Just watch the early "bad" episodes
A TV show teaches you how to watch it. Sometimes, it has to teach you via episodes that don't quite seem to work.
In which Roger Ebert almost gets me fired
On unlikely friendships, meeting your heroes, and avoiding yourself on the internet
"All Too Well" is Taylor Swift's best song, and I will fight you if you claim otherwise
Okay, it might be "Blank Space" actually
What do we want from the TV small town?
On Letterkenny, Schitt's Creek, and the ways we romanticize rural lives
Life jacket
Or: I watched the Mr. Robot finale and had an existential crisis
From the cutting room floor...
A cut excerpt from my recent end-of-the-2010s culture piece
What's your favorite pop culture New Year's Eve/Day?
New Year’s strikes me as a potentially great holiday to build into pop culture — but it’s very rarely present in even TV series (which usually opt for Christmas episodes). There are a few “drunken New Year’s Eve” tales, but the spiritual and symbolic significance of one year
My 11 favorite things I wrote in 2019
(Not including all of the things I wrote in 2019 that you won't see until 2020 at the earliest)
Let's make tiny New Year's resolutions together
A few years ago, I made the New Year’s resolution to learn how to use chopsticks — and I succeeded at this incredibly minor task. The year after that, I set a resolution to learn how to shuffle cards, and… I haven’t quite mastered that, but I’m much
Give us your pop culture prediction for the 2020s
What do you think will happen to pop culture in the 2020s? You can take this question as seriously or lightheartedly as you like, but let’s presume that pop culture will continue to exist in the 2020s. Which is to say — “Climate change will become a central concern of
What was your favorite pop culture moment of the 2010s?
This should not be more than just a few split seconds — no more than a minute or two — of a larger work. Whether it’s Furiosa wailing and kneeling in the sand in Mad Max: Fury Road or the way Elizabeth Jennings gasps when she realizes something big in The
3 Ghosts, 1 Corpse
The Christmas Conundrum by Emily Dickens