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.
Hello, internet: On behalf of myself, Emily VanDerWerff, but speaking for every single person I know who writes things on the internet, let me ask you a simple question: Are you mad at the headline? That thing you're upset about, the thing you're going to yell
When I got to Vox, one of the first questions I had for my new bosses was: Did they want ratings on our reviews? The answer was yes (much as I had secretly hoped it would be no). And it's easy to see why. For more casual consumers
I spent my vacation in Canada, specifically the Banff National Park region (10/10, very good park, would park again), and on my first day there, I went a little crazy on Twitter, as Americans inevitably do, mocking Canada's weird potato chip variants. I got some blowback for
Let me show you something dumb I wrote. Okay, first, let me set the scene. It's February 2013. I've just finished watching "One Man's Trash" -- the best episode of Girls still, to this day -- on HBO's crummy little
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