a famine of beauty by Carrie Courogen

I wrote my piece on Robert Redford earlier this week, but I am quick to concede that others paid better tribute to the icon. None that I saw was better than this remembrance by Carrie Courogen. It is personal and moving, accurately capturing the allure of Redford. She also puts his passing in a larger context. He carried himself with a decency and a commitment to improving the world that is in vanishingly short supply in a nation that has been turned over to leaders with souls that have rotted away. It makes his loss that much harder to bear. Courogen published this in her own Substack, bed crumbs.

The Conspicuous Contempt of the 2025 Emmy Broadcast by Myles McNutt

After several years largely characterized by predictability and redundancy, the Television Academy distinguished themselves with a series of inspired and laudatory choices with the 77th Emmy Awards. The thrilling triumph of Jeff Hiller leads the way, and Britt Lower’s complex character building in Severance taking a surprise win over Kathy Bates’s enjoyable but comparably mundane work in Matlock is close behind. The ceremony itself, however, was a disaster, reflective of the entertainment industry’s longstanding aversion to letting an awards show be an awards show. This is published by Episodic Medium, the website McNutt runs.