I think the problem is that the show uses my feminism to try to make me root for Rhaenyra’s succession, instead of taking my feminism seriously enough to really write a show about why feminism matters. Misogyny drives the plot. But the show can’t really decide how much misogyny matters to being a person in this world.

In this regard the answer to the question of “is this copaganda?” is yes, because an idealized symbiosis of white femininity and carceral power is basically the happy ending that American mass culture wants all of us to hope for. (That the chief of police is one of several framing Black characters only adds to the white carceral feminist fantasy, in that the show aggressively separates the police from white masculinity’s dangers.) But that “yes” comes with ambivalence, because this show is inside of white femininity deep enough to recognize white femininity, much like a police station, as a grim and dangerous place. But in a world where whiteness and carcerality have a lock on power — which, just saying, is not the only world we could imagine — that grim danger might feel, to the lucky some, the safest place available. […] What all this has to do with copaganda is that, by casting Kate, Mare of Easttown is making a particular offer to viewers like me: white women who have matured (Kate Winslet is exactly my age) watching Kate Winslet navigate the disciplining power of the American beauty economy. It is a particular offer about our abilities, ourselves, to seize police power to do our bidding. Kate Winslet is not Cameron Diaz, just like I am not. So maybe I could be her, no matter the status of my disciplinary body shit. Maybe I could be beautiful, maybe I could be worth saving. Maybe I could be the special version of copaganda this show offers, which is where the gap in power between police and white women collapses, and one woman, Mare, or me, holds the weapons of both. Maybe, just as Kate is, I could be the one who could keep the other white women safe. […] Mare of Easttown seems, at its end, to be heading into its own attic. Its ambivalent relationship to the story of police and white femininity it tells manifests in how it offers up the future — as a choice between two kinds of storytelling. There’s the male one Ryan will produce, one connected to Richard’s novel, apparently called May’s Landing, which looks to me a lot like the kind of prestige women-suffering fiction that Mare of Easttown also is. Against that, it offers the one Siobhan will produce, somewhere off-stage. When Siobhan drives away, this is one white woman, the show wants us to believe, who has truly been protected by her mother, the police. She’s been guided into a different story, to learn how to tell a different story.

H.P. Lovecraft was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. He was also one of its most racist. --- Still, there’s an extent to which all of this discussion has been taking place within Lovecraft’s niche community of genre writers — still well below the mainstream radar, away from the broader influence of his work. (As late as 2014, it was possible to read Lovecraft explainers in media outlets that made no mention of his racism.) That might finally be changing with HBO’s Lovecraft Country now spotlighting the conversation around the author’s racist legacy — but it also inevitably yields frustration because Lovecraftian imagery and themes are so embedded within the pop culture landscape. […] [Victor LaValle] also stressed capitalizing on Lovecraft’s love of fanfiction of his own stories to overwrite that legacy into newer, more progressive visions of horror. For instance, his award-winning Lovecraftian horror novel The Ballad of Black Tom largely revolves around the underlying premise that much of Lovecraft’s horror is predicated on ridiculous white privilege. That horrific realization that all Lovecraft’s characters undergo that the universe doesn’t revolve around them? That’s not a problem any Black character would ever have.

Escape your feed. Surf 20 streams dedicated to moods, music, and things that fascinate.

The story of a record-store snob struggles to fit an era defined by shared enthusiasm. --- The easiest way to update the satire would have been to change its milieu, making it about video gamers, for instance, or hardcore comics and superhero fans—or YouTubers, for damn sure. It’s all too evident there are toxic preference patterns to be skewered in those realms, set for processing through High Fidelity’s patented epiphany-and-redemption filters. But since it sticks to music, the show has to reckon with the fact that music fandom isn’t what it was 25 years ago. […] A general trend toward aesthetic eclecticism was already being noted by sociologists who study cultural taste before Hornby’s book came out. Surveys of previous generations found that people tended to share both their preferences and vehement distastes with other members of their social classes and backgrounds. Their tastes tended to follow, along class lines, the old model of “high art,” “middlebrow,” and “low culture.” But by the 1990s, elite cultural consumers were sampling widely across categories and creating more bespoke taste profiles—somebody might be an equal aficionado, for instance, of Asian art films, graphic novels, and WWE wrestling. Even in the original High Fidelity, the Championship Vinyl boys are well aware it would be lame to confine themselves too much to any single genre. While specialists still argue over how to read the data, it seems likely to me that the internet’s democratization of distribution has made this omnivore eclecticism the popular default (Exhibit A: “Old Town Road”), and it encompasses eras as well as styles. Through the “universal jukebox” of streaming, it’s as easy to give yourself an instant education on classic late-1960s Brazilian Tropicália—the new High Fidelity features a conversation about an Os Mutantes box set—as it is to inhale Young Thug’s whole discography in an afternoon. […] But from a lowercase-marxist perspective, it strikes me—and I realize this is a stretch—that being a cultural magpie, more noncommittal and contingent about which ever-changing suites of tastes might suit your moods and situations, roughly parallels the kind of flexibility and adaptability that’s demanded by today’s gig-and-hustle economy. We need to be able to change jobs, switch loyalties, move cities, update skill sets and personal images, to suit the ever-disruptable, often geographically and even physically disembodied labor marketplace. Being too strongly wedded to an identity becomes a liability. […] She wants to use music not to assert superiority and distance but to forge human connections—ultimately, despite her ragged insecurities, about being a music-maker herself. This might be where the new High Fidelity picks up the thematic thread from the original, in its radically different context, suggesting that it matters less what the characters’ particular tastes are than the ways they cultivate and care for them, along with one another. It isn’t what you like. It’s how you like it.

