Summer is a season for trends. I think it has something to do with how transitory, how temporary it all is. Only a few months of sun and daylight so you better make the most of it. Better feel like you were there. Instagram the pop star collab smoothie. Order the New York Times-recommended seasonal cocktail. Purchase the functional cross-body bag from the GQ listicle. Shout the chorus to the song of the summer. Brat Summer. BROCKHAMPTON Summer. White Boy Summer. The first unexpected trend of Summer 2026 has emerged in the form of 82-0, a browser-based basketball trivia game.

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It’s all pretty simple. You spin the wheel and get a team and a decade, you pick a player from the list you get, he goes into your starting five and after five picks the game gives you a score. The objective is to assemble a team considered good enough to win all 82 games of an NBA regular season. It’s all pretty unscientific and vibes bases, mostly factoring in offensive statistics. 82-0 is a deeply unbalanced experience. Lucky rolls to secure key assets overvalued by the game matter more than anything else, and dozens of runs can fall just short of perfection for no apparent reason. The game is nothing if not opaque.

Criticizing the game design, however, is missing the point. The point of 82-0 isn’t to play it, the point is talking about it. This whole trend is a Trojan Horse, a delivery platform and a force multiplier for a bedrock pastime of modern life as an American Man. All of us, whatever our background or belief system, are united in our love for Remembering Some Guys. The Internet is one big grill at the global barbecue and we’re all stood around it, lukewarm lagers in hand, saying that man, people forget how good prime Paul Millsap really was.

The trend has already broken containment and is likely to be well on its way to iterating itself out of existence by the time this essay goes to press. We have a competitor which simply calls itself “better 82-0.” We have 20-0, for the NFL, 15-0, for College Football, 38-0, for English Premier League soccer. We have one for pro-wrestling. We have the version of 82-0 that uses advanced statistics to calculate value and therefore misses the point, like one of those German board games where reading the instructions takes an hour and a half. The true heads have already decided the game is too easy and that the real challenge is assembling a team so booty it goes 0-82.

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(There is, perhaps, a separate column to be written about our frightening ability to drive fun things into the ground at ever-increasing speeds through iterative oversaturation but I’ll leave that for someone else.)

It’s a blip in the grand scheme of things. It’ll run its course in a week or two, overwhelmed by the horsepower of an all-timer sports month wherein the French Open (tennis), the US Open (golf), the World Cup (soccer), the NBA Finals (basketball), and the Stanley Cup Finals (hockey) are all overlapping with one another. Truly it is the best of times to be a fan. However I feel this blip is worth writing about, worth talking about, as a case-in-point of one of my favorite tendencies of sports fans writ large. The best among them, the ones worth knowing, never forget a true competitor.

Sports are brutally darwinian. One winner excludes dozens of losers. Young men grow old in a hurry, ligaments torn and surgically repaired, joints crunching and creaking as the God-given genius leaves them one punishing contest after another. The best among us get cash to destroy themselves for our entertainment. It’s a lot of cash, sure, but it doesn’t usually last. The modern media environment, hyperoptimized to appeal to gambling addicts, power-consumers, and the easily-enraged, would like you to ignore all that sacrifice so it can show you another riveting montage of the winners adjusting their jock straps and flexing watches with Jake Paul. We dehumanize athletes and tell ourselves that they’ve mortgaged their humanity by signing their contracts. We’re entitled to abuse them, because their yearly salaries are higher than ours. Fortunes greater than the gross compensation of 99% of all professional athletes have been built on calling men and women bums when they’re simply trying their best and coming up short.

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The 82-0 phenomenon helps us cut through this industrial apparatus of cynicism and rediscover the core of what it is to love sports and love the people who make sports possible. “Remembering some guys” is, of course, a homosocial mating ritual most commonly observed in men. It’s nice light conversation, allows everyone to get involved, self-perpetuates, cuts across generation gaps and cultural contexts. In modernity it is perhaps the closest thing we have to an invocation of mythic figures. Let us now speak of honorable personages. Men and women who dared to strive and portrayed the nobility of the struggle. People whose exploits united communities in hope and joy even if they never reached the mountaintop. If this is all just a waste of time to you, salves for losers, then I don’t think you really like sports. I don’t think you really like people. I think you just like associating yourself with success. Not earning it or profiting by it, just standing next to it in the hopes that it may bless you somehow.

More Words Here

82-0 and all its imitators are ultimately a diversion. They’ll pass into history as we all move onto the next thing. But what let them spread like wildfire across the internet is not in them, it’s in us. That’s worth celebrating, acknowledging, valuing. To Remember Some Guys is to acknowledge their humanity, and, in turn, to celebrate your own humanity.

“So this is the world. Can you see… Can you see what you have made? How do you stand the disappointment?”

• Jonathan Hickman, Ultimates

It has become apparent to me that some of you are not joking when composing posts about the Hantavirus Cruise Ship inevitably dooming us all to another global pandemic. I get the sense that some of you do not think this would be a bad thing.

For the mercifully uninitiated; aboard the three-hundred and fifty foot cruise ship MV Hondius, owned and operated by the Dutch firm Oceanwide Expeditions, nine passengers have thus far been either confirmed or deemed to have probably contracted the Andean hantavirus, most commonly found in rodents. Three people have died. A few dozen more are under observation by state or international public health authorities. It is a tragedy. People have died. But in the hyperinflated schadenfreude industrial complex of the Internet, there is virtually no action which some people will not view as goading the grim reaper into action, therefore making it justifiable and even, perhaps, morally courageous to mock a stranger’s untimely demise for clout.

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In another world this is what you would hear while cornered by the worst guy at the office party. Coworker stuff. The sort of pop-conspiracy indulged in by people living unexamined lives and arriving late to every item of inquiry, certain that they can glean all the answers from a half hour on their feed of choice. The sort of people who parse all our current events through the motivations of some nebulous “they” and what “they” “want us to think.”

We don’t live in that other world and so the feeling is something altogether more tragic.

In some cases, the rapt attention paid to every new datum about the Hantavirus Outbreak recalls footage of punch-drunk boxers snapping back to momentary lucidity, hands at the ready, when a bell sounds. The traumas of the COVID-19 pandemic, bundled up and submerged as quick as we could manage, have resurfaced. If you feel that March 2020 anxiety cropping back up, if you find yourself glued to your phone or your preferred cable news channel, I do not think less of you for it.

I have survivor’s guilt about the COVID era because it was good for me. Pre-COVID I was an underemployed recent college graduate, a part time barista turned part time pizza chef, smoking too much weed, drinking too much, not writing enough despite delusions that I’d soon sell a novel and graduate to a life of cosmopolitan splendor. I didn’t really want a job and didn’t really want to write and didn’t really want to change. COVID left me no other option besides change.

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That was five and a half years ago. My girlfriend in 2020 is now my fiancée in 2026. We’ll marry in October. I work a full time job with benefits. I’ve sold stories and essays and found peers, friends, readers as a writer. Life is good. But guilt abounds in our own happy home and in all the others thanking their lucky stars. I was lucky. Many others were not. The COVID era was a reaping. Families driven apart. Dreams deferred. This is, of course, to say nothing of the dead, so conveniently forgotten as COVID shifts in the collective unconscious from the crisis of a generation to a typical overreaction of a coddled society. No big deal, really.

There is a sense of missed opportunity. In our rush back to normalcy we mourned nothing but the free time lost. The social rot which we intellectualized and monetized and polemicized burst forth into our public space like the rotten guts popping out of a decaying beached whale, in a geyser of offal and noxious gasses and we’ve spent the half decade since posing with the rotten guts draped over ourselves like luxurious furs, composing pithy little witticisms about how fucked we all are.

We blew it and we know we blew it and we’re begging for a second chance. Our social sphere is reduced to a macro scale midnight text to the girl we never should have dumped, an arrival at our old office unannounced to beg for our old job back, a deniably-ironic wish for another global pandemic, a more severe one, one that will blow away the old world and absolve its sins.

