Let this be the summer that the IMAX marketing department proved itself savvier than A24. Savvier, even, than Lucky Strike back in the day. “The way it’s meant to be seen” is, I swear, a line from Don Draper somewhere in Season 3.

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FOMO as selling point is a tale as old as time, but what good fortune the technology company had to ride the coattails of an event film and event filmmaker during this time of titanic income inequality when and where we are so much more attuned to the particular crevices and rock faces of the canyon between the haves and the have-nots. The Ultimate Edition Era.

The cultural warriors had not even halted their advance before commentators and Instagrammers and the terminally online broadcast Reel after Reel, YouTube short after YouTube short, comparing the difference between IMAX 70mm and a “regular movie screen,” the implication being that IMAX 70mm is “the way the movie is meant to be experienced,” and the second implication being “you’re a broke boy slash cosmically unlucky if you can’t afford to make it to one of the 25 theaters across the whole country (41 in the entire world) to see this Christopher Nolan movie the way he meant for us to see it.”1

It might have been easier to dismiss all this noise for the bollocks it is, except for the fact that Ryan Coogler’s press run for Sinners (specifically that Kodak spot) made learning about film and film technique cool and accessible and I still had the bad taste of GTA VI’s pricing discourse on my tongue.

A few nights ago, I saw The Odyssey for the second time. And shortly after I finish this newsletter, I will see it a third. None of those times have been in IMAX 70mm. Why does it feel like I’m being told to be angry about this?

“You’re literally paying money for less movie!” screams the Comrade in the DSA t-shirt and the hammer-and-sickle ball cap in Fred Durst red.

“Can you just shut up and let me enjoy the movie I did pay for?” I want to shout back.

But he can’t hear me over his bullhorn and the trailers are about to begin so I start eating my popcorn instead.

A little ways from where I grew up was a Six Flags Mom would take us to from time to time as a treat. This one’s pièce de résistance was “The Superman,” tracks as red as his cape, that first drop promising to put your heart all the way up your throat. I miss the middle schooler who would get on that thing and believe with every nerve in his body that he was actually flying. That this was at least some approximation of what the Man of Steel felt when his feet left the ground.

At this Six Flags was also one of my earliest glimpses of socioeconomic inequality. In my mind, it’s called the FastPass, though it might have gone by another name. Anyone who’s visited a theme park in modern history knows what I’m talking about. Pay a little extra and skip the line, head straight to the front and ride the Rocket Doozy Whatever half a dozen times before the Brokeys in the other line can even get up the stairs. Yet another reminder that we were a 56k modem household when everyone else was hooked up to Cable or DSL. Pay a little more and download those mp3s a little bit faster.2

I thought of Six Flags and FastPass because I was also thinking about the College Football ‘27 kerfluffle, the jokes about GTA VI’s pricing decisions, and the fact that you can’t unlock hidden characters in a fighting game by beating the game anymore, you just have to buy them.

Microtransactions are maybe a couple console generations old, and having extra costumes available only in the Ultimate Edition or whatever, that’s been a thing my whole adult life. But, to get a little in the weeds here, it seems to me that the true offense isn’t the very existence of these pesky entreaties to spend more and more money but rather that single-player content once thought of as part of the basic package (we’re talking missions, in-world merchants/shops, XP progression in sports games) is now being gated behind a paywall. You’re not paying for Netflix anymore, you’re paying for Netflix with ads. Pony up if you want to keep enjoying the thing you were enjoying just fine a month ago.

On top of all of that is news that Sony will stop producing physical game discs for Playstation starting in 2028, and that, due to licensing issues (apparently), about 550 or so movies that customers purchased through the Playstation Store will be deleted from their accounts. Goes without saying that no one seems to be expecting a refund.

There are a lot of related but different things going on here—the immediate displays of what affording convenience can look like, having to pay multiple times to possess a thing you used to only have to pay for once, and not even truly owning that thing once you’ve finished paying for it—all contributing to this pocket-watching, pocket-whooping miasma. The treats we’d get ourselves to distract from both the apocalyptic economic future less than a decade ahead and our seeming inability to arrest its course, these treats—whether video games or a streaming service or a caramel macchiato—have been captured and by the same invading force that rolled out the welcome mat for Brexit and killed Toys R’ Us. Damn you to hell, neoliberalism.

So you go about your day not only angry but hypervigilant to even the remotest threat of a scam. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has hung up its cape, smashed the Bat-signal, and now we have to live in the Gotham that’s left. Where the American President has put Sani Abacha to shame. Where people in the know can make money predicting where bombs will drop and which head of state’s gonna get black-bagged next. Where you’re left having to do your own research because apparently those custom engagement rings you’re ordering were factory-made and dropshipped.

Howard Beale, we miss you.

So a loved one got us tickets to The Odyssey in IMAX several weeks in advance and on the day of, we set off on an odyssey of our own to this overcrowded theater only to discover that IMAX and IMAX 70mm are two different things, a Cyclops can be really, really loud, but not as loud as the toddler who shouted Anne Hathaway’s lines back at her for almost the full three hours.

We decided to try again, this time closer to home, at the same Cinemark where we’d seen everything from Predator: Badlands to The Brutalist. There were fewer seats in this theater, much more space between them. They reclined, the seats, and the ones we got vibrated and moved around when the time called for it…much like a rollercoaster.

Chat, it was the perfect moviegoing experience. Our popcorn, our ICEEs, the fact that we could actually hear the dialogue this time, all of it bundled together with the reminder that a so-called “regular screen” is still taller than me standing on five clones end-to-end. A “regular” movie screen is f’ing huge. The long shots were stunning, the imagery was striking3 and the monologue near the end still heart-wrenching.

But I did wonder about the IMAX of it all. Nolan’s used IMAX before, but here the idea was to use it to do a whole movie. As a consumer/customer, I can’t say it did for me what my “regular” movie screen couldn’t.

But as an artist, I get it. I think I understand where he’s coming from.

The “Winter” section of Goliath, that recorded testimony of the prison riot, was originally supposed to be one unbroken scene.

I’d first brushed up against the technique I was aiming at in my 2021 book (S)kinfolk.

There’s a section on Palestine and the development of my political conscience (and consciousness) from high school through law school, culminating in a ten-week stay in the West Bank working with a prisoners’ rights organization. In that section is a scene set in Hebron that a dear friend has always described to me as my Tracking Shot.

I’m narrating a tour a bunch of us are being given of Hebron by a colleague, a Palestinian Arab, noting what I see as we move back and forth between H1 and H2, the banality of the dystopia, the casual cruelty of the IDF soldiers, kids running around giggling nearby, all sorts of things. It goes on for a number of pages, this single unbroken walk from one part of town to another and though I hadn’t realized it while writing, it was the first time I’d sustained a scene for that long. A single episode, continuous, disconcerting you with its length until you arrive at the end, taken by surprise, breathless.

In the back of my mind was something I’d read a few years prior to that 2013 trip to Palestine. It was The Pale King, the final unfinished novel of the late David Foster Wallace.

It’s already been litigated and relitigated, picked over, praised, pilloried, all of that. But I had a luminous reading experience with it at a time when such things were salvational and in short supply, and, oddly enough, it was the first novel of his that I’d read.

Anyway, you’re going through the book and it’s short chapters for the most part, then somewhere in or near the middle, you’re turning the pages expecting to reach the end of the chapter, but it never arrives, the story keeps going and going, this guy just narrating his life, and there was a point in that section where it hit me like a mule kick between the eyes that I was witnessing this guy narrating, step-by-step, his whole life. Now, of course, there are all sorts of thematic connections with the rest of the book and a whole bunch of other stuff going on,4 but I still haven’t forgotten the shock I felt when I realized what was happening. What I’d stumbled into. The fact that it was supposed to be a stumble. That there was no preparation for this. No buildup. I’d met this character in passing prior. Completely unremarkable guy. And then all of sudden here he is in his mental, spiritual, and logorrheic enormity, hiding in the middle of the book.

I wanted to do that too and, during the revision process of Goliath (there originally was no “Winter” secton), I saw my chance.

Ultimately, I couldn’t figure out how to pull that off while having the Cayenne storyline, which, itself, was necessary to put a nice ambiguous bow on Linc’s story. I will always be proud of that book and, to this day, it’s one of the very best things I’ve published. But that unborn monologue lives crystalline and unblemished in my mind.

The novel didn’t suffer for not having the unbroken monologue in it. In fact, there were gains made from the juxtaposition of that narration with the Cayenne sections that would not have been possible otherwise. I hesitate to call it a compromise because “compromise” implies that what was lost is about equal to what was gained, when really, what the novel gained was so much greater than what it might have otherwise had. The reason I bring up Goliath, as well as The Goliath That Almost Was, is that the episode with the monologue was an artistic ambition I had for myself, rather than something I contemplated with any sort of audience in mind. And when I hear “Can I pull off a whole IMAX movie?” I also hear, “can I pull off this 20000-word monologue in the middle of a novel”. And doesn’t that share DNA with the 1000-page sentence? With the prog metal album that is a single hour-long song?

