Here's an essay years in the making: In 2019 I decided to run the Dipsea Race because of a movie I saw in 1986. The race got pandemic-delayed. So I started interviewing the people who made the movie — Bruce Dern, Pam Grier, and many others. The result: bymikerussell.substack.com/p/the-runnin...

As the Shane Black fan who commissioned this bit of handcrafted glory, please believe me when I tell you @briannaduggan.bsky.social Is the goods and hiring her to make things is the smartest move imaginable

Proper advice from the great @lubellwoo.bsky.social ….

Pencils down on a longform essay I've been researching off and on for the past six years. Started as a pandemic hobby, ended with me on the phone with Bruce Dern for three-and-a-half hours. Whoops! Now in edits. More at some point.

It is possible that if you zoom in on Steve's extraordinary "Jimmy Olsen" cover and scan the crowd, you'll find a Sabertooth Vampire t-shirt under the face of a familiar-looking man. This man may be making the agonized expression of someone who bet his entire 401k on the fight's outcome.

"If you go on there and manage to stick it out for a month or two, you will get 100,000 Instagram followers, and then you can spend the rest of your life doing sponsored content and making paid appearances at nightclubs on the Gold Coast." samkriss.substack.com/p/dreams-nev...

“I’ve realized that feeling … is the multi-billion-dollar business that these companies know they’re building. It’s not fascist anime art or excel spreadsheet automation, it’s preying on the lonely and vulnerable for a monthly fee.” www.garbageday.email/p/this-is-wh...

Surprisingly good running songs (an ongoing series): Heard this in a bar not long ago and proceeded to listen to it on a loop for an embarrassing amount of time. The groove is smooth and impeccable and rolls like a good run. Satisfy should set a vibes video to this. youtu.be/8ob0J3gi6b8?...

All clown emoji (emojis?) aside, this is really really really really really bad. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

Post your favorite Doctor Who. Wrong answers only:

Post your favorite Doctor Who. Wrong answers only:

Post your favorite Doctor Who. Wrong answers only:

Surprisingly good running songs, an ongoing series: youtu.be/Kg1JS69kEuE?...

An old friend made a website that rounds up local Portland repertory screenings in an easy-to-scan list. I now pass this cinema blessing along to you: pdxmovie.club

This scene from THE WIZ scared the ever-loving crap out of me as a child. Those growing puppets were RETURN TO OZ-Wheelie-level terrifying! I hope Criterion (which apparently just announced a WIZ disc) devotes an entire extra to its psychological scarring. youtu.be/6Ul-LwLX6Nk?...

Aw man, I love CROSSING DELANCEY and had no idea there was a Criterion edition (a delightful ‘80s rom-com with Peter Riegert and Amy Irving if you’ve never checked it out): youtu.be/CgaVmNJscms?...

New GODFATHER making-of podcast. airmail.news/issues/2025-...

Good read about the Jeremy Strong / Kieran Culkin approaches to craft and “hunger” that gets into why people like dunking on Strong so much: www.thatfinalscene.com/p/jeremy-str...

"He led me past a refrigerator cloaked in an Indian tapestry and into an emptied living room, where I found Parker Posey perched cross-legged on a mat, facing a row of gongs." www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/m...

Unexpectedly good running songs, an ongoing series: “Jaguar” by John Gregory, used to good effect here: youtu.be/So4bRpIxdBY?...

"This is not strategic genius, it’s a human Dali painting: melting, distorted, and utterly incomprehensible." claireberlinski.substack.com/p/impeach-him

“LOCAL HERO wouldn’t work with an antagonist who had no hidden depths, one who wants only to obtain and dominate.” open.substack.com/pub/therevea...

“I’m one of many people who are being unfairly blamed for something I didn’t want. Okay? I didn’t want the mayor to blow up the city like he mentioned many times; I just wanted him to fix the old bowling alley like he promised in passing once.” www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/vot...

“The clashing advice formed a din of white noise, leaving me free (I mirthfully concluded) to follow no advice at all.” www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/b...

"I tried to explain to my boyfriend, who was at that point literally taking a bath, why I needed to drive the 6-hour round trip from Oregon to Washington to visit a place where an artist I loved had chosen to set a television series I’d started watching in high school." longreads.com/2025/01/30/r...