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That’s the word, I think, “absolution.” We want absolution without having to pay penance. We’re flagellants that don’t want blood on our clothes or scars on our backs. The unpleasantness of changing the world in a lasting sense cuts into our TV time. Writing off your country, your species, your world, is simpler and easier than fighting for any or all of them. We know we are sinners and crave the wrath of God to bleach us away but do not want to be seen calling for it. All of this discourse must be parsed through layers upon layers of detachment and insulation. It is a kind of ecstatic performance of nihilism wherein the residents of the world’s richest countries cheer to hasten the death of the system which insulates them from all consequence. A world where children fantasize about the day they’ll feel the kiss of the nuclear blast wave. It is an ideology of self-satisfied cowardice, performed as kabuki theatre through layers upon layers of gilded irony, so that it may never confront its true loathsomeness. Under this framework, no world at all is preferable to a better world because a better world may ask something of you. The basic tenets of this belief system are that everything was better at some point in the past, it’s all been terrible since, it’ll never get better, and you’re a rube for believing otherwise. Any attempt by the individual to prosper or cultivate some personal talent is taken as proof of their unworthiness, naivete, or miscalibrated priorities. The successful are industry plants. The fulfilled are performative. The happy are disrespecting victims with their smiles or hiding atrocity behind them.

The result is a kind of Calvinism with no God and no elect. It believes the world is fallen and man is inherently evil but no redemption can take place. Nobody can ever become worthy of forgiveness because if they were, they wouldn’t have erred in the first place. It’s a realm of Marxist-coded posturing where the ability of the state to do anything beyond oppressing the weak and harming the blameless is considered the stuff of fairy tales, beyond the cynicism of any Libertarian. It terminates, inevitably, in the conception of the apocalypse as the ultimate absolution. No more office, no more commute, no more busywork and chores, no more complicated feelings or interactions, just one last hit of schadenfreude before we are engulfed, still riding the high. Zizek compared our disaster fixation to our sex drive, deeming us “perverts who are secretly horny for the apocalypse.” I would argue it’s more a millenarian urge than a libidinal one.

We are tired of death by tenths of a percentage point, we are bored of incrementalism, the band-aid being ripped off all at once would at least be exciting for a day or two. It would at the very least remove the contradiction of modern information consumption, the sense that something must be done immediately and the equal and opposite sense that nothing can possibly be done. The desire isn’t so much the orgasmic catastrophe of Zizek’s Hollywood gasoline explosions tearing through collapsing skyscrapers but a more quiet kind of surrender. A society infantilized, relieved of the burdens of agency, returned to the cradle, to the womb, is a society gone extinct, or at least decimated.

Kindness

All of this is the damage of the COVID years, a time in which so many found their futures rendered inert and gave birth to a broad consensus that the future itself was inert, illusory, dead. Do not allow yourself to hate the people who fall into this sort of thinking. Pity them. Avoid them if you feel it’s healthy. But you cannot hate them. Other people are all we have. True, the world can be exhausting, the long struggle can be cruel, the work can come to no profitable end, but the attempt itself is virtuous. Today’s failure is tomorrow’s trailblazer.

We will be parsing and unfurling the residual damage of COVID for years to come. In that time, healing will take place. There will come a day when the adolescent now dreaming of a Hantavirus lockdown wakes up and realizes they spent the best years of their lives dreaming of death. In the midst of the crisis which inevitably ensues in the wake of such a realization, it behooves us, as people still in the fight, to make space in the line, offer a salute to our returned comrade, and say “we’ve been waiting for you, glad you could join us.”

is perhaps one of the longest tenured subscribers to Genius of Loathe, and he’s a nice nutshell representation of why I’m so grateful to have the audience I do. Polite, insightful, and clever, Liam’s notes are always a welcome presence on my TL.

What makes him a unique presence on here, however, may be his status as Substack’s most enthusiastic sumo wrestling fan. Whenever tournament time rolls around, inevitably I’ll see him posting about it.

This took maybe thirty seconds of scrolling to find.

With the May Basho set to kick off on May 10th at the Ryogoku Kokugikan in Tokyo, it seemed to me to be an opportune time to pick Liam’s brain on what drew his attention across the Pacific towards one of the world’s longest-running and most insular sports. My own experience with sumo is just substantial enough to make it clear that I don’t know anything. In a prior life, as a Twitter Combat Sports guy, I became somewhat familiar with the basic schedule and format of sumo through following various video aggregators, true fight freaks that would post anything from Czech regional MMA to vintage full contact karate from the 1980s. These accounts grew giddy during sumo season, but I suspect my own experience in watching the highlights was somewhat like a non-American’s first encounter with the sport we call “football.” Seconds-long human car crashes moving too fast for any neophyte to appreciate their complexities. If I want to understand this ancient art, it’s clear I’ll need a guide. I’ve sat down with Liam to get his perspective, and share it with you. For our sophomore edition, Putting You On Game is stepping into the ring.

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But first; an introductory comment from Liam.

LIAM: I want to clarify in advance that everything I say here refers to professional sumo as it’s practiced in Japan. There are international amateur sumo organizations and world championship tournaments that wrestlers from many different countries compete in, but there’s no overlap between those folks and Japanese “grand” sumo.

KLAUS: So for starters, I’m curious about your personal background with sumo. How does a guy in Seattle come to be a fan of the sport?

LIAM: I owe it all to the YouTube algorithm.

A few years ago I was watching a lot of old professional wrestling videos, and at the same time I’d gotten into those preposterous competitive eating guys like Beardmeatsfood and Matt Stonie.

Eventually YouTube started recommending these sumo stable videos, which are filmed inside the sumo training facilities and ingeniously divided into equal parts training, cooking and eating.

Until recently the only way to see what sumo training was like was to go visit the stables in person, but over the past few years they’ve relaxed the rules around social media. So now some of the rikishi have Instagram accounts, and several stables have their own YouTube channels with really well-done subtitles that make it easy to follow what’s going on. As I watched the training segments I was struck by how intense and physical they were. Sumo matches start with a charge and a collision and these guys were hitting each other again and again and doing a million sumo squats in between. It was obvious that the sport required a high level of fitness and conditioning.

It made me want to know more, so I read up on the rules and the prominent wrestlers, and when the next tournament rolled around I found a livestream and dove in. I discovered this whole global community of sumo fans and it’s honestly been one of the most wholesome internet experiences I’ve had in years.

KLAUS: Modern combat sports are so suffused with marketing and branding, sumo’s odd position as half a sport and half a cultural totem keeps it from going in that direction. Would you say part of the appeal is that it’s sort of anachronistic? If not, what draws you to it as a fan?

LIAM: I think MMA has kind of broken people’s brains, because the basic premise is that it’s this hybrid form that can beat every other discipline. I have friends who follow MMA and they’re so dismissive of traditional martial arts like judo and especially sumo, because they have no “street application.” I find that attitude pretty silly. I have room in my worldview for niche sports with specific rules and conventions.

Don’t get me wrong, there are problematic aspects to grand sumo. Guys get seriously injured and the schedule makes it hard to recover. Women aren’t allowed to even touch the ring platform, let alone compete. There’s a history of hazing and brutality within the stables.

And it’s not like no one’s making money. High-ranking rikishi are celebrities, and they do have brand deals and corporate sponsors. But it’s all overseen by the Japanese Sumo Association, and the JSA is a classically conservative Japanese institution. They’re very concerned with maintaining sumo’s traditions. They decide what is and is not dignified for a rikishi to be doing.

It’s all pretty rigid and insular, but that lends it a kind of purity. It’s a whole lifestyle. Jake Paul could not parachute into grand sumo if he wanted to.

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And it’s thousands of years old. There’s all this Shinto ritual baked into it, like the salt throwing and the stomping to chase the demons away. I’m an American, I freak out if I see a guitar Kurt Cobain once played. I have no problem admitting I’m impressed by ancient ritual.

But none of that would matter if I didn’t love the actual fighting, and I do. There’s no screwing around in a sumo match. After all the stomping and squatting and salt-throwing is over you and the other guy line up two feet apart and charge straight into each other. The average sumo match lasts like eight seconds. All the training and preparation is summoned up into this intense collision. It’s incredibly exciting.

KLAUS: Let’s talk format. So this is an entirely tournament-based sport. Six per year, they give you however many opponents over fifteen days, and your individual performance moves you up or down the rankings which govern the sport. Do I have that right?

LIAM: That’s right. There are six tournaments, or basho, each year, one in every odd-numbered month. As a fan that’s great, because you never have to wait long for the next tournament.

