“Are you coming back?”

Who’s your favorite Looney Tune? No shame with going right to the top of the pyramid for this one as far as I’m concerned. There will always be an aspirational quality to the utter teflon unflappability of Bugs Bunny, more bemused than frustrated at the folly of whatever jamoke is currently harshing his vibe. He glides over all, threats, violence, social mores, gender norms, the laws of physics, the fourth wall, all of these collapse against the Zen Cool of that wascally wabbit (which, of course, is why so many of the best Bugs Bunny shorts culminate in an apocalyptic headloss, as Mel Blanc screams himself hoarse). Turn it around and you’ll find something relatable in the hair-trigger crash outs of Daffy Duck. Every slight to The Duck and his ego is a deeply felt wound, his aggrievement is in equal measure righteous wrath and petty narcissism and his rabid self-interest is deeply human. Most modern people are more Daffy than Bugs, but so few of them will commit to it. They all wanna be Bugs. Everyone does.

Then there’s the Coyote and the Roadrunner.

One of the first VHS tapes I can ever remember owning was a compilation of classic Looney Tunes shorts. The classics, of course. Duck Amuck. The Rabbit of Seville. Brilliant stuff, of course, but something about the simplicity of Wile E. Coyote (Card-Carrying Super-Genius) chasing that damn bird compelled me. Maybe it’s the lack of pretense. So many of Bugs and Daffy’s best stuff is parody of things a five or six year old in 2003 couldn’t possibly have the context for, but the Coyote isn’t cribbing the operas of Rossini. He’s trying against fate to solve a maze where the walls move to spite him. He’s battling the laws of the universe. Like the man said, you cannot negotiate with gravity.

But maybe you can take somebody else to court over it.

That’s an all-timer segue, folks, in the pocket, outtasight, let’s get this show on the road.

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I do love a film that more or less just does what it says on the tin, and Coyote vs. Acme is most certainly that. An absurd slapstick-driven “cartoons in the real world” comedy a-la Who Framed Roger Rabbit? about Wile E. Coyote taking the Acme Corporation to court over all the defective products they’ve sold him over the years, dragging a hapless strip mall personal injury attorney (Will Forte) into a legal joust with a corporate juggernaut.

Unfortunately, however, this is one of those situations where the film is more than just the film. Coyote vs. Acme has become cause célèbre for a demographic of plugged-in cinephile alternatively anxious and enraged about the accelerating consolidation of the entertainment industry writ large, and what it may mean for the medium they love. For those unaware, Coyote vs. Acme has been complete since 2023. After limited test screenings, Warner Brothers announced that they would not be releasing the completed film, preferring to take a $30 million tax write-off. Industry figures and the moviegoing public were united in outrage over the scandal, but outrage only gets us so far. Despite persistent rumors the film would be acquired by one streaming concern or another, it seemed for years that Coyote vs. Acme would be yet another victim of the bump and grind which accompanied the Warner Bros/Discovery merger, and the cost-cutting regime of CEO David Zaslav.

To give WB/Discovery the very barest kernel of grace over the whole affair, it’s perhaps understandable to view The Looney Tunes as a bad financial bet in current year. It’s a bit like the Muppets, still beloved in the abstract but outmoded and victimized by a culture that’s moved on and rendered their best formats a bit obsolete. Moreover, given Coyote vs. Acme was originally slated to be sent out to die against Oppenheimer, folding and taking the tax writeoff makes a grim, zero-sum kind of sense. Ironically, cancellation probably did a lot for this movie’s commercial prospects. Consumption as activism… so hot right now.

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But on the other hand they can all go to hell because this movie is awesome in all the ways I hoped it would be in addition to a million ways I never could have predicted. Why was this The Insider but with Looney Tunes? What do you mean animated Peter Lorre has a major role in this plot? John Cena is a much better, more fully realized villain in this throwaway comedy than he was in the WWE heel run his entire career built up to. The movie about Wile E. Coyote suing the company that sells him cartoon anvils almost made me cry more than once. It is 2026 and the Looney Tunes are anchoring the best comedy of the summer. Common was so right, we really are living in the future we always dreamed of.

I do think the secret sauce for shocking a legacy property out of prolonged malaise really is a simple earnest affection for it, artfully translated to the screen and nestled within a nominally compelling narrative. Simple, but often difficult to get right. It’s like baking, all the ratios and tones and textures and temperatures matter and a decimal point out of place can destroy the final product. This makes Coyote vs. Acme an incredible balancing act by director Dave Green and screenwriter Sammy Burch. The balance between jokes and referential easter eggs, between earnest love and madcap comedy, between social conscience and comedy for its own sake, is tuned to virtual perfection.

It’s interesting to see that the most compelling use of these characters in years is in service of Wile E. Coyote, a character that doesn’t speak, isn’t especially heroic, and mostly exists to fail in increasingly outlandish ways. Green and Burch’s greatest trick is in reckoning with that without descending into revisionism, making the hapless Wile E. more of a sympathetic figure or an avatar for some culture war martyr or another. What he is, ultimately, as an icon of struggle, failure, and perserverance. He’s Sisyphus, and, as the movie concludes, that boulder he’s pushing may be the only real friend he has. Who else, after all, could really understand him?

Go see it. It’s a good time you can feel good about.

I rate this movie five Albuquerque Carrot Festivals out of five.

As a sports fan in current year, there’s always something to keep an eye on. FIFA and UEFA have made sure soccer is functionally omnipresent these days. We barely had a month to miss the World Cup before club soccer returned. Baseball is rapidly approaching playoff time, which is usually my cue to get involved. The NBA, NHL, and NFL are all bearing down on my free time like a freight train. September also looks like a good time to get back into the UFC. Really, though, I’m easy. I try to keep an eye on just about everything in the wide world of sports because variety is the spice of life and people interest me generally. Different sports attract different people and hot-swapping in and out when the mood strikes me keeps me from feeling like I’m in a rut. The only major food group I’d say I neglect is tennis and that’s not out of any real animosity, just a lack of connection with the culture of the game and a tight time table. The life of a Jack of All Trades is such that I can decide my own level of involvement and keep a healthy emotional relationship with the sporting life. There is no schedule. I follow my whims.

Except, of course, for autumn Saturdays. Those are booked.

NCAA Division I FBS football is my favorite sport, period. It’s my favorite to watch live, it’s my favorite to watch on TV, it’s my favorite to take in journalism and analysis about, it’s my favorite to speculate about, it’s my favorite to gamble on. For a magical quarter of the year, a mad sprint from the very end of August to the hazy days after Thanksgiving, my world revolves around what happens when toe meets leather on Saturdays. There’s nothing I’d trade it for, nothing quite like it.

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In this respect, I suppose, I am somewhat out of step with the rest of football-watching America, at least here in an urban center and proud football region around Washington DC. I’m fine with the NFL, honest, I’m just usually a bit football’d out by Sunday and more amenable to a bit of soccer or a movie or honestly I may need to get some laundry done or something. Back to work tomorrow! Can’t lay around and eat chicken wings all day, at least not two days in a row!

Slowly but surely American football, that most cloistered of our national religions, has opened itself up to the world, or at least expressed an interest in obtaining the contents of the world’s collective wallet. It’s been an odd saga of fits and starts throughout my lifetime, one of bizarre grandiose ambitions (permanent NFL team in London) and quiet successes (NFL streetwear dominance in the UK, the existence of Jordan Mailata, literally any conversation I’ve ever had with a German fan). The NFL is the sort of corporate colossus ideal for a project of globalizing the game through ritual sacrifices of cash. But as the world meets the NFL, they get a narrower, colder, more corporate distillation of America’s most popular sport. It’s a league for the media centers and the branding partners, the financial and technological archons of modern globalized capital. This results in a kind of disconnect between the league and the nation. The NFL is America, but not its people. No single institution can ever truly embody a nation, but I would argue the coverage provided by NCAA athletics in general, and football in particular, is in the elite percentiles globally. College football is the national sport of middle America, and it provides a greater portrait of my country than any elite professional league ever can.

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For this edition of Putting You On Game, I want to explain, in brief, why I do my football watching on Saturdays. Why I love it. Why I think your autumn may be improved by learning to love it as well. Because God, do I love college football.

The Format

There are thirty-two NFL franchises, nestled, (with rare and special exceptions) in America’s largest urban centers. There are one-hundred and thirty-eight schools playing football at the highest level of NCAA intercollegiate competition. From one-hundred and thirty-eight teams, we get one national champion at year’s end. But getting there means roughly three months of football. These one-hundred and thirty-eight teams self-affiliate into “conferences.” In essence, self-contained leagues who prioritize games against other schools in their own conferences. These conferences decide their own champions after the conclusion of their league schedule, early in December. After conference championship weekend, an opaque and mysterious body known as the College Football Playoff Selection Committee picks the twelve best teams, seeds them into a playoff bracket, and we play single elimination knockout ball until we have one team left standing. Yes, you read that right, we basically convene the sports media equivalent of The College of Cardinals to decide who gets to play for a National Championship, and yes, everyone is mad about it every year. It used to be we’d have number one play number two and that would be that. Number three was always mad. Then the playoff expanded to four teams. Number five was always mad. Now we have twelve. We could go to fifty teams and number fifty-one would be bitching and moaning all offseason about corruption in the Selection Committee and vowing to never watch again.

The format being stupid is what makes it better than a format that’s less stupid. I don’t care about “merit” or who “deserves it.” I want to be entertained, and not knowing who’s safe and who isn’t is entertaining! Playoff qualification is almost without exception a high-wire act. It used to be one loss effectively ended your season, now the upper echelons have more breathing room, but not much! This has only been exacerbated by bigger, richer conferences gobbling up poorer ones. The SEC (traditionally confined to the American Southeast) is now up to sixteen teams. The Big Ten (a midwest conference, nominally, that now has teams from California and the Pacific Northwest) is now up to eighteen!

The overall effect of consolidation is that none of the big boys play an easy schedule anymore. No easy schedules mean unparalleled week to week drama. There is no feeling quite like checking the scores and seeing an Alabama or a Miami in mortal peril against a team they were favored to beat by twenty-five points or more. If you like rooting for an underdog, college football is for you. The underdogs have been growing in quality over the past few years as well. Ever since the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the NCAA in NCAA vs. Alston, college athletes have been able to make money off of their name, image, and likeness (NIL). While many predicted this would allow the rich to get richer, spending money to hoard talent, the actual effect has been a broad diffusion of talent into obscure nooks and crannies. Superteams are arguably rarer than they’ve ever been, as players pursue their own self-interest and elite teams struggle to keep rosters together long term. The traditional middle class of schools in has seen a crunch on their prestige and security, but almost every year a team from a school you’ve never heard of turns into the best story in the sport with a rag-tag band of low-level prospects that everyone seemingly misevaluated and a coaching staff with some crazy ideas. The game’s hyperevolutionary environment means that no two seasons are quite alike, and that’s before we consider that these guys all run out of eligibility eventually.

Which neatly segues us into.

The On-Field Product

Let’s do some math. One-hundred and thirty-eight college football teams (plus all the teams at the FCS level directly below them and all the Division II schools, and the international player pathway programs) produce players that could theoretically play for one of thirty-two NFL teams. That breaks down to about one percent of all college players who will ever see any amount of NFL football.

In lieu of explaining what that means, in terms of watching the game, I am simply going to reach for one of my favorite sports tweets of all time:

College football is more entertaining than pro football because 99% of people playing it are not good enough to go pro. That sounds counter-intuitive, but think of it in terms of breadth of possibility. College coaches can do things tactically that simply can’t be done in the NFL because players are too big or too fast. When everyone is super-human, it means the times where people actually look super-human are fewer and further between. The college game’s broader talent pool lends it a certain volatility on any given play. Any time the ball moves, you have a chance to see either the dumbest or most incredible thing you’ve ever seen.

Here, lemme show you what I mean:

The Insane Bullshit (Or, “The Culture”)

College football is just about everywhere and in every sort of community you can imagine. From the University of Washington’s Husky Stadium on the scenic shores of Union Bay in Seattle to West Virginia University’s Milan Puskar Stadium (which, on game days, becomes the most populated place in West Virginia) you can find college football in communities of all shapes, sizes, complexions, and creeds. From metropolitan Los Angeles to quaint college communities like Ann Arbor, Michigan, cow towns like State College, Pennsylvania, and time/space anomalies like Blacksburg, Virginia (a town which is seemingly near nothing) there is scarcely a municipality in these United States where an autumn Saturday does not mean game day. This means it is virtually unrivaled as a cross-section of American insanity.

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Here, I’ll just pull a rune of madness out of a hat. Most colleges fund their athletics in large part by soliciting donations from wealthy alumni. Auburn University, just a hop, skip, and a jump down the road from their mortal rivals at the University of Alabama, is no exception. In Auburn’s case, their power booster is a lumber magnate named Jimmy Rane, the richest man in the state. Which means a large portion of Auburn athletics’ decision-making runs through a man who gets on TV in a garish yellow cowboy outfit to sell pressure-treated timber.

Think that’s crazy? Consider that Phil Knight, founder of Nike, was a former track and field athlete at the University of Oregon. This means the Ducks get a bazillion dollars a year from dear old Uncle Phil, plus a whole wardrobe of garish-ass uniforms. They wear a different one every week. Neither Phil’s money nor Nike’s fancy uniforms have won the Ducks a national title (yet).

Let’s whip back across the country to Athens, Georgia, where the University of Georgia Bulldogs have developed a reputation for defensive excellence under head coach and visor enthusiast Kirby Smart as well as a miles-long list of speeding, street racing, and drunk driving citations among players. Give a college kid a big check for NIL rights and he’ll buy a dumb car and drive it recklessly, who knew?

The capital of Drama in college sports, in my opinion, is Baton Rouge, home to Louisiana State University. They were national champions in 2019 under the stewardship of suspected Swamp Thing Ed Orgeron, putting maybe the greatest college offense ever assembled on the field. The Bayou Bengals then promptly regressed to also-ran status and Big Ed got fired for bringing his mistress around the practice facilities and embarrassing the LSU country club booster set. After poaching head coach Brian Kelly from Notre Dame, LSU mostly remained mired in mediocrity. Though Kelly did briefly pretend to have a southern accent (for some reason) and the Governor of Louisiana Jeff Landry decided to engage in a bit of glad-handing by demanding that LSU bring a live tiger into the stadium before a home game. LSU were promptly routed 42-13 by Alabama and the idea went back to the Huey Long years where it belongs. After firing Kelly, LSU set a new standard in kicking hornets nests with a coaching hire as they induced Lane Kiffin, a man whose shit-stirring tendencies could support his own edition of this column, away from the University of Mississippi while they were preparing for a playoff run. They literally had to appoint a new head coach just for the playoffs! Since arriving in Baton Rouge, Lane has apparently found a new hot yoga studio, and recently become embroiled in a pissing match with former LSU quarterback Jayden Daniels over whether Daniels owns the number five.

I could go on. I could be here all day just listing things. The Sooner Schooner. Ralphie the Buffalo. Bevo. Iowa fans cheering for the punter. Touchdown Jesus. Toomer’s Corner. Matthew McConaughey. The Army/Navy game. The Holy War. The Keg of Nails. Paul Bunyan’s Axe. Miss Reville the fascist goddess-dog. It’s all good. All earnest and true. All little knots of bizarre humanity tying this unknowably gigantic, deeply insane country together. I love it like I love America. It can shock you, disappoint you, terrify you, and leave you numb.

But it’s all mine, and I love it to death.

I stand by every word.

They’ve run all the honest, work-a-day perverts off of Deviantart and Pixiv and E Hentai and all the rest of the incognito tab hot 100. Did ‘em like the US Army used to do the Lakota Sioux and the Crow and the Cheyenne. Sent the cavaliers in, got the women and children running to the hills, that’s where you park the infantry with the repeating rifles. Clean em up. Scatter em to the wind. Put their shit in glass boxes. Here, citizen, a rare artifact, a picture of a woman with basketball-sized tits actually drawn by a human being. None of that anymore. No money in it. The latest industrial revolution has come and the role of the luddites in this evening’s production will be played by the professional gooners.

AI art is gonna throw human sexuality as we know it into a taffy puller. I don’t think there’s much to be done about it. In some ways it was inevitable. This is content delivery now. The streaming video services all do it. YouTube pioneered it. Spotify arguably perfected it. You, as a consumer of media, are sold an infinity of instantly available choices. This sales pitch is a lie. In reality you likely have less choice than you enjoyed the years before instant delivery of media. What you have is the illusion of infinite choice. What you have is the illusion of a curated experience. In reality you are directed to one of several troughs based on which subspecies of pig the app suspects you are. If you don’t like the slop they pick for you that day, that choice goes into your livestock evaluation file. The service, the app, gets to know you better, theoretically removes the incentive to discover new content organically of your own accord. In so doing, the subscriber becomes the product and pays for the privilege of accessing the media which comprises their curated identity.

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In the modern way we engage with pornography, we direct this process ourselves. This will not be the case for much longer. The Goon Algorithm is being birthed by someone, somewhere, as we speak. The mass production of six-fingered, same-faced gynoid mannequins in the strike zone of some fetish or other is merely the first stage. The prompt engineers, by and large the sort of people writing bad erotica or crafting upsetting SecondLife porn before the grunt work of drafting and composition could be outsourced to the machines, are merely a transitional phase. What comes next will not enfranchise them, it will replace them. The AI girlfriend is coming imminently. It is merely a question of what form she will take.

We’ll see a handful of business models, no doubt. The market will decide the most successful. Not the best, I stress. Merely the most successful. Success, in this case, means mass adoption, profitable monetization, cultural ubiquity, and (again) that illusion of a unique experience. The prefab gf will not hold appeal, especially in a modern age of deeply insecure masculinity. No one is gonna wanna fuck the free version AI girlfriend. That’s broke boy stuff, playa. You gotta buy the goonerpass. You should wait for Christmas and get some expansion packs. Not all of it is essential, though. Here, this Reddit thread gives a pretty good summary of what you can skip. Though frankly I think the guy who wrote this is wildly overestimating the value of Foot Fuckers Community Select Pack #7. I think everything up to and including the fifth pack is essential but after that they switched community managers and the fall off was really noticeable. The sixth pack was basically already done by then but you could tell the love had gone out of it, you know?

The central question here is whether we (yes, we) sell the AI girlfriend as a palliative for the romantic Desert of the Real or a cure for it? Does the AI companion (because women and homosexual men are by no means exempt from our prospective customer base) augment one’s dating life or replace it? You’ll doubtless see an infinity of divides, cultural, economic, and so on as these companies come into being but that, to me, is the philosophical question which underpins the whole nascent industry. Is this porn? Or is this a sufficient evolution of the form where it can fulfill a higher function?

Let’s game this out, starting with the second case. Let’s assume we’re a small-ish startup with some venture capital. Our behavioral algorithm is our trump card. We can simulate the experience of having a loving partner better than our competitors. We advertise heavily on podcasts and YouTube channels frequented by young single men. We’re looking for a certain profile here. Not misogyny, but apathy towards the opposite sex (we can branch out to same sex coupling later). Tired of dating? Tired of feeling judged? Tired of the mind games? The transactional nature of it all? You can go to our website right now and take our free questionnaire to evaluate your romantic temperament (we’ll come up with some trademarked term for this). From this questionnaire we’ll craft your personal generative AI companions and give you a choice of which one is right for you. You’ll then access this companion for a nominal monthly fee. At least I assume you will. I’m not an accountant. Maybe the money men will see better long term prospects in a flat fee up front. My assumption is that we’ll be better off doing this at a low monthly rate.

Anyway basically everything from about the midpoint of the preceding paragraph onwards is bullshit. Our questionnaire won’t actually affect anything, at least most of it won’t. We’ll have maybe three to five buttons linked to actual levers. The rest will be for data harvesting (where the real money is). Think of it like the bit from Total Recall when Arnold is getting his Mind Vacation and they’re asking him what kind of wet dream he’d like to have. We’re only moving like three or four sliders on the character creator here (e.g. - Tits or ass? Race/ethnicity? Personality? Height? Weight?) the placebo effect handles the rest. “Wow, I told the quiz that I wanted a girlfriend who would watch sports with me and now she’s helping me draft my fantasy football team. This stuff really works!”

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Assuming we find some success and can secure more investment, maybe plan an IPO, hire some more people, we need to move very quickly. Because if software is where we excel every single day we are in business will be a race to beat the posse out of town. We can’t afford to fall behind by even an inch. If we lose our monopoly on magic it’s over. If China throws a trillion dollars at some AI lab in Chongqing that’s making something very much like our product? The CCP decides to follow up Zero Covid with Zero Incel? Homie it is over. I already sold my shares. I’m on the next flight to Guyana. I’m writing my memoirs. I’m getting my fee for a speaking engagement worked out. Y’all have fun. Best of luck.

Let’s explore the other case. If we’re talking about a simple porno service with a little more variance and engagement than is currently available to the end user, it really becomes more of a marketing game. If we’re selling the thing you have instead of a romantic partner, then we’re emphasizing quality. If our service is merely meant to jerk you off while your girlfriend is on her period, then quantity may be the key metric. Gatcha games may be instructive here. The companies that run these things make billions just charging for the right to roll a slot machine and maybe get a JPEG of a cute anime girl or boy. I know games like Genshin Impact or Zenless Zone Zero have tried to shed this reputation by emphasizing actual gameplay but I’m from the old school with this sort of thing, playa, you can’t fool me. You want me maxxing my credit card to roll for Artoria-chan.

There are two lessons we can take here. First and foremost, it may actually be both a waste of money and a misunderstanding of consumer/gooner psychology (consgooner? We’ll work on it) to try and tailor an individual experience to a particular personality profile. People already pick fake girlfriends by participating in “fandom” (methadone for a post-religion society withdrawing on divinity and meaning, I’m afraid). Maybe the ticket to success in the coming goon wars isn’t the software end of things, the interactivity, the nuance and depth of a flesh and blood woman or man digitized and made more instantly available and malleable to the whims of the consumer. If our audience wanted a real relationship they’d go and get one, or so goes the logic. We’re selling fantasy. Let’s lean in.

People don’t want an individual relationship, that’s too low-human-capital coded. Only losers marry the prom queen now. Winners assemble a multiethnic harem of amoral clout demons and traumatized people pleasers and prune it down over time based on their concubines’ tendency to talk back, spend time with people that aren’t them, or turn thirty. Ordinarily you’d have to be a sex trafficker or a dropshipping mogul with a Cybertruck vinyl-wrapped to look like the Akira motorcycle to live that lifestyle. We’ll bring that to you, but without all the shouting and psychological manipulation inherent in the arrangement. Better yet, we’ll bring you partners too perfect to actually exist and allow you to access them on your schedule. Remember that one girl from that one cartoon who gave you your first boner? You want her? Want her every night? Good to hear. Let’s talk payment plans.

Established IP is going to be the magic bullet. Assume we’re a new subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company. Disney Adult Entertainment. This way we can copyright the phrase “Disney Adult” and sue people who use it as a pejorative for slandering our company. If you think Disney is too wholesome and pure to get into e-porno I have several bridges to sell you. For the adults in the room, let’s move on.

