Bill Murray to Chevy Chase: "Medium talent"

“movies are too long” shut up im watching a MOVING PICTURE!!!!!!

There’s a scene in “The Zone of Interest” where the designers of the new crematorium being built for Auschwitz use the word “packages” to describe to each individual murder victim when they’re showing Rudolf Höss how the new system will work.

Here's a particularly juicy nugget I found in my reporting . . .

Miller's racist logic is the same logic behind the reverse freedom rides. www.npr.org/sections/cod...

The “free speech” and “cancel culture” panics have led to overt state censorship because that was always their purpose. (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Once again thinking about the single most baffling sentence in any review this year

The right, along the Roberts Court, is trying to nullify the Reconstruction amendments guaranteeing equality under the law, in order to restore the Antebellum Constitution, which envisions “liberty” as an eternal aristocracy of race and class (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Breaking: the conservative movement has officially reached 2007

I wrote about the conservative quest to restore the "true" Constitution, the Antebellum Constitution, shorn of the egalitarian nonsense in the Reconstruction Amendments, a document that replaces equality with a society of dominators and the dominated. www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

elaine benes gesserit

Regular people like to dismiss method acting for the same reason they dismiss exacting directors, or writers who take a long time between books: they don't want to admit that, typically, the more time and effort you expend on a craft, the better you get at it

I love that elected officials now regularly say things like “it is political correctness to oppose my calls to ethnically cleanse the United States.” What a healthy, stable democracy we have here

In his most recent book, “The Once and Future Riot,” the comics journalist Joe Sacco is investigating not only tumultuous past events but also the future they might create, Robert Rubsam writes.

The name "Popular Science" doesn't mean we shift our coverage depending on public opinion. It means we cover relevant subjects that are rigorously researched, reliable, and grounded in reality. And trans lives are grounded in reality. We see y'all. No matter what. www.popsci.com/science/tran...

"Today Sacco’s drawings are still loose, dynamic, even a bit cartoonish—but he always senses when caricature should end and the facts should take over." www.theatlantic.com/books/2025/1...

For @theatlantic.com I wrote about Joe Sacco's search for the essential truth, from Bosnia to Gaza to Uttar Pradesh: www.theatlantic.com/books/2025/1...

Every two and a half days on substack

Well there’s the whole game

It really is so funny that after 35 years as the editor of Commentary Norman Podhoretz finally found a worthy successor: his son

Ben Wheatley trajectory

I hear there's discourse about race and employment in the US

ICYMI:

Just ran into a real-life version of this meme on substack

Trump deported immigrants who, unlike Tina Peters, never received any sort of due process-no grand jury, no trial, no witness testimony, no guilty verdict, no chance to appeal-to a prison for terrorists in El Salvador, where they were beaten, tortured and kept under inhumane conditions

The good people at Notebook asked me to write about the restored Fall of Otrar. Of course, I turned in an essay on the deep strangeness of past worlds: mubi.com/en/notebook/...

The good people at Notebook asked me to write about the restored Fall of Otrar. Of course, I turned in an essay on the deep strangeness of past worlds: mubi.com/en/notebook/...

Way too many political scientists on here

Here's the thing: speeding is fun

The movie adaptation of 'Train Dreams' is something palatable, a safe choice between seasons of 'Yellowstone.' defector.com/train-dreams...

Now we're talking

"We must Aryanize the housing supply"

2025, Ranked

i read stuff like this and can genuinely angry at guys like jd vance who insist that this country belongs to some narrow vision of the "native born"

They're using the confinement box, one of the most horrific methods of CIA torture in the post-9/11 black sites, against migrants now. This is the direct result of the lack of consequences for the architects of the torture program. Either there will be criminal penalties for this or it will expand.

Elon Musk is worse at hiding it but this is the problem with all billionaires: they are a threat to democratic governance. They have an insatiable need to own and control everything. If you want to be free you have to curb their power, and demand political leaders who understand that

👁️NEW EP👁️ We look at Soderbergh's two Spalding Gray docs, 1996's GRAY'S ANATOMY and 2010's AND EVERYTHING IS GOING FINE, with real live New York intellectual @robrubsam.bsky.social ! You will not believe how mad Ian is at a dead guy - check it out. podcastyforme.com

@philklay.bsky.social: 'I suspect the question the administration cares about is not “is this legal,” “is this a war crime,” “is this murder” or even “is this good for America,” but rather, “isn’t this violence delightful?”' www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/o...

This position is fundamentally segregationist—civilization is "erased" by the presence of people who do not share the ethnic background of the present majority—something ironically at odds with the history of Europe, which has been profoundly shaped by migration bsky.app/profile/matt...

there are of course many examples of political constituencies that have in fact killed scores of children (en route to some other evil goal), but I can't offhand think of any historical examples of a political constituency organized for that specific purpose

Speaking of Netflix cinema

Pardon incoming in 5, 4, 3...

“There is a risk that the focus on the second strike and specifically the talk of ‘war crimes’ feeds into the administration’s false wartime framing and veils the fact that the entire boat-strikes campaign is murder, full stop." www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/u...

They’re killing people as a twitter joke. It’s depraved. Can’t let yourself lose the capacity to be appalled and disgusted and outraged by this.

Fine: I wrote about Train Dreams defector.com/train-dreams...

“Bentley’s film aims to enfold you within the profundity of common experience, only to crush you beneath a redwood-scale slab of kitsch.” @robrubsam.bsky.social on Train Dreams