The NBC afterlife comedy ended Thursday after four seasons, and it did so in a rich, emotionally satisfying, provocative fashion. --- Fragility and preciousness are not paired out of some regrettable irony; they are reliant on each other. It's because we know our time with people will end that we can find ourselves flooded with gratitude for their presence. The friction of our limitations is what necessitates effort (of all kinds), and effort — rewarded and not — is where we find meaning. Surround yourself with friends who love you and love them deeply, and you will grow. It's worth applying every part of yourself, including your intellect, to the question of how to do the right thing.

Only Anime & Pixelart Rain

HBO’s Confederate takes as its premise an ugly truth that black Americans are forced to live every day: What if the Confederacy wasn’t wholly defeated? --- For over a century, Hollywood has churned out well-executed, slickly produced epics which advanced the Lost Cause myth of the Civil War. These are true “alternative histories,” built on “alternative facts,” assembled to depict the Confederacy as a wonderland of virtuous damsels and gallant knights, instead of the sprawling kleptocratic police state it actually was. From last century’s The Birth of a Nation to this century’s Gods and Generals, Hollywood has likely done more than any other American institution to obstruct a truthful apprehension of the Civil War, and thus modern America’s very origins.

These men don’t exist in a vacuum, yet the Five frequently treat their subjects, and their ineptitude, as existing in one. The Five seems to believe that simply a lack of self-care is the problem in each of the straight men they makeover, unique to each of them, and not an issue of a systemic lack of accountability in men when it comes to household or traditionally feminine labor. The show continually begs for one of the Five to say, out loud, that straight men don’t often know how to take care of themselves because they rely on the labor of others (even, in this case, the labor of five gay men.) The makeovers at the heart of the show could be a jumping off point for a conversation more substantial than about how feeling good is the end-all, be-all goal. For example, it’s fun to joke about “can’t cook” Antoni, but continually he frames food and cooking not as a necessary skill but merely a fun instrument of entertaining. “Food is love,” he says. A nice meal is “special.” Cooking is a great “gift” you can give. What it rarely is, even for the subjects on the show who do cook, is sustenance for a man and his family that he’s rarely expected to make. It’s telling that in order to get so many men on board with cooking that Antoni needs to wrap up the experience as a special occasion and not a new, daily occurrence. [...] Queer Eye might be so in love with mapping out a heart-pulling arc that it won’t throw the Fab Five a good challenge, because freeing men (as much as you can in a 45-minute television show) entombed in ideas of what a Real Man should be is worth exploring right now. Mainstream America is just getting hip to the idea that women’s work in the home (the cleaning, cooking, date-keeping, childcare, etc.) is often invisible, unpaid, and yet implicitly expected on basis of gender alone; an American time use survey released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that in 2017, on an average day, “19 percent of men did housework—such as cleaning or laundry—compared with 49 percent of women.” At the same time, there’s an ongoing conversation about how to raise boys and what we expect of them in the shadow of their innate privilege and entitlement.

It's not just bad storytelling—it’s because the storytelling style changed from sociological to psychological [...] But if we can better understand how and why characters make their choices, we can also think about how to structure our world that encourages better choices for everyone. The alternative is an often futile appeal to the better angels of our nature. It’s not that they don’t exist, but they exist along with baser and lesser motives. The question isn’t to identify the few angels but to make it easier for everyone to make the choices that, collectively, would lead us all to a better place.

Stephen Colbert is ready to reinvent The Late Show. But how will he do it? And who will he be this time? The new king of late-night gives GQ a sneak peek

Kanye’s decade-long solo career has been a struggle between the non-stop ideas running through his brain and his skills at verbalizing them through a variety of communication obstacles, whether self-created or forced upon him.

The world premier of a new television series about our city was held Friday night at the Hollywood Theatre—just blocks away from where the set-up sketch for the series was filmed. This sketch was filmed at Northeast Portland's San Da Roda apartments (Note: As of Sunday the San Da Roda apartments are fully rented. Also note, with fair warning, the sketch shows a man in patriotic underwear.)