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Our deep IP bench gives us a lot of potential avenues to pursue monetization. There’s the Princesses™ obviously. That’s what I figure we launch with, let’s not be too cute here. I think, frankly we should give them away for free or something very close to it. We need a strong user base. Someone’s gonna tell me we’re leaving money on the table, I respectfully disagree. Gotta get into the consgooner’s shoes here. If it’s free it’s initially attractive but quickly loses value. We aren’t aiming to make money on Cinderella or Jasmine or Mulan. We’re leveraging exclusivity. We’re gonna get paid on the swimsuit costume, the Christmas costume, the bridal gown/lingerie set. Do you have any idea how much we can charge some of these people to get the exact same character model with the exact same LLM generated mannerisms but with bare feet? Better get that cash together quick, tho. It’s only available for the next ten days. Take a payday loan if you have to. Eliminate some expenses, live in your van, move into the internet cafe cubicle. Survive off cup noodles. Steal your mom’s credit card and use it to roll our gatcha, valued customer. You don’t want to be ashamed by the rarity and value of your digital harem, do you?

We need to implement some limits. Not onerous ones but they should be firm. Say you can run four companion AI’s at a time with the basic free service. Maybe we allow a fifth slot for a “rental” product which we’re trying to promote at that particular moment. But four permanent ones feels good to me. Now, here’s my proposal: we allow our users to bank a theoretically infinite number of options, but you can only run four. Where we actually make our money is in limiting the ability to swap companions in and out. This will encourage our users to put serious thought into their choices (and in turn, ties those choices more deeply into the presentation and performance of their identity in association with our company and its products). This will also aid in the sales of several tiers of premium pass. Because four perfect girls who obey your every whim is pretty baller but ten would be twice as baller, right? You get it. This is sex as Spirit Airlines. We offer a very cheap service and headhunt people that will pay more to feel special.

Limits imposed on the end user need to be counterweighted with some limits of our own. First and foremost we need to remember that this is porn and only porn. We can’t have emotionality enter this equation beyond a sort of narcotic. We want cheap beer and marijuana contentment and sticky lotion-handed lethargy. Cinderella shouldn’t be crying and begging for mercy with the user as he ships her off to cold storage for an indeterminate amount of time so he can make space for the five-star super super ultra rare Muscle Mommy Pocahontas he just rolled. It should be clean. Disposable. Like closing a browser window. Your companions shouldn’t be asking hard questions of you or competing with each other for your attentions above a benign, harem anime level of intensity. We’re leaning into the sterile unreality of it. This is relationship methadone in its purest and most honest form. We say; “we know you don’t care about any life that isn’t your own and get bored when people try to get you to alter that worldview, and that’s okay. We don’t judge. We simply provide the magic.”

More Words Here

I’ve been dancing around the actual mechanics of how we will interact with our AI companions. This is because I honestly do not know. My suspicion is that it will be on your phone for a while (this is arguably already the case). After that, who is to say? VR porn is already extremely ubiquitous and only getting more so. You can buy sex toys that are meant to interface with a VR setup. They’re as upsetting as you might expect when viewed from the outside but the dude with the VR goggles and the hard-on seems to be having a good time. To each their own, of course. Takes all kinds.

I’ll make one early prediction. I’m prepared to be wrong about this but I don’t think dedicated gynoids with the rough proportions and mannerisms of adult humans will ever catch on in a serious way. Social taxes are a real thing and the prospect of paying them drives behavior in a real way. Can you imagine how badly the first guy to show up at a party with his robo gf is gonna get clowned? That’s really what it comes down to; people will think you’re a loser for doing that nonsense out in public. It’s too “Google Glass” coded. Oooh lookit George Jetson over here. Prick. Social taxes, man! I know some of you guys like to do DreamWorks face and talk about IQ and The Longhouse when people (women) say you’re not allowed to praise the Wehrmacht or talk about racial crime statistics on public social media but I’m not arguing on your behalf when my girl says you and Kimiko-tan are banned from the next function. I hope you find the plug-ins to teach her to do that thing with the ping pong balls like you wanted but I frankly don’t need to see it, dude. I’ll take your word for it.

I’ll also say, while I’m staking out some skeptical positions here; I don’t think the Blade Runner 2049 holo-girlfriend is the path. You need to be able to experience touch or else this is pointless. That’s the real desire we’re trying to meet and fulfill here. That’s the pathetic, raw, bleeding heart unpinning all discourse surrounding the “male loneliness epidemic.” A lot of men are badly in need of a hug and don’t wanna admit that outside of the context of a 4Chan porno sharing thread because they’re afraid someone will dunk on them and then they’ll be “the incel who needs a hug” until they die.

So the solution is most likely some kind of “full-dive” neural network uplink or honestly fuck it just get a gooner implant. Build the cyber-succubi a condo inside your frontal lobe. Have them do the Haruhi dance for you when you close your eyes. Jerk off until you get callouses on that thing. Pay an Indonesian guy $25 for the fan-patch that voids the warranty and lets you put Elsa and Anna in Waffen SS dress uniforms. Avoid all the torturous, traumatizing pain which, I’m reliably informed, inevitably results from modern relationships so you can sit naked and alone in your home, talking to girls that exist in your head.

The biggest party of the summer has come and gone. After all the sturm und drang about cultural friction, ticket prices, a xenophobic political orthodoxy, and the ostensible ignorance and apathy of the American sports fan, someone kicked a ball and the festival atmosphere descended like clockwork for almost the entire duration of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. I say “almost” because, as with any big blowout party, the vast majority of the fun was already had by the time everyone went home. It’s a curious structural feature of the World Cup; it gets less exciting as it goes on. The group stages are full of giddy possibility, color, life, optimism. Photogenic underdogs tend to emerge and win hearts early. The climax tends to come early in knockout play, as higher stakes ratchet up the tension, but entropy generally sets in by the time we reach the quarterfinals. Gambling men will tell you: chalk is law in the world cup. This year was no different.

Spain were, no doubt, deserved world champs, but their final triumph over Argentina can be thought of as a monument to the tournament’s inherent entropic quality. Nobody without a direct rooting interest seemed particularly enthusiastic about the possibility of either team lifting the cup and the match itself was a snoozer, a quality enhanced by the halftime show feeling like a fever dream.

But complaining risks obscuring how much genuine fun was had in the course of this cup. In this age of fragmented reality, reflected and refracted though each individual’s preferred Internet Looking Glass, the World Cup was a rare hit of monocultural communion. The whole world was watching, and so we were, for a few weeks, united as fans. That’s the feeling that will endure, I hope. The matches blur together, the winners and losers become dour little facts, but the experience of the thing resonates deeper. A remarkable watching experience can tattoo itself on the memory.

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For this edition of Putting You On Game, I put the call out to readers of this blog to stand up and be counted in this people’s review and reaction to the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Seven of you answered the call. I would like to acknowledge and thank each of them here, before we begin let’s meet our contestants:

Now let’s play the feud.

Team of the Tournament?

I messed up right off the bat here. I didn’t specify whether I was looking for a combined best XI or a best team that actually played in the tournament. People seemed to lean towards the latter, so I’ll do the same. Special mention, however, is due to Patrick Cleary for providing his Best XI, which is as follows:

Goalkeeper: Orlando Gill (Paraguay)

Right-Back: Achraf Hakimi (Morocco)

Center-Backs: Pau Cubarsi (Spain)-Aymeric Laporte (Spain)

Left-Back: Marc Cucurella (The Spanish Guy with the Hair)

Midfield: Rodri (Spain), Jude Bellingham (England), Michael Olise (France)

Wide Forwards: Lionel Messi (Argentina), Kylian Mbappe (France)

Center Forward: Erling Haaland (Norway)

I’ll say I mostly agree with this, though I’d substitute Dayot Upamecano for Aymeric Laporte. I understand the pick, Spain’s defense was the class of the field and explains, in large part, why they lifted the cup. France’s defense obviously faltered once Upamecano lost his running buddy William Saliba to a back injury, but when he had his preferred complimentary piece next to him, Upamecano was that rare athlete who still looks superhuman on a field loaded with elite competitors. Like a tank with quilted leather massage seats and surround sound.

Additionally, while my head appreciates the Ball Knowledge required to acknowledge Orlando Gill’s shootout heroism to eliminate Germany in the round of thirty-two, my heart is with Vozinha. It was a huge cup for the men between the posts but Cabo Verde’s veteran keeper was the feel good story of the cup, and his performances will forever be a part of its remembrance.

On an actual team of the tournament, the consensus generally settled on the World Champions. Ghost of Giraldus sided with the majority but gave honorable mentions to Cabo Verde and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but S. Mooney provided, in my view the definitive take on Spain’s 2026 squad:

“…they won but also were never really threatened, they didn’t ‘dominate’ but were never really threatened. I also just enjoy the tiki taka style.”

For my own part, aside from those listed, I think I’ll remember this Norway team fondly. Scrappy and a bit limited in the way loveable national teams often are but able to punch above their weight by doing one thing very well. I noticed it from the Senegal game in the group stages, Norway had a different sort of momentum when they had an opportunity to get moving on the counter. A fun-to-watch team, an instant classic kit, a viral crowd celebration, and an iconic star at the center.

Which makes for a good segue.

Player of The Tournament

To my surprise, we actually have a plurality consensus here. Perhaps we can chalk it up to our English respondents contaminating the sample, but Jude Bellingham seemed to make far and away the biggest impression on the voting audience. Allow me to include some impressions below here for your perusal.

“...he came in as probably the most scrutinized player and put England on his back when it counted.”

• S. Mooney

“Like Frau Tuchel, I find him repulsive. There is a strong whiff of CR7 about this guy, you can see how full of himself he is as he plays and in the way he carries himself. But he stamped his authority on this World Cup in a way that reminded me of Zidane, and for a few dreadful minutes he made me feel as if England could actually win this World Cup. It feels harsh not to give the player of the tournament award to Messi, who was actually better in this one than I think he was 4 years ago, but I am punishing him for how boring (the final) match was.”

• Patrick Cleary

Patrick’s sentiment must have been felt by at least a few of the other voters, as Argentina’s little magician did not receive even a single vote. The Dictator Kylian Mbappe and his loyal strongmen Michael Olise and Ousmane Dembele also received no love. Russell Lifson voted for Lamine Yamal and Exa Moseley hand-waved the question, suggesting the award should go to; “someone on (S)pain probably - they blend together…”

If you want my take, I have to stand with James Benson Sarsgard here. My player of the tournament was Erling Haaland, with an honorable mention for Vozinha.

Statistics are for nerds. International sports are about feelings, narratives, the psychic union and cultural explosion they produce. In that regard, in capturing the public consciousness, The Striking Viking stood alone. No other player did more to encapsulate the vibes of World Cup 2026 at their highest.

Shame I can only root for him every four years or so (here’s hoping Norway makes a run to Euro 2028).

Goal of the Tournament

The voting public and the institutions are in union here. Cape Verde’s Sidny Lopes Cabral’s wonderstrike against Argentina has received goal of the tournament from both FIFA and this informal straw poll. Not much to be said. You’ll see it for years to come.

We weren’t unanimous, however. S. Mooney recalled Mostafa Zico’s non-goal for Egypt, also against Argentina, ruled out on a controversial foul call.

Ghost of Giraldus gave plaudits to the reigning Ballon D’Or winner, Dembele. He didn’t specify a goal, so how about we just watch all three of the ones he scored against Norway?

Finally, I admire Russell Lifson’s straightforward insight in marking out Ferran Torres’ extra time final-winner as the class of the field.

If I can be a bit selfish here, I’m going to reach for the best goal I saw live. Kylian Mbappe’s strike to put France out of sight against Senegal. Exquisite.

Moment of the Tournament?

I’m going to step out of the way here and let my respondents have their say:

“The above goal by Cabral. The moment, and his reaction after was special. You see players celebrate in sports all the time, but there was something about the look in his eyes as he ran into the stands looking for his girlfirend that felt really unique, touching, and in many ways unlike anything I’ve ever seen in sports. Very sweet moment, I thought they were destined to win after that, but alas.....”

• James Benson Sarsgard

“Cabo Verde’s draw against Spain. Pure WC magic. A heroic rearguard performance that got everyone doubting Spain (until they beat France).”

• Ghost of Giraldus

“The first time the fans sang Wonderwall to all of the England players after the Croatia game. I like it a lot. It was just a momentous occasion that really encapsulated the zeitgeist. I watched this with all my friends packed into this tiny room during a house party. Drinks were going and the party was flowing. But we were all zoned into this one thing - into this one match, this one beautiful manifestation of humanity. And after seeing the hope that England could really go all the way, by finally playing with some vigour. It was as if what this entire nation felt became embodied when all the fans start singing Wonderwall to our brave soldiers.

Since we are no longer, as with many nations or peoples, dedicated to war and conquering. The spirit of the volk, whilst often combative, finds victory in any place they can find it. Thus no longer do we parade those returning from the somme, instead we cherish these men who merely kick a ball about, because now they are the ones who carry the soul of their nation upon their backs.

Thus through love and hate, we see them as our soldiers fighting for us. And with each inch they move forward through the field of tournament football do we rejoice beyond compare.

So to see the fans in lands so very far away engage in this wasn’t just fun, or kool, or even beautiful - it was spiritually holy. It became a new form of ritual, and at that point all of us back home sing Wonderwall to our knights in polyester sweat-retaining matte-white armour, because they are so many things we would like to say to them, but simply do not know how.”

• I Like Things

“Cody Gakpo scoring to put Morocco ahead a few days after his wife miscarried. The tears on his face and the emotion of the other Dutch players as they celebrated with him remind you how powerful this game is. I was a bit sad when Morocco came back and won that game, which was one of the best of the tournament.”

• Patrick

“(T)rump being pushed aside during the celebration at the end, (T)rump openly flexing corruption to get the red card ejection overturned, cursing his own team”

• Russell Lifson

“England’s win over Mexico in Azteca was incredible and will be one of my lasting memories from the tournament. I thought it was a beautiful, gritty display by England and I left the tournament feeling very positive about England’s team despite the loss to Argentina (which was devastating). I thought the win over Norway in the Miami heat was also cool to see and a hard earned victory. They deserved to be in the final and I think they would have had a shot, but that’s how it goes. Should have played Saka

Winning at Azteca is so hard. It’s one of the toughest environments in sports and to do it down a man for 40 minutes. Seeing Jude collapse after was beautiful. They really fought so hard. It’s as good as sports gets.

(F)or a homer pick 1st half USA vs Paraguay was maybe the best they have ever played”

• Exa Moseley

“Sad Messi”

• S. Mooney

Match of the Tournament

It was razor-close but the English lobby once again makes its presence known. Here’s the prevailing opinion:

“Mexico vs England. I’m super biased but I’ve not seen an England performance like it since maybe Colombia in 2018 and even then, nothing matched it for intensity, drama, and wonderful play from both sides. A proper blood and thunder international where nothing was held back, the will to win overcoming the fear of losing - a rare thing indeed in the strange world of international football.”

• Ghost of Giraldus

Hydration Break! Free Parking

I asked everyone if they had a superlative that didn’t fulfill any of the prior prompts. Here’s what they gave me.

“The total fiasco surrounding Iran. They got hosed for sure. I’m ashamed of how they were treated in my country/by my government. And their determination to keep going despite all of the obstacles and of course a string of very bad luck at the end.”

• James Benson Sarsgard

“The penalty shift - stuttered run ups losing their hot streak for the classic run and smash. Minor perhaps, but big when VAR has tipped the scales towards the big beasts getting more penalties. I hated the conspiracy theorying and hero worship of this tournament. A proper team won, as it should be. The golden boot/ball race is a sideshow. Fuck Gianni Infantino, the ghost at the feast of every match he went to.”

• Ghost of Giraldus

“Cabo Verde. I am now Cabo Verdean. Enough Said.God Bless that tiny nation.”

• I Like Things

“Vinicius went on a run in the game against Japan (what a match that was, by the way) which would have gone down as one of the greatest World Cup goals of all time if Zion Suzuki hadn’t made the save of his life. He beat 4 or 5 defenders and looked more unstoppable in those 20 seconds than any other player did at any point in the tournament.”

• Patrick

“Scotland in Boston, awesome, also Algeria in Kansas. Wonderwall, I like it! Hey, Jude also I like it! Similarly Country Roads was cool! I think in general there was some great singing at this world cup. Trump curse is so real. As a VAR hater from the beginning I feel vindicated. It is ruining soccer. We have lost a lot with VAR specifically in how the game feels. Water/Ad breaks sucked but hopeful those won’t be a lasting thing (at least in 2030). The group stages were so happy and the knockouts felt like poison especially after the Balogun red reversal. A lot of conspiracies, discourse sucked a lot of the time. Found trying to find the wokest one of the last 4 teams hilarious. Was bummed. Yamal didn’t have a great tourney, Spain a great team that wasn’t very interesting unless he was a star to me. Elite tournament if you love Arsenal and love being annoying about Arsenal. Lots of hot guys to look at. How we treated Iran disgusting. John Strong might be the worst commentator in sports. People are letting Stu Holden off the hook for being less bad but he is also awful. The Hargreaves Fox crew was elite. Thank god I can delete the Fox One app from my phone. Enzo (Fernandez) seems like an evil man but the celebration for his goal against England with the puckered face is an all timer and I can’t stop doing it. 48 team world cup I ended up coming around on and I think 64 will be fine. Getting rid of the weird 3rd place stuff will make it feel better. Ronaldo playing for 90 minutes every game genuinely shocking to me. What a waste! France cratered once Saliba was out, coincidence?? Cape Verde was cool I liked when he celebrated in the stands with his girlfriend. Have to put it a second time I hate VAR so much”

• Exa Moseley

“The jerseys were awesome this year. More teams showing more vibes. Africa really showing up with some fire, Senegal, Ghana, Morocco, DRC all looked awesome.”

• S. Mooney

Any Fan Experience That Stands Out?

It occurs to me now that hopping back in to offer my own impressions may be construed as bragging a bit. Not only did I attend a World Cup match (France/Senegal) but I spent my bachelor party weekend orbiting around the ongoing World Cup festivities at the Linc. Drinking with Croatia and Ghana fans in a big rainy parking lot and watching Paraguay send Germany home on penalties from a smartphone in the bleachers at a Phillies game may have actually surpassed going to a match in terms of pure vibes. Once we’d left the ballpark we stuck around at a nearby sportsbar that actually stayed open late to show the shootout between Morocco and the Netherlands. It really did illustrate just how much of an all-encompassing experience the cup was here in the US.

But enough about my Cup, how was yours?

“When (England) beat Norway, you just had to have seen what was happening on the roads. Cars blocking paths, people running onto the roads and standing on cars. You felt as if this was the time, because never were the vibes like this where people just so happy and ready to see it come home.”

• I Like Things

“I saw nearly every jersey possible around New York for the past month. It was wonderful hosting the world, and I’m ashamed that the NJ government left a bad impression with their transit price gouging.”

• Patrick

“The crowd pop for the muppets halftime show appearance. Neutral (A)merican crowd ALL rooting for (S)pain and booing (A)rgentina a lot. Lots of packed bars and good times, went to a lot of different spots. Small college town but fans of all types even still. The US/Belgium crowd had great energy I wish it was a different result.”

• Exa Moseley

“Not my town, but I was in New England when the Scots were there and they were a blast. Big partiers but super nice and great vibes. Made a few friends and now I need to go to Scotland.”

• S. Mooney

Stoppage Time: What Will Stick With You About This World Cup?

“The overall experience of watching all of it go down in my country was special, even though Trump tried to taint it, it was nice to have abreak from gross politics and have some camraderie with the rest of the world over a shared bonding event. Looking forward to 2030!”

• James Benson Sarsgard

“Yanks getting into Football is always so nice, it’s the world’s game! Everyone is welcome. The cronyism and greasy palms at the top of FIFA will always hang over a modern WC, it’s a shame it was so obvious here. The bad vibes of this Argentina side will haunt them for a decade or more. In the short term, it might help you win games but it will poison the atmosphere in the long run. Goals goals goals galore, Mbappe going Gerd Muller and Bellingham getting more goals than any Englishman ever at a single WC is special. He’s a special player and we must cherish him.”

• Ghost of Giraldus

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“It made me both radically optimistic and pessimistic. I just gained so much hope only to be left with a feeling of Schopenhauerian demise. Yet the fact that I could be filled with such joy is something I will cherish forever, even if it all came crumbling down. Cus hey, that’s life. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

• I Like Things

“Sadly, the Balogun affair is probably going to be the thing which sticks with us the longest. Everyone will be crying conspiracy for decades whenever something goes against their team because of the door that FIFA opened with that decision. It’s going to be very annoying.”

• Patrick

“(T)he openness and flaunting of the corruption, the physical fight w(ith) the sore losers at the end, truly a children’s game for babies who can’t grow up”

• Russell Lifson

“The gap in the level of play between the top teams and everyone else and between Europe and the field. Having 48 teams allows for some cool cultural moments and a few Cinderella upsets but it really dilutes the group stage and makes the round of 32 more of a formality that a compelling matchup. I also think Europe is really pulling ahead of the rest of the world, Argentina without Messi does not look like a threat in the near future and Brazil and Uruguay were a shell of themselves. Africa is looking markedly better but they’re more catching up to (and surpassing) the Americas than they are competing with Europe. Morocco is a legit threat and earned their win over Netherlands and trip to the semifinal, but other than that and Germany shitting the bed, no top European team was really challenged by another continent (again, not including Messi). All that being said I liked the expansion because it was fun and chaotic and brought the Scots to America.”

• S. Mooney

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“(T)rump curse real - VAR bad - England needed Saka - It’s coming home 2030”

• Exa Moseley

As for myself, I dunno. I suppose what I’ll cherish most about it is how much it allowed me to see people. My father, friends from out of state, the whole sick crew here in DC, plans were being made virtually all the time, and while I watched most of the tournament at home, where the beer is cheaper and my cat and fiancee are around, I had one of the busiest social months I’ve enjoyed in some time. It’s worth acknowledging, I suppose, that The Cup may be over, but The World is as present and welcoming as its ever been.

“Back, back into your disguises.”

I’m not really a Christopher Nolan Guy, and I don’t really understand people who are.

Now don’t get me wrong here, he’s a quality filmmaker. I readily gave Oppenheimer five stars. I’d throw Memento on at the drop of a hat. Dark Knight was a cultural touchstone of my youth and I consider it worthy of its pedigree. Even the famously-inscrutable (not nearly as complex as some think) Tenet impressed me more than I assumed was possible on my first viewing. Actually though, I think I’ve gotten the most mileage, in personal terms, out of Dunkirk. Not the movie, but the associated stories I can tell. I worked at a multiplex during the initial theatrical run, big and purpose-built, complete with an IMAX theater. The sound tuning on that one was so bass-forward that when bombs would go off in the IMAX, it would audibly shake the marquee posters riveted into the front facade of the building. We never got so many complaints about a single film. No, sir, we can’t turn the volume down. That’s how Christopher Nolan wanted it. Want a refund?

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This story, in addition to reliably getting laughs and mouths wide open in shock, illustrates both why I am not a Christopher Nolan Guy, and also why I make a point of seeing his movies whenever he makes one.

