*Something Good* is a newsletter written by Mark Slutsky. I also make [movies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S70MOiL45xI) and [video games](https://compulsiongames.com/) and used to do a thing called [Sad YouTube](http://sadyoutube.com). Sign up below, or [email me directly](mailto:slutsky.mark@gmail.com?subject=Oh hi Mark) if you want to talk. 
I saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey last night, not on IMAX 70mm, screenings of which have been sold out for weeks, but on as large a screen as I could find. As a big Odyssey -lover since I read Robert Fitzgerald’s translation back in school, and then more recently Emily Wilson’s celebrated version, I was cautiously optimistic. I knew Nolan would do something interesting with it, at least. But…
Rollie in front of the legendary Bar Exxxotica sign Writer Rollie Pemberton, who is also the musician Cadence Weapon , has appeared in these pages before, where, in the early days of Something Good we talked about the early days of online music culture and the sacred nature of certain MP3s. Rollie is one of my favourite thinkers and writers about music, and his new book Ways of Listening: Building…
Last week, Sarah and I received the unexpected but very welcome news that our movie You Can Live Forever was going to be released on American Netflix today, June 4. Indeed, our film, which the New York Times called “a sweet coming-of-age film bathed in grunge hues,” and which Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian compared to Jeannette Winterson (!) is now available to watch on the streaming giant in the…
From Russia With Love , 1963. Chess is what is called, in the gaming world, an “abstract game,” a term usually used to refer to two-player games with thin or no theming, little or no luck (dice rolls, card deals, wheel spins), and no hidden information. 1 And yet, despite its lack of functional narrative or emotional elements, it’s an irredeemably human game, driven by huge and volatile…
Much has occurred in the world of artificial intelligence (and papal succession!) since I first posted this piece in 2021, just moments before interfacing with a chatbot became a regular feature of daily life. And while I haven’t seen much on the topic of A.I.-assisted religious practice, isn’t falling in love with your LLM basically right next door to the devotional? Easter weekend seems an…
A passing interest in early Christianity can be dated to when 13-year-old me discovered Philip K. Dick’s novel VALIS on an exchange trip to France. I have vivid memories of reading Dick’s autobiographical science fiction novel on a beach in Normandy, while I lay atop an inflatable mattress that rested on a beach of round, grapefruit-sized stones. Inspired by an episode Dick had in which he…
“Do you see yon whirligig of water there?” Thin Amren pointed to an eddy below an alder root by the bridge. “He doesn't move. But water, she goes by. Then what's whirligig?” “I dunno. It just—is,” said Joe. “Then what is brook?” said Thin Amren. “It's the brook.” “And brook was here yesterday,” said Thin Amren. “And she'll be here tomorrow. Whirligig stays. Though he’s not the same water. Then…
According to my Storygraph , 1 this has been a very fruitful year of reading for me. Books: they remain the most consistently rewarding pastime (terrible word, but I didn’t want to say something horrible like “form of media consumption”) for me. And while Barely a Book Club sits next to this newsletter on guilty hiatus, here’s an abridged list of recent reads of interest. La Belle Sauvage and The…
Writer and former alt-weekly colleague Roxane Hudon last appeared in these pages with her introduction to Irish writer Dervla Murphy for Barely a Book Club. Roxane writes and posts from her home on Fogo Island , off the coast of Newfoundland. In addition to being a great writer, she is one of my favourite readers, and when I saw her appreciation of Finnish writer, artist and fellow island-dweller…
This being the summer, the following is a rerun of a Something Good post, this one from 2023. The whereabouts of the DJ named below remain mysterious, despite my best attempts. For a long time, my friends and I were obsessed with a particular DJ mix we’d found online. Its exact origin and creator were, and remain, somewhat of a mystery. Nearly all the songs on it were new to us, and I was only…
It’s the summer, so here’s one from the archives. The story takes place in Vienna. The year isn’t entirely clear, but the sense is that we are in the waning years of the “ nervous splendour ” of the Austro-Hungarian empire—in that uneasy twilight period between the suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf and the assassination of his cousin, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I must have been around six or seven…
The Pyramid of the Moon, Teotihuacan. The past flattens as it recedes. Cleopatra lived closer in time to the moon landing than the construction of the pyramids. The Stegosaurus was extinct for 80 million years by the time Tyrannosaurus Rex showed up on the scene, but I’ll always picture them fighting in some primordial jungle. I’d always assumed that the famous stepped pyramids of Teotihuacan were…
Everywhere you go in Mexico City (or should I say, everywhere tourists go), you see Frida Kahlo. Her face stares at you from magnets and murals, t-shirts and tchotchkes. She has ascended into that rare pantheon of artists whose identities have been completely absorbed by mass commerce. Along with van Gogh, Dalí, Haring, 1 and Klimt, she belongs to the mousepads and touring holographic experiences…
Viktor and I. The phone rang a few weeks ago with terrible, shocking news: Viktor Antonov had died. It had only been a few months since I’d last seen Viktor, on a trip where the man had been in fine form, photographing everything in sight, encountering random celebrities, drinking fine wine. The news made me feel unhinged, like the universe was trembling around me. A friend was gone, and in his…