It turns out … spoilers don’t spoil anything. In fact, a new study suggests that spoilers can actually increase our enjoyment of literature. Although we’ve long assumed that the suspense makes the story—we keep on reading because we don’t know what happens next—this new research suggests that the tension actually detracts from our enjoyment.

The early history of MTV, with parallels to modern technology movements.

We’ve all been on nightmarish dates. The problem is that there is a flatness to “Louie’s” women that suggests their creator is woefully out of touch. Maybe in some roundabout way that is what he wants. When a character played by Chloe Sevigny works herself to orgasm at a coffee shop in a recent episode, Louie looks at the barista and kind of shrugs helplessly as if to say, Poor me, I had no part in this. Which is frustrating, as he’s the one writing the script.

This is an great interview because Nick is such an interesting and interested individual. Very insightful and humble.

They don’t show the product. They don’t explain the product. They make the target audience feel stupid. They make the Geniuses look like unsupportive know-it-alls. There’s no clear call to action.

Ultimately this is a question of what means more right now: The shoulder-shrug of indifference or the clarion announcement. Both have their value, but in the famous person/regular person conversation, we'd argue that the script has been incorrectly flipped. For many (lucky) young people (and older) the case may be that they can just be gay and, whatever, nobody really cares. And good for them. In high schools all across America that is probably the case, that's all that it takes. But for many people that is not the case. And those are the kids (and older) who most need to see examples of gay champions beaming down at them from the hallowed halls of celebrity Valhalla. The brighter the flash from above, the more light might get down to them. There is no right way to come out — you do you, Anderson — but there are ways that are more beneficial, more productive than others. We're happy to hear the news from Mr. Cooper. We just wish he'd said it a little louder. And a lot sooner.

We need not give in to sorrow, or feel disgust, or take action, because our brave clown princes have the tonic for what ails the national spirit. Their clever brand of pseudo-subversion guarantees a jolt of righteous mirth to the viewer, a feeling that evaporates the moment their shows end. At which point we return to our given role as citizens: consuming whatever the quacks serve up next.

Tina Fey has made huge, feminist strides for women in comedy at the same time that she has made comedy at the expense of women. Such is life when you attempt — as we all should! — to bring gender criticism out of the pure ether of sociopolitical discourse and attempt to deploy it in the real, messy world of commerce, consumption and popular culture.

Sandler's truth is that his onscreen persona has aged with his fans and experienced the same things at roughly the same time they've experienced it. Over the course of 20 years, Adam Sandler has gone from being a staple of sleepovers to dorm rooms to lousy apartments to the suburbs. And in that time he's remained, essentially, the same guy: He's "That asshole!," the incorrigible dickwad with a heart of gold, the loudmouth buddy who's progressively less fun to hang out with as you get older, the dude your wife forbids from crashing on the couch for "just a few days, I swear."

While I’m loathe to discuss the presidential race or the existence of God with strangers or even close friends and family members, I’ll gladly enter into conversations about whether it’s plausible that Joan did what she did with the dude from Jaguar in that recent episode of Mad Men, or why my beloved Packers will return to the Super Bowl this year. And I’ll do this even if I think the other person disagrees. If we end up jousting verbally for a few hours, it’s still fairly certain that we’ll be friends at the end of the night. I wouldn’t be as confident over a difference in party affiliation or spiritual beliefs.

Now, tasked with little more than delivering a modest number of age-appropriate eyeballs, O’Brien seems both stunted and settled, lavishly rewarded for doing what he loves most for a company that seems to value the end product the least. It’s been well established by now that Conan O’Brien can’t stop. But it seems he’s only transcendent when someone is trying to make him.

Now I am older than Keats was when he died and I live in a room whose walls somebody else painted this very soothing shade of taupe and I’m still the same age as Lena Dunham but I’m not jealous of her anymore. I am making a living doing a different thing that I love and I feel as lucky as she has probably at some point felt, and I catch myself whenever I start buying into a worldview that mandates I see anyone a little bit like me as my competition. So good luck to her. May she make the space expand.

But increasingly, people aren’t sniping about “whiteness” to be funny, or even defiant—at least not entirely. They’re using the term as a form of criticism, meant to be dismissive. “That movie looks very white,” or, “That sounds like music for white people,” is another way of saying, “That can’t be any good.” And I do have a problem with that.

‘Breitbart died, like all of us will, in darkness. But as a media persona he chose to also live there, and in the process has impelled countless others to throttle themselves into the abyss.’

‘Why would VEVO pirate content? Because it was easier than getting it legally. This is the actual root cause of piracy online. It’s not shady, masked individuals at swanky events commandeering computers to pirate for the hell of it. It’s VEVO employees. It’s everyone.’

A suburban dad. A fictional television blowhard. And now a political money launderer. How one funny guy became three.