Nolan is the youngest and most vital among a diminishing class of auteur able to mobilize massive resources, money, materials, technology, and performers, in service of whatever he wants to do. He is free to follow his muse wherever it leads and the studios will readily open their checkbooks to finance that journey. He’s literally inviting me to watch him set hundreds of millions of dollars on fire in service of whatever his current fixation happens to be. How am I not going to watch that?

However, a creative environment where nobody can tell you “no” means a body of work that lives and dies on the decision-maker’s personal taste. I find Nolan compelling as a craftsman. As a tastemaker? Up and down. Balls and strikes. Nothing to ever make me roll my eyes, but nothing to compel and thrill me in the way my true favorites do. The skeptics paint him as a man devoid of an artistic spark. The cold, technical, cerebral bard we deserve in a STEM epoch devoid of higher ideals. I watch guys build cars and write software for robotic golf clubs on YouTube, also my favorite filmmaker is Michael Mann, so clearly I have no issue with watching a technician solve hard, fast physics problems and then broadcast it as entertainment.

The flip side of the coin, however, seems to draw more ire. “Nolan Bros” are one of those demographics of allegedly-insufferable people that are supposed to be ubiquitous, but I have never once met. I know fans, but they’re fans of Nolan in the same way people are fans of, say, The Grateful Dead. I could see myself sharing their passion, but only if I was someone else. I suppose, as much as they befuddle me with their love for the artistic tastes of a man I consider to be pretty much equivalent to a tub of vanilla ice cream in that department, I envy the Nolan Bros for their ability to get excited, rather than simply interested. In theory, though, I should be excited for The Odyssey. As a former Percy Jackson Kid I retain a fondness for Greek mythology and better yet, it’s one of mankind’s great stories still lacking a definitive adaptation in film. Cohenheads will no doubt reach for Oh Brother Where Art Thou? But that film’s central conceit is that the best way to adapt the Homeric epic is to do so in a way which dodges the astronomical costs involved. Doing it straight up is nigh impossible before we even leave the begging for a budget stage and actually start trying to shoot the movie. It’s the sort of epic task a guy like Nolan should be ideally suited for. Cut through the studio risk mitigation and give us that singular vision of brave Odysseus and his long, strange trip home.

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SPOILERS COMMENCE HERE

I am bound and determined to discuss the primary text (the film) and only the primary text in these reviews. If I bring up concepts or companion/ comparison works, it’s solely to illustrate my own headspace. The Odyssey is making this difficult simply because, as the tentpole blockbuster of midsummer, it has arrived at the end of a monthslong hype parade of extrapolation, speculation, and interpretation of what this film (which was released mere days ago at time of writing) is be, would be, or must be. A lot of people were very confident that this film was going to exist pro or contra some specific politic or worldview literal months in advance of our being able to watch the thing.

This makes it, in short, gut-bustingly funny that after all the sturm-und-drang about the film and its cast, The Odyssey is… A Monster Movie! And a great one, at that! The iconic monsters of this myth, exiled for too long into the Dungeons and Dragons bestiary, recapture some ability to awe, to shock, to inspire genuine fear. This is a true credit to Nolan the Craftsman and Nolan the Spender of Money. No actors reacting in a vacuum to as-of-yet unfinished VFX blobs represented by tennis balls on a Burbank sound stage. By God we are gonna rig up that twenty-five foot puppet inside a musty cave to ensure that this Cyclops has gravitas! This is not a level fourteen miniboss encounter for parties of three or more, this is a borderline kaiju and you will feel its heft. It’s a neat heuristic for the film as a whole. When a scene or concept is a problem which can be tackled by Nolan the engineer, it’s smashing expectations. The evocative imagery of the myth comes to life because the money was spent and the hard, practical problems were solved. It’s charming, to me, because that’s ultimately the legacy of the 20th century’s stabs at mythic filmmaking. You get this sort of Ratatouille flashback of lil Chris Nolan in front of the family TV, watching Jason and the Argonauts, totally enraptured. How did they get those skeletons to move?

Nolan gets a lot more than the skeletons to move. The Laestrygonians, the Lands of the Dead, Circe, oh my God, Circe. Christopher Cronenberg, more like. Excellent. The Syclla may actually stick with me more than any other monster in the lineup despite maybe thirty seconds of screentime simply because it is such a nice nutshell illustration of how this approach both highlights Nolan’s strengths and reveals his weaknesses. One the one hand its an instantly iconic and genuinely skin-crawling depiction of a monster which always struck me as a bit ambiguous in its proportions and dimensions, Nolan makes a boss call and it pays off. On the other, it demonstrates that for all his technical might, Nolan is all thumbs in setting up a proper scare. There’s never the fake out, or an attempt to wrong-foot the audience. You always know when a camera is lingering just a touch too long on some poor crest-helmeted goon about to die horribly. That’s probably for the best, given this film’s ambition to fill multiplexes the world over, but once again we confront the limits of the singular vision we are being served here. Nolan the Engineer is in peak form, Nolan the Artist remains streaky.

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The nice thing about a massive budget sensibly spent is that one can hire people to cover for their weak points and Nolan most certainly does that. Anne Hathaway is Anne Hathaway, no real need for further comment, beyond any reproach from me and certainly not in need of any praise, still hoopin like year twenty LeBron, let’s move on. Tom Holland should fire his agent because he’s thirty years old and still playing these impotent angsty teens/early twentysomethings but I’m sure the checks are good. The strategy of pretending to be twenty until you’re forty worked well enough for Leonardo DiCaprio once upon a time, I suppose. Give it a pass, not like Telemachus has too much of a role in this story beyond Wanting His Dad To Come Home, anyway. It’s the little turns that stand out in a big, bold, epic production. The human moments against the canvas of mythic grudges and trials. John Leguizamo doing career-best work in this one was not on my bingo card but in retrospect, he’s an obvious Nolan Guy, think Josh Hartnett in Oppenheimer or noted guy-who-is-also-in-this-movie Benny Safdie. I’m on record saying Benny ought to act while he’s young and photogenic and he’s good here but in a vacuum, and with minimal intent to mock and jeer; it is so so funny to cast Benny Safdie as Bronze Age Darth Vader. But it works! Same with Jon Bernthal as the lemme tell you somethin’ King of Sparta, who proves an able tag-team partner for scene stealing turns from Lupita Nyong’o.

If we’re talking scene-stealers, however, tribute must be paid to Elliot Page. Simply tremendous. People had questions, both bad faith ones and justified ones, about how Nolan was going to deploy both Page and Nyong’o and I found them among the best performances in the ensemble. The same cannot be said for Robert Pattinson or Zendaya, but that’s less a problem with his performance and more with the script. An Odyssey where the gods and their agendas are more or less obscure means we need a human face the audience will want to see punched before the credits roll and Bob Patt certainly has that in spades but that doesn’t mean his slimy scheming ever scans as a genuine threat. I frankly did not think Nolan would be so bold as to attempt any serious departure from the accepted ending of the myth, and he didn’t surprise me. Maybe we really should have gotten some member of the Actors Guild of Great Britain to wear a toga, shoot lightning from their hands and introduce themselves as Lord Raiden Zeus or Aquaman Poseidon. As it stands we have Zendaya doing the “feel guilty” face as Ambiguous Athena. Still not dumping my stock in either actor ahead of Dune: Part Three. Swaggy Bobby is about to Freak It as Scytale, bookheads know.

More Words Here

Can’t have an Odyssey without Odysseus, of course, and Matt Damon finds himself with a tough road to hoe as marquee leading man gigs go (and that’s before we count all the times he had to be wet and miserable). He’s tasked with finding the sweet spot between popular myth and Nolan’s own distinct insight into this immortal story and the real world history around it. The resulting performance is a hero of simple nobility rather than stirring oratory (save one notable exception at the last possible moment). In this way he’s an able avatar for his director. Whether he’s the Odysseus of your childhood imaginings is ultimately up to you, and therein lies the rub with the whole production, doesn’t it? Mythology belongs to everyone, both as individuals and as a collective civilization. The problem of adapting a text so universal is that everyone will come into it with their own baggage. This makes Nolan’s approach, of simply calling his own shots and accepting the reactions as a fait accompli, all the more laudatory. I do not agree with all the choices made. There is a persistent feeling of bloat, a sense of cleverness over transcendent pathos, and a compelling discussion to be had about imposing modern morality onto premodern peoples. But I cannot help but respect and admire the confidence, vision, and commitment.

In the course of watching this film I think it finally clicked for me why I find Nolan compelling as a director even if I feel consistently out of step with him as a creative. He’s not unlike Odysseus himself. Exemplary in some ways, flawed in others, but committed to the struggle and eminently worth rooting for.

I rate this movie four lotus flowers out of five.

It’s sort of difficult in 2026 to pick any one looming threat to cinema as an art form or movies as an industry that’s distinct enough from the crowd to be worthy of a Sword of Damocles allegory here. If anything, being a film freak these days is rather like having dinner under an entire chandelier of swords looming over your head, all of them tenuously secured to the ceiling and heavy enough to pop you like a water balloon full of red paint. AI. Studio mergers. A climate of boring risk-aversion. Dropping attention spans. A dodgy macroeconomic climate generally. I can keep going.

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However, one sword in particular that’s looking more and more threatening all the time is the imminent retirements or deaths of the twentieth century’s master filmmakers. These men are not just artists of immense skill, renown, and commercial reputation, they serve as a conscience and a grounding, moderating force in an industry which grows to resemble the casino atmosphere of modern America more with each passing day. Without wishing to engage in any soapbox talk about the need to preserve history over profit and artistic heritage over economic efficiency, it is pretty worrying, to me, anyway, that most of the people qualified to take meaningful moral stands in defense of the art form are men in their seventies and eighties. Men like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and, of course, Steven Spielberg.

I suppose I could go around the horn with the standard “you-may-know-him-from” IMDB skim and paraphrase here but more so than in any other edition of this review column so far; it feels roundly pointless. He’s Steven Spielberg, a name practically synonymous with successful blockbuster filmmaking. He made Jaws when he was twenty-six and has spent the fifty years since leaving an unequaled legacy in American pop-culture. It could be argued, perhaps, that the great man has been diminished somewhat in the past decade (don’t jump me Fabelmans gang) as he’s shifted more into producing and emerges only for the odd passion project. But the mark of a true hitmaker is that they’re only ever one project away from being back on top, and with a return to the thriller mode which has served him so well, Disclosure Day seemed set to remind us all who the real king of movies is.

A film critic acquaintance of mine, Eli Friedberg, (read him in Slant and The Film Stage) called Disclosure Day “Spielberg’s Megalopolis” after attending an early screener. This got me excited because I am an avowed defender of the aforementioned Mister Coppola’s widely-lampooned rich old guy “Change Da World” freakpiece. It’s not brilliant, but it’s fun! I know in this age of gerontocracy we chafe against the alleged wisdom of the oldsters but there can be a certain sublime quality that an accomplished creative can only access once they start seeing the reaper in the mirror.

Megalopolis Review Here

I fear my buddy Eli and I miscommunicated.

He didn’t mean Disclosure Day was Megalopolis in the way I liked. He meant it in the other way. I’ve written five-hundred words so far to avoid facing the fact that this thing is by any metric disappointing. No joy in Mudville. Mighty Spielberg has struck out.

Disclosure Day is let down from the jump by its marketing. Trailers hinted at a return to the conspiracy-heavy American crack-up mode of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The actual film is a fairly standard chase thriller, mostly cribbing from Minority Report if you want a Spielberg comp.

A cybersecurity expert (Josh O’Connor) in the employ of an organization tasked with containing and exploiting alien artifacts and life forms on Earth has absconded with the entire treasure trove of video evidence he’s meant to be protecting. Going on the lam with his girlfriend in tow (Eve Hewson, Bono’s daughter) and barely a half step ahead of his former boss (Collin Firth in a pretty intriguing villainous turn, more meat on that bone I reckon). With a rogue faction of the organization (led by Colman Domingo in a more respectable addition to his Year of Getting That Check than Michael was), they plan a disclosure of the material, all of it, inviting debate over whether humanity is ready for these truths and reflection on how it might affect our perception of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. Oh, also World War 3 may be breaking out. It’s not well established or elaborated on.

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There’s certainly some things to like here. Spielberg is seventy-nine years old and still directing circles around the industry. He will simply never lose his touch in that regard. It’s a real indictment of modern blockbuster filmmaking that even in a minor effort like this, Spielberg’s camera feels so much more alive. The old men continue to dominate this field simply because the younger guys, whether out of sloth, ignorance, or fear of spooking some boss, have lost touch with the fundamentals that have always lent the cinematic medium an ability to thrill and astound. If Spielberg ever follows through on that remake of Bullitt he’s been threatening, I’ll be there, ready to forgive and forget.

Special mention is due to Emily Blunt, who’s easily the best performer in this cast. Playing a career-frustrated Kansas City weatherwoman who begins manifesting empathic powers of insight, communication, and clairvoyance seemingly at random, she’s asked to take a big swing, omniscient and overwhelmed at once, and absolutely nails it. Early Oscar buzz may bear fruit. It’s almost a shame Marvel never got the X-Men under the big tent because she’s playing maybe the best Jean Grey ever put on film, complete with redhead dye job.

The other thread of this plot, however, the one I summarized, is doing less well. A lot less. Josh O’Connor is as bad as I’ve yet seen him here, seeming totally out of synch with both the direction and the material and Eve Hewson gets it even worse. Frankly she’s more a victim of David Koepp’s genuine stinker of a script here than anyone else in this cast. The onetime scribe of Jurassic Park and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man has been pitching more and more of those lately, but frankly I don’t know if I can even blame him. This is allegedly Spielberg’s passion project, these are his ideas and fixations, and they’re embarrassingly underbaked.

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There are thematic thrulines I find interesting, but they’re interesting because of who is saying them, not how (Blunt being the exception). There’s some insufferable high-school grade religious anxiety about how we may feel our own place in creation, knowing we share it with intelligence beyond our world. There’s an overwritten but competently acted exchange of philosophies between Firth’s cynical company man and Domingo’s idealistic free-thinker. But the one I keep coming back to is a kind of unspoken chiding of middle America. There’s a kind of sickness of the spirit shot through Disclosure Day’s America, mostly the midwest. An unspoken sense that we’ve all grown cloistered and self-involved, unable to confront the big problems and face the unknown. This is, on its face, somewhat compelling. Spielberg took the Americana of his youth and sold it worldwide. Our great media prophet growing disgusted with the heartland is the exact sort of moral judgement I spoke of artists of his authority as having the unique authority to render. Blunt’s character works so well because it communicates this so artfully, this accomplished, well-compensated, materially comfortable sort of woman who cannot be content, cannot feel at home and happy because of some ineffable missing thing which she can’t help but pursue. The sudden unraveling of her life by forces beyond her understanding is a kind of euphoria, simply because that need to strive, to be more, is finally silent. She’s content to buy the ticket and take the ride, but the destination disappoints.

Spielberg may have a diagnosis but no treatment. Like so many of his generational cohort, the solutions he proposes for our national malaise feel stuck in the twentieth century, his century. The final act of Disclosure Day is the worst thing any film seeking to make a statement can be: a meme. Already it is being metabolized, reconfigured into meaninglessness, and will soon be gone, nothing, vapor. The great man has not lost his touch. He’s just lost touch. I fear that may be worse.

I rate this movie two North Korean smart phones out of five

Lemme tell you something I really appreciate about The Furious. Right into it, no intro, no preamble, no framing device, no ice, no chaser. This is not that sort of film.

When the average viewer reads the marketing copy and sits down to watch, they do so with the basic idea that The Furious is mostly just meant to sound kinda hard. Provocative. Gets the people going. Doesn’t really mean anything. It’s about some dudes and they’re mad as hell, yeah, sure, The Furious. Wrong!

There is one specific shot, totally unmissable and mostly pointless, that establishes exactly who The Furious are, and lemme tell ya when they dropped that bad boy on me, I realized that it was utterly pointless to call balls and strikes here. There’s no sofascore with this sort of thing, no advanced analytics, none of that. Oh there’s a bit of rough CGI, or the dubbing is distracting, oh the script and plot are such generic pastiche. Get in the locker, nerd. This shit is too real for you.

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The Furious is by some distance the best film I’ve seen all year, and its straightforward, transparent ambition to do nothing but kick ass for one-hundred-and-twenty minutes straight is a large part of what makes it such an unambiguous landmark in action filmmaking. We outsmart ourselves too often, these days. In attempting to find something original or subversive within the genre constraints we fail to consider that we may simply not be trying hard enough to push the boundaries in the conventional directions. Maybe our records can break more records. Maybe we gotta stop trying to be more clever than film itself, and start asking ourselves if we’re a different animal, and the same beast.

“What the fuck does that mean Jay Dubya?”

You’re welcome.

The Furious opens “Somewhere in Southeast Asia” (it’s Thailand) where a syndicate of human traffickers operates with impunity preying on the children of the poor and vulnerable. Seeking his wife, who disappeared chasing the story, an investigative journalist with the plot-necessary fight skills conducts a daring solo infiltration of the syndicate. Solo, that is, until the daughter of a mute Chinese handyman with a mysterious past is snatched off the street in broad daylight. The police are apathetic and the clock is ticking. What is an honest working man and kung-fu practitioner to do but lace up his steel-toed boots, get the biggest, meanest hammer he owns, and go find his baby girl?

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That’s it! That’s all you need! We got two dads (one of them doesn’t have kids but he’s dad-coded, lotta dads without kids these days we can’t hold it against him) and they’re gonna find brotherhood, justice, and fight every single scumbag, freak, and sleazeoid between them and that little girl. We’re off and running!

It’s a long held belief of mine that action filmmaking is first and foremost a technician’s medium. Film is, of course, an art form and there is ample room for artistry but in the realm of kinetic performance, the application of practical skills is paramount. What is Michael Bay without an inch-perfect gasoline orange explosion? What is Michael Mann without the deafening base of a painstakingly captured gunshot? What is John Woo without sparks and flying debris?

I think, however, this theory has failed to emphasize the immense contributions of stunt and fight team performers, whose technical skill lies not in the application of the hard sciences but in a kind of masochistic, balletic asceticism. Jackie Chan needed guys to go through glass panes to make Police Story (and certainly led by example in that regard). You can’t set a man on fire on film without someone being willing to put the burn suit on. Even John Ford could not have made John Ford movies without a whole brigade of movie cowboys willing to take the hazard pay to fall off a horse on command. The stuntman is increasingly an endangered species in Hollywood filmmaking, as the warm amoeba embrace of CGI swallows us all. But East Asia remains a bunker against the tides of progress in that regard. Under the direction of veteran stunt performer and coordinator Kenji Tanigaki, The Furious is a testament to what can be accomplished when the stuntmen are allowed to make a film of their own. It’s a film which prefers to communicate its intelligence through physical performance and rewards viewers that can speak its preferred language. Let me give you an example: I have never seen a martial arts film this dedicated to ensuring its key players are distinct not just through costuming, but through the actual language of martial arts. Every major character in this story has a distinct style and by the time The Furious reaches its frenetic, bloody conclusion, you are fluent in everyone’s distinct language of combat.

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While everyone here is operating at a superlative level, special mention in my book is due to Brian Le for one of the all-time brute performances in a martial arts movie, bringing bone-crunching force and animal agility to what would otherwise be another big bald shithouse character. I would be remiss, also, to not mention the Indonesian penchak silat legend Yayan Ruhian, who film fans will remember as that creepy looking guy with the scraggly hair from The Raid. His appearance solidifies his bona fides as one of the all-time martial arts baddies, up in the firmament with Bolo Yeung, Chuck Norris, and Benny Urquidez. He doesn’t need a character. With his distinctive look and physical talents he embodies more authentic menace than any script could ever give him. Tanigaki and the rest of the fight team brain trust on this production still gave him a compound bow and a pair of kukri short swords because this is a quality film.

It’s worth invoking The Raid because I don’t think we’ve seen an original martial arts film this gnarly, bloody, and mean since Gareth Evans’ 2011 action landmark. As The Furious enters its delirious final act, it authors what may be the bloodiest climactic fight in a film since the original Kill Bill with maybe five percent of the participants. The commitment and artistry from all involved is humbling, and makes me all the more certain that I need to seek out more modern offerings in this esteemed genre. In an age where rich men aspire to make the human animal obsolete as a productive, animated force, there is a certain transcendence to be located in our ability to destroy ourselves artfully.

I dunno how much more explicit I can make it. Go see it. Run. Don’t walk.

I rate this movie five Muay Thai Nightclubs out of five.

“Of course, O’Blivion was not the name I was born with. That’s my television name. Soon all of us will have special names…”

• David Cronenberg, Videodrome

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”

• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

My name is John.

My parents named me John but they called me Jack. Most of the people I know back where I come from still call me Jack. I only gave it up because I was too lazy to fill out a preferred name form ahead of college and so when I arrived as an eighteen year old undergraduate, John was the name on the dorm room door and I didn’t feel like correcting people. I was making a fresh start in a new place. It seemed appropriate.

A decade later I think I can admit that I was okay with the change because I was desperate to be someone else. I was a high school loser, slow to grow up, gawky, pimple-faced, undersocialized around girls, seeking attention through self-deprecation. That spaz who cuts a loud fart in class in the hopes the boys he calls friends will remember he exists. Sorry, Jack, you can’t come out with us. No room in the car for you. I sometimes wonder if they actually thought I believed that.

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It’s only dawned on me recently that the tension I feel between myself and myself is a function of parsing that period of my life. The person I was has become loathsome to the person I am. Some people never leave high school. I can’t get enough distance between it and myself. To me, it’s never been a question of roads not taken. That’s where people go wrong in lamenting their own adolescent loathsomeness. If only I’d played football. If only I’d talked to that girl. If only I’d gone to that party. If only my band had played a Green Day song at the talent show. Nonsense. Fantasy. Vanity. All is vanity. The problem with every road not taken is that the person you were then would be the one walking down it. Wherever you would have gone, there you would be. The fault is in you. Not your stars.

College? Yeah it was better, mostly. Still, though, I found myself going in circles. Falling back into bad habits. Temper, young man, temper. When I was almost done with it, my father told me that I was “made for the next stage.” Adolescence, school, all of it, this was something to be muddled through so I could get to the part where my talents could be leveraged most effectively.

I didn’t feel like it at first. Most people don’t. Now I am the adult in the room. Now I make a respectable, median amount of money at an adult job with benefits. Now there’s just four short months between me and a very respectable petit-bourgeois sort of wedding to an immensely competent woman who, for whatever reason, is willing to marry a man who runs around in digital back alleys calling himself “Klaus Zynski.”

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Klaus has gone on long enough, I think. It’s a good joke, probably the most successful I’ve ever told. But it’s begun to be more trouble than it’s worth, on virtually every axis through which I would like to further my professional and artistic life as a writer. Let me take you around the horn with it, I’ll keep it brief, you don’t want to hear me moan.