A lot of my art-making is done in the understanding that there is or will be, insh’Allah, an audience outside of me for this work. Someone else will read the book or listen to the song or watch the film. A lot of it is done according to the terms of the contract I’ve entered into with my reader.

But some of what I do, some of what I’ve been trying to do, is just for me. Sometimes, the artist wants to do the tricky thing to prove to themselves that they can do it. If it works, the rest of us are lucky enough to witness the fruit of their efforts.

The flipside is that I don’t think Christopher Nolan filmed The Odyssey in IMAX for me.

I think he filmed it in IMAX for him.

It was only after that first viewing and during the second that the film actually came alive for me. Having more amenable sound levels might have had something to do with it, but the thing that absolutely gutted me, in addition to Helen’s brief, final moment with Telemachus,5 is Odysseus’s monologue near the end of the movie. Because that was when I realized that if you squint, adjust your shutter speed, your aperture, all of that, the Trojan Horse and the atom bomb are made of the same stuff.

It’s…a trip, watching this movie in the midst of the collapse of the postwar global near-consensus. This whole “rules-based international order.” You know, the thing that gave us the UN, the International Court of Justice, the IMF, et cetera, et cetera. Though the Age of Never Again rang hollow for the Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica and for the Tutsis in Rwanda, there was, at least, a belief in the necessity of belief in the effort to fulfill that promise that the horrors of and perpetrated during the Second World War were never to occur again. Human rights scaffolding for an American hegemonic order seeking to win every front (including the PR front) of the Cold War, sure. But Ratko Mladić is still currently serving a life sentence at the Hague.

And yet.

When Odysseus talks, hauntedly, of how 10 years of rage, boiling on that beach, stormed into Troy once the gates were opened, I saw the molten hatred visited upon Gaza. Vengeance for Oct. 7, they said. But the level and tenor, the volume and the glee, the desperate comprehensiveness of it all…hiding behind it in the shadows of the cave is the true shape of the annihilationist animus serving as genocide’s engine, an animus that reifies itself every time you’re forced to look your guilt in the face and even after you shoot it or you bomb it or you jail it or you exile it, it keeps coming back. Year after year, decade after decade, since before 1948, it’s there again and again and again and again, dementing you.

A friend and I, at least a decade now in the past, used to postulate on why, in the US, so much vitriol and cruelty was visited upon Black Americans throughout American history. The reasons are innumerable, but he would wonder from time to time if any of the perpetrators—from slaveowner to secretary—actually could claim to have not known any better. But I rebutted that I’m sure they did. One way or another, you know what you’re doing is wrong, even if your parents whom you love have taught you otherwise and your friends whom you love have acted otherwise and your religious leaders whom you admire have told you otherwise. Even in the face of all of that, you know. They knew. Faulkner knew that they knew. He also knew that they couldn’t come to terms with what they knew and that the result was madness. A flailing, lethiferous cataclysm of the self. Because they couldn’t come to terms with their guilt, nor could they extinguish it.

The fact that so much of the world witnessed, was able to witness, or was forced to witness the unbridled brutality of Israel’s retaliation against Hamas for October 7 is, I think, what broke the already brittle carapace of the Age of Never Again. It was in the news (to a certain extent), it was all over TikTok. It was…it became very, very difficult to claim one didn’t know what was happening. “What has the world come to?” you asked yourself in October or November or December of 2023, through 2024, even up to the midway point of 2026, curled up on your couch scrolling through video after video after video of children, families, buried under the rubble of their homes while others nearby tried to dig them out.

The Odyssey’s answer is in that scene. That monologue, and the tearful realization that Penelope has at its end.

To win a war, a “really smart man” crafts a device that cleverly subverts the laws of nature, the laws governing Man’s relation to the world and to his fellows, and once the war is won, that really smart man is left to wonder whether or not he is responsible for making the world a demonstrably worse place than it was before he was born.

I don’t remember anything about “Zeus’s law” from the translation of The Odyssey I read back in 9th grade. I remembered the name Telemachus, I vaguely remembered that the sirens sort of make an appearance, and there’s a massive Act 3 throwdown at the end. So I don’t know if “Zeus’s law” is from the poem itself or a bit of researched world-building leavening this screen adaptation. But when that scene began, and everything that came before was recast, it felt like a story I was experiencing for the very first time.

Guilt.

Guilt will punish you in ways the gods can’t even dream of.

I don’t know how intentional Christopher Nolan is on a macro level with his filmographic ambitions, but the thematic continuities between this film and Oppenheimer seem to suggest an ongoing concern and one that doesn’t quite feel wrapped up or concluded just yet.6

The narrative framing, the temporal zig-zagging, the lone genius archetype. They’re not the same movie. But the funeral dirge hits the same key. The reality is that the world is broken. The fiction is that there is one man most responsible for the breaking and he happens to be a moral man who eventually comes to recognize that he has committed a crime whose consequences have escaped his ability to contain them.

The reality is that there are still sacred things in the world. The fiction is that their sacredness will protect them.

The reality is Gaza, is the West Bank. The fiction is that world-historical criminals have a conscience.

But every fiction has for its foundation the reality we know. In every fiction is a seed of the real, of the true, of the truth.

Isn’t that why we pay attention to stories in the first place?

The screen door’s open and we’re scrambling so much to catch what’s leaving, we forget about what we still have left.

It’s not that I’m tired of anger. It’s rather that I’m tired of letting it ruin a good time. T-Pain came on at the club and I’m in the corner crying because I thought about neocolonialism. That’s no way to live.

The righteous part of righteous anger gives a man permission to let it consume him, to let the fight for a better world be the alpha and omega of his existence, and I’m sure some philosopher or five has opined on the moral imperative of such forward vision, such horse blinders. And, yes, it would be nice if more people had access to IMAX 70mm screens and it wasn’t so hard to cancel subscriptions and it was made a little more difficult to buy a government. It would be nice if the world were a little less broken.

The work to repair it is beautiful, noble, necessary work. But here’s the truth of the matter:

Earlier this week, I got to see The Odyssey with a beloved for a second time, and we ate popcorn and drank slushies and our seats vibrated, and we talked about the movie on the short ride home and talked about it some more in bed and then went to sleep. And it was perfect.

I believe in my heart of hearts that that’s how he meant for me to see it.

Currently reading: The Faraway Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life - Lauren Markham

Currently listening: Tonight (demo) - Amira Elfeky

— Why The World Ignores Genocide in Sudan - Janine di Giovanni, Vanity Fair, Jun. 25, 2026

“A few hours after dawn, we climb into a jeep and drive for hours—willing our vehicle not to get a flat tire—to a women’s center run by the International Medical Corps and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Most of the women here have been violated. I expect a place of endless sorrow; instead, they greet us in brightly colored toubs, ululating as though celebrating a wedding. It occurs to me I am in a small village of women united by pain who are simply trying to survive.”

— For These Teens, Soccer Is Life. Now, the Cartels Want In. - Maria Abi-Habib, The New York Times, Jun. 29, 2026

“The first episode happened in 2018, when a referee and a player were killed on the field. Last year, 13 players were killed across the metropolitan zone of Celaya. So far this year, 14 players and spectators have been killed.”

— Bosnia Redux: Are the Balkans Headed for Another War? - Janine di Giovanni, Vanity Fair, Dec. 9, 2021

“For three hot days in July 1995, the world stood by as a genocide took place in Srebrenica, an otherwise unremarkable mining town in eastern Bosnia, where women once went to drink the local waters and pray for fertility. But for those of us who had lived through the three years of war leading up to those terrible days—or reported on that period of sorrow—Srebrenica became a potent symbol of the inertia and impotence of the international community.”

— From Bloody Kansas to the Rebuilding of Europe - Jay Sexton, Foreign Policy, Jun. 23, 2026

“The early conflict climaxed in 1856. A proslavery mob sacked Lawrence, Kansas, destroying printing presses and property. Days later, John Brown and his followers murdered five proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek. Open warfare followed in eastern Kansas throughout the summer. The Civil War didn’t begin at Fort Sumter in 1861; it started in Kansas in 1856.”

Currently reading: Quarantine - Jim Crace

Currently listening: I’m OK - Earshot

— Pope Leo has stirred awake a progressive Christianity. It can rise again - Bill McKibben, The Guardian, Apr. 26, 2026

“Even before the war, there were signs that these churches – while not exactly coming back, certainly not to the dominant role they once played – were reasserting themselves in remarkable ways. The first person to really stand up to Donald Trump in the days after his inauguration, as he launched his blitzkrieg of rightwing change, was the Episcopal bishop Mariann Budde, who at the official prayer service marking his ascension, told him: “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now,” specifically naming immigrant and gay communities. (Trump, of course, called her a “so-called bishop” and said the service at her cathedral had been “very boring”.) There were a great many different forces behind the magnificent display of non-violent resistance in Minneapolis this winter, but one of them was the Lutheran church, dominant in the region and with a long tradition of immigration advocacy. (Full disclosure, I’m on the advisory board of Global Refuge, known until last year as Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Service). Renee Good, shot in January as she drove away from a protest, was a serious Presbyterian, who had taken mission trips as a child; at a vigil marking her death, the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire called on his clergy to “get their affairs in order to make sure they have their wills written” so that they could, if necessary, stand between “the powers of this world and the most vulnerable”. After Good’s death, hundreds of clergy from across the country descended on Minneapolis as an act of witness; about 100 were arrested in a protest at the airport, appealing for an end to the flights disappearing immigrants from their families and communities.”

