Mandy Brown on reading and the limits of empathy: To reduce reading to the practice of empathy is to divorce it of its real power and pleasure: to enjoy the fruits of another person’s creative effort, to think with the writer and their characters, not becoming them, but becoming more fully yourself. But this means [ ]
From the Wired story More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’: Across journalism, criticism, creative writing, and especially among compulsive LinkedIn posters, writers are converging on a set of choices that implicitly resist the trappings of AI-generated prose. The style mostly takes shape through negation, often of the obvious AI [ ]
Glen Hansard died. I ve been listening to and writing about him and his music for damn near 20 years, so this is a gut punch. A few years ago I wrote an essay for Cinema Sugar about how seeing Once in the theater in 2007 completely changed how I viewed movie musicals, and much more. [ ]
An occasional series A freshly molting cicada: A night heron: A fox in our backyard: A yellowjacket stuck between our window and the screen: A great egret: A snapping turtle spotted in the section of a creek under a road underpass (the lines are reflections of the ceiling): A Photinus pyralis, i.e. a good ol’ [ ]
More photography here. Proud of capturing the 3 year old midair right before splashdown: Windshield bubbles: Our frontyard lilac in full bloom sandwiching our backyard redbud: Books on books on books at the library: Raindrops just hit different in the morning: Ahhh, ahhhhhh: Caught this airplane lifting off mid-cloud during my 7 year old’s soccer [ ]
I’m obsessed with this “laptop” our 7 year old made: I asked him what the different features were. Check out these specs: He just whipped this together on a whim while listening to a Yoto. Kids, man. Time, space, and materials for the win.
Zachary Kai runs a series on his site called Shelf Source featuring readers who share books they love on their sites. He reached out about me completing the questionnaire, and as I am all too eager to talking about books and reading I was happy to obliged. Check it out here to learn which book [ ]
I don’t believe in the concept of guilty pleasures (just watch and read what you want!). But if I did, the beautifully bonkers 2004 history-nerd film National Treasure would top my list. Read my America Month piece at Cinema Sugar celebrating all the reasons why the Nic Cage-est of Nic Cage movies still endures, if [ ]
Just published a new essay at Cinema Sugar as part of America Month called Lincoln is the Better Angel of Biopics. It s a celebration of Spielberg s masterpiece as both a biopic—a genre I m generally suspicious of—and a portrait of the man beneath the myth at a crucial juncture in history. Regular readers of this blog [ ]
Last weekend we went to Wild Kratts Live! on stage in Madison. It’s basically an extended, supercharged episode of the show, with Chris and Martin Kratt in various animal costumes and doing silly antics while teaching about creature powers along the way. It was a thrill to be in a large amphitheater packed with kids and grownups [ ]
An ongoing series Several of my interests in one: Steven Spielberg on The Rewatchables talking 2001: A Space Odyssey. Wikipedia as a Windows XP desktop. Shoutout to the Night Witches, (unfortunately) not an awesome band but an all-female Soviet bomber regiment who attacked the Nazis during World War II.
An ongoing series This Is A Gardening Show. Heard about this new Zach Galifianakis limited series on Netflix from friends, and it’s a delight. Funny, informative, family- friendly. Great hang. Project Hail Mary. Saw this with some dad friends, which felt appropriate since it’s both very dad-coded but also widely appealing as its box office [ ]
I was at the library last weekend with my two boys and we were playing a board game with pieces of all different colors. My 7 year old son picked a purple piece, and another boy who was a little older than him and at the same table as us said, “Why did you pick [ ]
Thanks to Chris Coyler for spotlighting the Internet Archive’s new book Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (available in print and as a free e-book). Going right to the top of my to-read list. Chris reflects on the report s findings about how many websites have and have not been preserved by the [ ]
I’ve worked in libraries for a decade, much of that time at a public info desk answering people’s questions. And do you know what drives me absolutely crazy? Whenever someone starts their question with “This might be a stupid question, but…” You know why? Because there’s no such thing as a stupid question. To be [ ]
An ongoing series Love this deep dive on the color theory behind why so many control rooms were seafoam green. What happened to movie taglines? I cannot believe the leaf sheep slug is a real animal. What a world. The Extrapolated Futures Archive maps real-world scenarios to the sci-fi stories that explore them. A clock that displays [ ]