First and foremost I’m beginning to get some joy pitching and selling essays. When I place one, I tell editors to list me as JW Yablonsky, not Klaus. All my short stories are published as JW. The novel I plan to sell in the near future is JW’s, not Klaus’. Klaus has always been a branding exercise. A bit of affectation to associate my notes with the great anon posters of Golden Age Twitter in your subconscious lizard brain. Look the part, be the part. Same basic strategy which led me to adopt JW as a pen name. There are guys who already write novels under my government name, so I’ll use a different one.

Secondly, and I am grateful for this, let me be very clear, I am meeting more and more people from this site with each passing month. Every time I shake a hand and do the mental social arithmetic on whether I’m Klaus, JW, or just John, I desire, briefly, to combust spontaneously. It’s so stupid being Klaus in meatspace. I have yet to do it successfully. It grows even more absurd when I consider that the inverse is also true. More and more people I’ve met out and about are coming onto Substack and, given my firsthand experiences with this site’s discovery algorithm, I feel giving them a boost is the least I can do. Then they gotta thank me or acknowledge me as Klaus and the whole thing feels even more childish and counterproductive. It’s a performance enhancer for being seen and an impediment to being known.

Of course, that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

Klaus, JW, the whole thing is just safety netting below the tightrope walk of modern online life. If ever it should get a little too real, well, I just delete the whole thing and it’s like it never existed to begin with. Slide back into that banal little adult sinecure until I get the itch for validation again. My very first essay on this platform was about The Pain of Being Known.

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But no pain, no gain. Things are happening for me in ways I never thought they could and I wish to meet them proactively. That will require some changes on my own part. Fewer than you think, though. It’s very much a “new name, same great taste” situation. I’m planning to keep the Michael Ironside in Scanners profile pic. I sort of consider it a good luck charm at this point. I dunno if I plan on a face reveal. Ideally they’ll print my face somewhere on the dust jacket for my debut novel. You can crack a copy open and see for yourself. Maybe you’ll meet me wherever Substackers gather. Perhaps I’ll be invited on a podcast which insists on video, or schedule another livestream myself. Really, I decided that the time was right to pen this essay and put the whole Klaus Era to bed formally while I was in the midst of that one-thousand sub celebratory livestream. I had fun with it, really. But that same self-consciousness I feel meeting a friend, a collaborator, a comrade and a fellow traveler from this platform in real life, with no masks or screens to separate us, began to creep up. It’s fun for awhile, but then it gets a little silly, doesn’t it?

Thank you to everyone who helped bring Klaus to life. I ask that you respect my decision to let him die.

In conclusion:

Summer is a season for trends. I think it has something to do with how transitory, how temporary it all is. Only a few months of sun and daylight so you better make the most of it. Better feel like you were there. Instagram the pop star collab smoothie. Order the New York Times-recommended seasonal cocktail. Purchase the functional cross-body bag from the GQ listicle. Shout the chorus to the song of the summer. Brat Summer. BROCKHAMPTON Summer. White Boy Summer. The first unexpected trend of Summer 2026 has emerged in the form of 82-0, a browser-based basketball trivia game.

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It’s all pretty simple. You spin the wheel and get a team and a decade, you pick a player from the list you get, he goes into your starting five and after five picks the game gives you a score. The objective is to assemble a team considered good enough to win all 82 games of an NBA regular season. It’s all pretty unscientific and vibes bases, mostly factoring in offensive statistics. 82-0 is a deeply unbalanced experience. Lucky rolls to secure key assets overvalued by the game matter more than anything else, and dozens of runs can fall just short of perfection for no apparent reason. The game is nothing if not opaque.

Criticizing the game design, however, is missing the point. The point of 82-0 isn’t to play it, the point is talking about it. This whole trend is a Trojan Horse, a delivery platform and a force multiplier for a bedrock pastime of modern life as an American Man. All of us, whatever our background or belief system, are united in our love for Remembering Some Guys. The Internet is one big grill at the global barbecue and we’re all stood around it, lukewarm lagers in hand, saying that man, people forget how good prime Paul Millsap really was.

The trend has already broken containment and is likely to be well on its way to iterating itself out of existence by the time this essay goes to press. We have a competitor which simply calls itself “better 82-0.” We have 20-0, for the NFL, 15-0, for College Football, 38-0, for English Premier League soccer. We have one for pro-wrestling. We have the version of 82-0 that uses advanced statistics to calculate value and therefore misses the point, like one of those German board games where reading the instructions takes an hour and a half. The true heads have already decided the game is too easy and that the real challenge is assembling a team so booty it goes 0-82.

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(There is, perhaps, a separate column to be written about our frightening ability to drive fun things into the ground at ever-increasing speeds through iterative oversaturation but I’ll leave that for someone else.)

It’s a blip in the grand scheme of things. It’ll run its course in a week or two, overwhelmed by the horsepower of an all-timer sports month wherein the French Open (tennis), the US Open (golf), the World Cup (soccer), the NBA Finals (basketball), and the Stanley Cup Finals (hockey) are all overlapping with one another. Truly it is the best of times to be a fan. However I feel this blip is worth writing about, worth talking about, as a case-in-point of one of my favorite tendencies of sports fans writ large. The best among them, the ones worth knowing, never forget a true competitor.

Sports are brutally darwinian. One winner excludes dozens of losers. Young men grow old in a hurry, ligaments torn and surgically repaired, joints crunching and creaking as the God-given genius leaves them one punishing contest after another. The best among us get cash to destroy themselves for our entertainment. It’s a lot of cash, sure, but it doesn’t usually last. The modern media environment, hyperoptimized to appeal to gambling addicts, power-consumers, and the easily-enraged, would like you to ignore all that sacrifice so it can show you another riveting montage of the winners adjusting their jock straps and flexing watches with Jake Paul. We dehumanize athletes and tell ourselves that they’ve mortgaged their humanity by signing their contracts. We’re entitled to abuse them, because their yearly salaries are higher than ours. Fortunes greater than the gross compensation of 99% of all professional athletes have been built on calling men and women bums when they’re simply trying their best and coming up short.

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The 82-0 phenomenon helps us cut through this industrial apparatus of cynicism and rediscover the core of what it is to love sports and love the people who make sports possible. “Remembering some guys” is, of course, a homosocial mating ritual most commonly observed in men. It’s nice light conversation, allows everyone to get involved, self-perpetuates, cuts across generation gaps and cultural contexts. In modernity it is perhaps the closest thing we have to an invocation of mythic figures. Let us now speak of honorable personages. Men and women who dared to strive and portrayed the nobility of the struggle. People whose exploits united communities in hope and joy even if they never reached the mountaintop. If this is all just a waste of time to you, salves for losers, then I don’t think you really like sports. I don’t think you really like people. I think you just like associating yourself with success. Not earning it or profiting by it, just standing next to it in the hopes that it may bless you somehow.

More Words Here

82-0 and all its imitators are ultimately a diversion. They’ll pass into history as we all move onto the next thing. But what let them spread like wildfire across the internet is not in them, it’s in us. That’s worth celebrating, acknowledging, valuing. To Remember Some Guys is to acknowledge their humanity, and, in turn, to celebrate your own humanity.

“So this is the world. Can you see… Can you see what you have made? How do you stand the disappointment?”

• Jonathan Hickman, Ultimates

It has become apparent to me that some of you are not joking when composing posts about the Hantavirus Cruise Ship inevitably dooming us all to another global pandemic. I get the sense that some of you do not think this would be a bad thing.

For the mercifully uninitiated; aboard the three-hundred and fifty foot cruise ship MV Hondius, owned and operated by the Dutch firm Oceanwide Expeditions, nine passengers have thus far been either confirmed or deemed to have probably contracted the Andean hantavirus, most commonly found in rodents. Three people have died. A few dozen more are under observation by state or international public health authorities. It is a tragedy. People have died. But in the hyperinflated schadenfreude industrial complex of the Internet, there is virtually no action which some people will not view as goading the grim reaper into action, therefore making it justifiable and even, perhaps, morally courageous to mock a stranger’s untimely demise for clout.

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In another world this is what you would hear while cornered by the worst guy at the office party. Coworker stuff. The sort of pop-conspiracy indulged in by people living unexamined lives and arriving late to every item of inquiry, certain that they can glean all the answers from a half hour on their feed of choice. The sort of people who parse all our current events through the motivations of some nebulous “they” and what “they” “want us to think.”

We don’t live in that other world and so the feeling is something altogether more tragic.

In some cases, the rapt attention paid to every new datum about the Hantavirus Outbreak recalls footage of punch-drunk boxers snapping back to momentary lucidity, hands at the ready, when a bell sounds. The traumas of the COVID-19 pandemic, bundled up and submerged as quick as we could manage, have resurfaced. If you feel that March 2020 anxiety cropping back up, if you find yourself glued to your phone or your preferred cable news channel, I do not think less of you for it.

I have survivor’s guilt about the COVID era because it was good for me. Pre-COVID I was an underemployed recent college graduate, a part time barista turned part time pizza chef, smoking too much weed, drinking too much, not writing enough despite delusions that I’d soon sell a novel and graduate to a life of cosmopolitan splendor. I didn’t really want a job and didn’t really want to write and didn’t really want to change. COVID left me no other option besides change.

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That was five and a half years ago. My girlfriend in 2020 is now my fiancée in 2026. We’ll marry in October. I work a full time job with benefits. I’ve sold stories and essays and found peers, friends, readers as a writer. Life is good. But guilt abounds in our own happy home and in all the others thanking their lucky stars. I was lucky. Many others were not. The COVID era was a reaping. Families driven apart. Dreams deferred. This is, of course, to say nothing of the dead, so conveniently forgotten as COVID shifts in the collective unconscious from the crisis of a generation to a typical overreaction of a coddled society. No big deal, really.

There is a sense of missed opportunity. In our rush back to normalcy we mourned nothing but the free time lost. The social rot which we intellectualized and monetized and polemicized burst forth into our public space like the rotten guts popping out of a decaying beached whale, in a geyser of offal and noxious gasses and we’ve spent the half decade since posing with the rotten guts draped over ourselves like luxurious furs, composing pithy little witticisms about how fucked we all are.

We blew it and we know we blew it and we’re begging for a second chance. Our social sphere is reduced to a macro scale midnight text to the girl we never should have dumped, an arrival at our old office unannounced to beg for our old job back, a deniably-ironic wish for another global pandemic, a more severe one, one that will blow away the old world and absolve its sins.

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That’s the word, I think, “absolution.” We want absolution without having to pay penance. We’re flagellants that don’t want blood on our clothes or scars on our backs. The unpleasantness of changing the world in a lasting sense cuts into our TV time. Writing off your country, your species, your world, is simpler and easier than fighting for any or all of them. We know we are sinners and crave the wrath of God to bleach us away but do not want to be seen calling for it. All of this discourse must be parsed through layers upon layers of detachment and insulation. It is a kind of ecstatic performance of nihilism wherein the residents of the world’s richest countries cheer to hasten the death of the system which insulates them from all consequence. A world where children fantasize about the day they’ll feel the kiss of the nuclear blast wave. It is an ideology of self-satisfied cowardice, performed as kabuki theatre through layers upon layers of gilded irony, so that it may never confront its true loathsomeness. Under this framework, no world at all is preferable to a better world because a better world may ask something of you. The basic tenets of this belief system are that everything was better at some point in the past, it’s all been terrible since, it’ll never get better, and you’re a rube for believing otherwise. Any attempt by the individual to prosper or cultivate some personal talent is taken as proof of their unworthiness, naivete, or miscalibrated priorities. The successful are industry plants. The fulfilled are performative. The happy are disrespecting victims with their smiles or hiding atrocity behind them.

The result is a kind of Calvinism with no God and no elect. It believes the world is fallen and man is inherently evil but no redemption can take place. Nobody can ever become worthy of forgiveness because if they were, they wouldn’t have erred in the first place. It’s a realm of Marxist-coded posturing where the ability of the state to do anything beyond oppressing the weak and harming the blameless is considered the stuff of fairy tales, beyond the cynicism of any Libertarian. It terminates, inevitably, in the conception of the apocalypse as the ultimate absolution. No more office, no more commute, no more busywork and chores, no more complicated feelings or interactions, just one last hit of schadenfreude before we are engulfed, still riding the high. Zizek compared our disaster fixation to our sex drive, deeming us “perverts who are secretly horny for the apocalypse.” I would argue it’s more a millenarian urge than a libidinal one.

We are tired of death by tenths of a percentage point, we are bored of incrementalism, the band-aid being ripped off all at once would at least be exciting for a day or two. It would at the very least remove the contradiction of modern information consumption, the sense that something must be done immediately and the equal and opposite sense that nothing can possibly be done. The desire isn’t so much the orgasmic catastrophe of Zizek’s Hollywood gasoline explosions tearing through collapsing skyscrapers but a more quiet kind of surrender. A society infantilized, relieved of the burdens of agency, returned to the cradle, to the womb, is a society gone extinct, or at least decimated.

Kindness

All of this is the damage of the COVID years, a time in which so many found their futures rendered inert and gave birth to a broad consensus that the future itself was inert, illusory, dead. Do not allow yourself to hate the people who fall into this sort of thinking. Pity them. Avoid them if you feel it’s healthy. But you cannot hate them. Other people are all we have. True, the world can be exhausting, the long struggle can be cruel, the work can come to no profitable end, but the attempt itself is virtuous. Today’s failure is tomorrow’s trailblazer.

We will be parsing and unfurling the residual damage of COVID for years to come. In that time, healing will take place. There will come a day when the adolescent now dreaming of a Hantavirus lockdown wakes up and realizes they spent the best years of their lives dreaming of death. In the midst of the crisis which inevitably ensues in the wake of such a realization, it behooves us, as people still in the fight, to make space in the line, offer a salute to our returned comrade, and say “we’ve been waiting for you, glad you could join us.”

is perhaps one of the longest tenured subscribers to Genius of Loathe, and he’s a nice nutshell representation of why I’m so grateful to have the audience I do. Polite, insightful, and clever, Liam’s notes are always a welcome presence on my TL.

What makes him a unique presence on here, however, may be his status as Substack’s most enthusiastic sumo wrestling fan. Whenever tournament time rolls around, inevitably I’ll see him posting about it.

This took maybe thirty seconds of scrolling to find.

With the May Basho set to kick off on May 10th at the Ryogoku Kokugikan in Tokyo, it seemed to me to be an opportune time to pick Liam’s brain on what drew his attention across the Pacific towards one of the world’s longest-running and most insular sports. My own experience with sumo is just substantial enough to make it clear that I don’t know anything. In a prior life, as a Twitter Combat Sports guy, I became somewhat familiar with the basic schedule and format of sumo through following various video aggregators, true fight freaks that would post anything from Czech regional MMA to vintage full contact karate from the 1980s. These accounts grew giddy during sumo season, but I suspect my own experience in watching the highlights was somewhat like a non-American’s first encounter with the sport we call “football.” Seconds-long human car crashes moving too fast for any neophyte to appreciate their complexities. If I want to understand this ancient art, it’s clear I’ll need a guide. I’ve sat down with Liam to get his perspective, and share it with you. For our sophomore edition, Putting You On Game is stepping into the ring.

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But first; an introductory comment from Liam.

LIAM: I want to clarify in advance that everything I say here refers to professional sumo as it’s practiced in Japan. There are international amateur sumo organizations and world championship tournaments that wrestlers from many different countries compete in, but there’s no overlap between those folks and Japanese “grand” sumo.

KLAUS: So for starters, I’m curious about your personal background with sumo. How does a guy in Seattle come to be a fan of the sport?

LIAM: I owe it all to the YouTube algorithm.

A few years ago I was watching a lot of old professional wrestling videos, and at the same time I’d gotten into those preposterous competitive eating guys like Beardmeatsfood and Matt Stonie.

Eventually YouTube started recommending these sumo stable videos, which are filmed inside the sumo training facilities and ingeniously divided into equal parts training, cooking and eating.

Until recently the only way to see what sumo training was like was to go visit the stables in person, but over the past few years they’ve relaxed the rules around social media. So now some of the rikishi have Instagram accounts, and several stables have their own YouTube channels with really well-done subtitles that make it easy to follow what’s going on. As I watched the training segments I was struck by how intense and physical they were. Sumo matches start with a charge and a collision and these guys were hitting each other again and again and doing a million sumo squats in between. It was obvious that the sport required a high level of fitness and conditioning.

It made me want to know more, so I read up on the rules and the prominent wrestlers, and when the next tournament rolled around I found a livestream and dove in. I discovered this whole global community of sumo fans and it’s honestly been one of the most wholesome internet experiences I’ve had in years.

KLAUS: Modern combat sports are so suffused with marketing and branding, sumo’s odd position as half a sport and half a cultural totem keeps it from going in that direction. Would you say part of the appeal is that it’s sort of anachronistic? If not, what draws you to it as a fan?

LIAM: I think MMA has kind of broken people’s brains, because the basic premise is that it’s this hybrid form that can beat every other discipline. I have friends who follow MMA and they’re so dismissive of traditional martial arts like judo and especially sumo, because they have no “street application.” I find that attitude pretty silly. I have room in my worldview for niche sports with specific rules and conventions.

Don’t get me wrong, there are problematic aspects to grand sumo. Guys get seriously injured and the schedule makes it hard to recover. Women aren’t allowed to even touch the ring platform, let alone compete. There’s a history of hazing and brutality within the stables.

And it’s not like no one’s making money. High-ranking rikishi are celebrities, and they do have brand deals and corporate sponsors. But it’s all overseen by the Japanese Sumo Association, and the JSA is a classically conservative Japanese institution. They’re very concerned with maintaining sumo’s traditions. They decide what is and is not dignified for a rikishi to be doing.

It’s all pretty rigid and insular, but that lends it a kind of purity. It’s a whole lifestyle. Jake Paul could not parachute into grand sumo if he wanted to.

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And it’s thousands of years old. There’s all this Shinto ritual baked into it, like the salt throwing and the stomping to chase the demons away. I’m an American, I freak out if I see a guitar Kurt Cobain once played. I have no problem admitting I’m impressed by ancient ritual.

But none of that would matter if I didn’t love the actual fighting, and I do. There’s no screwing around in a sumo match. After all the stomping and squatting and salt-throwing is over you and the other guy line up two feet apart and charge straight into each other. The average sumo match lasts like eight seconds. All the training and preparation is summoned up into this intense collision. It’s incredibly exciting.

KLAUS: Let’s talk format. So this is an entirely tournament-based sport. Six per year, they give you however many opponents over fifteen days, and your individual performance moves you up or down the rankings which govern the sport. Do I have that right?

LIAM: That’s right. There are six tournaments, or basho, each year, one in every odd-numbered month. As a fan that’s great, because you never have to wait long for the next tournament.

Three of the basho take place in Tokyo, and one each in Osaka, Nagoya and Fukuoka. Depending on where the basho is being held the winners might get different trophies from local organizations but the top-division winner always gets the Emperor’s Cup.

There’s a thing called the banzuke, which is a document that’s printed before every tournament showing the rank of every professional sumo wrestler in Japan, from the Yokozuna all the way down to the guys in jonokuchi division. There’s a saying in sumo that the banzuke is a living thing, because the wrestlers are constantly going up or down depending on how they did in the last basho.

Within grand sumo there are six divisions, and the rikishi in the two top divisions fight every day of the basho, fifteen times total.The guys in the four lower divisions only fight seven times per basho.

The best record in each division wins the championship for that division. If there’s a tie after the final day they have a playoff. Sometimes there are three- and four-way ties and they have these extended playoffs that go one until one guy has beaten all the other guys in a row.

These tournament matches are all that matter in terms of your rank. If you can manage a winning record (kachi koshi) then your rank improves or at least stays the same. So even if a rikishi finds himself out of the running for the Emperor’s Cup he still really wants to at least get a winning record to preserve his rank.

Getting promoted into the top divisions is a really big deal. Lots of guys grind for years and never get there. You get a salary instead of just a stipend, and you can start earning prize money for wins. You get a nice colored silk mawashi instead of the gray cotton ones the lower-ranked guys all have to wear. You get attendants to do your laundry and carry your gear. You can move out of the stable and into your own apartment.

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And of course it works the other way, too. One of the sadistic things about grand sumo is if you get injured, every match you miss counts as a loss. A rikishi could blow his knee out, miss a basho or several, get demoted, lose his salary and have to move back into the stable and do some other guy’s laundry while he’s trying to fight his way back up.

So there are always these various storylines to follow, young guys clawing their way up, veterans crashing out, rivalries that go back years between guys who fought each other in high school or whatever. There’s so much drama.

KLAUS: Styles make fights, or so they say. What would you say the major archetypes of sumo are? Is it more common for stables to recruit naturally big guys and teach them technique or do you see guys with a judo or shoot wrestling background packing on some weight?

LIAM: The rules of sumo are simple: If you step out of the ring, or if any part of your body other than the bottoms of your feet touch the ground, you lose. That’s really it. There are a lot of ways to make that happen; there are dozens of so -called “winning techniques,” or kimarite, but there are some broad categories.

There’s oshi-zumō, or “pushing and thrusting.” Kind of what people who don’t follow sumo think all sumo is like. Put your head in the other guy’s chest and just charge forward. Some of my favorite rikishi, like Daieishō, are oshi-zumo guys. Daieishō will speed-bag your face until you fall over backward.

There’s yotsu-zumō, which involves belt grips and grappling. The mawashi, the loincloth the wrestlers wear, is a major part of the support, because you can grab that belt and use it to pull and lift and set guys up for throws.

About twenty-five years ago there was an influx of wrestlers from Mongolia and they changed the sport by bringing in judo and bokh techniques, a lot more throws and low stances. That was kind of a golden age, because some of those guys are among the best to ever do sumo. You could make a case that Hakuho Shō was the greatest athlete in any sport, he was that dominant.

So even if you’re an old-fashioned pusher-thruster you do have be ready for the guys who will try to trip you and toss you on your ass with some Mongolian sorcery.

KLAUS: Would you say there’s any current macro trend in the sport that you find interesting? Are guys getting bigger? Faster? Are stables attempting to recruit more international talent? I know the young Ukrainian guy, Aonishiki, grabbed a few headlines internationally for his recent successes.

LIAM: One thing that shocks people about grand sumo is there are no weight classes. There’s just the banzuke, and you fight the guys who are close to you in rank, even if they outweigh you by a hundred pounds. Being big is an advantage in a sport that starts with an explosive charge, and the rikishi try to get as big as they can while still being able to move well.

But there are plenty of “small” guys. One of the smaller rikishi in the top division is Fujinokawa, who weighs around 260 lbs. That doesn’t sound small until you consider that the Yokozuna Onosato is around 410. But Fujinokawa absolutely smoked Onosato in the last basho.

The small guys are scary, they fight like demons. There’s a rikishi named Enho who is one of the smallest ever to make it to the top division. I recommend checking out his highlight videos, he’s incredible. Due to a combination of injuries and bad luck he fell all the way to the lowest division and has been fighting his way back up for almost two years. Getting back up there is crucial for him because he wants to retire and become a stablemaster, and he needs one more basho in the top divisions to qualify. So that’s a good story.