— A Year of Magical Thinking - Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Boston Review, Spring 2026

“On Saturday night, a lone gunman attacked the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, sending off the predictable wave of condemnations of political violence by U.S. public officials, from federal legislators to state officials. As Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin put it, “Political violence has no place in America.” But there seems to be plenty of room for violence of the apparently nonpolitical sort: federal immigration agencies have used the recent push for mass deportations to accelerate their long and violent history with high-profile murders on the street and in their detention centers; as of April 23, the U.S. military has killed at least 186 people in a consistent campaign of bombings in Latin American waters; and there were 121 mass shootings in the first 112 days of the year, making mass shootings of the kind attempted at the Correspondents’ Dinner a statistically daily occurrence. Public officials are appalled, then, to live in the same world the rest of us do.”

Currently reading: Transcription - Ben Lerner

Currently listening: We Won - Sevendust

I was fortunate enough to have this wonderful and wide-ranging convo with the homie over at The Rumpus, ostensibly about Racebook: A Personal History of the Internet, but more deeply about Scorsese, God, the pitfalls of racial identification, contemporary American literature, and our favorite social media eras (among other things!). It’s always a good time when we get together and it was super fun to be able to do this for an audience. If we did our jobs right (or, if I did my job right), hopefully you’re intrigued enough to check out the source material and pick up a copy of Racebook!

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Secondly, I’m going to be in NYC on Thursday (last minute, I know!) as part of the PEN World Voices Festival for a panel titled Techidemic:

Apr. 30, 6.30pm at the The Strand. Tix available at the PEN World Voices website! I don’t know how coherent I’ll be as I’ve been a massive fan of Sarah Jeong ever since I graduated from law school and saw that there were more things to do with a law degree than earn irresponsibly large amounts of money in morally dubious corporate law. And Cory Doctorow! THE GUY WHO COINED “ENSHITTIFICATION!” Need I say more! Finally, I’m so happy to have been introduced to the work of Alia Dastagir. And I can’t wait to hear more about To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person. I’ve long been a fan of the World Voices Festival because of events precisely like this one, timely and scopic. An hour is not nearly big enough to hold us. Hope y’all can make it.

Currently reading: All the King’s Men - Robert Penn Warren

Currently listening: Slave to Master - Alter Bridge

— Of Fire and Rain - Amir Ahmadi Arian, The New York Review of Books, Mar. 14, 2026

“Then it rained. First the drops were sporadic, then steady, then a downpour cascading off the shed above us. The storm had a strange, metallic odor. “Stay under the roof!” the principal shrieked into a microphone. “It’s not rain!” It was oil, falling in curtains so thick they veiled us from the world.”

— A Man-Made Disaster - Joshua Hammer, The New York Review of Books, Apr. 9, 2026

“Scott lays out the ineluctable slide toward mass murder with gripping clarity. Initially LeMay continued Hansell’s approach, ordering daytime raids on factories in Kobe. But after several of these raids fizzled, LeMay recast himself as an American Bomber Harris. In February he devised a plan to fly the B-29s far below the jet stream, at an altitude of just five thousand to seven thousand feet, and to elude Japanese flak and fighters by using the cover of darkness. Out went the selective target list of the Hansell era; now the bombers would blindly drop incendiaries over Japan’s crowded residential neighborhoods. LeMay was under no illusions about the horrors that his B-29s would inflict. “I suppose if I had lost the war,” he later confided to an aide, “I would have been tried as a war criminal.””

Currently reading: The Books of Jacob - Olga Tokarczuk

Currently listening: Army of Me - Mac Glocky

— Dario Amodei Has a Cold - Joe Hagan, Vanity Fair, Mar. 18, 2026

“Last year Schiffmann papered New York, Chicago, and LA with ads for Friend, inspiring widespread revulsion (“FUCK AI” is a common graffiti tag). He says he’s had an equally strong reaction in Paris. It’s all part of his master plan. “I enjoy it,” he says of the reaction. “Yeah, it’s fun to play the orchestra of the world. I’m also very inspired by the way, like, Timothée Chalamet markets movies, right? Like, what he’s doing with Marty Supreme. I find that to be so fascinating. Why can’t you do that with tech?””

Currently reading: The Books of Jacob - Olga Tokarczuk

Currently listening: We Are No Saints - Blind Channel

Just a boy in an airport killing time and wondering if he’s generating enough Content™ for his Platforms™, spurred to skip his alternately smooth and jagged Opinions™ on the otherwise placid pond of other people’s attention spans.

Usually, this is a tradition I have only with loved ones in the safety of our Group Chats (the way generally prudent people tend to have most important conversations), but this feels like a different year. I’m getting Zeitgeist Flashbacks to the 2011 ceremony where The Social Network was up for Best Picture and, though it lost, seems to have proved itself (in my mind, at least) to be the more enduring and consequential film. And with the impending Paramount-WBD merger, this does feel like the last year we’re ever gonna get a slate of nominees (and almost-nominees! Looking at you, No Other Choice!) this good. Feels a bit like being at a Jazz Age party on Oct. 23, 1929. Let’s not mourn what we will lose, let’s celebrate the fact that we had it at all!1

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I haven’t seen all the nominees in every category (what do I look like, a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences?!), my professional credibility so far doesn’t extend beyond a few purchased and un-produced TV pilots and an outbox full of unread features, nor am I statistician carefully collating data and transmogrifying it into bar graphs and informed commentary on the state of yadda yadda yadda. I’m just a dude who likes movies and got to his airport gate early. So without further ado:

Best Picture

Prediction: Sinners

Throw a stone and hit an op-ed or essay about why this one or One Battle After Another is gonna get it. Whether it’s who’s won the most precursor awards or who’s got the best vibes, what kind of Timeliness™ we’re talking about and who best embodies it, it’s all there and, at this point, interminable. This is a sentimental pick the way Moonlight was a sentimental pic. (And look how that turned out!) But I also think, as interesting and flawed and think-piece-provoking as One Battle was, Sinners was ultimately more of a MOVIE, if you get my drift. It was more fun. The music, the fight scenes, the music, the scene with Blue Hat MBJ teaching the little girl how to negotiate, the music, the badass Choctaw who damn near stole the show in the beginning, the music, THAT MONTAGE, the music, you get my drift. Like, I get it. It’s an “important” film, everything it says about Blackness and Black Art and the contentious, constantly-shifting ownership of both; truly, I get it. Sinners was just more fun than anything else on this list and it felt the most cohesive where every element was fire. The cinematography, the performances, the editing, the score, the location scouting, literally all of it. Some of the nominees stand out because of the performances (Bugonia, Sentimental Value, Hamnet, Train Dreams) and others blew me away more on the below-the-line stuff (F1, Train Dreams), but Sinners felt most like a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking this.

Best Director

Prediction: Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another

I think we get a split. This is where I get a little political. Do I want Ryan Coogler to make history and do what John Singleton should’ve been able to do in 1992? ABSOLUTELY! But I don’t think we get an Everything Everywhere or Anora situation.2 Not only are a couple of the other nominees too strong, the industry love still feels too split. Also, I would probably be very, very happy to see PTA get it. Was this his best movie? (No, that was There Will Be Blood) His most intriguing? (That would be The Master.) His most unexpectedly appealing to me? (That would be Phantom Thread.) And would this smack of a Career Award more than something for this specific film the way Scorsese got it for The Departed and not Raging Bull? Maybe. But—back to the politics—I can’t see the guy waking up Monday morning with only Best Adapted Screenplay in his haul, he’s too beloved. Also, there’s the politics of the film itself and which side of the Rorschach blot you fall on. It’s Timely™ and not only that, but its Timeliness confronts directly the assaults on the Arts, on Dissenting Opinion, a legal-political regime that delights in the cruelty it aims at the least protected among us, all of that, even if the movie is saying different things to different members of the audience. So much of the above sounds like an argument for Best Picture, but I think it’s more a tribute to PTA’s fearlessness in trying, once again, to adapt Thomas Pynchon to the screen. The jarring tones, the serious and the comic wrapped around and sometimes battling each other, the haplessness and human frailty of folks that in another movie, in another story, would’ve walked around with industrial amounts of courage and competence, the flawed singularity of it. It’s like…only PTA could have made this, and, as unhelpful a criterion as that is, I think that’s a big part of what it means to be Best Director. It’s got a…a Voice, you know what I mean? The way Denis Johnson has a Voice. Or—you know what?—Thomas Pynchon.

