He was one of those rare songwriters/performers who put a lot of work into his craft, but tried not to show it.

Of all the “eureka!” moments I’ve had cooking at home, realizing how unfathomably fucking easy it is to make a vinaigrette ranks near the top. Like, I’m actually struggling to think of something that’s easier to make, and it costs you about 25 cents’ worth of raw ingredients. I felt like an asshole for ever buying a…

Many years ago, I interviewed the Coens over the phone. Their voices sound pretty much identical, and I literally don’t think there was a single instance in this 20-minute call where either of them completed a sentence without the other breaking in. And it wasn’t just finishing each others’ sentences; often one would…

This is a pretty great interview. Rare to find an actor who has extensive things to say about his craft who doesn’t lapse into beard-stroking jackassery while saying them.

My favorite thing about Family Matters is that the show was initially supposed to be a sweet sort of slice-of-life sitcom about a realistic middle-class family in Chicago. Then, midway through the first season, they introduced an annoying one-off next-door-neighbor character called Steve Urkel. Fast-forward a couple…

Just on a practical level, it’s always bad news when the discourse around the financial stability of a once-impervious industry starts involving terms like “support” and “keep it alive.” It reminds me exactly of the way people used to talk about newspapers, magazines, and CDs – all of the sudden paying money for these…

It’s a damn good question that has no easy answers. I believe in rehabilitation and forgiveness, and I believe people who make good faith efforts to learn and atone for their mistakes deserve second chances. But where’s the line between giving someone a second chance and letting them off the hook? I think of one of my…

Right — you kind of have to have that gruesome death to establish the stakes straight away.

That stuff you’ve read is wrong — arm ripped off, pool of blood, the whole thing.

Yes, it did. And while I understand why both adaptations have divided the book cleanly into childhood and adulthood sections, it really does lose a big theme of the novel. So much of IT the book is about memory and trauma, the way a smell or a song or a walk through a certain neighborhood can suddenly thrust you right…

Having a kid has made me particularly vulnerable to this. I genuinely get mad at any film that uses a dead kid as a cheat, and most movies with dead kids do.

Having seen It, this is the perfect mindset for going into the film. It’s very much a popcorn horror-adventure movie, and definitely a well-done one, that nonetheless captures very little of what made the novel so great. But as you say, the novel is still there, unchanged.

1. Colin Trevorrow is not a terrible director, nor is he a particularly good one. He really didn’t seem to deserve the unbelievable opportunities that were thrown at him, but it does feel a bit much to cast him as the walking embodiment of runaway white privilege. Judging by his one good film, I’m sure he could do…

Yeah, in some other reviews there’s been a weird amount of personal hostility/armchair psychoanalysis about their reunion and Murphy in general. (One review even made a weirdly big deal about the fact that someone said not-so-nice things about young James Murphy in that Meet Me in the Bathroom book.) But you’re…

Losing My Edge is the best LCD song when you’re 24 and inappropriately impressed with yourself for only having to Google two of the references.

This is probably going to be a longish comment, but I have feelings here:

As much as actors love “speaking out” and “taking a stand” on various uncontroversial-in-Hollywood issues, it’s actually generally rare to see someone do so in a way that might tangibly affect their career. While I’m sure this dude lives a more comfortable life than most of us, he’s hardly a star, and he just turned…

And it’s a #sickburn because Katy Perry has never won a Grammy, whereas Taylor has won many Grammys!

“Blank Space” was clever, interesting, catchy, and displayed a relatively sophisticated grasp of irony. “Look What You Made Me Do” is the kind of “clapback to the haterzzz” track that a former Disney Channel star makes when she turns 18 and starts wearing crop-tops.

Pretty sure this is an effect of the post-“Blurred Lines” lawsuit paranoia, where people of Swift’s commercial caliber know any conceivable similarity to an existing song, however negligible, is fodder for a lawsuit. So you get out ahead of it instead.