Three of the basho take place in Tokyo, and one each in Osaka, Nagoya and Fukuoka. Depending on where the basho is being held the winners might get different trophies from local organizations but the top-division winner always gets the Emperor’s Cup.

There’s a thing called the banzuke, which is a document that’s printed before every tournament showing the rank of every professional sumo wrestler in Japan, from the Yokozuna all the way down to the guys in jonokuchi division. There’s a saying in sumo that the banzuke is a living thing, because the wrestlers are constantly going up or down depending on how they did in the last basho.

Within grand sumo there are six divisions, and the rikishi in the two top divisions fight every day of the basho, fifteen times total.The guys in the four lower divisions only fight seven times per basho.

The best record in each division wins the championship for that division. If there’s a tie after the final day they have a playoff. Sometimes there are three- and four-way ties and they have these extended playoffs that go one until one guy has beaten all the other guys in a row.

These tournament matches are all that matter in terms of your rank. If you can manage a winning record (kachi koshi) then your rank improves or at least stays the same. So even if a rikishi finds himself out of the running for the Emperor’s Cup he still really wants to at least get a winning record to preserve his rank.

Getting promoted into the top divisions is a really big deal. Lots of guys grind for years and never get there. You get a salary instead of just a stipend, and you can start earning prize money for wins. You get a nice colored silk mawashi instead of the gray cotton ones the lower-ranked guys all have to wear. You get attendants to do your laundry and carry your gear. You can move out of the stable and into your own apartment.

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And of course it works the other way, too. One of the sadistic things about grand sumo is if you get injured, every match you miss counts as a loss. A rikishi could blow his knee out, miss a basho or several, get demoted, lose his salary and have to move back into the stable and do some other guy’s laundry while he’s trying to fight his way back up.

So there are always these various storylines to follow, young guys clawing their way up, veterans crashing out, rivalries that go back years between guys who fought each other in high school or whatever. There’s so much drama.

KLAUS: Styles make fights, or so they say. What would you say the major archetypes of sumo are? Is it more common for stables to recruit naturally big guys and teach them technique or do you see guys with a judo or shoot wrestling background packing on some weight?

LIAM: The rules of sumo are simple: If you step out of the ring, or if any part of your body other than the bottoms of your feet touch the ground, you lose. That’s really it. There are a lot of ways to make that happen; there are dozens of so -called “winning techniques,” or kimarite, but there are some broad categories.

There’s oshi-zumō, or “pushing and thrusting.” Kind of what people who don’t follow sumo think all sumo is like. Put your head in the other guy’s chest and just charge forward. Some of my favorite rikishi, like Daieishō, are oshi-zumo guys. Daieishō will speed-bag your face until you fall over backward.

There’s yotsu-zumō, which involves belt grips and grappling. The mawashi, the loincloth the wrestlers wear, is a major part of the support, because you can grab that belt and use it to pull and lift and set guys up for throws.

About twenty-five years ago there was an influx of wrestlers from Mongolia and they changed the sport by bringing in judo and bokh techniques, a lot more throws and low stances. That was kind of a golden age, because some of those guys are among the best to ever do sumo. You could make a case that Hakuho Shō was the greatest athlete in any sport, he was that dominant.

So even if you’re an old-fashioned pusher-thruster you do have be ready for the guys who will try to trip you and toss you on your ass with some Mongolian sorcery.

KLAUS: Would you say there’s any current macro trend in the sport that you find interesting? Are guys getting bigger? Faster? Are stables attempting to recruit more international talent? I know the young Ukrainian guy, Aonishiki, grabbed a few headlines internationally for his recent successes.

LIAM: One thing that shocks people about grand sumo is there are no weight classes. There’s just the banzuke, and you fight the guys who are close to you in rank, even if they outweigh you by a hundred pounds. Being big is an advantage in a sport that starts with an explosive charge, and the rikishi try to get as big as they can while still being able to move well.

But there are plenty of “small” guys. One of the smaller rikishi in the top division is Fujinokawa, who weighs around 260 lbs. That doesn’t sound small until you consider that the Yokozuna Onosato is around 410. But Fujinokawa absolutely smoked Onosato in the last basho.

The small guys are scary, they fight like demons. There’s a rikishi named Enho who is one of the smallest ever to make it to the top division. I recommend checking out his highlight videos, he’s incredible. Due to a combination of injuries and bad luck he fell all the way to the lowest division and has been fighting his way back up for almost two years. Getting back up there is crucial for him because he wants to retire and become a stablemaster, and he needs one more basho in the top divisions to qualify. So that’s a good story.

As for recruiting more internationally, there’s definitely a tension there. It’s always been the case that when a foreign-born rikishi breaks through some barrier it raises the sport’s international profile. It was true with Akebono, definitely. But there’s the question of how big the sport can grow and still remain Japanese. There are a lot of rules about it. Each stable is only allowed to have one foreign-born recruit, and it can be a lonely life for that one recruit.

In spite of that there are and have been very successful European rikishi, from Georgia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Ukraine. You mentioned Aonishiki. He’s actually one of two Ukrainians in the top division right now.

But Aonishiki is compelling for a few reasons. Other Europeans have made it to the rank he’s at, but none have ever made it as fast as he has. It looked like he might make it all the way to Yokozuna, which no European has ever done, but then he had his first losing record and that set things back. Aonishiki has a freestyle wrestling background so he has a lot of ways to beat you. The other top division guys are starting to figure him out but for a while he was running wild.

Also, he didn’t come into grand sumo until 2023. Before that all his sumo experience was in Ukraine. His success demonstrates that you don’t necessarily have to be raised from puppyhood in the Japanese system. It shines a light on the sport’s international following, and the possibility that a program outside Japan could produce a wrestler that strong.

KLAUS: If people would like to tune in, how would they do that?

LIAM: Several YouTube channels post highlight videos after each day’s matches wrap up. Don Don Sumo is my favorite; he always includes slow-motion breakdowns which illustrate the techniques.

If you want to watch the tournament live you’re stuck with a pirated livestream. Western outlets don’t carry the tournament so at least no one is losing money to the piracy.

My favorite is Leo Dickinson Sumo. He’s on Twitch as well as YouTube. It’s a members-only stream but it’s like a dollar to join. He runs one YouTube channel with commentary and one without.

It’s fun to watch the tournament at different times throughout the day. When the lower ranked rikishi fight the arena is pretty much empty, and then it fills up as we get closer to the top divisions. Occasionally you see celebrities in the audience. I saw Jack White and his wife in the crowd once last year. And sometimes the emperor of Japan shows up.

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A fun way to get involved is to pick your favorites on kachiclash.com. It’s a free site that lets you predict who will do the best out of the top division guys. Even if you choose at random you’ll probably score higher than I normally do.

KLAUS: Finally, I’m going to open the floor to you here. Give me a funny or interesting story, a weird fact, a guy you find fascinating. I feel like sports always have these bizarre little anecdotes and in insular sports like sumo, they rarely break containment.

LIAM: Two things. The rikishi apparently smell very good. They all use the same oil from the same company to style their hair in those top knots, and it has an incredible floral fragrance. Lots of folks talk about how whenever a rikishi gets on a train the car fills up with it.

And because sumo is rooted in Shinto ceremony, the wrestlers are kind of considered walking good luck charms. If a rikishi holds your baby, that’s supposed to bring good fortune. So sometimes at exhibition events you’ll see people just handing their babies to the wrestlers to hold. It’s the most adorable thing. When you consider how brutal the sport can be, the fact that it has this wholesome other side is pretty wonderful.

“If I’m not here to receive these ideas, God might give ‘em to Prince.”

