One of my guilty-pleasure filmmakers is the British director Nick Broomfield, who, in the prime of his career making documentaries around lurid tabloid material, including two about the Aileen Wuornos case (Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer and Aileen: Life and Death of ... More »

The first two episodes of The Sympathizer are what I might call a slow burn: plenty of world-building, character introductions, and expository dialogue. Stylishly shot and compelling but without a clear hook. In the third episode, the last directed by Park Chan Wook, the show finally fin... More »

What happened to our literature in 2020? What kind of document did we create of the vast bewilderment, the isolation, fear, and loss? With more distance, patterns will surely start to emerge — someone out there is probably already cooking up an English seminar on pandemic writing. If so, they sho... More »

Once again, Taylor Swift is breaking Billboard records. The magazine reports that More »

Despite what the Taylor Swift industrial complex would have you believe, not everything is autofiction. Fans noticed some parallels between Challengers (written by More »

On April 24, TikTok user Joe Biden signed a bill into law that could see the app banned. If parent company ByteDance does not sell TikTok to an American buyer in nine months, t... More »