Yesterday I took the boys to a community cleanup event tied in with Earth Day and one of the exhibitors was a local raptor conservation group that brought live birds. Two key takeaways: 1. The turkey vulture was ugly AF but had an insane wingspan. The falconers were also impressed by all the turkey vulture [ ]
Occasionally the 7 year old will for fun write a word or phrase in “fancy” letters as a way to give it a special emphasis. I can’t think of something more deserving of such an honor than good ol’ Planet Earth: Long may Earth (and the bonus Moon Earth) remain in all of our hearts [ ]
A spinoff of an ongoing series A Real Bug’s Life. This National Geographic miniseries on Disney+ uses macrophotography to capture tiny insects in dramatized settings, supplemented by Awkwafina’s affable narration. Monsters, Inc. Before ever even seeing the movie, the two year old got absolutely transfixed by a figurine of Mike Wazowski (or as he calls [ ]
I say this as both a librarian who loves books and a cinephile who loves movies: Do not read the book before seeing the movie. I cannot emphasize this enough. Whenever there’s a new movie coming out that’s based on a book, people will think “Oh, I gotta read that so I’m ready for the [ ]
An ongoing series Love this deep dive on the origins of The Beatles’ “I Feel Fine”. Certified musical legend Alan Mencken breaks down his ‘90s Disney movie hits. Lots of fun and goofy designs in this 1956 Fun With Your Typewriter book. Really cool online tool to generate slipcovers for VHS, Blockbuster cases, and other [ ]
More photography here. A trace fossil of a leaf in winter: Are those lights in the sky UFOs? Mufasa? Reflections of the lamppost light from my camera? We’ll never know: A brief respite between snowball fights: One of their favorite chores is cleaning the windows: The entrance overhang at a nearby library is very edgy: [ ]
There are tons of books about filmmaking and filmmakers, but I have a particular appreciation for books written about just one specific movie. These microhistories (a genre I love) go deep on their film’s influences, development, production, and extended cultural relevance, and through that can tell us a lot about the power of cinema beyond [ ]
We had time for one Bluey episode before bed, and the first one that popped up on YouTube was Sleepytime. “This is one of my favorite Bluey episodes,” my seven year old said. Dude, same, I thought. It’s not only one of the best episodes of Bluey but also one of the finest shortform stories [ ]
Forget the Oscars—this is the ultimate resource for the best movies of 2025. Here are the 20 films that stuck with me from the last year. (Check JustWatch to see if and where they are available to stream, or your local library for the DVD/Blu-ray. See this list on Letterboxd.) 20. An Autumn Summer There’s [ ]
These days our two year old has taken to saying, What you say, papa? To which I reply: “I say that what you say… is what I say.” Which is, of course, from the iconic 90s masterpiece Newsies. This is just one of countless examples of me dropping quotes and cultural references my boys (and [ ]
An ongoing series Been loving Marcin Winchary’s thoughtful design takes lately, like Flickr’s inspiring URL scheme and the software versions of molly guards and Moylan Arrows. Times New Resistance is a Times New Roman impersonator font that “autocorrects the autocrats.” These 11th-century paper flowers, sealed in a Chinese cave, are a marvel of preservation. Speaking [ ]
Alan Jacobs wrote about his admiration for two enormously complex projects that only became possible after the Industrial Revolution : the manufacturing and logistical challenges the Allies faced in World War II leading up to D-Day and the studio system in the classic Hollywood era: It’s hard for me to imagine how D-Day did not end [ ]
Steven Soderbergh in an interview talking about the grammar of filmmaking: There’s a certain way you put a sentence together to get the idea across; you can fuck with that, but at a certain point you fuck with it so much the idea is lost. That applies to almost any form. When I’m on set [ ]
As a lover of nonfiction books, I’ve noticed many of the same phrases being used for subtitles—something that doesn’t happen with fiction since “A Novel” or “Stories” are basically the only options. Some templates I’ve noticed: What else should be on the list?
There s a scene from Band of Brothers I ve been thinking about a lot these days. It s from the penultimate episode ( Why We Fight ) which finds Easy Company en route to Berchtesgaden in April 1945. Private Webster (played by Eoin Bailey) beholds the thousands of surrendered German POWs marching the other way in defeat and has [ ]
An ongoing series Make something heavy. Pop songs in Renaissance and Baroque style. Great longread from Bilge Ebiri on Terrence Malick and his influential filmmaking style. “What if you held a tree long enough for it to grow around your hand?” You know I’m here for a Tangible Media Collection. Which HTML element are you?