Best Actor

Prediction: Michael B. Jordan, Sinners

THE WAY I WAS CHEESING WHEN HE WON THE ACTOR AWARD!!!! Now, look, I must confess. I totally intended on seeing Blue Moon before I wrote this and I think Ethan Hawke is a generational talent, but I haven’t yet gotten the chance to see him be brilliant yet again. Out of the others, it felt to me like MBJ had put in the most work or had stretched himself farther from his personal and non-professional self than all the rest. Which is unfair to Wagner Moura who made his performance in The Secret Agent look absolutely effortless.3 And it’s maybe a mark against Timothée Chalamet, because it seemed like his entire just-about-really-fun promo run (since that SAG award for the Bob Dylan movie, really) has felt like him being or prepping to be or him still wrapped up in the performance of Marty Mauser. I watched a YouTube convo between MBJ and Matt Damon, talking about MBJ’s performance as twins in Sinners and I can’t tell you how much it opened my eyes to the technical difficulty of the thing MBJ accomplished. If you’re able to find it, watch it, even just a little bit of it, and see that MBJ didn’t just put on an accent, didn’t just do charming and dangerous and funny and mean and loving the way we’ve seen glimpses of in his previous performances. He did all of that and then some. AND HE DID IT TWICE!

Best Actress

Prediction: Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value

My first real against-the-grain pick but if you watch Sentimental Value, you know wtf I’m talking about. Hamnet had me breaking tf down in the back of the theater in that final act. And Rose Byrne is f’ing INCREDIBLE in If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You. And did I mention already how much I LOVED Emma Stone in Bugonia? Tbh, this is such a strong category, but Renate Reinsve has, in my eyes, given the best performance, male, female, enby, that I’ve seen all season. Full stop. So, there’s a scene in Shame (dir. Steve McQueen) where Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan play siblings and I forget the exact context, but there’s a scene where they’re sitting on a couch, seen from behind, and Fassbender has his arm over the back of the couch and Mulligan’s head is on his shoulder or something, and you can see Fassbender f’ing acting WITH HIS NECK! I’d never seen anything like it before. Literally a whole journey of emotion in the back of a man’s neck! Similarly, Reinsve’s performance is simultaneously understated and full volume, if you get me. Her micro expressions. The things she’s able to do with her face, her reactions, the way she gets almost every line to do like three or four things at once, it’s astounding. I was blown away and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

Best Supporting Actor

Prediction: Benicio Del Toro, One Battle After Another

“A few small beers.” It’s a damn shame that Regina Hall’s not nominated in Best Supporting Actress because she and Benicio Del Toro were, like, the competent and beating hearts of this story of all the different ways “resistance” can take shape and the consequences of that. Leo’s character and Teyana’s character are showy and selfish and deliciously, hilariously flawed. Leo trying to remember the code phrases at the payphone while he’s got the weird sunglasses on, Teyana abandoning her child and lying to Leo that it’s because of her loyalty to the revolution. Catnip, right? It’s the extremes of the tragedy and comedy of “resistance.” But kudos to PTA for providing such lovely counterpoints in Del Toro’s and Hall’s characters. Del Toro has more screentime and is the quiet eye of the storm during perhaps the film’s most thrilling sequence, and his iconic line after he’s pulled over has clearly struck a chord. I want Delroy to win badly and will be cheering in the seat of my return flight if that’s what happens, but I’d also be smiling quite broadly if it was announced that one of my favorite actors has taken home yet another one of these.

Best Supporting Actress

Prediction: Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another

There’s been so much written and said about the politics of her portrayal, how she was written and how she was conceived, the white-writer-Black-character of it all, so much, in fact, that I’ve seen preciously little said of how captivating she is to watch on screen. She’s irresponsible and kinda bad at her job and endangers her comrades, then vanishes for the rest of the movie and yet the after-image of her permeates the whole rest of the story. You know what it reminds me of? The discourse surrounding Denzel’s win for Training Day. (“Oh, they’ll only give it to a Black man when he’s a villain!”) A lot of respectability politics, a lot of highlighting the history of the portrayal of Black Americans in American film and TV, a lot of History™. But even now, looking back and watching Denzel play the antagonist of a movie, I’m so grateful he’s in nearly every frame, because you can’t take your eyes off of him. The dynamism in both his and Taylor’s performances. I live for that. As for the other nominees, the “understated” current in Sentimental Value works for the blockbuster performance of the main character, but it wasn’t enough to wow me for the supporting actresses. And while I really f’d with Mosaku’s character in Sinners, Taylor’s performance just gave me more. People seem to really dig Amy Madigan in Weapons, but outright horror (as opposed to the more fun genre stuff) is just not something I find myself running toward. Madigan may snag this for any number of reasons, but I’m going with Perfidia.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Prediction: Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another

Yeah, wrap it up.

Best Original Screenplay

Prediction: Ryan Coogler, Sinners

All that stuff I said about Best Picture and how Sinners was the whole package? Well, this is a BIG part of it and yet it might be the least mentioned. The performances, how the picture looks, what it sounds like, all of that, that’s not necessarily in the writing. And Sinners has been acclaimed (and rightly so) for all of those things, but so much of it is already there in the script. It’s wild. If you get a chance to read the script, do it. And, like, there are SO many vampire stories out there (AMC’s got, like, what? Half a dozen going right now?), so it’s always super impressive to me when a piece of writing manages to dig something beautiful and specific and unique out of well-plowed soil. (Confession: It Was Just An Accident was another of those movies I JUST missed out on seeing before I wrote this and there’s no way I was gonna watch it on a plane, but it’s literally next on my list!) It just seems like if you’re able to do something this dope while operating within genre conventions (even if the “rules” of your vampires aren’t quite complicated and rigid enough for the genre purists), you should get extra points.4

Best International Feature

Prediction: The Voice of Hind Rajab, Tunisia

Hear me out. I know. I know. I know. Probably either Sentimental Value or The Secret Agent. But, just…just listen. I—

[hears group number called, boards plane and dutifully turns on Airplane Mode for all applicable devices, reads for a bit, almost misses his ATL connection but manages to wolf down a supremely unhealthy but supremely convenient meal before boarding his next flight, finally watches Once Upon a Time in Hollywood which he had been wanting to see for several years now, lands and is ushered by the kindest festival volunteer to his hotel, checks in, struggles with internet, CONNECTS TO INTERNET]

I’ve spent the past 3 years writing 2 books animated by a single question: what is the point? Both books engage the idea of what role art can or is supposed to play in the midst of material, political apocalypse. Civil war, genocide, coups and counter-coups, drought, and all of these things, faced by musicians and filmmakers and writers. While the project predated the Razing of Gaza, it did so only by about 7 months. Then, the whole thing (and everything I’ve dared to write since) has been overtaken by events and buzzing like a third rail beneath it all is this titanic sense of the smallness of pretty and truthful representations or depictions or interpretations of life in the face of the killing of a peoples. Who can a song save? A poem may resurrect the memory of a place, but it never stopped a single bomb from being dropped on it. Why, when there are donations to make and rescues to conduct and Senators to call and bail funds to replenish, when there are factories to sabotage and ports to block, when there are flotillas to pilot and streets to march in, do we also do this other thing? Why am I still compelled to tell stories? Why do people who care about what’s happening still feel compelled to make movies?

I think that in Kaouther Ben Hania’s docudrama about the last day and night in the life of 5-year-old Hind Rami Iyad Rajab, there lies an answer. From the second I heard her voice for the first time, the tears came. By the end, the astounding performances, the breathless pacing, the way the film manages to still push its characters and the viewer to hope in the face of the ultimate futility had left me as wrung out as any movie has ever done. Probably even more. Winning the Oscar for Best Documentary didn’t stop one of the filmmakers of No Other Land from being lynched. It didn’t stop one of the film’s consultants from being fatally shot by a settler. Nor did it prevent the eventual bulldozing of the subject’s village. And The Voice of Hind Rajab won’t bring that poor child back to life. But if art is to mean anything to us, if the dyad of life and its representations, its interpretations via the artist and via the person experiencing the art, is to mean anything to us, if we are more than our most hateful and savage parts, this movie is evidence of that. This movie was nearly impossible to find in a theater, but I believe it’s now available on demand. Even if it doesn’t win, it is, in my heart, the most powerful, most moving film I’ve seen, the most stinging indictment of us and our institutions and yet the most gleaming, glistening promise that we are more than animals. Yes, I want this film to win, but I think so do quite a few people who are empowered to make that happen. The Voice of Hind Rajab is art. And it is a reminder of why, in the face of everything that is happening, that has happened, art matters or, at least, should matter to us.

Best Cinematography

Prediction: Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Sinners

I am absolutely talking out of my ass here, because I have no idea how to judge a film’s cinematography outside of “oh, this looks stunning” or “oooh, fascinating angles” or some variation thereof. Train Dreams was absolutely luscious but in a very traditional way. Sinners showed me entirely new ways of seeing things. IMAX, yo. IMAX 4evr.