It’s fair to say, I think, that we’re a few years removed from the peak of the musician biopic as a going concern in modern Hollywood. This isn’t a declaration of extinction (or even endangerment) by any means, the musician biopic remains a dependable high-floor rotation piece for an industry seeking to manage risk. Diagnosing the genre as “past the peak” is meant less as a condemnation and more as a recontextualization. Somewhere between The Doors (1991), Ray (2004) and the present day, the musician biopic changed from a prestige vehicle, meant to grant a platform to the the actor or actress in the starring role from which they can exhibit their talent for imitation of an iconic figure, to a multiplex seat-filler and nostalgic crowd-pleaser. True, there are still films in the genre which aspire towards the awards hopeful mode of years past. The Bob Dylan biopic; A Complete Unknown (2024), scooped a respectable eight Oscar Nominations but went home empty handed. Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody battled through mixed critical reception to claim four Oscars in 20191. But macro signals suggest that the awards spigot is running dry for this sort of thing. The Academy, HFPA, and other elite circles which control the awards circuit have grown sensitive to allegations of stodgy Baby Boomer-ness and smart audiences have caught onto the paint-by-numbers quality of these films writ large. Consider last year’s Bruce Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. Released in the ideal awards season window, well-reviewed, projected as an Oscars also-ran, and struck out, comprehensively. I liked Deliver Me From Nowhere well enough, but then, I am a Bruce Springsteen fan and isn’t that just the typical line for these things anymore? These musician biopics are light work for the average movie critic, if you like the artist you’ll like the move, polite middle of the road rating, send that bad boy in well ahead of deadline, clock out early, maybe play golf or something. This is what drew me to Michael. What could this movie possibly have done to warrant the comprehensive and merciless critical asskicking it’s been receiving for the better part of a week now?

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Michael is a turd. It’s incompetently constructed from the foundations up and plasters over its total lack of narrative or artistic ambition with a passable directing job from the ever-dependable Antoine Fuqua. Having said all of that, I’m still not entirely sure why this, of all movies, is seemingly the breaking point for our nation’s working movie critics.

Let’s begin with the salvageable. While I’m issuing stays of execution, I may as well hand one out to Jaafar Jackson (Jermaine’s son). He’s not good if we’re scoring him against the leading man performances which define this genre, but he’s also a complete rookie, cast for his pretty-good facial resemblance to Uncle Michael. Getting The Michael Jackson Voice right can’t have been an easy first assignment and the guy can sing/dance. That’s essential for the movie Fuqua is trying to make here. Enlisting the aid of Bohemian Rhapsody editor John Ottman, Fuqua seeks to capture some of that movie’s concert scene mojo. This has the usual effect of making me want to seek out the archival footage from whatever is being re-staged for the film, but as a big screen spectacle to justify the film’s existence, it’s a worthwhile strategy.

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The film certainly doesn’t exist because it has some novel angle to approaching and understanding Michael Jackson, either as a man or an icon. Michael is the worst kind of celebrity biopic: The Narrativized Wikipedia Page, or in this case half a Wikipedia page. Michael jets through notable events in the life of Michael Jackson like it’s got a plane to catch, opting for rote re-staging devoid of friction or emotionality. Here’s dreary little Gary, Indiana. Here’s the Jackson 5 as you remember them, bell-bottoms, afros and all. Here’s Michael’s brothers, each one an interchangeable cipher with maybe one or two lines. Here’s Joe Jackson (Colman Domingo, giving us nothing) getting his belt off to whup little Michael’s ass for talking back. Here’s Bubbles the chimpanzee (in CGI, bleh). Here’s the Thriller video. Here’s the Pepsi Commercial incident. You get the idea. The result is a biopic with almost zero interest in the inner life of its subject. This would inevitably complicate things and Michael treats any possible complication as antimatter. There are practical reasons for this, but you get nothing but scorn from me for juking around a narrative challenge rather than confronting it. Storytelling is problem solving. Filmmaking is problem solving in the hard and fast realm of the real world, rather than merely on the page. Effective life stories find ways to show the human failings of immortal figures, to give the audience some sense of their struggles. Michael is content to ignore all that nastiness in favor of another needledrop or Moment You Might Remember. Like an ignored leak in a water main, the insistence on an uncomplicated, pollyanna King of Pop rots the film’s foundations from within.

The elephant in the room has gone ignored long enough: this movie’s narrative does in fact end in 1988 with the release of Bad, therefore omitting the notorious allegations of child molestation which followed Michael Jackson up until his death. This, presumably, is what ginned up such venom among the commentariat. It is galling, and shameless, and disrespectful to the victims, sure. All of that is true. But I’ll be honest, I get it. As I said, this is meant as a crowd-pleaser first and foremost, a celebration of the good times. We can discuss whether that’s appropriate in this case but it’s undoubtedly the correct strategic move. However, the film’s insistence on framing Michael as a gentle soul, oppressed by his abusive father, while omitting his own alleged predatory behavior drenches the production in the rank stench of cynicism. The selective amnesia protects the still-living beneficiaries of Michael Jackson’s largesse and the audience’s good time at the expense of any sort of realism It’s impossible to ignore once you detect it. The veteran character actors brought in to prop up Jaafar seem to be aware of this. Miles Teller2 may as well be wearing a sign around his neck that reads “The Check Cleared.” It’s genuinely shocking how little Fuqua was able to get from the usually-rock-solid Colman Domingo. Moreover, if this is simply going to be a re-staging of Moments, I detect some notable absences. No Paul McCartney? Like at all? Couldn’t throw a wig on some white boy and pretend he’s Eddie Van Halen, here to supply the riff for “Beat It?” Couldn’t get a real chimp to play Bubbles? Like not even once? Fuqua and company were likely correct to devote the lion’s share of their efforts to the performance sequences but the laziness outside of them is so obvious.

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Cynicism suffuses the film’s central conflict and renders it totally inert. In as much as we actually have a conflict here, it can basically be summarized as Michael wanting self expression and freedom to pursue his solo career, while his father views him solely as an extension of the family brand, and therefore himself. What is this film if not an extension of the Jackson Family brand? When a film becomes a mere branding exercise, we really do see the collapse of any conceptual wall between “art” and “content.” If these are no longer about telling stories or providing opportunities to actors, then they’re simply adult sing-along hours trading on cheap nostalgia. The optimal play, then, becomes puppeteering the biggest possible (usually dead) star for about two hours so their fans can all have a nice reminiscence, devoid of any difficult feelings, or even the vaguest allusion to a “complicated legacy.” Cynical? You bet. But it’s a workable theory, and who better, who bigger, to stress test it than Michael Jackson himself?

Given this film’s box office receipts, it may also be a valid theory. Lord help us.

I rate this movie one and a half CGI chimpanzees out of five.

Major League baseball has recently debuted its 2026 lineup of “City Connect” alternate uniforms, marking another step in the ongoing merch-saturation of America’s national pastime.

With my intrepid and insightful collaborators I’ll soon get into the gory details but I do feel it bears some mentioning that this sort of thing, the limited edition alternate uniform designed specifically as a consumer item, is a fairly recent phenomenon in American sports. These sorts of branding plays are nothing new, but credit likely goes to the National Basketball Association for beginning this most recent wave. It certainly makes sense. The NBA has long had one foot in the fashion world through its star players connection to the athletic shoe industry. The NBA’s own city jersey initiative has been going for roughly a decade and spawned several modern classics, along with more than a few groaners and a robust middle class of “meh.” We’ve definitely run this thing into the ground over the past decade, and if indifference towards the practice doesn’t reign yet, it;’s certainly eyeing up the throne.

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Personally, I think the credit for this trend should go to our friends across the Atlantic. Europe’s biggest soccer clubs have long made a killing on a yearly uniform refresh, and it was only a matter of time until American organizations began to follow suit. Whether it’s been a success, well, they’d know better than me. I’m not an accountant, and I’m certainly not their accountant.

Baseball is perhaps a bit of an odd fit for this sort of initiative, given the relatively conservative, traditional character of MLB along with the fact that dedicated fans tend to buy hats more than shirts. But, late to the party as per usual, MLB seems dead set on getting in this particular pool just as the water has begun to smell of piss, so we may as well yap about it.

Atlanta Braves

KLAUS: Hot start here. Like the powder blue, like that they went with the pullover as opposed to a button-down. Like that the lettermark on the hat isn’t a 1:1 copy of the old Hank Aaron-era unis. More a reinvention than a straight throwback. These will move units, I feel.

BENJAMIN: The powder blue is great, and I really enjoy the large lower-case “a” on the jersey and on the hat. I notice that the letter on the hat has a kind of 3-D script (not sure if there’s a name for that) but the letters on the jersey don’t, I kind of would’ve liked to see that.

JESSE: Love the powder blue, and the lower-case ‘a’ like the old days. I think this is probably my favorite.