As for recruiting more internationally, there’s definitely a tension there. It’s always been the case that when a foreign-born rikishi breaks through some barrier it raises the sport’s international profile. It was true with Akebono, definitely. But there’s the question of how big the sport can grow and still remain Japanese. There are a lot of rules about it. Each stable is only allowed to have one foreign-born recruit, and it can be a lonely life for that one recruit.

In spite of that there are and have been very successful European rikishi, from Georgia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Ukraine. You mentioned Aonishiki. He’s actually one of two Ukrainians in the top division right now.

But Aonishiki is compelling for a few reasons. Other Europeans have made it to the rank he’s at, but none have ever made it as fast as he has. It looked like he might make it all the way to Yokozuna, which no European has ever done, but then he had his first losing record and that set things back. Aonishiki has a freestyle wrestling background so he has a lot of ways to beat you. The other top division guys are starting to figure him out but for a while he was running wild.

Also, he didn’t come into grand sumo until 2023. Before that all his sumo experience was in Ukraine. His success demonstrates that you don’t necessarily have to be raised from puppyhood in the Japanese system. It shines a light on the sport’s international following, and the possibility that a program outside Japan could produce a wrestler that strong.

KLAUS: If people would like to tune in, how would they do that?

LIAM: Several YouTube channels post highlight videos after each day’s matches wrap up. Don Don Sumo is my favorite; he always includes slow-motion breakdowns which illustrate the techniques.

If you want to watch the tournament live you’re stuck with a pirated livestream. Western outlets don’t carry the tournament so at least no one is losing money to the piracy.

My favorite is Leo Dickinson Sumo. He’s on Twitch as well as YouTube. It’s a members-only stream but it’s like a dollar to join. He runs one YouTube channel with commentary and one without.

It’s fun to watch the tournament at different times throughout the day. When the lower ranked rikishi fight the arena is pretty much empty, and then it fills up as we get closer to the top divisions. Occasionally you see celebrities in the audience. I saw Jack White and his wife in the crowd once last year. And sometimes the emperor of Japan shows up.

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A fun way to get involved is to pick your favorites on kachiclash.com. It’s a free site that lets you predict who will do the best out of the top division guys. Even if you choose at random you’ll probably score higher than I normally do.

KLAUS: Finally, I’m going to open the floor to you here. Give me a funny or interesting story, a weird fact, a guy you find fascinating. I feel like sports always have these bizarre little anecdotes and in insular sports like sumo, they rarely break containment.

LIAM: Two things. The rikishi apparently smell very good. They all use the same oil from the same company to style their hair in those top knots, and it has an incredible floral fragrance. Lots of folks talk about how whenever a rikishi gets on a train the car fills up with it.

And because sumo is rooted in Shinto ceremony, the wrestlers are kind of considered walking good luck charms. If a rikishi holds your baby, that’s supposed to bring good fortune. So sometimes at exhibition events you’ll see people just handing their babies to the wrestlers to hold. It’s the most adorable thing. When you consider how brutal the sport can be, the fact that it has this wholesome other side is pretty wonderful.

“If I’m not here to receive these ideas, God might give ‘em to Prince.”

It’s fair to say, I think, that we’re a few years removed from the peak of the musician biopic as a going concern in modern Hollywood. This isn’t a declaration of extinction (or even endangerment) by any means, the musician biopic remains a dependable high-floor rotation piece for an industry seeking to manage risk. Diagnosing the genre as “past the peak” is meant less as a condemnation and more as a recontextualization. Somewhere between The Doors (1991), Ray (2004) and the present day, the musician biopic changed from a prestige vehicle, meant to grant a platform to the the actor or actress in the starring role from which they can exhibit their talent for imitation of an iconic figure, to a multiplex seat-filler and nostalgic crowd-pleaser. True, there are still films in the genre which aspire towards the awards hopeful mode of years past. The Bob Dylan biopic; A Complete Unknown (2024), scooped a respectable eight Oscar Nominations but went home empty handed. Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody battled through mixed critical reception to claim four Oscars in 20191. But macro signals suggest that the awards spigot is running dry for this sort of thing. The Academy, HFPA, and other elite circles which control the awards circuit have grown sensitive to allegations of stodgy Baby Boomer-ness and smart audiences have caught onto the paint-by-numbers quality of these films writ large. Consider last year’s Bruce Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. Released in the ideal awards season window, well-reviewed, projected as an Oscars also-ran, and struck out, comprehensively. I liked Deliver Me From Nowhere well enough, but then, I am a Bruce Springsteen fan and isn’t that just the typical line for these things anymore? These musician biopics are light work for the average movie critic, if you like the artist you’ll like the move, polite middle of the road rating, send that bad boy in well ahead of deadline, clock out early, maybe play golf or something. This is what drew me to Michael. What could this movie possibly have done to warrant the comprehensive and merciless critical asskicking it’s been receiving for the better part of a week now?

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Michael is a turd. It’s incompetently constructed from the foundations up and plasters over its total lack of narrative or artistic ambition with a passable directing job from the ever-dependable Antoine Fuqua. Having said all of that, I’m still not entirely sure why this, of all movies, is seemingly the breaking point for our nation’s working movie critics.

Let’s begin with the salvageable. While I’m issuing stays of execution, I may as well hand one out to Jaafar Jackson (Jermaine’s son). He’s not good if we’re scoring him against the leading man performances which define this genre, but he’s also a complete rookie, cast for his pretty-good facial resemblance to Uncle Michael. Getting The Michael Jackson Voice right can’t have been an easy first assignment and the guy can sing/dance. That’s essential for the movie Fuqua is trying to make here. Enlisting the aid of Bohemian Rhapsody editor John Ottman, Fuqua seeks to capture some of that movie’s concert scene mojo. This has the usual effect of making me want to seek out the archival footage from whatever is being re-staged for the film, but as a big screen spectacle to justify the film’s existence, it’s a worthwhile strategy.

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The film certainly doesn’t exist because it has some novel angle to approaching and understanding Michael Jackson, either as a man or an icon. Michael is the worst kind of celebrity biopic: The Narrativized Wikipedia Page, or in this case half a Wikipedia page. Michael jets through notable events in the life of Michael Jackson like it’s got a plane to catch, opting for rote re-staging devoid of friction or emotionality. Here’s dreary little Gary, Indiana. Here’s the Jackson 5 as you remember them, bell-bottoms, afros and all. Here’s Michael’s brothers, each one an interchangeable cipher with maybe one or two lines. Here’s Joe Jackson (Colman Domingo, giving us nothing) getting his belt off to whup little Michael’s ass for talking back. Here’s Bubbles the chimpanzee (in CGI, bleh). Here’s the Thriller video. Here’s the Pepsi Commercial incident. You get the idea. The result is a biopic with almost zero interest in the inner life of its subject. This would inevitably complicate things and Michael treats any possible complication as antimatter. There are practical reasons for this, but you get nothing but scorn from me for juking around a narrative challenge rather than confronting it. Storytelling is problem solving. Filmmaking is problem solving in the hard and fast realm of the real world, rather than merely on the page. Effective life stories find ways to show the human failings of immortal figures, to give the audience some sense of their struggles. Michael is content to ignore all that nastiness in favor of another needledrop or Moment You Might Remember. Like an ignored leak in a water main, the insistence on an uncomplicated, pollyanna King of Pop rots the film’s foundations from within.

The elephant in the room has gone ignored long enough: this movie’s narrative does in fact end in 1988 with the release of Bad, therefore omitting the notorious allegations of child molestation which followed Michael Jackson up until his death. This, presumably, is what ginned up such venom among the commentariat. It is galling, and shameless, and disrespectful to the victims, sure. All of that is true. But I’ll be honest, I get it. As I said, this is meant as a crowd-pleaser first and foremost, a celebration of the good times. We can discuss whether that’s appropriate in this case but it’s undoubtedly the correct strategic move. However, the film’s insistence on framing Michael as a gentle soul, oppressed by his abusive father, while omitting his own alleged predatory behavior drenches the production in the rank stench of cynicism. The selective amnesia protects the still-living beneficiaries of Michael Jackson’s largesse and the audience’s good time at the expense of any sort of realism It’s impossible to ignore once you detect it. The veteran character actors brought in to prop up Jaafar seem to be aware of this. Miles Teller2 may as well be wearing a sign around his neck that reads “The Check Cleared.” It’s genuinely shocking how little Fuqua was able to get from the usually-rock-solid Colman Domingo. Moreover, if this is simply going to be a re-staging of Moments, I detect some notable absences. No Paul McCartney? Like at all? Couldn’t throw a wig on some white boy and pretend he’s Eddie Van Halen, here to supply the riff for “Beat It?” Couldn’t get a real chimp to play Bubbles? Like not even once? Fuqua and company were likely correct to devote the lion’s share of their efforts to the performance sequences but the laziness outside of them is so obvious.

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Cynicism suffuses the film’s central conflict and renders it totally inert. In as much as we actually have a conflict here, it can basically be summarized as Michael wanting self expression and freedom to pursue his solo career, while his father views him solely as an extension of the family brand, and therefore himself. What is this film if not an extension of the Jackson Family brand? When a film becomes a mere branding exercise, we really do see the collapse of any conceptual wall between “art” and “content.” If these are no longer about telling stories or providing opportunities to actors, then they’re simply adult sing-along hours trading on cheap nostalgia. The optimal play, then, becomes puppeteering the biggest possible (usually dead) star for about two hours so their fans can all have a nice reminiscence, devoid of any difficult feelings, or even the vaguest allusion to a “complicated legacy.” Cynical? You bet. But it’s a workable theory, and who better, who bigger, to stress test it than Michael Jackson himself?

Given this film’s box office receipts, it may also be a valid theory. Lord help us.

I rate this movie one and a half CGI chimpanzees out of five.

Major League baseball has recently debuted its 2026 lineup of “City Connect” alternate uniforms, marking another step in the ongoing merch-saturation of America’s national pastime.

With my intrepid and insightful collaborators I’ll soon get into the gory details but I do feel it bears some mentioning that this sort of thing, the limited edition alternate uniform designed specifically as a consumer item, is a fairly recent phenomenon in American sports. These sorts of branding plays are nothing new, but credit likely goes to the National Basketball Association for beginning this most recent wave. It certainly makes sense. The NBA has long had one foot in the fashion world through its star players connection to the athletic shoe industry. The NBA’s own city jersey initiative has been going for roughly a decade and spawned several modern classics, along with more than a few groaners and a robust middle class of “meh.” We’ve definitely run this thing into the ground over the past decade, and if indifference towards the practice doesn’t reign yet, it;’s certainly eyeing up the throne.

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Personally, I think the credit for this trend should go to our friends across the Atlantic. Europe’s biggest soccer clubs have long made a killing on a yearly uniform refresh, and it was only a matter of time until American organizations began to follow suit. Whether it’s been a success, well, they’d know better than me. I’m not an accountant, and I’m certainly not their accountant.

Baseball is perhaps a bit of an odd fit for this sort of initiative, given the relatively conservative, traditional character of MLB along with the fact that dedicated fans tend to buy hats more than shirts. But, late to the party as per usual, MLB seems dead set on getting in this particular pool just as the water has begun to smell of piss, so we may as well yap about it.

Atlanta Braves

KLAUS: Hot start here. Like the powder blue, like that they went with the pullover as opposed to a button-down. Like that the lettermark on the hat isn’t a 1:1 copy of the old Hank Aaron-era unis. More a reinvention than a straight throwback. These will move units, I feel.

BENJAMIN: The powder blue is great, and I really enjoy the large lower-case “a” on the jersey and on the hat. I notice that the letter on the hat has a kind of 3-D script (not sure if there’s a name for that) but the letters on the jersey don’t, I kind of would’ve liked to see that.

JESSE: Love the powder blue, and the lower-case ‘a’ like the old days. I think this is probably my favorite.

Baltimore Orioles

KLAUS: Not sparking joy. “BMORE” is really awkward to me, either throw a hyphen in there or go with “CHARM CITY” (the gentleman’s choice). The green/cream/orange is alright, I guess. Number font is really weird. The 2 and 5 are the same patch, just turned upside down. You have problems if I’m noticing that. Hat is okay, but I feel like the O’s already have better. Maybe it’ll be a cult classic among the true heads but I’m doubtful.

BENJAMIN: I don’t really understand the color scheme here. Dark green that’s almost, but not quite, black, is not a color I would associate with Baltimore, Maryland, or the Orioles off the top of my head. Maybe there’s some history here I’m not aware of. Not a bad color at all, just don’t understand it. And I can’t say I’ve ever heard the city called “Bmore” which isn’t a great nickname in any case. The letter on the hat doesn’t really mesh with the jersey, it barely looks like a “B” and the orange color looks like it’s slightly different from the orange on the rest of the uniform.

JESSE: This one puzzles me more than anything. The Orioles don’t have any green in their colors, and never have, to my knowledge. I guess birds sit in trees? Ergo the green? Also don’t like the weird swirl in the ‘B’ on the caps. This is a ‘no’ for me.

Cincinnati Reds

KLAUS: Callin’ these the Playboi Carti’s. Whole Lotta Red. Too much, in fact. The Reds’ brand and marketing people are claiming there’s five different shades of red in this uniform. They could have fooled me. Don’t like the pinstripes. Don’t like the modernized lettermark. It’s a no from me.

BENJAMIN: He’s red for an amazing reason! I guess if any team is gonna do a full solid color uni, it may as well be the Reds. I appreciate the pinstripes, but they’re doing a weird thing where they end the pinstripes at the sleeves as a “nod” to the old vest jerseys, which begs the question - why not just make the jerseys vests? (The answer is they need to put sponsored patches on the sleeves.) The lettermark on the jersey is too big and stands out super aggressively with the rest of the jersey being solid red. The black numbers on the opposite side of the chest also stick out more than they really should, and for some reason I feel like the positioning should be swapped, with the letter C on the player’s right chest and the numbers on their left. Can’t really say why.

JESSE: Okay I actually like these a lot, unlike my colleagues here. It feels like it’s from an 8-Bit video game, and as an elder millennial, I’m into it. I like the pinstripes, too! They’re fun. Why should those denizens of the Bronx have all the fun???

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Kansas City Royals

KLAUS: Now we’re getting ambitious! I like these quite a bit. Very disco. Gradients are always tricky business but a splash of purple really works here. The new lettermark is a big winner for me. I could see this hat getting some motion as well. This one’s a real boom or bust swing. I was talking to a guy who hated these and said the hat looked like three smiley faces linked together. To each their own!

BENJAMIN: I love the “bisexual lighting” color scheme and the gradient. Agree the bit of purple adds a lot. The “R” looks very cool and I kinda wish they’d put it on the hat too. And yes, the crown does look like smiley faces, I think if you adjusted it by adding lines on either end, connecting the curves with the straight line at their edges, it would be a big improvement, but I think they were going for a minimalist look. The number is very sharp which I love, and the purple looks great.

JESSE: I’m on the fence with this because I like it, but it also looks like the uniform of a smoothie shop. Smoothie King in my mind, maybe, is what’s doing that? The hat especially looks like it should be on somebody asking if you want an extra protein shot or some wheatgrass for no charge. But I do like the teal/aquamarine colors. And even if the hat looks like it could be on a cashier, it’s a cool cashier hat, nevertheless.

Milwaukee Brewers

KLAUS: Kinda makes the same error as the Baltimore ones but I like the overall package more. It’s a good move to position the Brewers as the team for the whole state but I don’t think any Wisconsinite actually says “Wisco.” Feels forced. They should go back to this concept. I like the barrelman sleeve patch, that’s a fun pull. The hats are good.

BENJAMIN: Yeah, could’ve worked on the name a bit more (the full “Wisconsin” would’ve worked just as well, maybe they thought it would be too long?). But I really like it overall, the blue looks fresh and the little dashes of color at the edges of the words and letters make them look like they’re glowing which is very cool. I can see this selling a lot of units.

JESSE: I like the ‘Wisco’! I swear I’ve heard Wisconsin U get referred to that way, so that’s why I don’t mind that part. And the curly soft script looks inviting. Also, while I love the blue and yellow classic jerseys, I think this is a good switch for a change. Not my favorite but I don’t hate it.

Pittsburgh Pirates

KLAUS: A blackout uni is always a high floor concept but wow they nailed these. Love the font on the chest. Love the little splashes of red. Hats are a new take on a classic. These may be the best ones on offer. If only the team were any good!

BENJAMIN: Very nice, the letters on the chest look VERY cool with the sharp edges like they’re made out of knives or something, which fits with the team’s theme. I kinda wish they didn’t have the red (specifically the Nike and Sheets logos feel a bit out of place), but I love the hat, that one will be very popular even among non-fans.

JESSE: My second favorite besides Atlanta. When I was a kid, I had an older cousin who lived in Pittsburgh and loved all the city’s teams, so I’ve always been partial to the black and yellow. I’m glad they didn’t change it. I like the ‘spooky’ font on ‘Pirates’ and I LOVE the actual pirate logo on the cap! I would wear that, and I’m a Red Sox/Mets fan. But it just looks cool!

San Diego Padres

KLAUS: These ones really reflect the philosophy of the person judging them. Do you get points for playing it safe and simple? Or is that even worse than taking a big swing and missing? These kinda feel like spring training unis. I like the casual character of them but I think they’re a bit boring! Nothing wrong with them but they don’t thrill.

BENJAMIN: The lettering looks like spraypaint which is a cool design; however, it doesn’t match the number which is more bubbly. And the hat just looks like a normal Padres hat! It’s okay, but it feels like they didn’t try.

JESSE: I feel like they already did this, with the graffiti/street art style font. And the white cap with the regular SD feels lazy and unimaginative. I don’t hate it as much as the BMore or Tejas, but it’s also circling the drain of fashion for me.

Texas Rangers

KLAUS: These are my least favorite of the bunch and it’s not close. They’re like a Nike template uniform for a high school team. The choice to brand these as the Spanish Language unis feels deeply cynical to me. I saw a graphic about all the little touches on these like the socks and the belt and the stripe on the pant leg but like if you gave those things all that effort, why is the actual jersey so boring?

BENJAMIN: I really like these, I think I just like classic-looking jersey designs. Maybe they could’ve put some color into the letters or something, made them solid white like on the hat. The designs on the ends of the sleeves are neat.

JESSE: My least favorite. Just not very creative, aside from using the Spanish name for the state. But they could have done so much more with it! Just… red. We already have so many red teams, bro.

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Which is Best?

KLAUS: I'm between Kansas City and Pittsburgh here. Light mode and dark mode, how appropriate. If it’s down to “which would you have?” Gimme the Buccos. Easier to keep clean, easier to wear out (as any Pittsburgher can tell you, the black and gold is very easy to construct an outfit around). Just the cream of the crop.

BENJAMIN: My favorites are definitely the Pirates, it probably fits the team the best, the menacing letters are just so cool and the hat is an instant classic. Least favorite, I think the Reds, I don’t necessarily hate them but they just have too many issues for me.

JESSE: My favorites are Pirates, almost entirely because of the hat with the actual pirate face, and the Braves because of the throwback blue with lowercase ‘a’. I would legitimately wear either of those hats around even if I were rooting for the teams themselves to lose.

Special thanks to and for volunteering to participate in this little experiment. Let us know your thoughts and get in touch if you’ve got an idea for a future edition of this feature.

COFFEE OR I’LL SHOOT

By the time I tie the knot in late October of this year, I’ll have been engaged for two years. From the time we actually got engaged to when we reached the rubicon point on actually planning a wedding, my better half and I received exactly zero endorsements of the traditional wedding party out of maybe four or five solicitations. I managed one endorsement from my cousin, whose wedding I attended in Austin, Texas last summer. We were in a party bus, with the groom’s party, on our way to the venue. When asked about plans for our own nuptials, I told him that we were unsure of whether we even wanted a wedding, citing complaints from our acquaintances. My cousin told me those people were being ridiculous, a wedding is great, you get to throw this big celebration with all the meaningful people in your life.

The very next morning, after their thoroughly enjoyable ceremony and party, my cousin texted me to say that actually those people were right and he thought it was ridiculous how little fun he was actually allowed to have at his wedding.

We decided we’d have a wedding anyway, on the basis that we’d regret not having one if we simply eloped and it would be easier regretting the hassle of the wedding than its absence. We are, as many people our age find themselves, at the center of families which are not getting any younger or healthier, and the chance to remember the way we are now, before now inevitably becomes then, held some appeal for us.

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The Drama, released under the A24 label and directed by Norway’s Kristoffer Borghli, is not going to do anything to make me think I made the right decision in going for a reasonably sized wedding. In fact, I may spend my wedding week burning incense, fasting, and praying to ward off evil.

This film is going to live and die for you on two factors. The first is The Twist, which is less a Twist in the Twee Little Mystery Box Shyamalanian Sense and more an inciting incident from which the whole rest of the movie unfurls, spirals, and turns itself inside out. The fact that it’s not plastered over every piece of marketing material related to the film and can affect an audience blind is a credit to everyone involved. A24 has always oscillated between being a film production and distribution concern and being a marketing agency that mostly promotes/merchandizes trendy films for cosmopolitan young people. This sort of thing should in fact be their bread and butter and it’s a stark contrast to the dominant mode of studio trailer, wherein the entire movie will be given away sight unseen out of some deep fear of scaring off some theoretical customer. It’s very clever.

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That’s the second factor, the cleverness. Now it can be a very good thing, being clever, especially if you are making a comedy (which this is!). But it’s not always the appropriate response. Misplaced cleverness can drive a person into a rage simply because they find it offensive that someone is attempting to be clever (whether it’s successful or not) about something they consider beyond the range of appropriate things to be clever about. The Marx Brothers were clever but they never made a movie where Groucho was the wisecracking Kommandant of Bergen-Belsen, you know? Judd Apatow never had his boys do a 9/11 parody. There are in fact sacred cows and clever people are maybe at their most wise (wisdom being a somewhat distant cousin to cleverness) when they veer around them.

This is not that.

Borghli may be Norwegian but he’s crafted a cringe comedy in the British mode here, barreling his attractive, youthful cast directly into the middle of a nightmare of awkward, panicked, stuttering anxiety and watching them puke and lie and bleed their way out again. It is, I think, the rare European-directed film that seeks a deeper understanding of the American psyche as it exists in 2026 without condescension, overgeneralization, or a simply misadjusted frame of reference. Like a lot of clever people (and this is one of the things that makes clever people occasionally offputting) Borghli is less scandalized than he is fascinated by the American taboo with which he’s chiefly concerned. This is ultimately a movie about an Englishman coming into contact for the first time with the “average” American’s capacity for casual, all-encompassing violence and self-serving self-mythologizing and spiraling over it for a solid week. That’s a good plot! It’s also a very clever way to deploy two movie stars. Robert Pattinson in particular sets about deromanticizing himself with gusto, purging the teen heartthrob/Batman from his performance until all that remains is a repressed, gawky Brit abroad with an unconvincing hairline, kept afloat by a veneer of intelligence that gets thinner all the time. Ari Aster’s fingerprints as a producer are visible all over this thing, as Borghli channels his benefactor’s trademark mind-bending Anxiety Grotesque to great effect. It’s a film whose visuals will stick with you more than its lines.