Part of our six year old’s bedtime routine is dictating a text for me to send to my wife while he’s brushing his teeth. See if you can detect a pattern in some recent messages: If these don’t epitomize six-year-old boys, I don’t know what does.
Continuing the trend of the last few years, this is a “books I managed to read” list rather than a curated selection of favorites as my reading hit an all-time low. I could blame any number of attention grabbers in my life, but ultimately I’m just not In My Reading Era like I used to [ ]
Hollis Robbins on training LLMs on poetry and the concept of judging “greatness”: Poetry is a kind of test case, a training ground for understanding what expert knowledge brings to the table. Mercor s bet is that the same process that trains a model to write better poetry can train it to do better legal drafts, [ ]
See previous year in review posts. My view from the end of all things 2025: Joined my buddy Nicole Kidman at AMC for a 9:15am showing of Marty Supreme. Don’t think I’ve ever done such an early showtime before, but it’s a great way to start the day. Here’s a snapshot of what this year [ ]
An ongoing series Size of Life is another banger from Neal.fun, one of the best places on the internet. Shoutout to ROMAN and other obscure Excel functions. Unfortunately, I have to side with Marco Rubio in the Times New Roman/Calibri font war. In praise of the prescient and “punishing digitopia” of Spielberg’s Minority Report. The [ ]
Some thoughts after another Christmas season:
In his year-in-review post, Tom MacWright lauds the benefits of blogging: Blogging has been, for me, an unalloyed success. It has connected me to people, given me a place to develop my thoughts, made some of my work on the internet a place always decaying and forgetting a little more permanent. I absolutely [ ]
An ongoing series Christmas music. ‘Tis the season! Some newer albums I’ve been enjoying: Happy Golden Days by The Arcadian Wild, Sleigher by Ben Folds, and Family Christmas Album Vol. II by The Oh Hellos. Homestar Runner. I didn t realize this web series was still around, but browsing the website was a blast from my [ ]
An ongoing series How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner. How Marlon Brando changed acting. Red sprites FTW. How to fix a typewriter and your life.
For me: For my boys:
The hit game this autumn among my six year old’s playground friend group was one-way dodgeball, where another dad and I tried to nail them with a regular-sized dodgeball and one of those small rubber balls that come with the Little Tikes basketball sets. We’ll call this game… Dadgeball. Let me tell you: there are [ ]
Thanks to a few large coronal mass ejections from the sun, Chicagoland was treated to a brilliant display of aurora borealis tonight, which I attempted to capture through the trees outside our front door: Don’t think I’ve ever seen it in person before, so that was neat. Also neat? (Stay with me here…) If you [ ]
In the spirit of my band names list, here’s an alphabetical list of every nickname I can think of that friends, family, colleagues, or acquaintances have given me over the years. Some make more sense than others, but I will not be explaining any of them.
For years I’ve kept a running list of random phrases I’ve seen or heard in the wild—or inadvertently made myself—that sounded like they’d make a great name for a band, album, movie, or other work of art. I can’t remember where most of them came from, but that’s what makes them kinda fun. Rather than [ ]
An ongoing series As a Class of 2010 graduate, I can confirm: the best time to be in college was 2006-2010. Approaching our work as art can change our worlds. Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke is an “incredible informational product that is 100% EXEMPT FROM DONALD TRUMP’S STUPID TARIFFS!” A dad turned his favorite [ ]
A spinoff of an ongoing series A Minecraft Movie. We watched this a few weeks ago as a special treat and the Minecraft-obsessed six year old was completely locked in. (To be clear, he’s never played the actual game but has absorbed a lot about it from books and his friends.) Books. The two year [ ]
We were driving through southern Michigan awhile back and I noticed how the signs on country roads would change between DO NOT PASS when approaching a hill or turn and then PASS WITH CARE once the road straightened out. But it was rather comical how quickly they went back and forth, because it’s not like [ ]
More photography here. Caught this ornate fountain sculpture in Middleton, WI, in the perfect morning light: Specters of autumn at our local park: Will never get enough of the two year old’s chubby hands: And the two year old will never get enough of playing fetch with his fur cousin: Spotted this heart-shaped root on [ ]