Hello there.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a lot of stuff out there hollering at you, trying to get your attention. I don’t mean the bad stuff. I mean the good things. The world is full of great things — books and films and shows and music and podcasts and weird stuff creative people make up — and I see a lot of it, because I’m on the Internet a lot and have to monitor it for my job. Some day the world will be full of things like theater and dance and museums again, too. And clever people are doing clever things even in this very difficult time we’re living in.

Usually I assume everyone is on Twitter as much as me, and thus has seen everything and heard about everything. But then I snap back to reality and realize that’s not true at all.

I could post it all on social media, but it gets lost, and you shouldn’t have to be on Twitter in order to catch wind of a great essay or a fascinating artist. So I’m going to send this out semi-frequently (though absolutely not more than once per day, and most likely far less) with some things I think are worth your notice, or possibly a few stray thoughts about something that I can’t really publish at my real job and don’t particularly want to put on Twitter. Maybe sometimes links to something I’ve published that I like a lot and think you might like too.

If that appeals to you, great! If not, I’m not offended.

I might have some extra content for subscribers eventually, but for now it’s just open to everybody.

So anyhow. You can subscribe here if you like.

And you can tell your friends too.

Oh. Who am I? I’m the film critic at Vox.com (though I write about other things too), and I also teach criticism, cultural theory, and cinema studies at a small liberal arts college in downtown Manhattan. I’m on Twitter. And the Internet.

The image above is from The Souvenir, one of the absolute best films of 2019, and one you can and should watch, at least in North America, on iTunes, Amazon (streaming for Prime members), Vudu, YouTube, or Google Play, and probably some others, but I’d go out of my head trying to list them all.