Baltimore Orioles

KLAUS: Not sparking joy. “BMORE” is really awkward to me, either throw a hyphen in there or go with “CHARM CITY” (the gentleman’s choice). The green/cream/orange is alright, I guess. Number font is really weird. The 2 and 5 are the same patch, just turned upside down. You have problems if I’m noticing that. Hat is okay, but I feel like the O’s already have better. Maybe it’ll be a cult classic among the true heads but I’m doubtful.

BENJAMIN: I don’t really understand the color scheme here. Dark green that’s almost, but not quite, black, is not a color I would associate with Baltimore, Maryland, or the Orioles off the top of my head. Maybe there’s some history here I’m not aware of. Not a bad color at all, just don’t understand it. And I can’t say I’ve ever heard the city called “Bmore” which isn’t a great nickname in any case. The letter on the hat doesn’t really mesh with the jersey, it barely looks like a “B” and the orange color looks like it’s slightly different from the orange on the rest of the uniform.

JESSE: This one puzzles me more than anything. The Orioles don’t have any green in their colors, and never have, to my knowledge. I guess birds sit in trees? Ergo the green? Also don’t like the weird swirl in the ‘B’ on the caps. This is a ‘no’ for me.

Cincinnati Reds

KLAUS: Callin’ these the Playboi Carti’s. Whole Lotta Red. Too much, in fact. The Reds’ brand and marketing people are claiming there’s five different shades of red in this uniform. They could have fooled me. Don’t like the pinstripes. Don’t like the modernized lettermark. It’s a no from me.

BENJAMIN: He’s red for an amazing reason! I guess if any team is gonna do a full solid color uni, it may as well be the Reds. I appreciate the pinstripes, but they’re doing a weird thing where they end the pinstripes at the sleeves as a “nod” to the old vest jerseys, which begs the question - why not just make the jerseys vests? (The answer is they need to put sponsored patches on the sleeves.) The lettermark on the jersey is too big and stands out super aggressively with the rest of the jersey being solid red. The black numbers on the opposite side of the chest also stick out more than they really should, and for some reason I feel like the positioning should be swapped, with the letter C on the player’s right chest and the numbers on their left. Can’t really say why.

JESSE: Okay I actually like these a lot, unlike my colleagues here. It feels like it’s from an 8-Bit video game, and as an elder millennial, I’m into it. I like the pinstripes, too! They’re fun. Why should those denizens of the Bronx have all the fun???

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Kansas City Royals

KLAUS: Now we’re getting ambitious! I like these quite a bit. Very disco. Gradients are always tricky business but a splash of purple really works here. The new lettermark is a big winner for me. I could see this hat getting some motion as well. This one’s a real boom or bust swing. I was talking to a guy who hated these and said the hat looked like three smiley faces linked together. To each their own!

BENJAMIN: I love the “bisexual lighting” color scheme and the gradient. Agree the bit of purple adds a lot. The “R” looks very cool and I kinda wish they’d put it on the hat too. And yes, the crown does look like smiley faces, I think if you adjusted it by adding lines on either end, connecting the curves with the straight line at their edges, it would be a big improvement, but I think they were going for a minimalist look. The number is very sharp which I love, and the purple looks great.

JESSE: I’m on the fence with this because I like it, but it also looks like the uniform of a smoothie shop. Smoothie King in my mind, maybe, is what’s doing that? The hat especially looks like it should be on somebody asking if you want an extra protein shot or some wheatgrass for no charge. But I do like the teal/aquamarine colors. And even if the hat looks like it could be on a cashier, it’s a cool cashier hat, nevertheless.

Milwaukee Brewers

KLAUS: Kinda makes the same error as the Baltimore ones but I like the overall package more. It’s a good move to position the Brewers as the team for the whole state but I don’t think any Wisconsinite actually says “Wisco.” Feels forced. They should go back to this concept. I like the barrelman sleeve patch, that’s a fun pull. The hats are good.

BENJAMIN: Yeah, could’ve worked on the name a bit more (the full “Wisconsin” would’ve worked just as well, maybe they thought it would be too long?). But I really like it overall, the blue looks fresh and the little dashes of color at the edges of the words and letters make them look like they’re glowing which is very cool. I can see this selling a lot of units.

JESSE: I like the ‘Wisco’! I swear I’ve heard Wisconsin U get referred to that way, so that’s why I don’t mind that part. And the curly soft script looks inviting. Also, while I love the blue and yellow classic jerseys, I think this is a good switch for a change. Not my favorite but I don’t hate it.

Pittsburgh Pirates

KLAUS: A blackout uni is always a high floor concept but wow they nailed these. Love the font on the chest. Love the little splashes of red. Hats are a new take on a classic. These may be the best ones on offer. If only the team were any good!

BENJAMIN: Very nice, the letters on the chest look VERY cool with the sharp edges like they’re made out of knives or something, which fits with the team’s theme. I kinda wish they didn’t have the red (specifically the Nike and Sheets logos feel a bit out of place), but I love the hat, that one will be very popular even among non-fans.

JESSE: My second favorite besides Atlanta. When I was a kid, I had an older cousin who lived in Pittsburgh and loved all the city’s teams, so I’ve always been partial to the black and yellow. I’m glad they didn’t change it. I like the ‘spooky’ font on ‘Pirates’ and I LOVE the actual pirate logo on the cap! I would wear that, and I’m a Red Sox/Mets fan. But it just looks cool!

San Diego Padres

KLAUS: These ones really reflect the philosophy of the person judging them. Do you get points for playing it safe and simple? Or is that even worse than taking a big swing and missing? These kinda feel like spring training unis. I like the casual character of them but I think they’re a bit boring! Nothing wrong with them but they don’t thrill.

BENJAMIN: The lettering looks like spraypaint which is a cool design; however, it doesn’t match the number which is more bubbly. And the hat just looks like a normal Padres hat! It’s okay, but it feels like they didn’t try.

JESSE: I feel like they already did this, with the graffiti/street art style font. And the white cap with the regular SD feels lazy and unimaginative. I don’t hate it as much as the BMore or Tejas, but it’s also circling the drain of fashion for me.

Texas Rangers

KLAUS: These are my least favorite of the bunch and it’s not close. They’re like a Nike template uniform for a high school team. The choice to brand these as the Spanish Language unis feels deeply cynical to me. I saw a graphic about all the little touches on these like the socks and the belt and the stripe on the pant leg but like if you gave those things all that effort, why is the actual jersey so boring?

BENJAMIN: I really like these, I think I just like classic-looking jersey designs. Maybe they could’ve put some color into the letters or something, made them solid white like on the hat. The designs on the ends of the sleeves are neat.

JESSE: My least favorite. Just not very creative, aside from using the Spanish name for the state. But they could have done so much more with it! Just… red. We already have so many red teams, bro.

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Which is Best?

KLAUS: I'm between Kansas City and Pittsburgh here. Light mode and dark mode, how appropriate. If it’s down to “which would you have?” Gimme the Buccos. Easier to keep clean, easier to wear out (as any Pittsburgher can tell you, the black and gold is very easy to construct an outfit around). Just the cream of the crop.

BENJAMIN: My favorites are definitely the Pirates, it probably fits the team the best, the menacing letters are just so cool and the hat is an instant classic. Least favorite, I think the Reds, I don’t necessarily hate them but they just have too many issues for me.

JESSE: My favorites are Pirates, almost entirely because of the hat with the actual pirate face, and the Braves because of the throwback blue with lowercase ‘a’. I would legitimately wear either of those hats around even if I were rooting for the teams themselves to lose.

Special thanks to and for volunteering to participate in this little experiment. Let us know your thoughts and get in touch if you’ve got an idea for a future edition of this feature.

COFFEE OR I’LL SHOOT

By the time I tie the knot in late October of this year, I’ll have been engaged for two years. From the time we actually got engaged to when we reached the rubicon point on actually planning a wedding, my better half and I received exactly zero endorsements of the traditional wedding party out of maybe four or five solicitations. I managed one endorsement from my cousin, whose wedding I attended in Austin, Texas last summer. We were in a party bus, with the groom’s party, on our way to the venue. When asked about plans for our own nuptials, I told him that we were unsure of whether we even wanted a wedding, citing complaints from our acquaintances. My cousin told me those people were being ridiculous, a wedding is great, you get to throw this big celebration with all the meaningful people in your life.

The very next morning, after their thoroughly enjoyable ceremony and party, my cousin texted me to say that actually those people were right and he thought it was ridiculous how little fun he was actually allowed to have at his wedding.

