A brief weekly round-up of some things that are good this week. That puppy. Her name is Grace, and she's three months old and perfect. I met her at Animal Haven, the animal shelter where I volunteer each week. Sometimes people ask if I want to take dogs
By the time I watched Marty Supreme two nights ago, I was already a little tired of it. The coverage that has attended it since its Christmas Day release has been as relentless as critics reported the movie's plot to be, and while I don't mind
A brief weekly round-up of some things that are good. The Bald subreddit may be the most supportive place on the internet. Kevin Smith posted this clip of James Van Der Beek and it's very funny, and I will take funny in the wake of this very sad
Yesterday I had an appointment with an orthopedist in midtown Manhattan. An unremarkable event on an unremarkable if bitterly cold afternoon. I left my Brooklyn home an hour before my appointment and waited for the F train. The announcer said there wasn't one. I got on the G
A brief weekly round-up of some good stuff. The Muppets came back! For one night only, but holy hell do we need whatever we can get right now. Peter Hujar's Day is now available to watch on Criterion and it's an absolutely lovely way to spend
I can tell you exactly where I was when I learned that River Phoenix had died: In the bathroom, getting ready for school. It was right after Halloween, 1993. My mother knocked on the door and told me. I remember being shocked, and sad, and not knowing what to do
A brief weekly round-up of a few good things. Lord Byron's biographer has translated some letters from Lord Byron's boyfriend. Winter behaving like winter. I know it's a pain in the ass but I'm so happy to have some seasonal normalcy. The
I was going to write about bougie sweaters this week. But then ICE murdered yet another person in Minneapolis and, well, much as I like to treat this newsletter as reality-adjacent at best, it's hard to commit sustained thought to knitwear right now. So instead I'm
A brief weekly round-up of some things that are good. Rose Byrne got a much-deserved Oscar nomination for her work in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, I film I greatly admired and never want to see again. I re-watched Lost in Translation a couple weeks ago
This past December, a very good thing happened to me: I got a two-book deal for two novels I've been writing for the better part of the past decade. My publisher, Bloomsbury, asked me for a headshot they could use to accompany the announcement. This quite reasonable request
A brief weekly round-up of some things that are good. Helen Frankenthaler is at MoMA for three more weeks! Mulatu Astatke's Éthiopiques Vol. 4, forever transcendent. People in the U.K. are helping hedgehogs by creating hedgehog highways, a phrase I will never get tired of saying. Gourmet
Whether it's due to a flawed memory or a subconscious act of radical self-care, I don't remember much about junior high school. But what I do recall with great clarity is the feeling of being left out, of wishing I could, for just a moment, be