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.
Every Friday, we rank something why not. Let's not beat around the bush. Let's do this. 1.) Quarters: Is there anything better than a quarter? No. The quarter is a perfect coin. Just holding it feels like holding power, and if you get a roll of
Two major TV stories this week left me thinking about Leave It to Beaver (though, to be fair, it doesn't take much for me to start thinking about Leave It to Beaver). The first was the tremendous episode of Black-ish that aired Wednesday night, in which the show
ON THE ONE HAND: I really do think that eating meat probably contributes to a bunch of global ills, just in the sense that, like, livestock production contributes so much CO2 into the atmosphere, etc., etc., etc. I also think that I like animals a lot and have to sort
(This newsletter now has over 500 subscribers, which seems crazy to me. Welcome to all of you, and when we hit 1,000, I promise to do an Episodes on an episode of Showtime's Episodes.) One of the great joys in my life (as we've established)
(This horse is not Dude, but it looks a surprising amount like him. Good work, horse.) My sister, like so many sisters, had a period where all she wanted was a horse. Because we lived in the middle of nowhere, my parents could make that dream come true for her.
My home state, South Dakota, has seen a bill that forbids transgender people from using the bathrooms of the gender they identify with at public schools pass both houses of its Legislature. The only thing standing in the way of it becoming law is a potential governor's veto.
If I had a dream job (OK, if I had one dream job among many I wanted to talk about here today), it would be to get paid to visit remote places and write about the people who live there. This is probably because I grew up in a remote
My review of Vinyl will appear Friday, and I'll likely talk a bit about this there. It's a show I like a fair amount, but it's also a show that shares something with creator Terrence Winter's previous series, Boardwalk Empire: mistaken protagonist
When I moved to Vox, I was excited to get back into something I hadn't done for quite a while but wanted to do again: forthright reporting. I had been so bogged down in weekly episode reviews and other critical stuff at AV Club that I hadn'
Look, I get it. The Oscar for Best Picture has gone to some lousy movies (though fewer than you'd think), and it's gone to some really mediocre ones (roughly about the number that you'd think). The number of all-time classics that have been awarded
I almost missed an important anniversary. Okay, I DID miss an important anniversary earlier this year. The only reason I'm thinking to mark it now is because my friend Jace Lacob mentioned on Facebook that his own site, Televisionary, turned 10 recently. And in an instant I remembered
In the buildup to Fox's Grease Live spectacular, I mentioned to a few people that I had never seen the movie Grease, but I had been a teenager at exactly the right time to have had to sing every song from it in various show choir and music