A Re-Introduction

For newbies and olds

An Explanatory Greeting!

Hello again! It’s me.

My inbox reveals I’ve had a steady stream of new followers over the past few months. I’m starting to think about next year’s book release (more on that soon) plus one or maybe two new book ideas, so I thought this might be the time to begin again here, in earnest.

But I don’t think all my new subscribers really know me. So let me reintroduce myself: I’m a writer who’s been living in New York City for a long time now — I just passed my 19th anniversary here, which I describe, not entirely with my tongue in my cheek, as the longest relationship of my life. I grew up in a rural place between towns near Albany, New York, and moved here after college. And I am, among many other things, a movie critic at the New York Times.

If you want to stop here and pop down to the bottom, because you already know me or you’re not that interested or whatever, I do have a question for you.

Obligatory Personal History, Mostly Job Stuff

A fact that often startles people is that I studied information technology (then a term so unfamiliar that I had to explain it to everyone) and computer science in my undergraduate years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. When I moved to New York, I worked in fintech for a big investment bank, back in those halcyon days before the recession. I quit that job (just before the deluge, as it turned out) to take a tech writing position at NYU so that I could afford to go back to graduate school, which I did, in the program that was then called the Draper Interdisciplinary Program in Humanities & Social Thought. (It’s now called XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement — that’s NYU for you.) I focused my M.A. efforts on the intersection of 20th century history, philosophy/theory, and art worlds, and though I’m perpetually playing catch-up, at least I’m doing it with a little fluency.

A winding road ensued that involved so many weird little side roads that I won’t try to explain them all. Let’s put it this way: I worked in a whole pile of nonprofits, freelanced as a culture writer for no money and then slightly more money, and simultaneously wound up as a full-time instructor, then professor, at a small liberal arts college in downtown Manhattan, where I taught writing, literature, postmodern theory, cultural criticism, and film studies for 14 years, plus a few forays into weirder territory. If you found me during that period, it was probably as a freelance writer, possibly at Christianity Today. I also earned an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction writing.

My career got slightly more legible in 2016, when I went on staff at Vox to cover film and other culture-related things while simultaneously teaching full-time (which, for the academics in the room, was at least a 3/4 load, though it got to be more some years). I joined Vox six weeks before the 2016 election. I was writing for the Internet, as a woman, about movies. It was a Time.

That was more or less my life through the roiling years that followed — politics and pandemics and what-have-you — until last year, when the college essentially folded and, nearly simultaneously, I went through an arduous and lengthy interview process that ended, somehow, with my new job as a movie critic at the New York Times. This is, quite literally, my dream job, which is very bewildering and unexpected. It has been terrific. I review a few movies per week, plus the new “Documentary Lens” column, and write critics’ notebooks about things that don’t fit either of those categories (like Disney, or the moral weight of sound design, or why it’s bad when ChatGPT sounds like a movie star, or Broadway shows being adapted from more and more obscure film sources). I’ve also written a little bit for the NYT Book Review, including an essential guide to Joan Didion and a review of her former assistant’s memoir. I also love doing audio, which has been one of the most fun things about joining the Times.

I’ve been at the Times since November and for the first time in my life have only had one job, though I’m thinking about teaching again in the future, too.

Additionally, I co-wrote a book published in 2016 about the apocalypse in pop culture called How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the World. In the depths of the pandemic, I wrote my first solo-authored book, Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women, which was published in June 2022.

My next book, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine, is due out from Liveright in early 2025. If you stick around these parts, you’ll hear a lot more about that soon.

I Also Have a Life

I do have some spare time these days, a thing that basically never happened to me before. So I tend to spend it reading books, watching movies in New York’s repertory theaters, and seeing stuff on and off Broadway, which, as you might notice, is basically what I do when I’m working.

But I love other things, and am trying, as I head into mid-career, to focus more on things I’m not already good at. So I slowly run mid distances (half marathons are where I max out) and practice a lot of yoga. When I turned 40 last year, my gift was a nice mirrorless camera, and I’m trying to develop a practice of photography, figuring out what I’m interested in looking at. I love to cook and entertain (I did write an entire book about it), and though moving late last year means I haven’t done much of it since last fall, I’m hoping to bring it back soon. I crave travel, especially by train — I spent the last two weeks of May this year ripping through six European cities in four countries thanks to the magic of inexpensive rail journeys. And my husband of nearly 18 years works in the digital visual arts, so I’ve developed an interest in the areas he works in (they have good parties) as well as thinking about what interests me as I poke around museums and galleries.

Here Is A Question

I have been thinking, as I seem to do periodically, about what would be most interesting to put into this newsletter. Because my real writing appears in the NYT, I’m not going to review movies or something like that. You’ll have to subscribe, sorry, girl’s gotta eat, plus you want to play Wordle or Connections, right?

But I like to connect with book readers, and so I’m curious what you’re interested in, whether there are questions I can answer. (For instance, I get emails at least monthly from people who want to become film critics; I intend to write a little about that here.)

I’m turning DMs on here on Substack, though I don’t really know how they work, or you could reply to this email or post a comment or do whatever you want!