I can always tell right away when something is going to be for me, or “Mark-coded” as friend of the newsletter Sarah G. put it recently. And from the opening moments of Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera , I knew I would fall in love with this film. 1 The movie begins on a train somewhere in Italy, where an unhappy Englishman, Arthur (Josh O’Connor) in a dirty white suit is being interrogated by a…
One of my favourite gigs during my years of sporadic freelance employment was as a writer and researcher for a popular technology podcast. This show, let’s call it Pathfinders , had a very very well-known host—we’ll call him “William Josephson” 1 —who was famous for writing doorstopper biographies about technological innovators. It was underwritten by a large computer manufacturer, call them…
Montreal from up, up on the hill, in 35mm. As my grandmother used to say whenever there was a lull in the conversation: What else? This year I wrote about chronic pain : Physical pain has qualities of its own, it has quirks and contours and depth. It is an entire world of sensation to taxonomize. But as soon as we stop feeling it, we leave it behind and forget it. It’s not fun to think about and…
Outside, the snow is falling. It is early December, which as far as I’m concerned means that winter is here. 1 Compelled by a desire to read a very specific type of story in the snowy months ahead, I’ve been compiling a reading list I want to share with you. These are books ostensibly written for children, but equally appealing to adults. They are set in the British Isles, and they all have some…
This started as a recommendations letter, and while I may sometimes stray from that mandate, I’m bringing it all home this week for the holidays. This is a list of things I like, and that your friends and lovers might also like. Disclaimer: clicking on any of the links below will NOT help support this newsletter. I could not be bothered to sign up for any affiliate programs. If you want to support…
From the disposable. I hadn’t expected much from the disposable Kodak film camera we’d bought for our daughter’s trip to camp last summer. The cheerful, charmless plastic rectangle was a lonely heir to what was once a global empire of consumer celluloid, and its rules and limitations already felt like holdovers from another epoch. No, we explained, you can’t see the pictures right away. Yes, you…
Mervyn Peake’s Alice and her looking-glass All I want to do right now is read. I have been voraciously consuming books lately, juggling several at a time, losing myself in bookshops, wondering why I bother doing anything else with my spare time. Put me in a nice setting with a good book and a chair with decent back support and I am set for hours. I won’t list everything I’ve read lately (you can…
When Dr. Ruth Westheimer died last month at the age of 96, the world mourned the loss of a pioneering sex therapist, educator, ethnographer , and unlikely media mega-star. Inwardly, I cringed. Not because I thought the tributes were unwarranted, but because Dr. Ruth was the most fumbled interview experience of my career as a journalist—an encounter that went so poorly that 10 years on, I still…
Sometimes a book comes along that connects all sorts of glimmering, disconnected ideas, weaving them into a constellation of meaning that feels like it had always been waiting there invisibly. Often that book is by U.K. journalist John Higgs, whose The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds will be published for the first time this week in North America. This is a book that…
All images courtesy Graeme Williams Longtime readers may recall my two conversations with the pseudonymous Instagrammer Professor Chip , real name (I can reveal now, with his permission) Graeme Williams, author of potato chip critiques both thoughtful and profound. When Graeme announced an upcoming trip to a small fisherman’s social club on the south English coast to see an obscure folk-industrial…
I’ve been taking dance lessons (modern dance, if you must know) for a few months now. One day I realized I missed the joy of moving my body expressively and so I signed up for adult classes at the local studio where my daughter goes. I was nervous at first, but it was for the most part just me and a handful of women around my age, who all seemed amused by, and very supportive of, my presence.…
I started playing Chants of Sennaar on New Year's Eve, and for weeks it was almost all I could think about. Looking at my Notes app entries from the time, I find myself asking searching questions like, "Do we impose puzzles on the world, or is it actually made of them? Is there any difference?" Chants of Sennaar is a video game created by a small team of French developers. The visual design takes…
All I can really remember is an image of the departure lounge where I started reading the book. I couldn't even tell you which airport. I was on my way home from somewhere and I'd picked up a book to read on the plane. The book was Inverted World by an author I'd never heard of named Christopher Priest. The description on the back looked interesting. I started it in the departure lounge and didn't…
I have these vivid memories of my parents running interference for me as a kid when it came to certain gifts. I was a bookish and retiring child and their adult friends, mistaking a melancholy nature to what was just shyness, got me all sorts of horrifying picture books. There was Heinrich Hoffmann’s grotesque 1845 classic Struwwelpeter , a collection of 10 cautionary fables involving overgrown…
Patient says, “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.” Doctor says, “Then don’t do that.” — Henny Youngman The problem started in September, when I woke up with a mild but persistent ache in my left forearm. Later in the day, working at my desk, it felt like somebody was pouring hot lava onto my shoulder. I shrugged it off—working hunched over a computer for decades accustoms you to all sorts of…
This is it. Your last chance to dance. There are only a couple of days left in 2023, which means the Do Something Good fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières I’ve been running all month is close to its end date, December 31. You may recall that the original idea was to raise $2,000 for this extremely worthy charity, which has been saving lives and aiding suffering people…