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If you’re gonna deploy your stars as non-stars then you need bit players and setpieces to pick up the slack and The Drama arguably hits its best beats in that regard. Special mention is due to Zoe Winters, who delivers one of the most spirited and inappropriate laughs of the year in an absolute scene stealing turn. Tremendous.

It will not work for everyone, but I found The Drama to be a wholly worthwhile use of an evening. Left me thinking.

I rate this movie four wedding speeches out of five.

In celebration of my short story The Coat Trade being selected as a finalist for the The Republic of Letters inaugural short story contest, I’ll be reposting some of my back catalog of published short stories here over the coming weeks. While the finalist’s prize is fairly modest all told, it does represent a vital milestone; I have never been paid to write fiction until now. So thank you.

This short story originally appeared in Muleskinner Journal in January 2025. It is about a young woman and her boyfriend, the professional gambler. I hope you enjoy it.

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“I have warned many times about the guaranteed dangers of betting with your heart instead of your head…”
- Hunter S. Thompson

“But suppose I’d lost heart then? What if I hadn’t dared to risk?”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler

August 15th - $74,362

Later on, when reflecting on how they met and everything that came after, she concluded that the only reason she’d spoken to him at all was that he was the only person in the bar even close to her age. She was on a girls beach weekend with the other women in her family, still the baby in her mid-twenties, stuck shuttling her aunts and cousins back and forth from the beach to the hotel to the same four restaurants. He was alone and unbothered by it, free as a bird. His hair was bushy and sun-kissed. He was shaving maybe every three days, about mid-cycle at that point. He wore a matched shirt and pants set patterned in green glass liquor bottles, Soju, he’d later tell her. He was talking to the laziest bartender on shift about sports, in that way men do. A silent arms race of escalating trivia and insider terminology.

It was a simple matter to get her to leave with him. He wasn’t in the Hampton Inn across the street, where her family was staying. It would be a walk, further down the peninsula to a rather sprawling, rather upscale condominium complex. She knew the one. She’d gone past it in her teetotaler aunt’s rented minivan en route to restaurant number three. She didn’t want to go back to the two queen beds and see that same aunt in her nightgown, cream on her face, snoring in defiance of her assertion that she’d never once snored in her life. She hated how she felt about her own blood but couldn’t deny it. The sexless snowbird frumpiness of her family was like a miasma. A preview of what biology and cruel, cruel time held in store for her. She wanted a little adventure and her traveling party found adventure an inconvenience. So she sent a text to the girls trip group message and left with him.

They walked back on the beach at high tide, holding their shoes, feeling the seafoam fizzle on their feet, watching the crabs scuttle away. She figured he must be a local. He had trivia for seemingly every oceanfront property. Used to be a pretty nice house there before the last hurricane. This condo building used to be orange before the sun faded it pink. There’s a good bar here. This is the spot we used to stay in when I was a kid.

“So hey look, uh, I’m grateful for the company if that’s all you’re after but I don’t want any confusion here because-”

Then she kissed him. When she opened her eyes again he had this look of incredulity, a horrible feeling pierced her gut. Was he mocking her?

“Well all right then.” He smiled, gap-toothed “Glad we cleared that up.” He’d later tell her he just couldn’t believe his own luck.

The condo was a lot nicer than she was expecting. High ceilings, leather sofas, granite countertops. Too big for just one occupant. It was his family’s. She left her sundress in a heap on the tile and followed him to bed. It all began beautifully. His was the tautest male body she’d seen since she’d arrived in Florida, starkly contrasting the swollen, hairy, sunburnt retirees musking all up and down the beach. Mummified or reptilian, poured into soggy swim trunks, Miller Lite in hand. She caught a bad feeling, though. Lost interest all at once. She couldn’t say why. It might have been the beer on his breath, the day-old sunscreen collected in his crevices, maybe the absence of a condom and his laxity in seeking one out.

“Wait. Wait. Please, just. I’m sorry. Could we stop?”

“Oh shit, sorry. Condom? Right? I’m clean, but good thinking.”

“No, I just- I’m sorry but I don’t think I want to.”

She hated herself at that. Hated the feeling of her own indecision. It’s the hell of being twenty two, three, four, five, grown and told to take hold of the world before it slips away from you. So god damn sure of what you want but by the time it comes you’ve lost interest. Being told you’re spoiled but really you’re just impulsive. Neither condition is “good” strictly speaking but confusing the two ascribes a moral failing to impulsivity where none exists.

In any case he simply sat up and said “Well all right. Want a glass of water or something?”

She was fine, thanks.

“Alright, fine. You mind sleeping in the guest room? All my stuff is in the bathroom here.”

“You’re not mad?”

“I’m not mad. Children get mad. I’m frustrated. But what am I meant to do? Scream into your vagina until you want me? Make you walk home alone in a town you don’t know? I’d rather just go rub one out and try my luck again in the morning. I don’t chase losses as a rule.”

She didn’t yet know what he meant by that, “chasing losses.” Her drowsiness overtook the shame at her indecision and she drifted off in gritty, sandy sheets in a room furnished for a child that had long since outgrown it. She suspected the child in question was in the master bedroom, sawing logs.

When she rose in the morning, he was already up, drinking cheap coffee and typing away on a laptop. With the evening’s haze dispelled the romance of his all-too-grand living situation could fall away. It was unmistakably a twenty-something single man’s apartment, with the requisite detritus. She couldn’t decide if he was more disciplined in keeping house than the median example of the species or if he just had more space to clutter up than most.

He asked if she’d like to join him for breakfast. She obliged. He chose not to walk, he had a small electric scooter in the garage downstairs.

“You don’t mind riding on the back, do you?”

“No.”

They went to a small cafe nestled into the corner-pocket of a brick strip mall, the sort that seemingly come into being on their own all throughout central Florida with no input on the part of any thinking, feeling human being. He had waffles and bacon and another cup of coffee. She had two eggs over easy with whole wheat toast and a glass of orange juice. The meal cost maybe fifteen dollars altogether. The waiter came, recognized him. More friendly words between men, the sort she’d always feel alienated by. He gave the waiter a fifty dollar bill and they walked out.

“You must have tipped that guy 200%”

“So what? He needs it more than me.”

“Were you trying to impress me?”

“You never gave me the sense that you’re the sort of person that’s impressed by money. So no. He’s a good waiter. It’s a good cafe. He needs the money more than me. What does it matter?”

“What do you do?” She felt that the very question leaving her lips represented failure of some sort of invisible test.

He sighed, as if he’d had this conversation before and it hadn’t gone well. Without a word he took out his phone, tapped away on it for just north of thirty seconds, then he turned to show her the screen. It displayed a username, an email address, and an account balance. Sixty-nine thousand three hundred and sixty two US dollars.

She didn’t understand “What- what is this?”

“It’s my FanBet account. You asked what I do. This is what I do. I’m a professional gambler.”

“There’s almost seventy-thousand dollars on here.”

“Oh I know. I’ve been having a few mediocre months.”

Summer was the off-season and it was almost over. He’d get busy as the leaves started to fall and the weather turned gloomy and damp. The arrival of football season was like an earthquake, with basketball and hockey coming right behind as aftershocks. Golf, soccer, and mixed-martial arts were theoretically year-round affairs but generally served as a side-dish to the meat and potatoes of the Big Four American TV sports, or three of them anyway. He’d hit peak season as football wound down and the championship pictures came more sharply into focus. The results of those title games would set the tenor of the spring; whether the incoming basketball and hockey playoffs would be a slow, stoic advance across no-mans-land to recoup losses no matter the cost or a mad ecstatic orgy of profit and victory. Slamming house money on the table, wild-eyed, real defeat never even a possibility. Then the summer would come and he’d slink off in search of powdery white beaches and beers that cost what they ought to cost. He’d catch up on his reading, sleep late, squat in his parents’ condo, take little trips whenever they rented it out from under him to doughy midwesterners shuttling their spawn off to the theme parks in Orlando. Two weeks before they met he was in New Orleans, a month before that he’d gone up to Minneapolis to escape the heat and visit a fellow traveler, supposedly the greatest Canadian Football handicapper in the country. He’d had long weekends in the Bahamas, Key West, Puerto Rico, and Aruba, where he’d sunburned his feet and vowed never to return.

He subsidized his lifestyle partially via charging for his picks, netting him a respectable passive income in the neighborhood of $1500 monthly from premium subscriptions at $5 a pop. But this, in his own words, was just for beer money. The real money, the twenties and fifties he’d hand out so freely to waiters, bartenders, and hotel housekeepers, was acquired via a yearly ritual of cash withdrawal. A pilgrimage to pay homage at the temple of luck, victory, and gold. His bankroll, the money he played with, sat at just under $90k at the conclusion of last year’s busy season. That annoyed him. He’d resolved to make it into six figures and gotten so damn close. If his hockey positions had played out a bit better, if those frauds in Boston hadn’t choked it all away to an equally fugazi Montreal squad, he’d have gotten over $100k comfortably. He grumbled and groaned but still dropped his account balance down to $70k even before leaving for Florida. The sunshine state had no legal sports gambling, so there was no temptation. This was to avoid betting on baseball, which he seemed to fear like the devil.

He told her a story the night before she flew home. The first year he’d started gambling he’d cleared $15k just betting on the college basketball tournament. He walked around his parents home in Pennsylvania feeling like he had a superpower, he conjured money from thin air just by watching sports and putting some numbers in a spreadsheet. Baseball season rolled around and within a month he’d pissed it all away. He’d acquired an almost mortal fear of America’s pastime, convinced the sportsbooks ran the major leagues through some shadowy conspiracy. She never really had an opinion on that, though later on she’d theorize that this trauma was what gave him his flippant attitude about money. Nobody, at least nobody normal, could ever keep hold of it in his view. So the smart thing to do was spend it, ideally on one’s own pleasure and at one’s own whim. Burning fortunes quickly meant accruing them even more quickly, the expenditures serving as an offering to some unseen deity of wealth.

October 9th - $67,028

She’d flown home to Fairfax County, Virginia. She was settling back into that endless suburban flatness which saw its colors stripped anew every four years with the coming of one government and the departure of the last. A parade of defense contractors, lobbyists, bureaucrats, alphabet mafiosos, and military desk-jockeys would roll in and stamp down anything that grew in the cracks during the previous administration. It was some of the richest real estate in America and it was full of people that thought the Cheesecake Factory was fine dining. She hated it so much she no longer needed to think about it. It was just a reflex.

As it happened he offered her an escape hatch, not into real life but further down the rabbit hole into his little wonderland. He kept an apartment for himself in Maryland, near the DC border. This came as a surprise to her. He’d talked about Pennsylvania as being home. Maryland had never come up.

“If your parents are getting on your nerves,” he proposed, “why not come down to Bethesda and stay with me for a bit? Could use the company.” She found herself packing her bags and begging her mother for a ride to the metro station within minutes.

It wasn’t a big apartment, no one rents in Bethesda for an excess of space. Alone it was a lonely, expensive little box. With two it was cozy. She’d gotten over her lingering anxieties about sleeping with him while they were still in Florida and they weren’t shy about enjoying the reunion after a layoff. For a weekend they lived like children playing pretend, imagining themselves as adults. Eating out for every meal, dressing well, sleeping late, accountable to no one. On Monday she rose to find him at his computer, navigating an abyss of spreadsheets. He didn’t pay her any attention until she forced the issue. Then he suggested she find breakfast without him, as well as lunch. Dinner they could probably have together. “Here.” He said, pulling out his wallet “That’s $250 I think. Drink it, bet it, eat it, go see the changing room girl at Anthropologie and send it up your nose. I don’t care.”

“Look I told you when I got in, I don’t want you buying me-”

“Then don’t spend it and give it back once I’m done. It would just reflect badly on me if my guest were walking around with empty pockets.”

Guest. Not girlfriend. Not any of its cruder synonyms. Just guest. She didn’t know how to feel about that. Maybe he thought he was doing her a favor. He clearly valued his own freedom. Wanted to make it clear he was valuing hers.

Though really, how free was he? She had pictured a more romantic lifestyle than this when he’d held up that phone and shown her his little dragon’s hoard. He’d made it seem that way when he’d spoken of his friends and comrades. A merry band of rebels like himself all over the world. There was Macau Pete, the Korean baseball and Asian kickboxing savant. He had a real respect for Gaz from Cardiff, public enemy number 1 of the UK sportsbooks for his prowess as a darts and lower-league soccer handicapper. Then of course there was Silk Suit Slayer, the resident court jester and head-case. Silk would burn $30k in a weekend, drunkenly declare that all the sports leagues around the world were rigged in favor of the bookies, then come back next week to do it all again. Two out ten weekends though, Silk would get on a heater and make his money back with interest. That was when they all loved him, quietly envied his bravery. That was what it took in the estimation of that fraternity. It took bravery to be out here with no insulation. Not working for the books or for sports media, not relying on a 9 to 5 to get by like some sucker. Not paying Uncle Sam his share so he could drop missiles on Pakistani children (his exact words when she expressed concerns about his not paying taxes). Out here, on your own, surviving by your own wits, luck, and balls.

But really, none of that was true. It wasn’t luck. Not if you were smart. It was statistics. Cold, acidic, above-the-shoulders type stuff. If you were a pro, making real money, you had a statistical model that told you what bets to place, where and how much. A model meant data, endless rows and columns of numbers. The more the better. In essence, they’d draw themselves magic eye pictures in the spreadsheet programs of their choice and then squint at them until they saw dollar signs. That was the reality of it, greasy little men hunched over their double-monitor displays hunting for percentage points. A crumb of value to get the barest edge. It was easy to see, for her at least, how that could drive you crazy, like Silk. He told her they’d had to kick Silk out of their little group chat a handful of times for sending death threats to tennis players. He said it like a joke. She must have missed the punchline.

She had a lonely day. Made some resolutions to herself. Then came back to the apartment and handed him his $250. She wasn’t going to be taking money from him like that anymore. It made her feel dirty. If she needed it she’d take a loan and repay him. Furthermore, if they were going to be serious about this, he couldn’t be sending her away like that. She wanted to help him, wanted to be involved. Would that be okay? Or should she go back to Fairfax?

He was shocked. It didn’t occur to him that he could hurt her that way, without meaning to. He shut off his computer and they spent the rest of the night within the range of each other’s warmth, promising to make it work. In the morning he jumped her into the lifestyle, the requisite beating delivered by terminology and numbers. Spread. Moneyline. Team total. Parlay. Hedge. Boost. Prop. Trap. Hook. Plus. Minus.

One number stuck out. His new FanBet balance was just a hair north of $62k. Was he on a losing streak? “Oh no, not at all. Just placed a few big futures.”

Another insider term. A future. Picking a champion, an award winner, an MVP, before the season had even begun. Like dropping a dart out of an airplane and hitting a bullseye. If you saw someone do that, then you’d be pretty impressed, right? You’d pay someone a pretty decent chunk of change to do it, right? He’d gone a little nuts, he conceded, going all the way down to $55k, but he was already well on his way to making it back. Besides, if any of those darts dropped from orbit did find the board, the resulting payout would hit, in his words “like crack.” Besides, he hadn’t even touched the 5K he kept off-shore for betting on entertainment and political props. He’d cleaned up on the Oscars last year.

November 19th - $67,764

With her he was healthier, but he didn’t seem happier. Just down to a lack of luck, really. The big hits eluded him. The climb back towards six-figures was sisyphean. Up five, down three, up seven, down six, up four, down eight. A slow, grinding sort of progress. Like trench warfare.

If his luck wasn’t better than his process was healthier at least. She had him in the habit of clocking out at regular hours. Eating better and more regularly. Taking walks around Bethesda Row to relieve the nervous energy accumulated by monitoring ten, twelve, fifteen games at a time. He was drinking less. Self-medicating with amphetamines and cannabis less. He was more present. It was like helping a snake shed its skin. The necrotic shell around him peeled back by helping hands. She’d begun to get some sense of the strait-laced, shy, rabbity data analyst he’d once been, before he’d “busted out,” in his own words.

When he won big it was like a holiday. They’d go downtown, eat well, drink and dance in Dupont Circle. Normally he didn’t like downtown DC, he carried money and was paranoid about muggers. When he won he felt invincible. Steak au poivre. Red wine. Shots for the whole bar. But he always stayed true to her. His appetites never ranged in that direction. She was grateful for that, and hoped he was grateful for all her work in turn. He’d say he was, and she believed him.

It all went wrong on a wet, cold morning in November, just when she was considering whether to tell her mother she wasn’t coming home for Thanksgiving. She clocked it well before she heard it from him, but figured he’d tell her when he was good and ready. He got distant and quiet when things went wrong and it was almost always over nothing. Some impactful injury or suspicious line-movement would set his stomach in knots. Was better to just let him work it out on his own. Later in the afternoon, when he came to her in his jacket and boots, announcing that he was going downtown to the FanBet sportsbook, she began to suspect something was really, truly wrong.

He’d done nothing wrong, made no mistake. It was the damn app. The FanBet mobile app had robbed him. He was dialing up a couple soccer plays, normal, by the-numbers stuff. Four units apiece. He played a unit size of one hundred dollars. But the app froze, when it began working again he felt as if he were going to be sick. They’d placed a forty-thousand dollar parlay bet. No early cash out was offered.

FanBet customer support was worse than useless. They could pay celebrities to shill their app but not web designers or customer service staff. They kept him staring at an automated live chat for hours on end. Once, when going to his computer, seeking advice from his comrades, a flesh and blood human did attempt to make contact. When the customer support woman received no reply, she closed the session and shunted him back to the rear of the queue. He’d waited three hours. She waited seven minutes. The second interaction was somehow more insulting. Whatever overworked, underpaid call-center slave he found himself in communication with this time merely directed him to the terms of service and terminated the session again. They were under no obligation to offer him a refund, even if it wasn’t his fault.

When at last he worked up the nerve to check his phone, he broke even more. He’d missed by one leg. One point. One pitiful little roll of the dice. If it had broken differently he’d have made $120,000 that afternoon. As it stood, he’d lost $40,000.

She wasn’t sure what he was planning to do and that was why she followed him out the door. The determination in his eyes scared him. His purpose was clear, but only to him. They got the train in silence, made the switch downtown and ended up at Navy Yard, near the baseball stadium. The FanBet Sportsbook was a two-story high glass cube leaking television light in every direction. She could see the illumination dancing against the parking garages arrayed around the baseball stadium from the moment she stepped off the escalator from the metro and hung a left out of the station. Inside the air was thick with tension and stress chemicals found in human sweat. It was decidedly unromantic, whatever hidden appeal the place held for its patrons wasn’t showing up on her radar.

To the window clerk, he was polite. That was something she’d always liked about him. He was always polite and abiding to service workers. “No reason to make someone’s day worse,” he’d say. He simply explained his situation and wished to speak to the manager. The clerk was confused. The bet was placed through their company, that’s true. But it wasn’t at their facility. He was insistent. He’d just like an explanation from a flesh and blood human being.

The manager was a woman, dressed in an off the rack suit. She wore it well.

“I’m very sorry to hear that.” She said, “But unfortunately there’s very little we can do.”

“You can give me my money back for one thing.”

“Well sir, we can’t do that. Don’t be unreasonable.”

“Your app. Stole my money. Without my consent. And I’m being unreasonable?”

“There’s no need to yell.”

“I’m not yelling!”

She’d been standing behind him and leaned forward to whisper in his ear. “Please baby, let’s just go home.”

He brushed her off and stepped closer to the manager. The manager stuck an acrylic-nailed finger in his face “Now sir if you’re going to lose your temper I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I can offer you a beverage on the house for your trouble and escalate the complaint to our corporate office if you want. But you’re going to have to calm down, alright?”

He laughed under his breath, smiled, looked at his shoes “Forty-thousand dollars and she wants to buy me a beer.” He mumbled. “Okay fine, fine.” he was polite again all-of-a-sudden. “I’ll take the beer and go–”

“You can have a cocktail if you’d prefer.”

“Thank you. I’ll keep that in kind. I’d just like you to answer a question for me.”

“Please.”

“Do you have children?”

The manager looked concerned “I hardly see-”

“I asked you a question. Do you have children? Yes or no?”

She thought about it for a second. Then she said “Yes. I have two daughters.”

“Good. Good. I hope they both get cancer.”

The manager’s mouth fell wide open, and before she could respond he’d grabbed a nearby aluminum barstool and thrown it towards the window to his right. It crashed straight through. The sound was like she’d only ever heard in movies.

“Marsha! Call the cops!” Shouted the manager

“You better have those kids ready to meet God you stupid–”

She didn’t hear the rest. She sprinted out the way they’d come in. She didn’t stop shaking until she was on the subway and didn’t even begin to feel safe until she was back over the state line in Virginia.

November 20th - $27,764

Her parents didn’t ask what she’d been up to. Didn’t berate her for disappearing like she had. Being cruel to be kind wasn’t their way. The holidays passed in a haze. Fall turned to winter. Ice encased the ground, not even allowing the world the romance of a new fallen snow. He didn’t call. He didn’t text. After Christmas she worked up the nerve to ask when she could come by and pick up her things. He said whenever, quicker than she expected. “Whenever” wound up being just after new years.

January 9th - $117,923

He was in a great mood. If the police had ever sought him out after that night at Navy Yard he didn’t show any evidence of it. He didn’t bring it up at all, in fact. Nor did he bring up the state of the apartment. It hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. Cockroaches crawled in and out of empty pizza boxes. The air smelled like weed, urine, and stale air freshener. He’d stopped shaving again. The bags under his eyes were colored like cheap red wine.

He left her in the entryway, went to get her things. Returned with them neatly packed in her gym bag. No malice but no feeling.

She hated herself for even thinking it, but in that moment she simply couldn’t stop herself. “I’m sorry,” she said, “for leaving you like that.”

He waved a hand dismissively “Quite alright. I wasn’t myself. I don’t respond well to being cheated.”

She’d begun to suspect in their time apart that he hadn’t really been cheated at all. He’d just made a mistake and couldn’t bear to admit it. She kept that one to herself. She was scared she’d end up like that barstool. She had to admit as well that she was scared of him.

“Anyway it’s for the best,” he continued, “I frankly don’t think we can be together.”

“Yeah I don’t think so either.”

“Thank you so much for understanding. I really do appreciate your worrying about me. And it’s not your fault.”

“What’s not my fault?”

“That you’re a jinx.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You don’t have to apologize” He tapped at his phone, showed her his balance on a new app. It was over one-hundred-and-ten thousand dollars. His futures had found the mark. He was in his much-sought-after six figures. The way he figured, she’d had him losing his edge. He’d gotten it back these past few months. He’d hit big. The numbers didn’t lie. She was the source of his bad luck.

In the car on the way home she realized she could have never been a partner to him in the way those numbers were. She could never be as compelling as his spreadsheets. As gripping as the game. She realized it was all an act. He was never getting healthier, he just wanted her to believe he was. She expected to be heartbroken, but by the time she pulled into her parents driveway there was a strange kind of relief. She didn’t have to try and help him. He didn’t want the help.

“Rocky hate Mark.”

It’s a bad time to be a millennial but, then, was it ever a good time to be a millennial?

