Emily St. James is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in Vox, The A.V. Club, and the New York Times. She is the co-creator of the podcast Arden and a writer on the TV series Yellowjackets.
The smartest thing I've ever read about marriage is in Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, a terrific sci-fi novel that you should read right now. Background: The Sparrow is about a mission to a nearby star that proves to have life structured in civilizations that are,
You remember 24, season six, right? (Bear with me; I've been thinking about 24 a lot today.) It's probably the worst season of the show, when the series more or less gave up trying to tell even 25 percent of a coherent story and gave in
It's 1987. I'm in Sunday School. The instructor is talking about fruits of the Holy Spirit, about the gift of leadership God might bestow on us. We might be called, she says, to serve the church or our community or our country. But not the girls,
(As always, all names have been changed and various details obscured to hide real identities, etc.) The first time Bill Clinton was elected president, I was pretty sure the world was going to end. I had been born into a world of Republican rule. When Ronald Reagan left office, I
I saw a movie tonight that I'm convinced is a near-masterpiece, held back by a couple of dumb judgment calls made by its rookie filmmaker, judgment calls said filmmaker probably won't make in their second or third or fourth films. I was quietly blown away by
Every July brings one of my least favorite TV rituals: complaining about the Emmy awards. Now, to be sure, there was a time when I was a veteran Emmy complainer. (I once even wrote a whole column full of shaking fury about what the Emmys needed to do to improve.
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(I posted this to Facebook in August of 2015. Its length made me think maybe I should have an email newsletter, so I started one a few days later. USA! USA! USA! USA! Since Mr. Robot returns this week, and since so much of the discussion around it is driven
So as I said a few days ago (before the plane's descent so rudely interrupted me), sitting down with some sort of structure in mind when you're writing a thinkpiece/essay/what-have-you can be the difference between a great piece and one that just repeats itself
(I had been planning a version of this essay to run on July 4, but couldn't find time to write it. It's become accidentally timely, so I'm going to write it now instead. We'll return to our regularly scheduled programming shortly.) I
The most common mistake I find in thinkpieces around this great internet of ours is that they repeat themselves over and over and over again. They find a way to say the same thing in five or six different ways, slap on an intro and conclusion, then get out. After
(I would absolutely read that one about the 1875 mansion, fwiw.) It is, for some, the gravest insult that can be leveled against a piece of online writing: clickbait. The hackles go up. The body shivers. Surely, it's not clickbait. And yet "clickbait" is increasingly becoming
If there's a common thread to most criticisms of Orange Is the New Black's fourth season -- even the mildest ones -- it's that Piper Chapman doesn't really have a reason to be on the show any more. People who disliked the