A fascinating portrait of Club 33 Disney Adults gone wild: "He emailed himself a series of screenshots from the Club’s members-only Facebook group. The images showed two female guests drinking spilled red wine off the Disneyland sidewalk with straws —" www.vulture.com/article/disn...

“Anniversary reissues are a dime a dozen, but the reappearance of *Before Sunrise* feels sympathetic, appropriate, almost a creative act in its own right.” www.independent.co.uk/arts-enterta...

Watched THE IPCRESS FILE and BULLITT recently. My favorite lost movie subgenre might be 1960s action/espionage films where whole scenes are devoted to just vibing out with the hero while they, like, make coffee and shop for groceries and cook and eat and park cars

"Loading plasma into a cannon so that a precisely aimed bolt of it can be fired directly into the serenely smiling face of a blogger is, at least in theory, one of the great feats of genius in human history." defector.com/i-would-thin...

Closed out the unofficial Johnnie To “bodyguard-loyalty trilogy” with a group screening of VENGEANCE ( THE MISSION / EXILED / VENGEANCE Criterion box set please )

“The obvious antecedent for ‘Beautiful Things’ are the canned alt-rock epics of Imagine Dragons, a band whose music I associate w/ trailers to late installments in Dreamworks Animation franchises I did not know existed but that make $300 million at the box office” open.substack.com/pub/maxread/...

“Scott would be the West Pointer who did not ask me to dance, the football hero who did not remember having been introduced to me, he would bring back the long line of desirable young men I could not have and the eccentrics that had flocked to me.” harpers.org/archive/2025...

“This team of former iPad babies and incels have not only compromised the OPM and the GSA…. They’re currently trying to block staffer access to USAID. And over the weekend they successfully infiltrated the U.S. Treasury’s payments system.” www.garbageday.email/p/musk-s-sup...

Good tea-leaf explainer by @jvl.bsky.social : “When the New York Stock Exchange opens on Monday at 9:30 a.m. we will see just how seriously the world takes the assault … launched on the American system of government.” open.substack.com/pub/thebulwa...

Getting back in the gym after my recent flu siege, and so

My vision board for the remainder of 2025 is these two images and only these two images:

Never not thinking of the time a dozen years ago when I introduced @thekarlapacheco.bsky.social to @mudron.bsky.social and risked creating the Singularity It was my Oppenheimer “sure we might accidentally ignite the atmosphere lol push the button anyway” moment

"Fat, happy, lazy, and oblivious, America's most powerful tech companies sat back and built bigger, messier models powered by sprawling data centers and billions of dollars ... without, it appears, much consideration of whether an alternative was possible." www.wheresyoured.at/deep-impact/

"Like many Americans, I spent yesterday trying to process the new reality we’ve suddenly found ourselves in. One where I am aware that something is happening, but largely unable to actually figure out the specifics." www.garbageday.email/p/yeah-it-s-...

The flickering sign is a flag at half-mast

One of my favorite things about David Lynch was his ability to ask and answer the question, “what if some of the most beautiful people you’ve ever seen unsettled you to the core?”

“It’s doubtful that American tech oligarchs are actually capable of accepting how screwed they are because AI is not just a massive pyramid scheme to them. It has ballooned out into a psuedo-religion.” www.garbageday.email/p/the-ai-guy...

"I remember thinking, 'This guy looks exactly like David Lynch,' as if he had dressed the part of his persona, but maybe it meant the persona was real." Brian Libby @brianlibby.bsky.social remembers a memorable hour in the Lynch household, a month after 9/11. www.orartswatch.org/my-afternoon...

Excellent NYT interview with the outgoing U.S. ambassador to Hungary. This is a key insight!

Edited a couple of his community newspapers for several years, and while I never met the man, I distinctly remember higher-ups never not referring to him as “Doctor Pamplin,” and also that he referred to our health-care benefits as “The Pamplin Plan” www.wweek.com/news/2025/01...

“Indeed, the characters use every conceivable swear word… to vivisect each other with almost Shakespearean invective (if Shakespeare had been drunk, Canadian, and a survivor of several concussive jet-ski accidents).” An ode to LETTERKENNY by @cintra.bsky.social : open.substack.com/pub/cintra/p...

Have taken to calling these “Canadian Froot Loops”

I have some questions

There's your garden-variety existential crisis, and then there's Apple's comically wretched Image Playground depicting you as a Chris Ware drawing of a 65-year-old city councilor's mugshot