A generation pidgeonholed as frivolous and nauseatingly self-involved almost from the moment of its debut in the public sphere has gone from young and foolish to old and uncool almost overnight. The new consensus is that millennials are ugly and childish and childless and terrible with money and shrill and shallow and hypocritical. They owned nothing, produced nothing, and accomplished nothing. The things they did make momentarily popular are widely loathed and their value system did not prove durable beyond their own generation, indeed, the bizarre hyperpolarization of their successors in Generation Z may be best explained by a simple desire to be literally anything else other than a millennial. They were so uncool that they made the kids become Nazis, in opposition to their uncoolness.

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I paint unfair strokes with a broad brush and do so intentionally. I think we’ll wake up one day, when the Zoomers are bald and fat and Gen Alpha is lampooning their tendencies with as little mercy as Gen Z is currently showing the Millennials, and we’ll conclude that perhaps we were all a little too eager to turn up our noses at the Millennial cultural project writ large. Just like the Millennials themselves seemingly got old overnight, the great Millennial blockbuster suddenly seems to be a dying breed. Marvel has never quite gotten the machine back in gear after the COVID-19 pandemic and the parade of imitators spawned by the dominant Marvel Method of jokey, bantery, ironically distant scriptwriting and plotting has dispersed in recent years. This means that 2026’s first serious blockbuster of note, Project Hail Mary, arrives as something of a curio. An honest to God smash hit in the Millennial mode.

Ryan Gosling freakin LOVES science, you guys, and he’s a bit awk, like just a bit, you know, he talks too much, like he’s doing now. He’s got graphic tees about the periodic table and rides a bike to work because, you know, #adulting is hard, and money is tight, and even though he’s a handsome genius microbiologist, he’s teaching middle school. The freakin economy dude! Not amazeballs! But now all of a sudden he’s woken up on a whole-ass SPACESHIP? Like in the middle of SPACE? Uh, yeah, that just happened.

I’ll stop before you start plotting my gory death.

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If I had to summarize Project Hail Mary in brief, it would be as follows: “Armageddon but for Democrats.” Based on the novel of the same name by Andy Weir1 the titular project concerns a critical threat to life on Earth as we know it, and the longshot effort to diagnose and solve it before it’s too late. Alien microbes2 of unknown origin are in the process of eating the sun, dimming and weakening it ever so slightly, and unless a countermeasure is found, the world will spiral into a permanent ice age within a matter of decades. The same phenomenon is affecting nearby stars all around us, except one. An advanced spacecraft is constructed to take a small crew on a one way trip to study the local phenomenon and find a solution which they can send back to earth before its too late. So rather than Michael Bay sending a crew of scowling roughneck oil drillers (and also Ben Affleck) to blow up an asteroid, we gotta send a wisecracking STEM guy to do epic whiteboard math and study samples while doing Marvel movie banter. Generally speaking, I find Weir sort of unimaginative as a plotter and so more than the actual space stuff, the odd couple buddy comedy problem solving is really the meat and potatoes here, with a tone that gently reassures you that all will be well in the end. This is very much a Does the Dog Die Dot Com coded production.

Sounds awful. But it works. This may as well be the motto for Phil Lord and Chris Miller, Hollywood’s specialists in getting good to great films out of bad ideas, and masters of the Millennial Blockbuster form. They crafted two brilliant buddy comedies bearing the name of flash in the pan cop show 21 Jump Street and somehow made The Lego Batman Movie allegedly worthwhile. I’m not surprised that they made Ryan Gosling’s self-effacing, Joss Whedonesque Ryland Grace more amusing and charming than grating. Ryan Gosling is, of course, Ryan Gosling; a genuine movie star in an era when they’re also meant to be an endangered species. Lord and Miller also have the good sense to stand back and let Sandra Huller work, and her turn here makes a dignified first stop on her 2026 Bag Chasing Tour.3 But the real star here is Rocky The Alien, which is fitting because he’s truly the most Millennial Blockbuster-coded part of the whole production. He’s Groot for 2026. Cute, charming, never quite crosses the threshold into being insufferable. Somewhere between a talking dog and a friendly foreign roommate. The introduction of the alien craft and its sole occupant is easily the best string of scenes in the film, and there are multiple contenders for that title. Project Hail Mary is easy to root for as a proper blockbuster of scale and pathos and an outlook of genuine optimism and humanism. People forget that this was another feature of the millennial project writ large. Whatever your critique of their complacency or lack of tact, the progressive consensus which still dominates the millennial generation (and is suffused through its art) is ultimately a statement of faith in the future. You can view it as insufficiently revolutionary or direct but films like these are founded on the premise that things can get better because we can make them better. In an age shot through with doom and resignation, belief in the power of human ingenuity and human virtue to save us all is something worth admiring. Project Hail Mary is a monument to that belief, that doing the right thing really might save us all.

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Enjoying the Millennial Blockbuster is sort of like supporting the Invasion of Iraq in 2004. It’s deeply unfashionable to admit it these days but you most likely did at the time. You liked the banter and the references and the winking and nodding and the evil sky beams and the post-credits scenes. I don’t care how many A24 hats you buy or Disney Adult-mocking memes you post, you wanted to know who the hell Thanos was in 2010. I know this because I was the guy, the comics guy, that you asked. There is no time more repellent to us than the recent past because it forces us to confront the people we just got done being, and a lot of you got done being graphic tee wearing, impact font memeing, Marvel Movie obsessives as the 2010s resolved. I never shame anyone for their taste, as a rule, and I’m not out here demanding we bring these back to the fore. Disco’s dead, baby, and so is the Millennial Blockbuster. I want us to recognize that we have a unique opportunity, in the form of this film, to say goodbye to an artistic and cultural movement which dominated the world for a decade. I think it’s an opportunity worth taking. I think it’s a ride worth taking.

And The Millennial in me (I’m a 1997 baby, score me where you like) finds it so delightfully ironic that this Millennial Blockbuster will lose its spot atop the Box Office charts to a Zoomer Blockbuster (The Super Mario Galaxy Movie) next week.

I rate this movie four “Savior of the Universe” paper hats out of five.

In celebration of my short story The Coat Trade being selected as a finalist for the inaugural short story contest, I’ll be reposting some of my back catalog of published short stories here over the coming weeks. While the finalist’s prize is fairly modest all told, it does represent a vital milestone; I have never been paid to write fiction until now. So thank you.

This short story originally appeared in Apocalypse Confidential in spring of 2023. It is about a man falling in love with a mummy. I hope you enjoy it.

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My job requires me to spend time with people that don’t get many visitors. As a result you develop a relationship with each of them. It wasn’t like that at first with her though. The realities of her situation made her somewhat withdrawn, and we met in such a professional context that neither of us could make a real impression on the other. A few years later I was reassigned and, given the option, chose a post in California. I didn’t know she was living in my service area around Los Angeles when I took the position. When I found out it made me certain I’d taken the right job. Having said that; I doubted she’d remember me. Our first appointment was on a Thursday. I remember setting out early, hoping to beat traffic. That’s the irony of it though, so was everyone else in the gridlock.

She’s an alchemist by trade, and a very successful one. In her business you measure your career’s prestige by your lifespan and she’s pushing three thousand. Immortality is a tricky proposition. Organs fail. Skin ages and rots. Even a mind may decay as the brain it’s housed in dies. So she did what geniuses do. She found a loophole.

She had taken a house for herself, really raised one for herself out of the sand, on the fringes of the Mojave. It was a domed mud hut designed with machinelike precision. Practical and uncomplicated, very few changes or complaints since she moved there in 1966. The ideal type of case to manage. She’d officially been with the Company from 1934 through 1974 and had retired, though no pension had ever been necessary. I remember being told by a supervisor that the previous supervisor helped her pick a spot to settle down, and that initially she’d planned on constructing a kind of cave complex for herself in the rock of Death Valley but abandoned the project after complaining to her handlers that the sun was far too intense. This was meant to be the punch line, but I didn’t really get it.

I remember my first, real, close, personal impression of her as well. She surprised me. I drove up, parked my car, walked up to the side that, given where the road came from, seemed best suited for a front door, and there she was.

She’s five feet tall on her best day, and I suspect on this occasion she was floating a few undetectable inches off the ground to maybe push for 5’2”. The mask makes her appear larger than she is. It’s a massive over-the-shoulders solid gold casing, polished to a reflective sheen and shaped to fit the face of a young woman. The whites of the eyes are filled in and surrounded by a dark line standing in for the kohl a person of her status would have worn in life. Black metal pock-marked with divots at regular intervals to simulate the texture of hair rested on her back and shoulders, ringed with bands of more gold at the bottom and adorned on the back with a small ornament in the shape of a sphinx whose wings stretched out on either side to about the diameter of the mask across. The whole thing was linked in a solid piece to a jeweled neck collar which gave her shoulders a bit more width. It appeared heavy and phenomenally uncomfortable.

When the door appeared, and then she appeared in the door, it startled me. I jumped just a bit before catching myself.

“Miss Knefera?” I asked, though there really wasn’t anyone else it could be.

She gave a sort of half bow, half nod in response and said, “We are none other.”

She always spoke like that, the royal we I guess you call it. Never really seemed to me that she was trying to act like royalty though.

She directed me in with a gloved hand and I took care not to step on the billowing knee-to-neck one piece linen tunic lined with tiny lengthwise pleats she wore under her collar, or to catch my hands in its long, loose sleeves. Her pants were of a similar construction and fit and what little could be glimpsed of her feet was tucked into some sort of moccasins.

When I got through the door it startled me again to see I was standing on nothing, in the ether above a sheer drop. It was an elevator made of glass, operated by a pulley system which is in turn operated by a pair of the miniature wax golems which act as her housekeepers, lab assistants, and as a kind of nervous system for her home and the things in it. I was impressed and being polite in a new acquaintance’s home, despite the scare, and so it wasn’t until later that I confessed to being spooked by the elevator (she was mortified when I told her, and later put down a rug to prevent the problem) and asked why she’d even made it out of glass. She just said sand was everywhere and served most of her construction needs. She was right, a lot of things in her home were made out of glass. It was a home built to serve her and only her. She was not the type to stumble around and break things and so why not live in a glass house?

Though the thing that surprised me, more than the mask or the elevator, was that she remembered me. She remembered my name.

Your ka, your spirit, naturally dwells in your blood and organs. Those break down and so to hear her tell it many of her contemporaries, similarly uninterested in the orthodox methods of guaranteeing life after death, would try putting their ka in all sorts of vessels. She decided this was a waste of effort, your body already has a perfectly good vessel, one that never wears out and doesn’t require maintenance. She theorized that human ka could be bound to one’s skeleton instead of her flesh.

I remember the elevator let out into a kind of mud room, bigger than someone who didn’t get many visitors and likely didn’t own many pairs of shoes needed. That’s what I thought anyway, and I told her so. She told me that it needed to be this big for when the men from the Company came to deliver her monthly provisions. She could just disintegrate it from where they left it on the “front porch” and reconstitute it down here without bothering with the elevator. A bigger landing area made everything so much smoother.

After that there was a hallway which opened up into a small sitting room on the left and led you into the kitchen if you continued on straight ahead. To the right there was a small nook in the wall housing a household shrine, to Bastet if I wasn’t mistaken, usually also holding small sacrifices, a lab mouse or a little desert finch, as it was on this occasion. Biggest thing I ever saw on there was the head and severed feet of a jackrabbit, one of the big floppy-eared ones from deeper in the Mojave. That was for the winter solstice though. Despite the cat goddess shrine, I never saw a cat around. Though if there wasn’t one, who was leaving those mice and finches on that altar? Best not to think about that.

I almost forgot the bread, and I’m happy there’s no way I can tell this story without it. The smell actually hit me in the elevator, this yeasty, nutty, earthy smelling sourdough bread smell just rose through the whole place and I finally found the source. Domed and rustic, it sat on her kitchen table. That just made me more curious. It’s sort of tough to be curious in private though, she could tell I was interested in the bread and so she offered me some, saying it had just been baked that morning.

“We should have had something more waiting. You must be tired,” she said. “We often forget how long the journey from your city takes. Distances are not so hard for us.”

I was curious about what exactly she meant by that too, but first I thanked her profusely, saying how excellent it smelled and how it would be lovely with just a glass of water, thanks. The bread was, predictably, excellent, which got us talking more about food and after a while I got a little too curious and said, “Well wait, you don’t have to eat, right?”

Without a word, she tore a piece off (she never saw the point of a knife for such things). It rested in her palm, on the velvety surface of her glove, for a moment before it evaporated into a plume of steam.

“We eat with our ka, not our mouth. Though we must eat, as our shabti remind us during our studies.” She pointed at one of the wax golems clearing crumbs off the table.

The appointment got more businesslike after that. I could tell it was a question she was tired of answering. Not uncomfortable about it, maybe even the opposite. Still, it was likely for the best. I had to remind myself that I was on Company time and this was work, not a social call, at least not entirely. We concluded our business, nothing out of the ordinary as far as the month’s provisions go and no other complaints. She saw me out on the elevator and I thanked her again for the bread and water as I left.

I got hung up on what I’d said for the next couple days as I was going about my other work. Not guilty per se but just kind of a nagging sense that things had been going well and then I’d hurt her feelings. Some guys who do this job act like the people they see don’t have feelings to hurt. Never wanted to be one of them.

So I decided that when I visited again the thing to do would be bringing a baked good of my own along. Of course, I put it all off until the last minute and ended up getting her a supermarket pecan pie that struck me as “good enough” while standing in the bakery section the night before. I caught myself sneaking glances at the thing as I drove out, wondering if I was just making a jackass of myself. I like pecan pie though, most people seem to. Cupcakes struck me as juvenile, donuts not special enough, and fruit Danish just a little too boring. I was between the pie and a chocolate babka and like I said, I like pecan pie.

This time she was waiting for me outside. Her mask glowed in the sun and her clothes rippled in the hot, low breeze that blows off the desert. She inquired about the supermarket plastic bag in my hand and I told her it was to thank her for the bread. Then I heard her laugh for the first time.

“You modern people are so funny about this. No debts need be repaid. We merely acted as the laws of hospitality bid us.” I insisted, however, and though she acted as if she might roll her painted-on eyes at me she relented. She bent over at the waist to take the bag from me saying simply, “You honor us.” As she did, the wind picked up and I could see for just a moment the bony little wrists and sharp vertebrae hiding under those robes. As the wind died and she straightened the moment passed and we headed inside, talking as we took the elevator down.

I said, “Let me know what you think.”

“We are sure it will provide sufficient nourishment,” she replied.

“Oh I meant to let me know how it tastes.”

She explained that she didn’t “taste” as I understood it. In fact the lack of a nervous system meant her senses were very different from mine. She still had all five, but it was all purely through her ka with, as she put it; “no organs in the way.” She “saw” whatever her perception was focused on, irrespective of which direction she was facing. She “smelled” through feeling the composition of the air. Her “touch” was achieved through spreading her ka into her gloves and using the kidskin of their construction as a substitute for the human dermis. Hearing was mostly unaffected as sound travels in detectable waves either way, though taste was another matter. She understood the chemical and aural properties of whatever she took in just by the act of “eating,” but she never got that tactile, blood and guts enjoyment out of it.

By the time she’d finished her explanation, in that practiced way scientists explain their work to you, we were back in the kitchen. Immaculate as it was before with a brand new loaf of bread on the table along with a few tall dark glass bottles of what was almost certainly wine.

“Well then I have to ask, if you can’t taste your food why bother baking such great bread?”

“Father was a baker by trade. We have fond feelings for bread of this sort. We believe your word for it is nostalgia.” That just struck me as so sweet and nice and I told her so. She seemed a bit embarrassed by my saying this and told me that it was just one of several projects she was pursuing in her retirement.

She showed me her laboratory for the first time after that. To this day I’m unsure if she was trying harder to convince me or herself that she was pursuing more serious matters beyond baking bread and making wine. You know, the sort of business befitting an immortal.

In any case the room itself wasn’t anything particularly interesting. A small room with two walls dedicated to workspaces and two dedicated to shelving and storage. Even the things that stuck out were mundane, as among the decidedly more analog implements such what appeared to be an ivory mortar and pestle there were Bunsen burners with gas lines to match and digital scales. There was also plentiful drainage and ventilation.

Her work was much more interesting. She explained that the main obstacle to making bread just like her father used to was that the kind of grain they’d harvest to make it had gone extinct. There were ways to fix that (or at least get around it) but it required a lot of catching up in biology and the natural sciences, as well as developing her long-held interest in botany. She spoke with a degree of awe that it didn’t even seem possible for a three-thousand-year-old to possess about the very concept of genetics. A lot of it was opaque to me but the basic idea seemed to be knitting two similar types of grain together on the genetic level to get something similar to what she was after. You could theoretically accomplish this through breeding, like Mendel did, but alchemy is faster and more precise.

I suspected a lot of it was going over my head but she spoke with such enthusiasm about how she was exchanging letters with botanists from Berkley, anthropologists from Oxford by way of Cairo, and even an obscure geologist on the faculty of Louisiana Tech who’d written what she described as a “brilliant” and “insightful” thesis on river delta erosion. To hear her tell it she’d gained a bit of a reputation among academics in the relevant fields as a kind of reclusive savant, the Emily Dickinson of plant genetics. She had even worked her way into the good graces of one of the world’s foremost experts on plant genetics and speciation at the University of Zurich.

We had a lively visit after that. Another absolutely tremendous home-baked loaf of bread was improved even more by the addition of some olive oil her botanist friends at Berkeley had sent her. She vaporized a piece of pecan pie and remarked that she’d never cease to be amazed by how much sugar we modern people could pack into food.

I also gratefully accepted some wine though I will admit to underestimating how much stronger the ancients liked their wine. I had to stick around even past the close of our usual business, just for a bit while I sobered up. This meant there was time to finally see her sitting room, which also functioned as her library. I don’t know how much she even figured I would understand but it was apparent to anyone, even the wax housekeepers, how long she’d been waiting to talk about her collection to someone. She even managed a joke as she half-skipped, half-levitated around the shelves carved into her walls, pulling out one regally adorned scroll and proudly identifying it as the world’s only surviving hieroglyphic translation of the Apology, rescued from the Library at Alexandria before the fire by some Ptolemy-era scholar either too lazy to return it or too broke to pay the late fees. At least that was her theory, she’d never met the man. She removed the scroll from his tomb while helping the same archeologists who dug her up excavate her neighbors in the Valley of Kings.

Anyway, I left that evening in a great mood even though the pecan pie hadn’t gone over as I’d hoped.

For a while, things went on like this. I’d make my usual visits and she’d talk about what she was working on, who she’d gotten a letter or a gift from, what she thought of the books she’d asked us to check out from local libraries. She was always so happy to see me and it was becoming more and more of a mutual thing. She was unlike anyone I’d ever met. I began to appreciate how I could read subtle changes in her tone or posture the way I’d read someone else’s face. I got wise to how she used her clothes as a kind of nervous system, gaining spatial awareness by how they billowed out around her. Most of all though I was always left in a good mood by her zest for life, how much she seemed to be enjoying the gift of immortality that she’d won for herself. I was in awe of her mind, and, I later had to admit, beginning to fall in love with her ka.

I recall that it was a Friday. By this time I’d begun scheduling her visits on Fridays so I could clock out right on time and be free to have a drink or two and socialize. I’d come to enjoy these conversations quite a bit. I’d become more reference material for her. Maybe that sounds insulting to you but I for one kind of enjoyed it. She’d ask me my perspective on things that puzzled her about the modern world. Sometimes we’d argue about it. Usually we’d end up somewhere completely different from where we started the conversation. I always like conversations like that. Lets you know people don’t want things from you, except to talk.

All of this is to say I’m not sure whether it was the wine or just the ease of talking to her but I got a little too honest. I told her my theory, about all of this.

“It’s subconscious. You’re making food that you remember because deep down you miss eating it like you used to. You’re fixated on this because you have a craving and no stomach to feel it in.”

“Is this what modern people call psychology?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“We merely wish to understand from where your premise originates.”

“Well I didn’t go to college for psychology but if you’d like to talk to one I can finally get your briefed on that Company health plan.”

“We are sympathetic but there is no need. Mortals see wise men to offer them counsel. In this time, none are wiser than We.”

She was sitting in her favored reading chair, legs crossed, arms nested on her knees so her robes billowed out just so. She looked very regal. Would have, anyway if one of her wax servants weren’t standing on her shoulder, buffing dust bunnies out of her collar and smudging off her mask with a bit of cloth. Her attempts to be bigger just made me all the more aware of how small she was.

“I’m not dropping this. I think you’ve just been nursing a craving for three thousand years.”

Her eyes almost seemed to roll again. “It has not been nearly so long. We have had flesh more recently than you may realize.”

“So what happened?”

“Far too much maintenance.” She waved a hand in the air dismissively. “The energy generated by one’s ka has better applications than keeping meat from rotting.”

She liked to deflect that way when I was a little too close. It was easier to pretend she was above it all in that way, floating above our mortal concerns like she did the ground. It may have worked with some of my colleagues but she wasn’t fooling me. There was a human girl somewhere in there, behind that mask.

The conversation carried on like that for a bit, just her evading me. I hooked her back in with the suggestion that we make it a kind of game, a test of everything she’d been working on. She could make herself some skin, I could come out early on my day off and we’d cook a whole feast.

She was quick to kill the idea that I would be involved in any way in cooking the meal, which I expected. Though I had already decided to buy another pecan pie in anticipation of the occasion, whenever that ended up being. I didn’t settle on a date that evening, or even get a definite yes from her. But she’d agreed to add the necessary chemicals and minerals for making human flesh to her monthly provisions and I took that as a win.

It was next Wednesday, if I recall correctly, when I received a note, handwritten on rough dry papyrus, informing me that she wouldn’t be needing a visit this week, but that I should come hungry the week afterwards. The time in the interim really wound up dragging. Anticipation can do that.

I bore some teasing about visiting my “girlfriend” from a few of my co-workers and took the day off to drive out early. I had my pecan pie on my passenger seat along with a plastic jug of Arnold Palmer and a little glass jar of cultured butter I’d picked up from a farmer’s market, thinking it’d go well with the bread. No one likes a dinner guest who shows up empty handed.

When she met me at the door my first impression was that she was the color of cinnamon. My second was that whoever had made that mask for her had done a pretty good job capturing her likeness. Though her real face-the face she’d made for herself, was more mature. To the world she’d shown a girlish face, with an abiding smile and bright, wide eyes. In person, face to face, she seemed much more like a full-grown woman. More elegant.

Her clothes gave that impression too, she’d eschewed her usual knee to neck smock in favor of a short-sleeved sundress arrangement made of the same fabric, with similar pleating. She’d kept that damn neck collar though and paired it with giant gold earrings that must have been about as uncomfortable. Though I suppose they’d have to be that big to stand out from the curtain of wooly black hair she’d grown for herself. Or maybe she’d grown it independent of herself. I remembered reading that the average ancient Egyptian woman would shave her head and wear a wig. Too much maintenance, I guessed. Especially when you have fleas and lice to worry about.

In any case she caught me staring. I know she did. She just didn’t bring it up. She chose instead to berate me (at least as much as was polite) for bringing my own food and not allowing her to treat me as an honored guest, then she invited me into the elevator. (She’d gotten the rug for it by this point.)