Best Editing

Prediction: Stephen Mirrione, F1

A theme with these below-the-line categories: I continue to talk out of my ass. There’s a transition toward the very end of Sentimental Value that made me audibly gasp, and I think that moment carries in it something to explain the power of good editing. But I also think F1 is one of those movies that, as much as it gets knocked, is a technical feat. We’ve seen “go fast, turn left” so many times, and yet there were still moments in F1 that had me on the edge of my seat, that took me on whole journeys over the course of a single race. Vroom frickin’ vroom.

Best Original Song

Prediction: “Golden,” KPop Demon Hunters

Bro, this song is EVERYWHERE. Honestly, it’s been doing Mariah Carey Christmas Season numbers.

Best Original Score

Prediction: Ludwig Göransson, Sinners

This long-haired Swede don’t miss. Three-peat.

Best Casting

Prediction: Francine Maisler, Sinners

The best ensemble out of all the nominees. Every single face in every frame absolutely belongs, you know? Every role was perfectly filled.

I don’t know enough about the other categories to even be able to bullshit properly. I’ve seen none of the docs, none of the shorts (animated, doc, or live action). And all I know is I want Ruth Carter to win Best Costume Design. The others, I’m more than content to follow the consensus, even if that means busting my bracket.

This exercise really reminded me of how good we had it. I was looking at showtimes for movies playing near me this past week and a half and, already, it felt like blight had hit our crops. Increasingly, it feels like the Good Times are in the rear view, but that’s a song that’s been sung before about this industry. And, again, rather than look ahead with horror at what awaits (or, rather, what doesn’t await), I prefer, at least for this weekend, to reminisce on the absolute embarrassment of riches that was this year in cinema.5 There will be upsets, but I won’t be upset at any of them. I’ll be happy no matter how it all turns out.

Some of these picks might change over the course of the weekend; heck, some of them might change over the course of the next 24 hours. But for now, I’m standing by them. There’s no pot of gold at stake, I don’t have a Kalshi account, this is purely for the love of the game. Which is the best way to play.

I’ll be in the air again when the envelopes get opened, but once I’m home, I look forward to my loved ones gloating about how they beat me in the final tally. And, as always, I’m sure there will be memes. Hilarious, heartfelt, smart, dumb memes. A veritable embarrassment of riches.

Currently reading: [redacted]

Currently listening: late night traffic in Tucson, AZ.

— The Docteur Is In - David Beal, The New York Review of Books, Mar. 11, 2026

“In this changing environment, songs like Adou Elenga’s 1954 “Ata Ndele,” which implicitly called for decolonization, were quickly banned. But Congolese rumba was becoming broadly linked to the évolué associations incubating the independence struggle and to the city’s growing spirit of liberation, proving that there was an energized social base for the kind of nationalist political movement Patrice Lumumba would soon start to build. In the late 1950s, when Lumumba briefly worked as a sales manager for Polar beer, he began amassing his political following in the bars where rumba orchestras regularly played, and he developed close connections with musicians. Manu Dibango would later claim that the Congo was a place that “hummed to the single beat of music and politics. Everything was worked out in the bars. Stars were an integral part of public life.” This was especially true during the struggle for independence and the critical period after decolonization.”

— Metal Was Born in Britain’s Urban Working Class - Fraser Watt, Jacobin, Jul. 31, 2025

“The hypercommodification of things we need to survive such as housing and water has placed a profound financial burden on working people. Instead of making strange new music — or art, or television — as they did during Britain’s postwar boom, the next generation of working-class eccentrics and would-be innovators are now spending rehearsal time working longer shifts to pay their landlord’s mortgage or contributing to the record-breaking profits of energy companies.”

Currently reading: [redacted]

Currently listening: Mouth of Madness - Heart of a Coward

— Child’s Play - Sam Kriss, Harper’s, Mar. 2026

“Donald was practically vibrating when we left Cluely. “Dude, he’s just a scared little boy,” he said. “He’s scared he’s not doing the right thing, and because of the fucked-up world we live in, people who should be in The Hague are giving him twenty million dollars. Something bad is gonna happen here, something really fucking bad is gonna happen.” He sighed. “I just want Zohran’s nonbinary praetorians to march across the country and put all these guys in cuffs.” I found it hard to disagree. It did not seem like a good idea to me that some of the richest people in the world were no longer rewarding people for having any particular skills, but simply for having agency, when agency essentially meant whatever it was that was afflicting Roy Lee. Unlike Eric Zhu or Donald Boat, Roy didn’t really seem to have anything in his life except his own sense of agency. Everything was a means to an end, a way of fortifying his ability to do whatever he wanted in the world. But there was a great sucking void where the end ought to be. All he wanted, he’d said, was to hang out with his friends. I believed him. He wanted not to be alone, the way he’d been alone for a year after having his offer of admission rescinded by Harvard. For people to pay attention to him. To exist for other people. But instead of making friends the normal way, he’d walked up to strangers and asked whether they wanted to start a company with him, and then he built the most despised startup in San Francisco. He was probably right: he could count on making a few million dollars every year for the rest of his life, even after Cluely inevitably crashes and burns. He would never want for capital, but this did not seem like the most efficient way to achieve his goals.”

— The Goon Squad - Daniel Kolitz, Harper’s, Nov. 2025

“Malone’s death was covered widely in the tabloids and trended on social media, where it was described as the “Goonicide.” His vigil, meanwhile, was an ironic, livestreamed stunt that came to be known as the “Gooneral.” Remarkably, this language—Goonicide, Gooneral—was broadly legible to hundreds of thousands of people who engaged with it online. The implication, unmistakable, was that the verb “to goon,” the root of these terms, had broken containment. By the time you read this article, a full definition might be needless, but in the sincere hope that that day has yet to—will never—arrive, I will provide one.”

Currently reading: The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova

Currently listening: Something to Remind You - Staind

— Another Country - Adam Shatz, London Review of Books, Feb. 5, 2026

“Yet, paradoxically, it was jazz in particular, and Black music more generally, that prevented me, as it still does, from giving up on America. My guides to the meaning of American democracy, and to what Albert Murray called the ‘mulatto textures’ of American culture, weren’t the Founding Fathers. They were Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. Their music embodied the promise of another country, one that was true to its professed ideals. Its very existence seemed miraculous. A vernacular music, created by the descendants of slaves, had evolved into the country’s greatest art form.”

— The Blood-and-Soil Nationalism That Killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good - Ta-Nehisi Coates, Vanity Fair, Jan. 26, 2026

“Deportations are up under Trump, but that is not the true purpose of ICE. “They’re not serious about getting rid of as many people as they can. They’re serious about causing human pain and suffering,” a former ICE official told Dickerson. “Putting someone into detention isn’t a removal, it’s a punishment.” Thirty-two people died in ICE’s custody in 2025—the highest number in 20 years. And befitting an administration filled with reality TV stars, a policy of human pain and suffering is presently being repackaged as spectacle. Activists arrested in defiance of The Homeland have had their portraits altered via AI. Minor celebrities, their dubious status on the wane, have sought to supercharge their prospects by accompanying ICE on raids or even joining its ranks. Kristi Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, posed in front of a group of immigrants sent to a torture site in El Salvador, in a show of sadistic titillation. Last June, LA County supervisor Janice Hahn watched as Noem led an ICE raid in Huntington Park. “I could tell she was doing a full camera crew production,” Hahn said. “She was getting hair and makeup done.” Noem, like the president she serves, has a flair for the theatrical. She cosplays in camouflage and bulletproof vests. The focus on appearance and production value is essential in a movement that seeks not just to purify the actual America, but to resurrect the America of legend and myth. Securing The Homeland, they tell us, is an existential priority. It is also content.”

— ‘I felt betrayed, naked’: did a prize-winning novelist steal a woman’s life story? - Madeleine Schwartz, The Guardian, Feb. 17, 2026

“Eleven days after the Goncourt ceremony, a woman appeared on an Algerian news show. She wore a blue-and-white-striped shirt; her long hair was tied into a bun. This left her neck visible, and attached to it, some breathing apparatus with a cannula. She introduced herself as Saâda Arbane, 30. Daoud, she claimed, had stolen her personal details to make his bestseller. “It’s my personal life, it’s my story. I’m the only one who should determine how it should be made public.” For 25 years, she said, “I’ve hidden my story, I’ve hidden my face. I don’t want people pointing at me.” But, Arbane said, she had confided in her psychiatrist. “I had no filter, no taboos. I told her everything.” Her psychiatrist was Kamel Daoud’s wife.”

Currently reading: The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Currently listening: Reintegration - Gemini Syndrome

Scoured the blasted landscape of my memory of 2025 to try to recall just what I watched, what I listened to, what I read over the past 12 months and wtf year did we just live through?

Lists are fun, fodder for barbershop conversation, arguments that are never truly meant to be settled, but these things, I’ve discovered, can also beat senility back for just a little, remind me of that tiny gem of an experience I’d picked up off the shoreline all those months ago, how brightly it shined before events overtook my wonder or my joy or my relief and you’re thrust back into the Sisyphean task of trying yet again to stumble upon or manufacture another encounter—however brief—with the Sublime.