We decided we’d have a wedding anyway, on the basis that we’d regret not having one if we simply eloped and it would be easier regretting the hassle of the wedding than its absence. We are, as many people our age find themselves, at the center of families which are not getting any younger or healthier, and the chance to remember the way we are now, before now inevitably becomes then, held some appeal for us.

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The Drama, released under the A24 label and directed by Norway’s Kristoffer Borghli, is not going to do anything to make me think I made the right decision in going for a reasonably sized wedding. In fact, I may spend my wedding week burning incense, fasting, and praying to ward off evil.

This film is going to live and die for you on two factors. The first is The Twist, which is less a Twist in the Twee Little Mystery Box Shyamalanian Sense and more an inciting incident from which the whole rest of the movie unfurls, spirals, and turns itself inside out. The fact that it’s not plastered over every piece of marketing material related to the film and can affect an audience blind is a credit to everyone involved. A24 has always oscillated between being a film production and distribution concern and being a marketing agency that mostly promotes/merchandizes trendy films for cosmopolitan young people. This sort of thing should in fact be their bread and butter and it’s a stark contrast to the dominant mode of studio trailer, wherein the entire movie will be given away sight unseen out of some deep fear of scaring off some theoretical customer. It’s very clever.

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That’s the second factor, the cleverness. Now it can be a very good thing, being clever, especially if you are making a comedy (which this is!). But it’s not always the appropriate response. Misplaced cleverness can drive a person into a rage simply because they find it offensive that someone is attempting to be clever (whether it’s successful or not) about something they consider beyond the range of appropriate things to be clever about. The Marx Brothers were clever but they never made a movie where Groucho was the wisecracking Kommandant of Bergen-Belsen, you know? Judd Apatow never had his boys do a 9/11 parody. There are in fact sacred cows and clever people are maybe at their most wise (wisdom being a somewhat distant cousin to cleverness) when they veer around them.

This is not that.

Borghli may be Norwegian but he’s crafted a cringe comedy in the British mode here, barreling his attractive, youthful cast directly into the middle of a nightmare of awkward, panicked, stuttering anxiety and watching them puke and lie and bleed their way out again. It is, I think, the rare European-directed film that seeks a deeper understanding of the American psyche as it exists in 2026 without condescension, overgeneralization, or a simply misadjusted frame of reference. Like a lot of clever people (and this is one of the things that makes clever people occasionally offputting) Borghli is less scandalized than he is fascinated by the American taboo with which he’s chiefly concerned. This is ultimately a movie about an Englishman coming into contact for the first time with the “average” American’s capacity for casual, all-encompassing violence and self-serving self-mythologizing and spiraling over it for a solid week. That’s a good plot! It’s also a very clever way to deploy two movie stars. Robert Pattinson in particular sets about deromanticizing himself with gusto, purging the teen heartthrob/Batman from his performance until all that remains is a repressed, gawky Brit abroad with an unconvincing hairline, kept afloat by a veneer of intelligence that gets thinner all the time. Ari Aster’s fingerprints as a producer are visible all over this thing, as Borghli channels his benefactor’s trademark mind-bending Anxiety Grotesque to great effect. It’s a film whose visuals will stick with you more than its lines.

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If you’re gonna deploy your stars as non-stars then you need bit players and setpieces to pick up the slack and The Drama arguably hits its best beats in that regard. Special mention is due to Zoe Winters, who delivers one of the most spirited and inappropriate laughs of the year in an absolute scene stealing turn. Tremendous.

It will not work for everyone, but I found The Drama to be a wholly worthwhile use of an evening. Left me thinking.

I rate this movie four wedding speeches out of five.

In celebration of my short story The Coat Trade being selected as a finalist for the The Republic of Letters inaugural short story contest, I’ll be reposting some of my back catalog of published short stories here over the coming weeks. While the finalist’s prize is fairly modest all told, it does represent a vital milestone; I have never been paid to write fiction until now. So thank you.

This short story originally appeared in Muleskinner Journal in January 2025. It is about a young woman and her boyfriend, the professional gambler. I hope you enjoy it.

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“I have warned many times about the guaranteed dangers of betting with your heart instead of your head…”
- Hunter S. Thompson

“But suppose I’d lost heart then? What if I hadn’t dared to risk?”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler

August 15th - $74,362

Later on, when reflecting on how they met and everything that came after, she concluded that the only reason she’d spoken to him at all was that he was the only person in the bar even close to her age. She was on a girls beach weekend with the other women in her family, still the baby in her mid-twenties, stuck shuttling her aunts and cousins back and forth from the beach to the hotel to the same four restaurants. He was alone and unbothered by it, free as a bird. His hair was bushy and sun-kissed. He was shaving maybe every three days, about mid-cycle at that point. He wore a matched shirt and pants set patterned in green glass liquor bottles, Soju, he’d later tell her. He was talking to the laziest bartender on shift about sports, in that way men do. A silent arms race of escalating trivia and insider terminology.

It was a simple matter to get her to leave with him. He wasn’t in the Hampton Inn across the street, where her family was staying. It would be a walk, further down the peninsula to a rather sprawling, rather upscale condominium complex. She knew the one. She’d gone past it in her teetotaler aunt’s rented minivan en route to restaurant number three. She didn’t want to go back to the two queen beds and see that same aunt in her nightgown, cream on her face, snoring in defiance of her assertion that she’d never once snored in her life. She hated how she felt about her own blood but couldn’t deny it. The sexless snowbird frumpiness of her family was like a miasma. A preview of what biology and cruel, cruel time held in store for her. She wanted a little adventure and her traveling party found adventure an inconvenience. So she sent a text to the girls trip group message and left with him.

They walked back on the beach at high tide, holding their shoes, feeling the seafoam fizzle on their feet, watching the crabs scuttle away. She figured he must be a local. He had trivia for seemingly every oceanfront property. Used to be a pretty nice house there before the last hurricane. This condo building used to be orange before the sun faded it pink. There’s a good bar here. This is the spot we used to stay in when I was a kid.

“So hey look, uh, I’m grateful for the company if that’s all you’re after but I don’t want any confusion here because-”

Then she kissed him. When she opened her eyes again he had this look of incredulity, a horrible feeling pierced her gut. Was he mocking her?

“Well all right then.” He smiled, gap-toothed “Glad we cleared that up.” He’d later tell her he just couldn’t believe his own luck.

The condo was a lot nicer than she was expecting. High ceilings, leather sofas, granite countertops. Too big for just one occupant. It was his family’s. She left her sundress in a heap on the tile and followed him to bed. It all began beautifully. His was the tautest male body she’d seen since she’d arrived in Florida, starkly contrasting the swollen, hairy, sunburnt retirees musking all up and down the beach. Mummified or reptilian, poured into soggy swim trunks, Miller Lite in hand. She caught a bad feeling, though. Lost interest all at once. She couldn’t say why. It might have been the beer on his breath, the day-old sunscreen collected in his crevices, maybe the absence of a condom and his laxity in seeking one out.

“Wait. Wait. Please, just. I’m sorry. Could we stop?”

“Oh shit, sorry. Condom? Right? I’m clean, but good thinking.”

“No, I just- I’m sorry but I don’t think I want to.”

She hated herself at that. Hated the feeling of her own indecision. It’s the hell of being twenty two, three, four, five, grown and told to take hold of the world before it slips away from you. So god damn sure of what you want but by the time it comes you’ve lost interest. Being told you’re spoiled but really you’re just impulsive. Neither condition is “good” strictly speaking but confusing the two ascribes a moral failing to impulsivity where none exists.

In any case he simply sat up and said “Well all right. Want a glass of water or something?”

She was fine, thanks.

“Alright, fine. You mind sleeping in the guest room? All my stuff is in the bathroom here.”

“You’re not mad?”

“I’m not mad. Children get mad. I’m frustrated. But what am I meant to do? Scream into your vagina until you want me? Make you walk home alone in a town you don’t know? I’d rather just go rub one out and try my luck again in the morning. I don’t chase losses as a rule.”

She didn’t yet know what he meant by that, “chasing losses.” Her drowsiness overtook the shame at her indecision and she drifted off in gritty, sandy sheets in a room furnished for a child that had long since outgrown it. She suspected the child in question was in the master bedroom, sawing logs.

