(As we head toward Election Day, I thought I'd share a few anecdotes from my political past. They won't take over the newsletter, but I have enough of them of interest to keep your attention, hopefully.) In the summer of 2008, unemployed, desperate, and believing I
If you have followed my career lo these many years, you will know that I have a major soft spot for graphic adventure games – games where you take over a little character who tries to solve puzzles (usually by combining random items in an attempt to guess exactly what the
If you spend a lot of time reading and researching about '80s and '90s TV (and u know I do), a group keeps popping up: the Viewers for Quality Television. At first, the idea of the group seems more or less obvious: this was an organization of TV
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