Currently rewatching Half Man and the first four seasons of The Bear. My jam: flawed complex characters, often dealing with (directly or indirectly) substance abuse. Add a difficult childhood to the mix. Oh, I also love prank call/prank names TikToks.

Josh Safdie next to Timmy. (I’m Team Benny Safdie, by the way, especially after Marty Supreme.)

I swear to Jesus, if FreddyLA7 turns out to be a plant, I will cry. So wholesome. (Fun fact: I’ve never been to Helen, GA.)

youtu.be/ojjCvICC86c?... The trailer made me cry. I’m not ready for the end of an all-time favorite series.

Aaron interviewed Atom Egoyan for his Criterion podcast, and he was a gem. I got to chat with him briefly before the cast because Aaron told him that I was a huge fan. He sent us an autographed copy of the Exotica screenplay book. Prized possession.

I love bad album covers.

Oh, man. The “be curious” scene in Ted Lasso worked so well because of him.

This is the content I’m here for. I had an Uzbek-South Carolinian student this year!

“Human nature is made for freedom. With this youth, we might have better days.”  For @ebertvoices.bsky.social, I wrote about the late, great Marjane Satrapi

This news saddens me greatly.

Husband walks in and sees Guy Fieri on the television. Hubby: “Guy’s Grocery Games?” Me: “No, Flavortown Food Fight” Hubby starts to laugh at all the Guy Fieri show iterations. I have to give Guy/Food Network some credit for sticking with alliterative titles.

I was wondering about the Darien Gap. I guess I’m a geography nerd—proudly!

My mother loved Idris Elba. ❤️

Half Man really put you through the wringer. Not an easy watch it all, so dark and grim. But Jamie Bell was outstanding, as was Richard Gadd. They deserve some acting credits for it. Very brave work.

It’s officially out! Loved Backrooms? Learn about the history of A24. Available now in digital and print form. The A24 New Wave: Empowering Artists, Transforming Modern Cinema a.co/d/0dc6mckS

"LLMs generate fluent, authoritative-seeming outputs based on statistical patterns rather than true understanding, and they have limitations in reasoning, calibration, and transparency." Medicine as an Information Industry in the Age of AI ai.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

Yet another example of “Succession is actually a documentary.”

WE HAVE A BOOK! Officially uploaded yesterday. Since I’m the leader of the West family street team, get ready for a flurry of posts.

This week, I'm talking about the history of recipe writing! Medieval recipes were shockingly vague: "Boil until it be enough." But modern recipes use a highly specialized style — publishers even have cookbook style guides. APPLE: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/h... YOUTUBE: youtu.be/SKnAJUpbE50

I was trying to explain what ChatGPT is to my mom (she thought it was a messaging app) and after my explanation and some thought, she volunteered, “Oh, so it’s the magic mirror in the beginning of Snow White when it only tells the queen what she wants to hear.” Perfect analogy.

I’ve been snarky about Jeremy Allen White’s voice acting, but this post is a good reminder that the young target audience never saw JAW’s incredible Al-Anon monologue in S1 E8 of The Bear.

I kid you not, twice in the past 24 hours, there have been two references to the “Serpentine!” line in The In-Laws. First, my sister discussing how to escape from a gator, and then me describing the conclusion of this race.

The sentiment “Hurt people hurt people” is facile, but Richard Gadd’s works are fascinating because they illustrate what an immensely talented group can do with making something potentially clichéd into original, insightful art. Half Man is stunning. Not an easy watch, but strongly recommended.

I’m also concerned about Europeans not understanding how 1) giant this country is and 2) how slow and inefficient train travel is. Something I miss greatly about Europe is the wonderful train system. I also spent a lot of time on Amtrak as a kid because Dad didn’t fly.

THE MAN I LOVE: Starring Rami Malek, Ira Sachs’ latest is a quietly monumental portrait of a queer artist that knocked me completely flat. It's the best of the competition thus far and one of the absolute best of the festival📽️ My rave #Cannes2026 review @thewrap.com: www.thewrap.com/creative-con...

Rami Malek burns brighter than he has in years in ‘The Man I Love,’ the new film from Ira Sachs. In it, he plays a performance artist who throws himself into his creative work after a hospitalization.

Welcome to another edition of Andrea’s Controversial Oscar Opinions. Rami Malek was more than deserving of that Bohemian Rhapsody Oscar. I’m not singling out this reviewer at all! His take is common among cinephiles.

Icon. Influenced my graduate school research so much. #lingsky

A colleague just sent me this meme.

Sir, another graduation ceremony in which the students booed AI has dropped. "College graduates were pissed after their school used AI to announce graduates’ names and missed hundreds of names" (via @/FearedBuck on Twitter)

“We’re contemptuous of you, new college graduates - but we’re also incredibly stupid. Do you have snake oil? Amazing, we’ll take the entire inventory.”

An auditor for the Ontario, Canada government found that AI agents tasked with turning doctor/patient conversations into structured notes routinely hallucinated false treatments, replaced drug names with entirely different drugs, and missed crucial information

From a working-class family in Wolverhampton! Great win.

I have thoughts, especially about the top 20, but there are some really wonderful books on this list. I think I’ve recommended Half of a Yellow Sun to most of my friends. www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...

Hi all— over at @cinejourneys.bsky.social we welcome back Imogen Sara Smith with her upcoming class on Kinuyo Tanaka. Registration is still open. Come join us! Details at the link.

Imogen's last class for @cinejourneys.bsky.social was SO GOOD, this is a great use of your time and money. If you can't make the meetings, the calls are recorded and can be watched later.

NEW: ArXiv, the open-access repository of preprint academic research, will ban authors of papers for a year if they submit obviously AI-generated work. www.404media.co/new-arxiv-ru...

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

Every week, Half Man leaves me absolutely speechless. It’s deeply unsettling, emotionally raw, and some of the most riveting storytelling I’ve seen in years. If it sticks the landing, it deserves every award. 👏👏Richard Gadd 👏👏

“So if what you have is working for you, or you think that it can stand a reasonable chance And for there's broken seems fixable and nothing's beyond repair” (1/2) DBT, “A World of Hurt”

Sigh. 😮‍💨

Today in linguists are NOT KIDDING when we say that your language ability lets you understand sentences that have never before been uttered

Richard Gadd’s insistence on crafting stories that reject clear-cut ethics and force the audience to navigate a moral minefield is precisely why I’m so drawn to his work. What’s triggering for some is therapeutic for others and he very clearly writes for those who are the latter.

extreme lol: www.404media.co/ucf-ai-comme...

In Chicago, I didn’t cry, maybe because of all the hysterical laughter of a sold-out screening before the end. Wonderfully enthusiastic rowdy group. In Columbia, at a surprise screening a few months later, the end hit me hard.

this graduation speech moment is notable, and her amazed shock at having failed to read the room feels instructive. when you're inside the bubble, you think everybody else is. but everybody isn't.

A desert island disc. www.theguardian.com/music/2026/m...