What’s So Bad About Being a Monster?
What I liked about monsters was never that they taught me to love my body. If anything, that would have reproduced the same representational problem in a slightly more gothic…
The Five Things Essay
An all-purpose writing prompt to help you find your voice, lose your voice, beat writer's block, or figure out what the hell you want to write about in the first…
Pixar’s Layoffs Came Days After Receiving a $26 Million Tax Credit.
The purpose of California’s film tax credit is to encourage studios to create and retain production jobs in the state.
The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV’s Ambassador With the Avignon Papacy
The Free Press has documented a closed-door Pentagon meeting in which a senior Trump official lectured Pope Leo XIV’s ambassador on American military supremacy.
Dangerous Light
On a lost effect from the analog film era.
The magicians’ cemetery
It feels a little tired to write about Houdini and Halloween, like a last resort. You know the basics: Houdini died in Detroit on Oct. 31, 1926, at Grace Hospital…
The Best Substack Alternatives
It would be hard to leave Substack, granted. They are a very good, normal company—one that does not at all enable extremism (wink.) Everything Substack does is justified, and good,…
CEO Chris Best on racism on Substack
Substack CEO Chris Best on why racism is ok on substack
Eugene Debs Really Liked Bicycles
The mission of the bicycle is greatly underrated. Human ingenuity, in evolving the bicycle, has given man a mighty boon. It is to play a great part in the world’s…
This machine needs us but doesn’t care about us
“I think the pandemic really gave industry workers a footing to stand on and get started,” Hanley went on. “People were patting industry workers on the back, saying we’re ‘essential’…