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So, without further ado, a few of the faves I experienced this year, only some of which came out this year.

Books I enjoyed:

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez

Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road - Kyle Buchanan

A Flag for Sunrise - Robert Stone

Amulet - Roberto Bolaño

Missionaries - Phil Klay

A People’s History of Soccer - Mickaël Correia

Life’s Work - David Milch

Movies I enjoyed1:

Bugonia

BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions

Sentimental Value

A House of Dynamite

One Battle After Another

Sinners

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera

F1

Black Bag

TV I enjoyed:

Andor

The Studio

Adolescence

Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War

The West Wing2

Albums I enjoyed:

BODIES - Thornhill

private music - Deftones

The Sky, the Earth & All Between - Architects

The End Will Show Us How - Tremonti

Debí Tirar Más Fotos - Bad Bunny

motionblur - Split Chain

Follow the Leader - Korn

Games I enjoyed:

Cyberpunk 2077/Phantom Liberty

Black Myth Wukong

FC ‘26

I look back at how little TV I watched and am tempted to think Netflix might be onto something when they say their biggest competitor isn’t Warner Bros or Paramount but rather YouTube. In my defense, much of it—I dare say the majority—was for research, but isn’t it all at the end of the day? Still, finances got tight this year and it wasn’t like I had a YouTube subscription to put on the chopping block. Maybe that’s the lesson: make your ad-tier free. Anyway, I digress.

The year’s over and what I feel more than anything else is relief. It began with several huge things looming—two book launches and an international trip—and here I am thumbing through my 2026 calendar and absolutely delighting in how empty it is. Having a book published is a net joy, and “hassle” is not the first word that comes to mind for most people when it comes to the topic of telling people about the thing you’ve been working on for the past however-many years, but I cannot say I’m not exceedingly grateful I won’t have to do it like that again for the foreseeable future. Amazing the ways in which dread can curdle a beautiful thing.

Usually, my end-of-year reflection is more robust, redolent with wisdom, lessons learned from the chaos of a year, things to take into the New Year that will undoubtedly help me to become a better person, the best version of myself and all. There’s usually some accounting of accomplishments, the words written and the places seen, and I’d originally planned on writing about how I’d found God again in Ireland and about how He’d kept me in the warmest embrace for the first four months of the year while I was busy having the most fun I’ve ever had as a writer. I really did. And I don’t think it’s a matter of the sheen having worn off or those things suddenly lacking in import as the newness falls away. It’s rather that your boy is tired. This year feels more like something I survived than anything else. A body drags itself across the finish line. The defeated boss disintegrates, my own healing flasks empty. Made it to the end, but at what cost?

Usually, this would be the part where I talk about the ways in which this new openness to the appearance of the Divine carried me through the omnishambles of 2025 and how the Sublime is now something I am better prepared to meet in 2026, but, again, your boy is tired. Exhausted. Épuisé, as the French would say. And not a little misanthropic. I blame the AI bubble taking so long to burst.

However 2026 meets me/you/us, I hope we/you are ready for it. I hope there’s some good in it. In the meantime, I now have to rush off to watch Pulp Fiction with a loved one before it vanishes from Netflix and there’s pizza, so things can’t be all that bad.

Get some rest.

Now reading: Conversation in the Cathedral - Mario Vargas Llosa

Now listening: Raw - Thornhill

— Hannah Arendt Is Not Your Icon - Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times, Dec. 5, 2025

“But it was what she wrote about the trial of a Nazi official that really got her into trouble. “Eichmann in Jerusalem” ran as a series of articles in The New Yorker and was published in 1963 as a book. Instead of depicting Adolf Eichmann, one of the organizers of the Holocaust, as a monstrous demon, Arendt portrayed him as morally and intellectually shallow — a dutiful bureaucrat who personified “the banality of evil.” That assertion, combined with a few pages about the unwitting complicity of the Jewish councils in sending Jews to the camps, sparked a furious anti-Arendt campaign, which decried her criticism of Zionism, too. The Anti-Defamation League urged rabbis to denounce her from the pulpit. “Self-Hating Jewess Writes Pro-Eichmann Book” read a headline in The Intermountain Jewish News. In France, Le Nouvel Observateur published excerpts from the book and subsequently printed letters from outraged readers in a column asking, “Hannah Arendt: Est-elle nazie?””

— Why Does A.I. Write Like … That? - Sam Kriss, The New York Times, Dec. 3, 2025

“When you spend enough time around A.I.-generated text, you start to develop a novel form of paranoia. At this point, I have a pretty advanced case. Every clunky metaphor sets me off; every waffling blog post has the dead cadence of the machine. This year, I read an article in which a writer complained about A.I. tools cheapening the craft. But I could barely pay attention, because I kept encountering sentences that felt as if they’d been written by A.I. It’s becoming an increasingly wretched life. You can experience it too.”

— What Really Happened with the CIA and The Paris Review?: A Conversation with Lance Richardson - Dan Piepenbring, The Paris Review Blog, Nov. 11, 2025

“As Matthiessen tells it, he had finished Yale in 1950 and wanted to be a writer, but how do you just become a writer? His English professor Norman Holmes Pearson tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he wanted to do something for his country. This was happening quite a lot at Yale at the time. One of Matthiessen’s contemporaries estimated that two dozen of their classmates were recruited for the CIA through various professors. The agency called them the “P source,” for “professor.” Matthiessen wrote that Pearson opened him “like an oyster.” Not because he was ideologically driven—his politics at that point were unformed and chaotic—but because he wanted a stipend and an excuse to go to Paris, which was a city that he and his first wife, Patsy Southgate, really loved. The CIA then was reputationally much more benign, at least domestically. It hadn’t yet become known by most Americans for its involvement in coups and things like that.”

Currently reading: A People’s History of Soccer - Mickaël Correia

Currently listening: Hollywood - Thornhill

It’s like the graphic says!

Oct. 21, we are launching in Charm City at the Enoch Pratt Free Library where I’ll be in convo with Danielle Evans.

Then, Oct. 23, it’s off to Oakland, CA and Litquake where I’m doing an event with THEE Audrey T. Williams.

But we’re not done. That Saturday, Oct. 25, I’m gonna be in Beantown for the Boston Book Festival, reuniting with dear friend Ken Liu.

On Oct. 28, I’m coming home to Possible Futures, my favorite-est bookspot in the world.

And finally, Oct. 29, Barnes & Noble is opening a new spot in Cheshire, CT, and I’ll be a part of the festivities!

If you’re in any of those spots around any of those times, do slide through. I’m realizing that I do quite enjoy talking about this book. Like, a lot a lot.

OH! And also, feel free to (pre-)order the actual book.

Peace, y’all.

Currently reading: [redacted]

Currently listening: Your Bore - Seether

Back in college, sometimes when I had money, I’d stop by Cutler’s Records and Tapes on Broadway. It was this record store sandwiched on a strip with Educated Burgher and Yankee Doodle diner that made this little corner of New Haven feel like you could see the melted history dripping off your burger patty and onto the plate. It wasn’t the ivy wrapped around stone façades or the stained glass windows or anything like that. It wasn’t the imported stolidity of Oxbridge, nor was it that older-than-America vibe you’d get running through the names of the residential colleges. That little bit of Broadway was the type of history you could maybe see your parents or grandparents being young in. Cutler’s was selling CDs but they were also selling 45 rpm records. I don’t remember all the albums I bought from that place, that shop that felt like it’d been around forever and that it would endure for just as long, but I do remember, during the fall of 2005, picking up Ten Thousand Fists by Disturbed and knowing in my heart of hearts it was worth whatever necessity I’d forgone for the purchase.

Yankee Doodle shuttered in 2008, junior spring. Cutler’s closed up shop in 2012, same month I finished up film school. And Educated Burgher turned off its stoves two years later. Now, it’s Urban Outfitters and some other national brands that have scrubbed the grit from under that street’s fingernails, rendered the whole strip antiseptic. The kids’ll never know how good we had it.

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Broadway’s been on my mind these past few days because, earlier this week, I had breakfast with a loved one at a diner and later that day, bought a vinyl. Sleep Token’s Take Me Back to Eden. And I thought about the record player I’d put that vinyl on and I thought about the aproned waitress who topped off our coffees with an apple-cheeked smile every time and I thought about how tactile things used to be, and while I found myself missing it all, the sorrow deepened, leavened by mist-eyed gratitude and a profound sense of loss, I got to thinking about what mighta happened if Cutler’s had survived till now. Had the place lived long enough to witness Taylor Swift herald the 2020s Vinyl Revival. Maybe it woulda risen like the Phoenix from the ashes. But, then again, Urban Outfitters sells vinyls too, so maybe that scrappy family outfit never stood a chance.

It’s been cool, wild, heartening to see that it’s not just me or misanthropes from my generation wrapped up in the wool comforter of nostalgia, wishing simultaneously for that time when we were less online and that time when online-ness was less of a threat to our sense of selves both as individuals and as collectives. And I look at the Kids These Days™, documented in these news stories as specimens trying to unplug, buying bricks over smartphones, doing their digital detoxes, pining for an analog past, not so much technophobic as wildly suspicious of the corporate and institutional impellents behind the way we live today, and I thrill at the sight of them, but there’s no small amount of guilt in it too. Because I got to actually touch that Eden.