When she rose in the morning, he was already up, drinking cheap coffee and typing away on a laptop. With the evening’s haze dispelled the romance of his all-too-grand living situation could fall away. It was unmistakably a twenty-something single man’s apartment, with the requisite detritus. She couldn’t decide if he was more disciplined in keeping house than the median example of the species or if he just had more space to clutter up than most.

He asked if she’d like to join him for breakfast. She obliged. He chose not to walk, he had a small electric scooter in the garage downstairs.

“You don’t mind riding on the back, do you?”

“No.”

They went to a small cafe nestled into the corner-pocket of a brick strip mall, the sort that seemingly come into being on their own all throughout central Florida with no input on the part of any thinking, feeling human being. He had waffles and bacon and another cup of coffee. She had two eggs over easy with whole wheat toast and a glass of orange juice. The meal cost maybe fifteen dollars altogether. The waiter came, recognized him. More friendly words between men, the sort she’d always feel alienated by. He gave the waiter a fifty dollar bill and they walked out.

“You must have tipped that guy 200%”

“So what? He needs it more than me.”

“Were you trying to impress me?”

“You never gave me the sense that you’re the sort of person that’s impressed by money. So no. He’s a good waiter. It’s a good cafe. He needs the money more than me. What does it matter?”

“What do you do?” She felt that the very question leaving her lips represented failure of some sort of invisible test.

He sighed, as if he’d had this conversation before and it hadn’t gone well. Without a word he took out his phone, tapped away on it for just north of thirty seconds, then he turned to show her the screen. It displayed a username, an email address, and an account balance. Sixty-nine thousand three hundred and sixty two US dollars.

She didn’t understand “What- what is this?”

“It’s my FanBet account. You asked what I do. This is what I do. I’m a professional gambler.”

“There’s almost seventy-thousand dollars on here.”

“Oh I know. I’ve been having a few mediocre months.”

Summer was the off-season and it was almost over. He’d get busy as the leaves started to fall and the weather turned gloomy and damp. The arrival of football season was like an earthquake, with basketball and hockey coming right behind as aftershocks. Golf, soccer, and mixed-martial arts were theoretically year-round affairs but generally served as a side-dish to the meat and potatoes of the Big Four American TV sports, or three of them anyway. He’d hit peak season as football wound down and the championship pictures came more sharply into focus. The results of those title games would set the tenor of the spring; whether the incoming basketball and hockey playoffs would be a slow, stoic advance across no-mans-land to recoup losses no matter the cost or a mad ecstatic orgy of profit and victory. Slamming house money on the table, wild-eyed, real defeat never even a possibility. Then the summer would come and he’d slink off in search of powdery white beaches and beers that cost what they ought to cost. He’d catch up on his reading, sleep late, squat in his parents’ condo, take little trips whenever they rented it out from under him to doughy midwesterners shuttling their spawn off to the theme parks in Orlando. Two weeks before they met he was in New Orleans, a month before that he’d gone up to Minneapolis to escape the heat and visit a fellow traveler, supposedly the greatest Canadian Football handicapper in the country. He’d had long weekends in the Bahamas, Key West, Puerto Rico, and Aruba, where he’d sunburned his feet and vowed never to return.

He subsidized his lifestyle partially via charging for his picks, netting him a respectable passive income in the neighborhood of $1500 monthly from premium subscriptions at $5 a pop. But this, in his own words, was just for beer money. The real money, the twenties and fifties he’d hand out so freely to waiters, bartenders, and hotel housekeepers, was acquired via a yearly ritual of cash withdrawal. A pilgrimage to pay homage at the temple of luck, victory, and gold. His bankroll, the money he played with, sat at just under $90k at the conclusion of last year’s busy season. That annoyed him. He’d resolved to make it into six figures and gotten so damn close. If his hockey positions had played out a bit better, if those frauds in Boston hadn’t choked it all away to an equally fugazi Montreal squad, he’d have gotten over $100k comfortably. He grumbled and groaned but still dropped his account balance down to $70k even before leaving for Florida. The sunshine state had no legal sports gambling, so there was no temptation. This was to avoid betting on baseball, which he seemed to fear like the devil.

He told her a story the night before she flew home. The first year he’d started gambling he’d cleared $15k just betting on the college basketball tournament. He walked around his parents home in Pennsylvania feeling like he had a superpower, he conjured money from thin air just by watching sports and putting some numbers in a spreadsheet. Baseball season rolled around and within a month he’d pissed it all away. He’d acquired an almost mortal fear of America’s pastime, convinced the sportsbooks ran the major leagues through some shadowy conspiracy. She never really had an opinion on that, though later on she’d theorize that this trauma was what gave him his flippant attitude about money. Nobody, at least nobody normal, could ever keep hold of it in his view. So the smart thing to do was spend it, ideally on one’s own pleasure and at one’s own whim. Burning fortunes quickly meant accruing them even more quickly, the expenditures serving as an offering to some unseen deity of wealth.

October 9th - $67,028

She’d flown home to Fairfax County, Virginia. She was settling back into that endless suburban flatness which saw its colors stripped anew every four years with the coming of one government and the departure of the last. A parade of defense contractors, lobbyists, bureaucrats, alphabet mafiosos, and military desk-jockeys would roll in and stamp down anything that grew in the cracks during the previous administration. It was some of the richest real estate in America and it was full of people that thought the Cheesecake Factory was fine dining. She hated it so much she no longer needed to think about it. It was just a reflex.

As it happened he offered her an escape hatch, not into real life but further down the rabbit hole into his little wonderland. He kept an apartment for himself in Maryland, near the DC border. This came as a surprise to her. He’d talked about Pennsylvania as being home. Maryland had never come up.

“If your parents are getting on your nerves,” he proposed, “why not come down to Bethesda and stay with me for a bit? Could use the company.” She found herself packing her bags and begging her mother for a ride to the metro station within minutes.

It wasn’t a big apartment, no one rents in Bethesda for an excess of space. Alone it was a lonely, expensive little box. With two it was cozy. She’d gotten over her lingering anxieties about sleeping with him while they were still in Florida and they weren’t shy about enjoying the reunion after a layoff. For a weekend they lived like children playing pretend, imagining themselves as adults. Eating out for every meal, dressing well, sleeping late, accountable to no one. On Monday she rose to find him at his computer, navigating an abyss of spreadsheets. He didn’t pay her any attention until she forced the issue. Then he suggested she find breakfast without him, as well as lunch. Dinner they could probably have together. “Here.” He said, pulling out his wallet “That’s $250 I think. Drink it, bet it, eat it, go see the changing room girl at Anthropologie and send it up your nose. I don’t care.”

“Look I told you when I got in, I don’t want you buying me-”

“Then don’t spend it and give it back once I’m done. It would just reflect badly on me if my guest were walking around with empty pockets.”

Guest. Not girlfriend. Not any of its cruder synonyms. Just guest. She didn’t know how to feel about that. Maybe he thought he was doing her a favor. He clearly valued his own freedom. Wanted to make it clear he was valuing hers.

Though really, how free was he? She had pictured a more romantic lifestyle than this when he’d held up that phone and shown her his little dragon’s hoard. He’d made it seem that way when he’d spoken of his friends and comrades. A merry band of rebels like himself all over the world. There was Macau Pete, the Korean baseball and Asian kickboxing savant. He had a real respect for Gaz from Cardiff, public enemy number 1 of the UK sportsbooks for his prowess as a darts and lower-league soccer handicapper. Then of course there was Silk Suit Slayer, the resident court jester and head-case. Silk would burn $30k in a weekend, drunkenly declare that all the sports leagues around the world were rigged in favor of the bookies, then come back next week to do it all again. Two out ten weekends though, Silk would get on a heater and make his money back with interest. That was when they all loved him, quietly envied his bravery. That was what it took in the estimation of that fraternity. It took bravery to be out here with no insulation. Not working for the books or for sports media, not relying on a 9 to 5 to get by like some sucker. Not paying Uncle Sam his share so he could drop missiles on Pakistani children (his exact words when she expressed concerns about his not paying taxes). Out here, on your own, surviving by your own wits, luck, and balls.

