily the best Rochester!

I just saw The Housemaid. It is perfect, high-gloss, beach-paperback Friday-night-movie trash of the kind we never get anymore. Everybody involved understood the assignment and aced it, and small heresy, this should have been Amanda Seyfried's Oscar campaign. Preposterously entertaining.

This Awards Season Officially Has Its Villain Hamnet isn’t this year’s Shakespeare in Love. It’s something worse.

For the good people of Slate dot com, I wrote about Hamnet, Shakespeare in Love, and why Shakespeare‘s prestigiousness does his work a disservice.

slate.com/culture/2026...

I think it came up as we were discussing other good Shirley MacLaine performances, and yeah, both Mel and I gave it a thumbs up. I'm glad you got to it!

Today, Marco Rubio is the Trump administration's most formidable liar. When Pam Bondi or Pete Hegseth or Karoline Leavitt or Stephen Miller refers to an anti-genocide protester or a day laborer or a sandwich hurler or a fisherman clinging to the wreckage of a fishing boat that has just been struck by a Hellfire missile as a "terrorist," they come off as pathological. But Rubio's approval ratings are the highest in the Republican Party, even as he is the architect of what is arguably Trump's single most cynical policy: the scheme to appoint drug cartel bosses and their cronies atop the governments of every Latin American country, in the name of fighting drug cartels.

holy fucking paragraph batman

prospect.org/2025/12/23/n...

There is nothing in this films musical cues, in the casting, in how it ends that implies much else but a "Yeah he sucks, but you gotta admire his gall" attitude. I saw it a second time and it only confirmed it.

and if you want to know... why Donald Trump is the president

It's because the Ecru measure Goodness as being able to handle snakes rather than avoid them.

Yearning!

Processing: How Brandon Taylor Wrote Minor Black Figures The author on embodied characters, writing process, and how “a novel should show people fighting and striving against and with and for and alongside each other.”

‘I’m sorry, but if reading theory makes writing harder for you? Good! You should think about your writing more. You should think more. You should struggle more.’

@thelincoln.bsky.social’s excellent interview with Brandon Taylor:

Even better! Weird hot is always better than conventionally hot!

What good is a dream man if he's not hot!

Opening night!

It's very fun, and also very hot!

You haven't read the book, huh?

The number one thing a person with a Nazi tattoo does not do is pass the smell test.

Now, I have a high respect for timeliness, but a statement like this is mostly just revealing a lack of knowledge about how most cultures outside of the (northern) United States relate to time and schedules.

We really are the outliers!

She's marvelous!

Your dad is my dad.