Betraying the Victims of the Opioid Crisis by Ryan Hampton In the myriad of legal actions taken against Purdue Pharma, and the Sackler family that profits from it, the spigot drip of half-measure punishments is no less infuriating for being … Continue reading Outside Reading — Outrageous Fortunes edition
Adia Victoria maintains that her new album, A Southern Gothic, is an act of reclamation. She takes back all that belongs to her and her kindred, in race, in culture, in gender, in every part of her identity that has … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Adia Victoria, “You Was Born To Die”
Since great television comedy always begins with the script, this series of posts considers the individual episodes that have claimed the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series over the years. For the first four seasons of … Continue reading Golden Words — Schitt’s Creek, “Happy Ending”
There are plenty of workplace sitcoms across the history of television. A remarkable number of them don’t both to really deal with work. The assemblage of people with disparate personalities, unified by obligation only, is a handy way to generate … Continue reading That Championship Season — Superstore, Season 3
Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter is valuable, too. When Norm Macdonald was … Continue reading Laughing Matters — Norm Macdonald on Late Show with David Letterman
These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art. When I was a kid, a few different magazines jostled for the unofficial position of being my … Continue reading The Art of the Sell — The TV Guide Fall Pre-View issue
302. Duran Duran, Duran Duran (1981) “We’re Duran Duran, and we want to be the band to dance to when the bomb drops,” Simon Le Bon declared from the stage in 1980, during the first live performance by the configuration … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #302 to #300
SALLY ROONEY IS IRISH by Sean O’Neill As the arrival of Sally Rooney’s third novel stirs up a deluge of swirling opinion silt in the waterways of modern literary culture, Sean O’Neill offers a thesis that seems ludicrously simple and … Continue reading Outside Reading — O Ruanaidh edition
I often hear the famous Toni Morrison quote “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it” modified to speak to the particular need to fill gaps in the … Continue reading This Week’s Model — MUNA, “Silk Chiffon (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)”
I’m hardly privy to all the information I would need to definitely determine why Billie Eilish’s debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, became an outright sensation. It’s sold more than four million copies to date, … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Happier Than Ever