I guess I’d had the thought once or twice before then but during that elevator ride down I started thinking that maybe I should have just gone with it when the guys from the office tried to say she was my girlfriend. Seemed like a better proposition all the time.

We opened a bottle of wine and off we went. First came a tour of the new and improved house. She’d added a proper bedroom (two, in fact) as well as a bathroom with pretty modern fixtures, all things considered, and a small sunroom. This last one had been on her agenda for a while, as she needed somewhere to properly care for the gifts her growing network of botanist friends sent her. It just dovetailed nicely with her new skin’s need for vitamin D. She showed me where she’d grown it down in her lab as well. A long, shallow box (a bathtub, or a coffin, if you’re feeling more macabre) still held some of the gooey residue from her metamorphosis, though a crew of shabti was hard at work on the cleanup, naturally. She explained to me as well that it had been a simple matter to modify a few of them to serve as her beauticians and nursemaids and how they’d been helping her readjust to the hygienic and sanitary needs of human skin. I decided we should eat before the conversation could go somewhere that would adversely affect my appetite.

The food was excellent, of course. My spinach artichoke was appreciated (she’d never had it before) though it paled in comparison to her bread and the stuffed grape leaves which really ended up as the unexpected star of the meal. That one was her uncle’s recipe. He had brought it back from one of his trading voyages to Greece and it had gone straight in the family cookbook. Trendy recipes were still around back then, they just took longer to travel.

We had finished off our entrée (some lovely lamb cutlets) and were split on dessert. I was stuffed and she wouldn’t have any of the pie unless I did. We agreed, however, that bottle number three was not getting any less empty and more wine was an absolute necessity.

What we couldn’t agree on was who should go to the cellar to get more wine, and so we both went. That’s how we ended up having our first kiss. She reached up for a bottle on a high shelf, I grabbed it for her, and when the bottle came down and my eyes came down with it there was nothing between me and the shelf but her, and she was so beautiful.

“Hmmm I see now why you were so adamant that we return to flesh,” she said. I wanted to deny it, you know, act like a gentleman but she stopped me with a manicured finger on my lips. “We have desired this also.”

The sheets in her room were phenomenally soft, freshly conjured I figured, along with the rest of the furnishings. I had time to admire them since she was off in the bathroom, primping. Women are funny about that, most men I know probably don’t even care and would say so if you asked but then again their wives and girlfriends would tell you they don’t do it for their man’s benefit. Suppose it’s a confidence thing and lord knows men are just as fussy as women if not more so when their egos get bruised. I think so anyway.

She came out of the little bathroom she’d carved out of the rock adjoining to her bedroom wearing a light cotton robe. She didn’t seem to have put it on for any other purpose than taking it off and letting it fall to the floor theatrically. In the bathroom she’d rubbed herself with some sweet-smelling oil and now stood naked. The details of these sorts of things make me a bit uncomfortable so you’ll forgive me for not giving you a full account of all you may wish to know. I remember I used to read my Uncle’s old James Bond paperbacks and every single one of those suckers had a scene where the main love interest tells the reader how big their breasts are and how the women would moan so loud the paint would peel. As a teenage boy I appreciated it. As a man it’s always made me just a bit embarrassed.

Suffice it to say that I informed her I was done waiting around and demonstrated this by lifting her up in my arms (remember that she’s not a very big person) and dropping her onto her bed while she half-giggled and half protested. We exchanged another kiss. Rolled around a little. I was able to confirm that her hair was natural, both with my fingers and unintentionally with my mouth. She ended up on top of me. She winced. Then I saw why.

Do you know what “skin slip” is? I can’t recommend you do too much research on it if you have a weak stomach. It happens most often to bodies that have been in the ground for a while, getting ripe. It starts as something like a blister but as the gas and fluids from decomposition build up the surface tension of the blister goes past the point of no return. It pops, and the skin “slips” off the bone. Though as it happened in a matter of seconds on the fleshy part of her upper-arm it struck me more as a flopping than a slippage. “Skin slip” makes more sense as a medical term but Skin Flop better describes the phenomenon in terms of simple phonics. Warm, wet things like human flesh go “flop.”

It did not spread from her arm like a skin infection, it appeared all over her body at random. One of her breasts began to sag to the point of snapping off, her eyes grew jaundiced, her fingers began to melt one after the other. She was rotting alive and rippling with panic. And she was right on top of me.

I would like nothing more than to tell you that I was understanding, mature, in command. That I extricated myself calmly and told her that our fun appeared to be over tonight and that she should see to her own health. Instead, I saw blood and guts, smelled pus and rot, and did what people unused to such situations do; I vomited.

I had to sit and stew in all the oils, mine and hers, natural and cosmetic, for a while. She was in the bathroom again, sobbing with no eyes to cry from. At first I pounded on the door, I wanted to know if she was okay. All I got back was “I’m sorry” wailed again and again. It was the first time she’d ever called herself “I” when talking to me. Somehow it made things worse, a feeling like I’d destroyed her. A silly thing to think given that the reverse could have been true if she ever wanted to do so.

When the bathroom door opened again I got to see her for the first time. She was a bleached white skeleton, perfectly maintained but so small, so fragile. The air behind her stunk of lye. It became clear to me that she’d torn off what was left of her flesh and dropped it in the bathtub to dissolve.

I tried to be nice. I don’t know why. People in pain never like it when you try to be nice to them. After I apologized for vomiting, I asked if she wanted to sit up a while longer before bed. She just put her head in her bony hands and ran out the door, yelling, “We have no need for your pity.”

I slept in the chair I was in. The sheets were filthy with gore and vomit and when I woke up in the morning they hadn’t been changed. The whole house sat quiet. The wax housekeepers had dropped dead where they stood. Unlit, uncleaned, uncared for, the place felt so much like a tomb. There was no sign anywhere of Knefera, the alchemist, the immortal, the woman I realized I loved maybe just a second too late.

What else was there to do? I drove home, called up the Company, and told them I was cashing in my accumulated vacation time. Not that I did anything with it. I said I’d take the time to think about things, figure out how I felt, but that was just an excuse to drink too much and lay around the house, buried under my own self-pity. I hated myself for not having the courage to love someone as they were, I had tried to change her and I’d ruined everything.

I thought so anyway.

A month later I got a knock at my door and there she was, in a new suit of skin. It was different from the old one, though not in any way I can point to as an obvious difference. She just seemed more natural in it, more at home, maybe it was just a trick of the light. The way the California sun danced in her hair and on her light linen jumpsuit brought out the flecks of gold in her kohl-lined eyes.

I swear the moment could have gone on forever, just the horrible infinity of not knowing why she was here, what she had been doing, how she felt about me. The thought crossed my mind that maybe she was just here to reduce me to the grease spot I felt like I already was before I could gossip.

She didn’t do that. She apologized. I felt like that was wholly unnecessary and I told her so but she said she had been a bad host and a bad friend for walking out on me like that.

Then she handed me a brown paper bag with something light and loaf-shaped inside, saying, “A token of my goodwill and affection.”

I took the bag and said the first thing that came to mind: “So it’s my and I now hmm?”

She pouted. “Just because we do not choose to speak in the vernacular does not mean we are unaware of it. We addressed a great gathering of wise men and women today, to speak properly in such settings is important!”

She’d been traveling, meeting her friends at universities all over the world, first Zurich, then Istanbul, then Cairo, finally her globetrotting had brought her back here, where she’d just been the guest speaker at a faculty luncheon for the University of California-Los Angeles’ botany department.

“In any case whether you wish for continued companionship or not, We were bound to bring you the fruits of this labor. It was you who allowed for it to happen.”

“How do you figure?”

“It is somewhat embarrassing to admit but simply tasting the bread allowed for far more progress on my research than other forms of analysis. We are angered to think that we ever could have been so foolish.” She sighed. “Though it seems that we have been foolish for three thousand years.”

“Well I don’t know about any of that but this is it? This is your dad’s bread?”

“It’s better.”

“Better?”

She smiled. “You heard me.”

“Well then I gotta try it.” She looked down and away, as if searching for an exit. “Do you want to come in and see what I think?”

“I’d like that.”

I won’t speak too much on the bread, since you can’t buy it anywhere and I don’t want to make you jealous. But that night we concluded we very much wished for each other’s continued companionship, to borrow her words. We still do, all these years later.

“What’s my name!?”

You hand this to eight out of ten filmmakers and you get a boilerplate sports drama. You hand it to Michael Mann and you get an almost hubristically ambitious historical/biographical epic of conspiracy, symbology, and identity with some mind-bending boxing sequences thrown in for good measure. That’s the Mann Touch, baby.

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The Performance of Will Smith’s career. I think he’s almost supernaturally well-suited to what Mann is going for here. He’s obviously a competent face match for Ali himself but the arc of the film and what Mann is trying to state with it are so fitting for the persona of Will Smith circa 2001. The novelty hip-hopper turned TV comedian turned box office topper. Middle America’s respectable, nonthreatening black friend. More a successor of the sort of all-audiences entryism via respectability of Bill Cosby than the braggadocio and provocation of the man once called Cassius Clay. There’s the obvious level-raising dramatic potential of the role for Smith, and a prestige drama turn to avoid being typecast as a wisecracking action hero made pragmatic career sense in 2001, but I can’t help but read Smith’s performance as a conscious effort to regain a connection with his own blackness, after years in the homogenizing Hollywood machine.

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The role finds a unity between its actor and the thematic fixation of its director. Mann’s leading men are always men of principles, whether moral, professional, or simply ego-driven. They are all alike in that they will not compromise on that which they value most. Muhammad Ali fits this mold beautifully. What’s so novel and unexpected about it is how Mann and Smith take that next step in showing the consequences such a principled individual will incur when living as a public figure and cultural symbol. The Zaire stuff is such sublime apotheosis. Ali’s struggle was always identitarian in nature, asserting the right to live, speak, present, and worship as he pleased within America, and in so doing, to hold America to account for promising him the right to do all these things but never following through. In stepping outside of the American bubble, we see a man realize that even after winning his fight in courts of law and halls of power, his identity is still no longer his own. It belongs to all people that find, to paraphrase Kanye West, bravery in his bravado.

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I think we all forgot how absolutely loaded this cast is beyond Smith. Jeffery Wright. Mario Van Peebles (as Malcolm X!). Lil Jada Pinkett in a “huh, that’s interesting” type appearance. A nice little turn for Giancarlo Esposito and space for habitual Mann Character Actors Mykelti Williamson and Barry Shabaka Henley. Jon Voight scooped a deserved Oscar Nomination as Howard Cosell (man, it seems fun to have a homie you publicly loathe for branding purposes). But really, there’s such an instant director/actor connection here between Mann and Jamie Foxx. He’s electric. Little wonder they’d reunite a few more times before the decade ended. You know, come to think of it, Jada Pinkett was in Collateral, too! Not my place to proclaim this sort of thing but is Michael Mann, like, for the culture? There’s a case to be made! Not my business, as I said. But I do think there’s a case.

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There’s a cruel sort of irony to the long tail of this movie’s legacy. Will Smith was nominated for best actor at the Academy Awards and lost to, let’s face it, a superior performance by a more accomplished black thespian in Denzel Washington (in Training Day). He’d spend the next decade and change chasing another bite at this prestige filmmaking apple and never get this close again. Mann didn’t even get a sniff, either for best Picture or Best Director. Sure, it was a pretty loaded field that year, (come on, Ron Howard over Peter Jackson AND David Lynch? Shame on you people) but one of Mann’s most ambitious stylistic swings couldn’t get any juice for the squeeze. I saw Ali for the first time as a child. It was on FX or AMC, and that’s probably the same way a lot of you saw it. That’s maybe the unkindest cut of all. A movie so clearly built for a theater destined to be consumed in a lazy, Sunday afternoon haze by bored suburbanites and their Dads, both wondering why there isn’t more boxing in this boxing movie.

I rate this movie four and a half water glasses full of vodka out of five.

“They don’t just give out Pulp Man of the Year to any old fool.”

Hollywood in 2026 is an institution in retreat. Every financial statistic pulled from the box office reporters tells us this is the case. If the metaphorical Blue Ocean Event which indicates imminent collapse of the American cinematic ecosystem has not yet taken place, it’s surely close at hand. The modern viewing public has given up on the movies.

However, there is an argument to be made that the movies gave up on modern people first.

Hollywood’s retreat is not just a material one, but an artistic one. It surrenders ground to its entertainment competition as it flees into distant sci-fi futures, curated lookbook pasts, and parallel comic book presents. None of these are in and of themselves a bad thing, and all of these things are vital parts of balanced diet of cinematic visions, but the cinema of the 2020s feels uniquely afflicted by a conscious disconnect from the realities of everyday life as its ostensible audience lives it. Modern filmmaking is an art conducted in crippling fear of the smartphone. Look at the recent work of any director of note and it’s impossible to miss. The stewards of the art form would rather do anything else than attempt to confront modernity head-on.

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It doesn’t have to be this way.

Step outside of the Hollywood monoculture and you’ll find international filmmakers more game to make movies about people living as we do today. This is by no means an indicator of their quality, plenty of crap still gets made. But it’s worth acknowledging that the problems of modernity can be tackled head on, rather than obliquely nudged via allegory or association. For my money, no country’s cinema has done a better job of hog-tying modernity and jabbing at its pain points than South Korea, and the latest feature from one of their filmmakers of record is another chapter in the saga of Hollywood fumbling its role as our global storyteller, and of other countries picking up the ball with style and substance.

No Other Choice is, in my opinion, totally excellent. But then, I would think that. It’s an adaptation of one of my favorite authors, Donald Westlake1, handled with style, class, humor, and intelligence by one of my favorite working directors in Park Chan-wook. Of course I’d love it. It’s less remarkable that I loved it than it is remarkable that it’s not quite my favorite film of the year2.

In short: No Other Choice is the story of a prosperous and fulfilled family man, Yoo Man-su. Man-su has a wife, two kids, two big fluffy golden retrievers, a gorgeous home. He’s living the dream until he’s fired from his supervisory job at a paper mill after a twenty five year tenure, victimized by corporate restructuring after his company’s acquisition by American investors. That’s hard times, daddy. Facing imminent financial ruin after months of unemployment, our man happens upon the perfect opportunity to secure his comfortable existence and his children’s futures. The problem is; so has every other qualified candidate in his industry. Like I said, hard times, daddy. There aren’t enough spots on the lifeboats. What’s a man to do? Eliminate the competition, of course. In a desperate last attempt to stave off a home foreclosure, Man-su hatches a plot to kill the other candidates and win the job by default.

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Now I feel it’s appropriate to specify that this is a farce, a black comedy, and it succeeds in that lane. No Other Choice is by and large a society comedy shot through with moments of crushing bleakness and quiet tragedy. Yoo Man-su isn’t driven by Tyler Durden postmodern machismo or Patrick Bateman materialist insanity. He’s introduced to us as a sweet, caring man who’d like nothing more than to keep doing for his family what he’s always done. He’s by no means suited to be a killer. This makes him typically Westlake-ian. If, say, Elmore Leonard found humor in scorning the criminal class for its stupidity, Westlake saw it as a simple extension of human folly. Every crime is a comedy of errors. However, for adaptational purposes, he’s superbly portrayed by Lee Byung-hun. Lee’s a prior collaborator with Park Chan-wook, on his breakout feature Joint Security Area, but probably more familiar to American audiences for his role in Netflix’s Squid Game3. He brings the manic desperation and gaunt-eyed guilt that the script dials up for him, but I really do want to make a note of his physical acting. He’s appropriately flustered in moments of capering gone awry but also brings the requisite sensitivity and warmth of a family man trying to navigate genuine crisis, he’s the lame but lovable dad, shot through with middle-aged impotence even in his moments of trying to take the power back. Special mention is due to one of the slickest fist-bumps I have ever seen on a movie screen. You will know it when you see it.

A commitment to being a film of the moment is shot through No Other Choice, and continues the stylistic project from Park’s previous effort Decision to Leave. Park’s always had a certain style, naturally favoring an oversaturated color palette flush with vibrant foliage greens and primary colors bright enough to burn your eyes. However, in recent years he’s emerged as a student of the modern populist filmmaking of TikTok and Instagram Reels. I don’t think there’s a director working today that understands how to incorporate this stuff, this inescapable video stream of modern life, into his films in a way that feels naturalistic, but never condescending, even at its most openly parodic4. I don’t consider it a gimmick, if anything it’s an avenue by which Park can probe deeper into the social satire of the film. The spiral into poverty is marked by the surrender of status symbols and what is a curated Instagram feed if not a status symbol?

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The emotional core of the film is watching all that warmth and love exit the family unit in the ever-more frantic pursuit of financial security. It’s a modernist tragedy, a man losing touch with people that already love him so that he can win approval from people that will readily dispose of him. Victory is hollow in every sense. No Other Choice is a crime drama for the era of LinkedIn platitudes and universal precarity. It is vital and cutting because its reality, its absurd, cruel, banal reality, is our reality.

I rate this movie five Pulp Men of the Year out of five.

"How bout you wash my ass, Father? It's Tuesday, not Sunday!"

Spare a thought for the quality mid-budget film saddled with the indignity of a January/February release window. While the meat and potatoes of a multiplex audience still grazes on Christmas crowd-pleasers and the self-styled cinephiles rush around to catch sparse showing of awards hopefuls, 2026’s first proper releases stumble out into the world, anonymous and unloved. Well, all the ones that aren’t 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple at least (though even that is struggling).

Dead Man’s Wire is one such film. A charmingly-old school little true crime thriller with trendy actors at its fore and a solid hand on the sticks in Gus Van Sant, sent out to die against franchise films with bigger marketing budgets. At time of writing, the film has grossed just under $2 million and is probably headed directly for a purgatorial afterlife of streaming anonymity. Like a kid who wrote a few nice poems in the trenches and then got sawn in half by a Kraut machinegun at The Somme, the poor thing never had a chance.

I am not here to tell you this movie is great. If asked to pay the price of admission (an indignity which is beneath me these days as an AMC Stubs A-List member) I would probably tell you to save your money. But I do feel like this film is good. Its failures are more interesting than infuriating. It doesn’t overstay its welcome with a 105 minute runtime. In three months time this film will be just another tile on your streaming entertainment grid and I am here to tell you it’s worth a look.

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For the uninitiated: Dead Man’s Wire is based on a true story. In early February 1977, Indianapolis businessman Tony Kiritsis entered the offices of his mortgage broker under the pretenses of a meeting to resolve a dispute over Kiritsis’ late payments on a piece of property which he planned to develop into a shopping center. Instead, Kiritsis produced a twelve gauge shotgun, wired it to both his neck and the neck of the mortgage loan broker Richard O. Hall, and marched him out the front door and through downtown Indianapolis in full view of the police and media. Kiritsis felt he had been cheated and taken advantage of by his financial backers and incited a hostage crisis to demand the cancellation of his debts and a personal apology from the Hall family.

Kiritsis is played (in a typical though not especially egregious case of a handsome actor playing an ugly real person) by Bill Skarsgard, a name which should be very familiar to horror fans. The scion of Sweden’s famous acting family has found a profitable lane for himself as a modern-day Boris Karloff, first bringing Pennywise the Clown to life for a new generation in the recent IT films and then tackling cinema’s most famous vampire for Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu in 2024.

But there is always the danger of getting typecast, isn’t there? It happened to Karloff and so many other actors who made their bones in horror movies. I suppose that was really the draw for me. On the one hand it’s a sort of challenge to the actor in question; can he really act or does he just wear the facial prosthetics and do the funny accents well? On the other, well, it must get dreadfully hot and itchy under all that crap, right? Gotta be on set however many hours early so they can lacquer it on. Critical support for people that wanna show up to work later and abide by a less onerous dress code. It’s a winning combination of actor and role, as Skarsgard’s physicality and horror-movie grade facial acting brings a real vein of authentic rage to a character which could have turned into a middle-American caricature rather quickly in the wrong hands. There is something pathetic about him, this weird little man screaming about how he’s been cheated and he wants to get his money back. There’s no Robin Hood justification for Kiritsis, no photogenic family waiting for dad to bring home the bacon, just an empty apartment in an ugly brick mid-rise. His businesses are his children, he tells us. He’s loaded with signifiers of a pathetic, ridiculous sort of American masculinity but you’re sort of obligated to take him seriously, despite all his blustering. He’s holding the shotgun, after all.

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After the initial abduction, the film faces the issue of what exactly to do as far as keeping the audience engaged, and this is where it begins to lose focus and momentum. There’s a number of interesting potential threads to be pulled and, as is so often the case with a movie doomed to be merely pretty good, it gives them all a cursory tug without ever committing to one in particular. There’s the media angle, framed by the persistent presence of an Indianapolis area TV news anchor and her cameraman, but this never goes anywhere better films haven’t been going for years and the anchorwoman in question, played by Myha’la (who is apparently on Industry in some form or fashion), is a real dud of a performance for me. She’s done no favors by the script and I suspect Van Sant’s direction has let her down too, as she’s delivering many of her lines in this late-20th Century newscaster voice which feels overly affected, especially when compared with real archival footage from the TV coverage of the actual hostage crisis. These are the perils of having people in 1977 portrayed by actors born twenty years later. Doesn’t help that she’s sharing pseudonarrator/Greek Chorus duties with the inimitable Colman Domingo, which, holy smokes, Colman Domingo is in this! I had no idea! It’s hardly his best work when measured against his recent run of acclaimed performances in awards hopefuls that make no money but the man’s voice is ideally suited to play a drive time jazz radio DJ, one with whom Skarsgard’s character has formed a parasocial bond. I assume based on that description Domingo Hive is already rushing to book tickets and they should! It’s a good turn by him and it feels like a real missed trick by the marketing department to not play up his involvement. Probably wouldn’t have helped, but still!

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I suspect Van Sant is betting biggest on the psychodrama of it all, as Hall is left trying to placate his captor as the wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly towards a resolution. Dacre Montgomery (who was apparently on Stranger Things in some form or fashion) does yeoman’s work with a role that was always going to end up starved for oxygen opposite Skarsgard but manages to make his moments memorable, few as there are. There’s a gesture towards commonality between the two men. Kiritsis is the product of an abusive home and Hall’s awkward phonecall with his own father (played by Al Pacino, in a fat suit, doing a Foghorn Leghorn voice, sitting down for the entirety of his screen time) is a highlight of the second act and gives some sense of his own difficult family life. Poor fathers just have their belt, rich fathers have a whole war chest with which they can abuse you and everyone else.

However it never really comes to fruition. Van Sant throws a few more videotape filters up on the screen and the film meanders through to a third act which does regain momentum as it heads towards a conclusion. However, Van Sant and company get no points from me for that. If you’re making a film about a true story, and the true ending of the story is thematically satisfying and grimly hilarious, you don’t get credit for tracing over it. It does, however, lift Dead Man’s Wire out of the doldrums of mediocrity and into a spot from which I can earnestly advocate for it. Give it a look next time you’re scheming on a double feature.

I rate this movie three and a half Mood Charts out of five.

NEXT TIME: Something some of you will actually watch in a theater.