Book Riot’s excellent “True Story” newsletter, which focuses on nonfiction, recently linked to a piece called “I’m Breaking Up with 3-Star Reads,” about the decision to stop pushing through the just-okay books and to focus instead on finding books to truly love. As a relentless optimizer myself (I know, I know, it’s capitalism trying to brainwash me, I know I’m sorry), I was allured by the author’s plan to optimize their reading by DNFing books as soon as they realized those books wouldn’t be four- or five-star reads. I have led (or attempted to lead) many a DNF-shy friend down…
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I watched Loki. On one hand, I enjoyed it. On the other hand, if I were the casting department at Disney/Marvel, I would spend all my days aflame with resentment that I went to all this trouble of casting the perfect people and ensuring they all have excellent chemistry together, only to have the company chuck the whole thing out the window by trying to use six episodes to tell a full television season’s worth of stories. My frustration with Loki is partly a bigger frustration with the trends in TV. Around the time of your Mad Mens and your…
Leave a CommentIn a lovely moment of reading serendipity, I happened to pick up Akwaeke Emezi’s memoir, Dear Senthuran, in the same week that I was working my way through Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred. Emezi is an award-winning writer of literary fiction and young adult literature, with three books under their belt and more to come. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an astrophysicist who’s come to public prominence in part through her accessible science writing for popular outlets like Slate and Bitch magazine. I started these two books thinking that they would be worlds…
Leave a CommentWell, friends, Supernatural returns for its fifteenth and final season tomorrow night. I recently finished the seventh season of Supernatural, yet somehow I am not even halfway done. It is, experientially, the longest show that has ever aired on television, the show that launched a thousand gifs, the show that has never let a woman or a black character survive in all its years of running. (I love Supernatural but OMG it’s a mess.) And as it veers into its final season, freeing up its leads to spend all their time making the con circuit and charge $2500 for photographs, we…
1 CommentI figured out nonrepresentational art in the spring of 2009 at the Tate Modern. I was there with my mother and a close friend, and the friend asked my mother– (Bear with me; I will get to Time War in a minute.) –what a particular piece of art meant. My mother said, “You don’t have to worry about that. You just have to look at what the artist made, and see if it resonates anything in you. And if not, maybe you weren’t the audience for it.” This advice was not directed at me, a person too proud to admit…
Leave a CommentConsensus around the new Amazon Prime Good Omens series is that it’s a rather static adaptation of its source material, and that David Tennant and Michael Sheen absolutely sparkle in the lead roles. I think this is correct! I’m not going to get into my broader thoughts on the show, which have been covered adequately by reviewers elsewhere, but I do want to talk a leetle bit about queerbaiting and the central relationship between Crowley and Aziraphale. Here’s what the lead actors and the writer have to say about that relationship: Michael Sheen: They’re both very bonded and connected anyway,…
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