I can’t tell if I’m imagining it or not, but ever since I learned Alfred Enoch is William Russell’s son I think I keep seeing Ian Chesterton-style expressions on his face.

NYT gonna NYT: "Both Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Maduro identify as socialists, though they have no relationship.” — would be funny if they did this every time you write about two capitalists. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/w...

The deleterious social impacts of smartphones are more than compensated for by the fact that you no longer have to memorize the draft beer menu, you can just take a picture of the chalkboard.

Saving this screenshot from Threads as a new reaction image

The fact that Verhoeven movies have proven a significantly more effective bellwether than Ezra Klein's podcast

The likelihood you've been right about the course of American politics over the last decade rises in direct proportion to how often you listen to Rage Against the Machine. Having studied political science hurts you a bit. Having worked as a political journalist hurts a lot.

This could have big repercussions for mail voting in 2026: USPS no longer guarantees when it’ll postmark mail. More important than ever to be careful about how you vote, including voting as early as possible if you want to do so by mail. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Democrats need to hammer the GOP over this. ”The Party of Trump and Epstein is accepting donations from the world’s most prominent publisher of child pornography.” It’s that easy! Lawyers can’t do shit about it without admitting Grok makes child porn.

found the new CBS mission statement.

KNIVES OUT 3 - if necessary the state should compel Johnson and Craig to keep making these just so we have at least one thing to look forward to.

The answer to this shit cannot possibly be "never post another photo of yourself online," there has to be *something* else.

The role of a free press in a democratic society is not to effusively gush about the ‘love of country’ but to hold the government accountable and provide a check on all 3 branches. Murrow did not claim to love the state - he challenged power.

This shit is so depressing. The right has done a superb job of fostering a robust "gateway drugs to gradually becoming super right-wing" culture, and now they can count a massive, widely trusted media network as part of it.

Not to restart discourse or anything, but this is why I think patriotic imagery is an important part of No Kings protests

If you really love America, defend liberty and justice for all, not lawless deportations to torture prisons.

so x dot com’s ai generated CSAM and they admitted it may violate US law and … i haven’t seen in anyone in power say much at all or call to stop using the platform

Time to start writing the wrong date in all my CHECKS, you know? Right guys? My CHECKS? That I write for goods and services??

I resolve… to make LOVE

Awwwwwwwwwwwww yeah

At an NYE party with a bunch of old friends and their kids. The kids all excused themselves to another room to watch the Stranger Things finale, and they all just came back, and folks… it looks like they have mixed feelings.

“…and I realized that, in the end, the human heart… is the strangest thing.”

"The Republicans are now the party of sending masked men to break into daycare centers" is right there if anyone prominent in the opposition wants it.

Well as long as it turns out to be every single thing they're saying it is, we should be fine! www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/b...

Well, I hope they sort out the stranger things.

One night after acting in an outdoor summer-stock show in Kentucky, a woman in the audience told me she loved my performance, and added "I see in your bio that you also write plays?" "That's right," I replied. "Well," she said, "you don't have to do THAT anymore."

I say the same thing every time this tired discourse gets reignited: you NEVER see a quote from anyone in the whole left-of-center spectrum despondent that conservatives won't date them. It's only ever the other way.

I guess one of the challenges of a late-in-life change-the-narrative attempt is you either need 1. to have been nice to literally anyone so they can go on camera and say so, or 2. to be so stratospherically wealthy you can pay people to say you were.

One thing I find depressing when reading online threads about fiction is how so many readers seem to have zero tolerance for characters they find irritating, which is a big problem for writers because humans are irritating.

There are 5.5 hours left in 2025, but nevertheless I'm going to take the chance that my year's reading is concluded. Here are my best reads of 2025, an idiosyncratic bunch of choices in a year that did not seem to have many big, zeitgeisty books. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2025/12/2025...

ONE BATTLE is basically an unstoppable juggernaut for Best Picture, right? Not necessarily other categories, but for Picture the consensus around it is so broad. Maybe if MARTY SUPREME has a crazy second weekend there's some doubt?

“Wash jeans and self” - a calendar alert I set last night for this morning

That guy who insists on calling Winnie-the-Pooh “Winnie”

Look obviously we’re all gonna make the same joke - but I don’t even think it reduces him! Whitlock was a great actor who had a great career (most recently loved him on The Residence) AND he turned a single-word line delivery into the stuff of legends. So, all together now: youtu.be/4UXJZgOiVAI

I know you’re supposed to talk up everything you accomplished in the past year, and I did accomplish a few things, but the larger truth is I got knocked back hard this year, on multiple levels, and I’m smaller and less confident than I was a year ago.

Another peripheral thought on this movie: John Carroll Lynch’s ability to either be the scariest or most the most harmless guy you’ve ever seen continues to be a marvel. Usually dudes specialize in one or the other, but Lynch can give you the farthest extreme of each.

HILARIOUS post from McArdle here. Just incredible stuff.

There was a Beavis and Butthead episode where they were fantasizing about having “money and chicks,” and their fantasy was just the two of them and some scantily clad women sitting around on piles of money as Butthead says “Isn’t it great that we have money and chicks?”

As the writer of this film, I would like to thank whoever those 118,640 people are that suddenly came out of the woodwork and watched our movie.

Watching SORRY, BABY and thinking that high on the Never Woulda Predicted list has got to be “the Showtime series BILLIONS turning out to be a fantastic launching pad for nonbinary actors.”

Snoop’s Holiday Halftime Show is now available to watch.

I will never “save Christmas”

The late 2020s will see a revival of the Shakespeare adaptation rush of the late 90s, only this time it will be Terence Rattigan plays. Rattigan-mania, as it will be coined, kicks off next year with Miles Teller and Zendaya’s (who also directs) searing new cinematic take on The Browning Version.

Nobody tell me where I’m ranked, I’m gonna force myself to read it in ascending order.

I guess if the interviewer here had asked the obvious follow-up question “Could you list some recent comedy specials where the comedian mocked the working class?” they wouldn’t be allowed to interview celebrities anymore.

One time I acted in a student film by a director who was obsessed with Lynch and Lost Highway, and he wanted so bad for his movie to have that tone, but all he could think to tell us was “When the other character says a line to you, wait a really long time to respond.”

Yeah, it's important to be able to distinguish between "this is an actual masterpiece that transcends genre", "this is something everyone who likes this genre will like" and "this is perfectly fine and I like it because I like the genre it's doing".

My only quarrel with LOST HIGHWAY, a remarkable movie that I like a lot, might seem like a greedy one: I don’t feel as though I get anything new out of it on rewatches. I see the same good movie every time. That’s rare for me with Lynch stuff, which usually feels capacious and endlessly explorable.

I continue to be baffled by this aggressive trad push in an economy that makes it broadly impossible.

Relatives watching Love Actually. It’s striking how Richard Curtis manages to create work that strives for wholesomeness, completely misses, and lands squarely in bizarre. It’s his best and worst quality.

It’s infuriating how “op-ed” means you suddenly don’t have to do journalism. You “heard of a man who”? Let’s find him, get him on the record. Let’s interview the people who supposedly said this stuff to him. Oh, we don’t have to? Since it’s an op-ed we can just say “this happened to my buddy Eric”?