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The Genius of Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus
Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus, which aired its finale on Christmas Eve, has all the characteristically ironic notes you would expect from its paradigmatically Gen X filmmaker. Gilligan, the mastermind behind...
St. Cuthbert and the Cave That Couldn’t Be Filmed
August 2025 in northern England was chilly and windy. I had gone over to this land along the Anglo-Scottish border one month earlier, in July, to scout out St....
The Rise and Fall of Urban Frump
In 2021 a friend sent me a video of a bizarre fashion show. The models paraded through a dark warehouse while an ominously mechanical remix of Radiohead’s “Creep” played...
Oppenheimer’s Tragic Fate
In Oppenheimer, director Christopher Nolan has taken the meticulously researched seven-hundred-page book American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, and rendered it into his best film yet....
A Divine Comedy We Can Feel in the Pulse
English is a wonderfully weird language with a huge vocabulary, but one with distinct “registers.” I am currently in the process of translating Dante’s Comedy, and this is the...
Tolstoy’s Moments Beyond the Clock
Before the museum and before the printing press, works of art were meant not to represent, but to perform, evoke, render something or someone mysteriously present—as if summoned from...
The Waste Land at 100
Reading a literary text in a certain type of physical space can make what was previously unintelligible come to life. Greek tragedies make more sense when you remember ancient...