I can’t help but wonder, in this current day and age with its growing appreciation among the proletariat for physical media—for Blu-Rays, vinyls, etc.—if this is us trying to touch it again. One Criterion Collection box set at a time. It feels like more than just bell-bottoms or boxy shoulders coming back. It feels as specific as when Billie Eilish would always hop out looking like a 2003 contemporary of Chingy’s or Chamillionaire’s, all of us wondering if she had a durag in her bedroom that spoke to her like the Green Goblin mask in Spiderman: No Way Home. Hell, they’re even saying nu-metal is back!1

I’ve often said to a friend that we don’t excavate enough the psychic trauma of 2007-08 and the austerity regime that followed in the western world as a way to explain our current moment of authoritarian drift. Take that and mix it with the calamitous and unpunished lying of the George W. Bush presidency and all of a sudden, there goes trust in public institutions, government and banks alike.2 Pretty straight line from that to shooting up the CDC building. Similarly, I don’t think I’ve seen enough written on just how much the lockdown era of the pandemic is still affecting us, at least in the US. That some derangement has taken place is obvious, but the loss-of-control goes beyond the inability to leave our homes. If it wasn’t clear beforehand, it became clear in those years that the digital is effervescent and capricious, that you don’t actually own all that media you pay for.3 Remember in 2022 when the head of Warner Bros. Discovery pulled Westworld off of (HBO)Max?4 Well, once bitten, twice shy.

From the beginning, there was something creepily corporate about how the institutions around us looked at us, how our plight—trying to survive and keep our loved ones alive amidst a global respiratory pandemic nobody knew anything about—was something to be exploited, preyed upon. Tech companies and video game studios alike over-hired, believing, maybe even hoping, that indoors was to be our default status for the foreseeable future. The metaverse was supposed to be a thing. It turned out that that wouldn’t be the case and it’s been a bloodbath in the games industry ever since. But, man, all the ads out there trying to tell us they cared but please buy their product because it’s exactly what you need in these trying times…meanwhile, the kids were out here doing Dad Jokes on TikTok and dancing to “Custer” by Slipknot. I think it’s ‘cause we all knew.

No matter the soothing music or whatever our bosses said over the Zoom, we knew that in the end, the social contract was broken. So broken that, for at least a generation, it’s spoken of in the same tones one uses for Betamax. “You’re on your own,” the people charged with your welfare tell you, but then you watch the cast of Archer do a live reading of the elevator episode in the first months of the pandemic, and you watch “you’re on your own” turn into “we’re all we’ve got.” And if that ain’t the beautiful-est thing.

It does feel like a taking back of control, the Blu-Rays and the CDs. Sure, the Collector’s Edition stuff is pretty to look at, but imagine the thrill that comes with thinking of a movie early in the day and then, that night, taking it off your shelf and watching it, knowing all the while that you’ve had it within reach. Gone, the mind-numbing endless scroll. Gone, the portal-hopping from streamer to streamer. Purchasing a film versus purchasing a license to watch a film, how hollow the latter, how vivid and casual and empowering the former. The part about those Criterion Closet clips that makes me happiest is when the featured guest realizes they get to leave with what they picked. Nardwuar was really good about that too. Whenever you want to put on that record, whenever you want to watch your film, all you have to do is reach over and put it on.

“Whenever you want” was once upon a time an aspect of technological marvel. You mean the thing I saw in the big movie theater is also a thing I could have in my home? On this little rectangular thing called a VHS? Now, “whenever you want” is almost this relic we look back at with longing, a “man, remember when”. And maybe this is me just reading to deeply into things, but I cannot help but wonder if us making physical media cool again is part of the project of repairing the world the Boomers broke.

Separate from the rest—from the vinyl collecting and the DVDs and all of that—I’ve recently started watching The West Wing.

I never caught it when it was on the air, nor in the immediate aftermath with its boxed sets flying around, but it was like the Beatles for much of my generation. Jed Bartlet and co raised that whole cadre of young politicos and commentariat-hopefuls who threw themselves with abandon into the Obama era of White House politics, all of us thinking that what we saw on TV, as far as it was from reality, was something we could—something we would—make once we got in.5 A government run by people who were good at their jobs and who gave a fuck. How quaint.

But it really did used to be like that. Not exactly like that, often not even close to like that. But there was enough recognizable in Aaron Sorkin’s neoliberalism fever dream for someone to say, “oh, yeah, that’s supposed to be the United States government.” They were cleverer on TV, cuter on TV, younger and more idealistic (even when getting the idealism walk-and-talked out of them). They were firmer in their convictions, more of them had the right convictions, they were (for the most part) not interested in self-enrichment but rather took to heart the “servant” part of “public servant.” Even when they came close to abusing their power, we knew that, in the confines of episodic television, it was all in service of some teachable moment. Everybody in the Clinton White House was uglier, physically and morally, but you didn’t have to squint to see in both an aspect of both expertise and good intentions. Then came 8 years of George W. Bush’s headass, and every episode of the Emmy winner turned into “this could be us but you playin’.”

All of which is to say that though The West Wing wasn’t documentary, an entire generation of college students took it as such. Or saw in it, at least, aspiration. “Something like this could actually happen,” was the thinking of that generation. They would be that clever, they would be that pretty, they would be that noble. That’s what we were all thinking during Mock Trial practice.

Some would say we had it that good generally because of neoliberalism, but—and this is hardly the space to fully elaborate on it—I’d argue that neoliberalism was us running out of road, the chipping away at the future a more progressive mid-century had prepared for us.

Post 1970s energy crisis, you get all these right-wing and libertarian think tanks popping up complaining that the business community’s got a bad rap for too long. Having lost the ideological battle on college campuses, the “free enterprise” clique spawns the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and others, a veritable Sinister Six of policy advocates. Then you got the Watergate Babies, rechristened “Atari Democrats” and all of a sudden, it’s two pro-business parties, “one comparatively stupid, the other comparatively bright.” The comparatively bright get Clinton elected, and it’s NAFTAs all the way down.6

Was that period the self-induced twilight? Neoliberalism danced too hard and knocked the chandelier down from the ceiling. But the music hadn’t yet stopped. We still had a bit of road to go. But eventually it runs out and The West Wing is sepia-toned. Your parents lose their job in an economic collapse, we’ve started two wars that won’t end until after you’re done with grad school, which you went to because said economic collapse meant there was no job waiting for you after college, and there goes our federal budget surplus.

I didn’t start out trying to be “fuck neoliberalism,” I’m just writing, but still, fuck neoliberalism.

I’m not about to wax lyrical about Empire, but the beginning of the end was long before Trump. Long before AI snake oil salesmen and the evisceration of the moviegoing experience. Long before the hardcore financialization of basically everything. Long before even Bud Light Lime and credit default swaps. Nixon can eat shit, but I hope the first thing that anyone ever does upon entering hell is find Reagan and beat the fuck outta that nigga.

I really am just writing. Freestyling. Thinking out loud. Because I’m glad I’m able to play music on a record player and I’d like to know a little bit more why I feel that way. Why so many people around me also feel that way. Why it feels like a big thing to want that, to be able to effectuate that desire. And I started writing this because I’m curious about a few other things.

I’m curious about those younger generations reaching back to the 2000s (nu-metal) or the 90s (brick phones, DVDs), pining for a thing they never got the chance to have when it first met us, screwed over by having been born too late to have lived through the last good childhood decade this country ever saw. All the articles and everything, they’re not talking about the smooth-cheeked cinephiles smoking their rolled cigarettes and lamenting the death of the 1970s political thriller, they’re not even really talking about the whole tradwife thing. There’s this little island of time between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Invasion of Iraq and there’s maybe this dividing line at either The Matrix or 9/11, and, like, was there something specifically golden about that time? The hip-hop was young, the movies were mid-budget, we had no idea the peak of USian race relations would be Alien Ant Farm covering “Smooth Criminal.”

It wasn’t perfect, not by a long shot. Rodney King, the Patriot Act, Columbine. But maybe enough of my generation has talked about it like it was for long enough. Maybe it’s our fault. We wouldn’t shut up about how good we had it, so maybe we just annoyed the youngin’s into discovering all that good shit we once upon a time took for granted.

Whatever it is that bullied Best Buy into selling DVDs again, I’ll take it. How’s that for a social contract?

Currently reading: The Other Americans - Laila Lalami

Currently listening: greyintheblue - Split Chain

— ‘What reconciliation? What forgiveness?’: Syria’s deadly reckoning - Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, The Guardian, Sept. 2, 2025

“Munir became a schoolteacher in the late 70s, travelling between remote villages, witnessing the extent of the deprivation of mountain peasants. He was confident that only through class struggle could the situation of the rural poor improve. But for many of the Alawite children he was teaching, it was the state, under Hafez’s leadership, that offered a path out of poverty. Often, while registering attendance at his classes in the morning, Munir would ask, “Where’s so-and-so?”, and the students would laugh and say, “Oh, he volunteered for the Saraya militia”, a group led by Hafez’s brother Rifaat. It began to dawn on him that these boys, aged 14 or 15, were being “indoctrinated, brainwashed and shaped” to become the regime’s enforcers.”

