in a way, isn’t causing men to crash out before she’s even done anything just proof that Lupita is perfect for Helen of Troy

There's a family sitting next to me, and the college-aged son was trying to show his dad how it was a bad idea for him to ask AI for medical advice. And his dad has become so upset that he's now furiously lecturing him about how he smokes too much weed. That may be true, but he's right about the AI!

It seems to me that most of the critiques of "toxic masculinity" as a phrase are about the inevitability that either a) men will mistakenly understand it to mean all men are inherently bad or b) men will react aggressively against it. Both of which seem like good examples of toxic masculinity?

Various Types of Women

Widow’s Bay Is a Menacing and Hilarious Mash-up newrepublic.com/article/2100... via @newrepublic.com

Look, maybe if you didn't describe the organized effort to repeal the 19th amendment as "toxic masculinity," then they wouldn't be organizing an effort to repeal the 19th amendment.

Once day a major outlet will manage to write about the rise of misogyny as a unifying ideological project in the American right without a viscous little aside about how it’s actually all women’s fault for buying “male tears” mugs in 2015.

Whenever a person in real life finds out that I write about TV, they always ask for a rec. I usually just say: SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE. As of this month, though, I have a new official recommendation. It's called WIDOW'S BAY. I wrote about it here. You should watch: newrepublic.com/article/2100...

This feels an awful lot like a writer getting distracted by the "experts" with the hottest takes. Am I talking to a heterodox truth-teller "outside the polite consensus" or someone who's framed their take in the terms most likely to attract a magazine writer? www.newyorker.com/news/fault-l...

I was in a seminar room this semester with a bunch of seniors, and I let them out ten min early so they could go to the grad speaker announcement event bc they were all so excited to find out. I keep laughing about what it would've been like the following class if the announced speaker had been me.

I have to admit, I've thought about doing apparel, especially for AWP. Some useful insight here into how to prepare from someone who specializes in wearable merch.

I wrote about how “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” never quite became the show you—and, I suspect, its host—initially hoped it would be. wapo.st/4uN2xzw

"Presented, at long last, with the opportunity to replace the pieces of the culture they have been hating for years, all these guys can do is create lifeless facsimiles of what they despise." defector.com/the-saddest-...

I have a friend who has a handful of article links he wants to promote every month and a book to promote next year. He's not going back to X, but would be open to building up a presence on other platforms that are better for this. Can somebody clear this up for me? I mean for my friend?

One good thing that entertainment journalists covering The Odyssey can do is never to ask Nyong'o, Page, or Nolan about this. When a prominent racist and transphobe says something racist and transphobic, go make his life miserable and leave his targets alone. They have nothing to defend or explain.

The real scandal is that NYU cheaped out on getting a cool celebrity speaker for their graduation AT YANKEE STADIUM — the article says past speakers include Taylor Swift and Sonia Sotomayor — and just booked a professor from their own business school instead. What a bummer!

Always true

This may be jarring on your timeline at the moment but it’s important: I am deep into the show “Girls5Eva”. Maybe I missed it initially because I live in UK? In any case I am angry & physically sick that I was not on this show. It’s so funny I do not know what to do, other than evangelize.

a challenge of criticism rn is all these cultural spheres colliding in ways you’d never know. a vapid take on tv goes viral because the OP is clearly anime pilled and no one knows this. Gamers bringing their idiosyncrasies to movies. Genre lit obsessives doing the same to everything else

Everyone on here is arguing about X and Bluesky again. But no one ever talks about the two major issues with this platform, one cultural and one technical. And until both are solved, people are going to keep arguing about whether its relevant or not! www.garbageday.email/p/safe-and-c...

WIDOW'S BAY is Matthew Rhys' best performance since The Americans. Creator Katie Dippold knows exactly how to use him, and how to do everything else, too, it seems. I wrote about the best new show of the year: newrepublic.com/article/2100...

We should look into getting a bizarro Fetterman. Like, can Pete Ricketts get in a rollerskating accident and then all of a sudden start stumping for the Green New Deal?

