Trump is a creature of media before anything else and I suspect one thing we're seeing in this (wild!) Mamdani meeting is that nothing impresses/intimidates him like someone capable of generating a competing media phenomenon

This is where I am with ranking my year-end list. I used to do it bc I had to, now I don't have to so I don't do it. The simple reason is that the rankings are arbitrary BS, and one of my few jobs as a critic is not to bullshit my reader!

Hard Fork needs to do an emergency podcast

“Who’s taller, LeBron James or Elon Musk?” “True height is standing up for the colonization of Mars and against the Woke Mind Virus so—“

Her first film will be g rated

Recently added a home-office electric standing desk and it has probably been great for my health and posture, but every time I raise and lower it has become an anxious inspection to make sure I don't accidentally crush something

got some stuff off my chest www.vulture.com/article/penu...

I've been watching a bunch of AI slop nostalgia videos recently for... reasons, and none of it looks like reality, either present-day or past, but it looks EXACTLY like advertising

Not the most important thing right now, but the one instance I can remember of hearing a human being use that phrase was Eddie Murphy in an SNL Gumby sktech

As bleak as this situation is--and hoo boy is it--it's heartening that brilliant people like Alissa are at least thinking about the problem

So glad EV mentioned this in particular. One of my biggest Broadway pet peeves is the pandering joke/reference, and the RFK Jr one wouldn't have survived the worst late-night show's writers room

Mentally casting Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Nuzzi/Lizza

these are all the names of weird virility drinks sold at the gas station

I’m on The Daily’s Sunday Special episode with @poniewozik.bsky.social and Gilbert Cruz talking about a thing I never talk about (docs). Come for the Ken Burns, stay for a real nail biter of a trivia showdown: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Obviously, you can think whatever you want about any book, but to me, Nabokov's two masterworks (Lolita, Pale Fire) are about horrible people possessed of deep delusions of grandeur who aim to get the reader on their side by appearing to be smart. And a lot of people fall for it!

Writing the first third of several pieces, then closing the files, like the cobbler hoping the elves will finish the shoes for him overnight

Ken Burns made a documentary about Americans who declared "No kings!" and rose up against the military occupation of their cities. What could possibly be polarizing about that? [giftie] www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/a...

To balance this rant by saying something nice: You CAN, however, elevate an already-good show with great casting, and Exhibit A right now is The Lowdown. Absolutely stacked cast, not just in terms of talent but dead-on appropriateness for the specific role

I didn't review this show, but my personal hobbyhorse is "You cannot make a bad show into a good one just through casting" and this here is Exhibit A

Probably my most cancellable belief, on Old Twitter or here, is that I am a prescriptivist about a lot of things. It is good, actually, for words to have specific meanings, and bad, actually, when those meanings are so diluted that you can no longer unambiguously express them!

Inspired by a convo here about the ideas in Pluribus, re-upping my review--which, like probably most of my "spoiler-free" advance reviews, is really written in code so you can read it after you've watched the thing and know the spoilers

I was told that the unspooling of the elite sex-trafficking conspiracy would have much more reference to the work of HP Lovecraft

please, tv writers, i beg you stop making the penultimate episode a flashback that answers all my questions about how we got here i don't care! i already AM here. these are not questions i want answered! i don't care about these flashback people! i don't want to care about these flashback people!

We are all going to be Henry Hill, it’s noodles and ketchup from here on out

Think about buying a car, a fun, stress-free negotiating process that everybody loves. Now imagine that if you don’t buy a car you die and if you buy the wrong car you also die

oh my god

wrote an essay about the lowdown, and how it can be hard to think about drama at a time when there never seem to be consequences for bad guys, and how the lowdown offers us a way out www.vulture.com/article/the-...

One more thing I would add: There's a popular idea that "Media wants negative reviews because that gets clicks." Not to overgeneralize but for a good while a lot of incentive has been the opposite, toward ingratiation: "We like that thing that you like! We're OBSESSED with ___!" &c

I’ve said it before but news outlets worry a lot about looking biased and not enough about looking phony. Why should people trust you if you won’t say what they can see plain as day?

I agree with this and/but also: There will probably be times when you wonder if the show *has* somewhere to go next. It's a very different mode from the all-gas-no-brakes approach of, like Severance season 1. But every time I thought the show was flagging, it pulled off another magic trick.

My ears were glued to Wesley Morris and Kelefa Sanneh on the nice-ification of music criticism. This is a thing I think about a lot lately with TV criticism, although the reasons/dynamics are different. Maybe inside baseball, but you follow a critic on social media! www.youtube.com/watch?v=zerX...

"Pluribus" reminded me a bit of a lot of other things. And also, it is like absolutely nothing else you've ever seen. [giftie] www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/a...

This case will be taught for decades in torta law classes

I wrote about "The Office" memes, the Esperanto of the Internet. Apologies for the preview image of Steve Carell's gigantic forehead [giftie] www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/a...

I saw this figure, and I’m not sure where I’d be classified here. I’m culturally/ethnically Jewish, I identify as Jewish, but I have no religious practice and am an atheist. This describes a lot of Jews in NYC, but I don’t know where we are in this chart!

Maybe Mamdani finally has a shot at the Schumer endorsement

My periodic election-night PSA to NYC non-Spectrum customers: you can stream NY1 coverage on YouTube www.youtube.com/live/gJpgKnQ...

OMG yes. You can pick your personal most grim section of the piece, but mine was when it ends, "But we have one hope--we can create a functional social and political response to the disruption." Welp! *begins digging own grave*

Get the AMERICAN VANDAL team to do it AMERICAN SANDO, coming 2026

Just saw local news say that Diane Ladd's role in "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" was "inspired by 'Alice,' the sitcom that she starred in" and I am seriously wondering how much AI was involved in that

For all the talk about whether it’s A Bad Thing to stream movies rather than see them in theaters, A House of Dynamite feels like a perfect use case because—I don’t mean this pejoratively—it sort of fits a role that TV movies used to.

I'm no political consultant but as someone who writes about TV/media it's interesting to me how many people want to make his success either about *only* his particular platform or *only* his charisma/facility with media. You can't separate content and form that neatly!

Because I know you follow a TV critic account mainly for recipes, this is one of my cold-weather go-tos. Biscuit crust is easier and (IMHO) 100x better than the usual. I guess it’s a chicken pot cobbler? (Not to be confused with Hoboken Squat Cobbler.) cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1020...

Marathon day hands down the best thing NYC does. Mobs of people lining the streets to cheer on regular-ass people doing a hard-ass thing. All of life should be like this!

Or you can make this instead and thank me later. Save yourself a headache and bake the sweet potatoes, you can thank me for that too cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/251-...

One of my kids’ first Halloweens, they got candy at his house from him and Jim Jarmusch

Salute to the dad who talked his kid into picking a Butterfinger from the candy bowl, because dad clearly wanted to claim it as his candy tax later