— ‘We were tricked’ - Loubna Mrie, London Review of Books, Aug. 14, 2025

“For Alawites, the way Hafez seized power wasn’t important. What mattered was that one of them was president. In the early years of his rule, Alawite villages were transformed: oil lamps gave way to electric light; dirt tracks became paved roads. Buses began to reach isolated mountain villages – buses that soon carried sons into the military, intelligence services and state bureaucracy. The geography of Syria shifted, as coastal towns like Jableh – once dominated by Sunni merchants with a small Christian enclave – became magnets for Alawite families from the surrounding hills. Ali’s family was among them. His father opened a smoke shop in a working-class neighbourhood, and Ali attended one of the newly built schools. These were like shrines to Hafez: there were posters of the president on the walls and the pupils memorised his speeches. ‘Our leader for ever: Hafez al-Assad,’ Ali and his classmates recited every morning. Pupils were told stories about Hafez’s tough childhood to emphasise how lucky their generation was.”

Currently reading: The Other Americans - Laila Lalami

Currently listening: can u see me in the dark? - Halestorm, I Prevail

— The Life and Death of the Suburban Novel - Adelle Waldman, The New York Review of Books, Aug. 28, 2025

“The death of the suburban novel, a relatively short-lived subgenre of American literature, may be of interest primarily to academics and literary hobbyists. The death of the middle-class society from which it sprung, on the other hand, is a national tragedy.”

— Imitation of Life - Andrew O’Hagan, The New York Review of Books, Nov. 6, 2003

“The world Eminem sings about is certainly profane and terrifying. It is part of the mentality of his generation, so overdescribed on national television and so underdescribed in literature, a world of hostility and desperation we take as given when it appears on Jerry Springer, but that we find inexcusable when given full imaginative life in the verses of an instinctive songwriter. Eminem knows about a suburban America where blacks and whites lie dispossessed together, and he has become that country’s sharpest and most savage chronicler. He has been an amazing witness to that new, multiethnic underclass in America, and also a manifestation of that class’s way of talking and thinking, wanting and hating.”

Currently reading: The Story of a Brief Marriage - Anuk Arudpragasam

Currently listening: Psychosphere - Periphery

— AI Isn’t Coming for Hollywood. It's Already Arrived - Zoë Schiffer, WIRED, Aug. 20, 2025

“Irwin says he has spoken with the team at Stability but has “not been able to use their tools successfully on a show at scale.” The comment reflects a theme I found in my reporting: While I was able to identify a number of filmmakers who admitted to toying around with Stability’s text-to-image generators, none used the tools professionally—at least not yet.”

— I Saw the Future of AI Film and It Was Empty - John Semley, WIRED, Aug. 20, 2025

“OK. But is all of reality “already mapped”? Is this technology merely being “discovered,” as one might discover, say, a river or a cool restaurant? Or is it being invented, and managed, by actual people making actual decisions, which have actual consequences? Perhaps AI is just the latest disruptive innovation riling up the haters and fuddy-duddies. Or perhaps machine-generated art constitutes not just another step in cinematic-technologic evolution, but a fundamental break from the basic, taken-for-granted idea of what it is to make art: that it involves skill, tremendous patience, considerable talent and, at very least, a human being positioned as its prime mover. AI is a difference (or “disruption”) not of degree, but kind—not the next step in a process, but a totally different thing. Apples and computer-generated oranges.”

Currently reading: Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Steve Coll

Currently listening: Atlantic - Sleep Token

— My years reporting on Gaza broke me down. Why did it take so long for the world to become outraged? - Phoebe Greenwood, The Guardian, Aug. 10, 2025

“When I moved to Jerusalem in 2010, the foreign correspondents there offered me some unsettling advice: “The first year here you’ll hate the Israeli government, the second year the Palestinian leadership, by the third you’ll hate yourself.” It’s best to leave before four, I was told, in the interest of sanity. I nodded along thinking how sadly cynical they were. I would do better than that, I told myself. I did not.”

— Blue sky thinking: why we need positive climate novels - Sarah Hall, The Guardian, Aug. 16, 2025

“So what is the fiction that needs to be written now? This is the question I grappled with over the decades of writing my novel Helm. Is it about signposting progress when it comes to environmental adaptation and damage limitation? Should writers try to offer a restorative or rousing spirit for the times we live in, an opposition to eschatology? Can literature actually be a tool to encourage something better – creating eco-topia on the page, so it might be imagined off it? Midway through the writing of the book, I took part in a British Council Nature Writing panel in Germany and this last question was asked by the audience. Robert Macfarlane, the chair, barely paused before saying: yes. I remained silent.”

Currently reading: Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Steve Coll

Currently listening: Obsession - Thornhill

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Anyway, what am I rambling on about? I’m here to talk about Racebook: A Personal History of the Internet, out from Grove Atlantic/Roxane Gay Books on October 21, 2025, available for pre-order just about everywhere books are sold. </TV informercial voice>

Every time I turn around, it seems like October has jumped a few months closer. In the meantime, this essay collection that was so much fun and so restorative to write has picked up a few advance reviews! And they are quite kind! Including 2 stars!

From Kirkus Reviews:

“Onyebuchi’s cultural vocabulary is impressive, weaving together references to, among others, Graham Greene, Nas, and Walter Mosley. … this is a lively and astute read.”

From Library Journal:

“Onyebuchi captures several universal moments of a generation growing up online but pushes the narrative further to encompass how it intersected with his offline world and shaped his identity.”

From Publishers Weekly (starred!):

“This is a must-read.”

From Booklist (starred!):

“For those who are terminally online, Onyebuchi’s Racebook feels like a rest stop: a place to sit down, catch your breath, grab a snack, and reflect before driving back onto the information superhighway. Racebook’s essays are filled with nostalgic gaming references, musings on the current state of the internet, social media follies, and a surprising amount of German.”

There is indeed a “surprising amount of German” in Racebook. I was particularly chuffed to see that part of the book remarked upon.

It’s been a fun and interesting year (with more fun and interesting stuff to come), and it can be easy to get a little unmoored in the “publishing” part of his whole gig, but rest assured that I have been writing (more for my own sanity than anything else), and if I am absent, it is, for the most part, because I am attempting to be industrious.1

More to come. So Gott will.

Pre-order here!

Currently reading: Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Steve Coll

Currently listening: God Bites His Tongue - Sevendust

— “Even God Cannot Hear Us Here”: What I Witnessed Inside an ICE Women’s Prison - Rümeysa Öztürk, Vanity Fair, Jul. 17, 2025

“Within this despair, we found small joys in life, like feeding the birds, finding their nests, and hearing them chirp—a reminder of our freedom and the better days to come. My friends from Latin American countries held hands, forming large circles as they sang and prayed to God, trying to stay hopeful. Friends shared humorous news. They took a moment to watch the sunrise as we returned from breakfast. They appreciated small flowers hidden in the yard; some even used them to make hair accessories. They made small decorations using bread as clay. They made colorful necklaces and bracelets from plastic commissary bags, only to have some officers snatch them and throw them in the trash. Still, the next day, they made them again. Aunts from Russia warmly greeted me with kisses on the cheek, while friends from Georgia gifted me beautiful bracelets and colorful plastic necklaces made with their bare hands. I chuckled as my new friends from around the world playfully offered up their unaware brothers as potential husbands. Friends from Senegal enveloped me in warm hugs, and friends from Cameroon shared the recipes of their favorite African dishes, promising to cook me fufu and eru—one day, when we are free.”

— Playing Dead - Andrew Cockburn, Harper’s, Aug. 2025

“Whatever his intentions, the party machinery inherited by Martin will be difficult to reform. James Zogby, a member of the DNC for the past thirty-two years who spent sixteen of them on its executive committee, applauds Martin’s strategy as “a needed shift in resources from the national party, where money largely went to consultants.” But Zogby—who once told me his mission is to be “a pain in the ass” for the DNC—also provided stark insights into the inner workings of the institution. “Think the Bulgarian Communist Party circa 1955,” he said sourly, describing a tightly controlled, top-down structure. “There has never been a discussion about budget or priorities. It’s an opaque process that is run by consultants and law firms, and the party members are kind of props. We go to meetings and sit there to look like there’s actually a decision-making process, but there’s not.” Ordinary members, he said, “do not have opportunities to ask questions” at the biannual meetings, nor could they easily introduce resolutions. Even the executive committee’s more frequent meetings haven’t featured much, or any, general discussion. (On a conference call with DNC members the weekend after Biden’s catastrophic debate with Trump, then–DNC chair Jaime Harrison reportedly turned off the chat function and refused to take questions.)

Currently reading: Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller - Ron Chernow

Currently listening: The Awakening - Discrepancies