When sports podcasters use the phrase "the human element" in talking about athletes, do they realize that that makes them sound like poorly programmed androids?

everyone should not have stayed on twitter, everyone should have stayed on tumblr

Is it New England Gothic Parks & Rec? The X-Files in the style of Veep? Rob Reiner's Halloween? I wrote about the temptation to think about TV like an AI prompt engineer, and I wrote about the best new show of the year — WIDOW'S BAY — which isn't like anything else. newrepublic.com/article/2100...

This would make for a great one-act play.

I hope Daryl Morey and Sam Hinkie start a podcast together

I wonder which of Bob Myers' three daughters will be the Sixers' new president of basketball operations.

When TBS started airing reruns of SEX AND THE CITY in syndication, they couldn't air curse words or graphic content, which meant that Samantha was essentially not in the show anymore.

This is the "woke" social media platform in the sense that, being here, I have become awokened to the constructedness of all social media. People who make arguments in which the main figures are warring social media fiefdoms are basically trapped in an oil painting.

Stop sharing stills from the WaPo Opinions podcast.

What this video shares with the recent viral clip of the commencement speaker is the sense that collective outrage and mobilization in defense of principles is, somehow, bad, or at least confusing. "Againstness breeds againstness" is just another way of describing how solidarity works.

Tapping the sign.

Cannes jury member Demi Moore on AI: “Against-ness breeds against-ness. AI is here. So to fight it is to fight a battle that we will lose. So to find ways that we can work with it is a valuable path that we can take.” Against-ness breeds against-ness 🥴

Workday recently became a target for "activist investing," which usually does not portend well for improving functionality or security.

Select final paper titles from my Dad Culture Studies seminar this semester: "Worn by Supermodels and Dads in Ohio: Normcore and the Making of the Dad Shoe" "The Dad that Stepped Up: Stepfatherhood as Dad Culture" "The Jabberwockian Dad" 1/2

re: lots of kidlit is really bad, actually

I love this movie. I wrote about it a couple of years ago. I could write about it forever. pjmaciak.substack.com/p/golden-years

my friend @sepinwall.bsky.social are doing a podcast together, it's coming out on mondays starting next week, and our attempt to record a five minute teaser goes predictably awry podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

"Dr. Oz is a preposterous figure. Everything he says is a dangerous, disingenuous grift. The Republican party is transparently using the birthrate crisis as a cover for rolling back women's reproductive rights. And yet, we are under-babied. It's time for leftists to take this discourse seriously...

Man, burying the "Devery Jacobs" lede — REZ DOGS RENAISSANCE! I just need Willie Jack leveled up to series regular on The Lowdown.

There is a clear through line from K-12 having kids read and analyze excerpts of works in lieu of full works with context to pushing AI into schools.

The point isn't that it's wrong, the point is that a human being would have to have learned something in their real life — even just watching a TV show! — to be able to *tell* that it's wrong. "Prompt engineering" and "AI literacy" can only be valuable in a world where people still know things.

So, in 2019, somebody spent $5 million to build an enormous modern mausoleum in an historic St. Louis cemetary, and their IDENTITY IS A MYSTERY! It will not be revealed until they die. I'm guessing Jayson Tatum, but that's probably not it. www.stlpr.org/culture-hist...

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.

One last time for this season: in his entire life, Joel Embiid has never done anything wrong.

The list of serious literary nonfiction about the history/politics/culture of dadhood isn't long, especially compared to books like that about motherhood. Anyway, for mother's day, here's a couple books about motherhood I've found particularly inspiring as I try to write a book as good about DADS.

today i finally thought abt AI in terms of what i know as a historian about new media & tech & it’s this: we actually have no idea what AI will really be meaningfully used for. we have a ton of uses to put it to that are actually fantasies about doing things we already do “better.”

A hearty congratulations to the middle-aged man who won the "Girls on the Run" 5k in downtown St Louis today — you really showed 'em.