I also don’t see how they could have possibly thought they would even be anonymous—they weren’t wearing Klan hoods, a lot of them willingly engaged with media (Hi, Chris “Crying Nazi” Cantwell), and almost all of them were young enough to understand how social media works. They were proud bigots who thought there…

I think I heard about this case on some true crime podcast or other. I believe the police’s prevailing theory was that he fell into the river? But his body has never been found and his parents don’t believe that’s what happened—I don’t know if they have concrete reasons for thinking that or if it’s just hope. Hope…

I loved Los Espookys so I watched My Favorite Shapes a couple of weeks ago, and I had that feeling that’s becoming familiar, that “I might be too old to be this material’s intended audience” feeling. And yet I did enjoy it, maybe not in a constant laughing out loud way, but in a low-key appreciation of its clever…

I avoid the shame of listening to Alex Jones by listening to him via the podcast Knowledge Fight, which is dedicated to using well-researched thoughtful rebuttal to point out how full of shit he is. But there’s still plenty of bizzaro rants, bad acting, fake crying, hot mic oopsies, and hard ad breaks to laugh at…

Every time I see a photo of Zuckerberg I think “That’s the face of a man who gets two hours of sleep a night and brags that it makes him more productive”.

Whatever happened to the adaptation of A Head Full of Ghosts he was supposed to be making? I really wanted to see that. Googling it only turns up various links from February of 2018, when it was announced he would be directing it. I guess it’s stuck in development purgatory.

Fun fact: there’s a guy running for local office where I live named Pervis Gaspard. Living in south Louisiana is a constant mental game of “Real dude, or character in a James Lee Burke novel?”.

Those are also on my “some day” list, so good to know.

There was more that I liked about it than not, and I am not King superfan nor have I read his entire output. But I did read it over a period of nearly a decade, and not one after the other. (I didn’t start until the year it was finished, because I was afraid he’d die before finishing it--a not unreasonable fear, given…

Grover Gardner read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, he must specialize in long form narration. That audio book of Skeleton Crew sounds dope as hell. I mostly know Dennis Boutsikaris from when he played one of the more unlikable defense attorneys on Law & Order: OG, but starting with World War Z a few years back…

Last night I found out more or less accidentally that the first season of What We Do in the Shadows appeared on Hulu at some point during the weekend, and I stayed up until almost 1:00 a.m. bingeing the whole thing. That hadn’t been my plan, I was just going to watch 3 or 4 episodes and then finish it today, but you…

At first glance I thought the headline said “Steven Soderbergh’s Banana Peppers Movie” and was like, those aren’t a big deal, they put them on Subway sandwiches.

I never watched The Young Pope past the first episode. Trump had just been inaugurated and I guess I wasn’t in the mood to watch horrible people being horrible for entertainment. Now that I’m sufficiently dead inside, maybe I’ll re-visit it.

Subversive comedy should punch up at powerful people who do terrible things and make the world an objectively worse place. Not down at their victims and other marginalized people. I thought Chapelle used to understand that, but stand-up isn’t really my thing so maybe my perception is clouded by early naughts nostalgia.

I don’t put it past Bret Stephens to have a Google alert set up for himself, but would a 9-like tweet even turn up?

How did Stephens even find that tweet? It had no re-tweets or hashtags and he wasn’t @’d. But anyway, yes the racist climate-change denier who boiled campus rape down to “bitches be lyin’” is VERY UPSET about being “dehumanized” by being called a metaphorical bedbug, how droll. That’s like being mad that one of…

I have a long-standing fascination with the Heian period of Japan (794 to 1185). The Tale of Genji is the best known work of this period, but my favorite of the written works that have survived are the diaries of court women. The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon was hugely popular among the noble ladies and got endlessly…

The Nickel Boys and Exhalation are both on my list. And Toni Morrison, I’m embarrassed to admit, is a glaring hole in my literary consumption. I’m going to start reading her books as soon as I’m done with my current “ready everything by” project, William Faulkner. I just have to finish the last book in the Snopes trilo…

My brother and I make fun of our stepfather for endlessly watching this one cable channel that only plays old TV shows since he retired; for up to 8 hours a day he’ll watch anything from The Three Stooges to Bonanza to Wonder Woman. But when I think about it, I guess I’m just glad it’s not Fox News, because I know so…

I was gonna ask if this was the “vagenda of manocide” guy, but I read the article first and yup. I still sometimes use that phrase on Twitter or Instagram, and whenever I go to Michael’s for washi tape or embroidery floss I like to refer to it as “vagenda of manocide HQ”.