But really, none of that was true. It wasn’t luck. Not if you were smart. It was statistics. Cold, acidic, above-the-shoulders type stuff. If you were a pro, making real money, you had a statistical model that told you what bets to place, where and how much. A model meant data, endless rows and columns of numbers. The more the better. In essence, they’d draw themselves magic eye pictures in the spreadsheet programs of their choice and then squint at them until they saw dollar signs. That was the reality of it, greasy little men hunched over their double-monitor displays hunting for percentage points. A crumb of value to get the barest edge. It was easy to see, for her at least, how that could drive you crazy, like Silk. He told her they’d had to kick Silk out of their little group chat a handful of times for sending death threats to tennis players. He said it like a joke. She must have missed the punchline.

She had a lonely day. Made some resolutions to herself. Then came back to the apartment and handed him his $250. She wasn’t going to be taking money from him like that anymore. It made her feel dirty. If she needed it she’d take a loan and repay him. Furthermore, if they were going to be serious about this, he couldn’t be sending her away like that. She wanted to help him, wanted to be involved. Would that be okay? Or should she go back to Fairfax?

He was shocked. It didn’t occur to him that he could hurt her that way, without meaning to. He shut off his computer and they spent the rest of the night within the range of each other’s warmth, promising to make it work. In the morning he jumped her into the lifestyle, the requisite beating delivered by terminology and numbers. Spread. Moneyline. Team total. Parlay. Hedge. Boost. Prop. Trap. Hook. Plus. Minus.

One number stuck out. His new FanBet balance was just a hair north of $62k. Was he on a losing streak? “Oh no, not at all. Just placed a few big futures.”

Another insider term. A future. Picking a champion, an award winner, an MVP, before the season had even begun. Like dropping a dart out of an airplane and hitting a bullseye. If you saw someone do that, then you’d be pretty impressed, right? You’d pay someone a pretty decent chunk of change to do it, right? He’d gone a little nuts, he conceded, going all the way down to $55k, but he was already well on his way to making it back. Besides, if any of those darts dropped from orbit did find the board, the resulting payout would hit, in his words “like crack.” Besides, he hadn’t even touched the 5K he kept off-shore for betting on entertainment and political props. He’d cleaned up on the Oscars last year.

November 19th - $67,764

With her he was healthier, but he didn’t seem happier. Just down to a lack of luck, really. The big hits eluded him. The climb back towards six-figures was sisyphean. Up five, down three, up seven, down six, up four, down eight. A slow, grinding sort of progress. Like trench warfare.

If his luck wasn’t better than his process was healthier at least. She had him in the habit of clocking out at regular hours. Eating better and more regularly. Taking walks around Bethesda Row to relieve the nervous energy accumulated by monitoring ten, twelve, fifteen games at a time. He was drinking less. Self-medicating with amphetamines and cannabis less. He was more present. It was like helping a snake shed its skin. The necrotic shell around him peeled back by helping hands. She’d begun to get some sense of the strait-laced, shy, rabbity data analyst he’d once been, before he’d “busted out,” in his own words.

When he won big it was like a holiday. They’d go downtown, eat well, drink and dance in Dupont Circle. Normally he didn’t like downtown DC, he carried money and was paranoid about muggers. When he won he felt invincible. Steak au poivre. Red wine. Shots for the whole bar. But he always stayed true to her. His appetites never ranged in that direction. She was grateful for that, and hoped he was grateful for all her work in turn. He’d say he was, and she believed him.

It all went wrong on a wet, cold morning in November, just when she was considering whether to tell her mother she wasn’t coming home for Thanksgiving. She clocked it well before she heard it from him, but figured he’d tell her when he was good and ready. He got distant and quiet when things went wrong and it was almost always over nothing. Some impactful injury or suspicious line-movement would set his stomach in knots. Was better to just let him work it out on his own. Later in the afternoon, when he came to her in his jacket and boots, announcing that he was going downtown to the FanBet sportsbook, she began to suspect something was really, truly wrong.

He’d done nothing wrong, made no mistake. It was the damn app. The FanBet mobile app had robbed him. He was dialing up a couple soccer plays, normal, by the-numbers stuff. Four units apiece. He played a unit size of one hundred dollars. But the app froze, when it began working again he felt as if he were going to be sick. They’d placed a forty-thousand dollar parlay bet. No early cash out was offered.

FanBet customer support was worse than useless. They could pay celebrities to shill their app but not web designers or customer service staff. They kept him staring at an automated live chat for hours on end. Once, when going to his computer, seeking advice from his comrades, a flesh and blood human did attempt to make contact. When the customer support woman received no reply, she closed the session and shunted him back to the rear of the queue. He’d waited three hours. She waited seven minutes. The second interaction was somehow more insulting. Whatever overworked, underpaid call-center slave he found himself in communication with this time merely directed him to the terms of service and terminated the session again. They were under no obligation to offer him a refund, even if it wasn’t his fault.

When at last he worked up the nerve to check his phone, he broke even more. He’d missed by one leg. One point. One pitiful little roll of the dice. If it had broken differently he’d have made $120,000 that afternoon. As it stood, he’d lost $40,000.

She wasn’t sure what he was planning to do and that was why she followed him out the door. The determination in his eyes scared him. His purpose was clear, but only to him. They got the train in silence, made the switch downtown and ended up at Navy Yard, near the baseball stadium. The FanBet Sportsbook was a two-story high glass cube leaking television light in every direction. She could see the illumination dancing against the parking garages arrayed around the baseball stadium from the moment she stepped off the escalator from the metro and hung a left out of the station. Inside the air was thick with tension and stress chemicals found in human sweat. It was decidedly unromantic, whatever hidden appeal the place held for its patrons wasn’t showing up on her radar.

To the window clerk, he was polite. That was something she’d always liked about him. He was always polite and abiding to service workers. “No reason to make someone’s day worse,” he’d say. He simply explained his situation and wished to speak to the manager. The clerk was confused. The bet was placed through their company, that’s true. But it wasn’t at their facility. He was insistent. He’d just like an explanation from a flesh and blood human being.

The manager was a woman, dressed in an off the rack suit. She wore it well.

“I’m very sorry to hear that.” She said, “But unfortunately there’s very little we can do.”

“You can give me my money back for one thing.”

“Well sir, we can’t do that. Don’t be unreasonable.”

“Your app. Stole my money. Without my consent. And I’m being unreasonable?”

“There’s no need to yell.”

“I’m not yelling!”

She’d been standing behind him and leaned forward to whisper in his ear. “Please baby, let’s just go home.”

He brushed her off and stepped closer to the manager. The manager stuck an acrylic-nailed finger in his face “Now sir if you’re going to lose your temper I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I can offer you a beverage on the house for your trouble and escalate the complaint to our corporate office if you want. But you’re going to have to calm down, alright?”

He laughed under his breath, smiled, looked at his shoes “Forty-thousand dollars and she wants to buy me a beer.” He mumbled. “Okay fine, fine.” he was polite again all-of-a-sudden. “I’ll take the beer and go–”

“You can have a cocktail if you’d prefer.”

“Thank you. I’ll keep that in kind. I’d just like you to answer a question for me.”

“Please.”

“Do you have children?”

The manager looked concerned “I hardly see-”

“I asked you a question. Do you have children? Yes or no?”

She thought about it for a second. Then she said “Yes. I have two daughters.”

“Good. Good. I hope they both get cancer.”

The manager’s mouth fell wide open, and before she could respond he’d grabbed a nearby aluminum barstool and thrown it towards the window to his right. It crashed straight through. The sound was like she’d only ever heard in movies.

“Marsha! Call the cops!” Shouted the manager

“You better have those kids ready to meet God you stupid–”

She didn’t hear the rest. She sprinted out the way they’d come in. She didn’t stop shaking until she was on the subway and didn’t even begin to feel safe until she was back over the state line in Virginia.

November 20th - $27,764

Her parents didn’t ask what she’d been up to. Didn’t berate her for disappearing like she had. Being cruel to be kind wasn’t their way. The holidays passed in a haze. Fall turned to winter. Ice encased the ground, not even allowing the world the romance of a new fallen snow. He didn’t call. He didn’t text. After Christmas she worked up the nerve to ask when she could come by and pick up her things. He said whenever, quicker than she expected. “Whenever” wound up being just after new years.

January 9th - $117,923

He was in a great mood. If the police had ever sought him out after that night at Navy Yard he didn’t show any evidence of it. He didn’t bring it up at all, in fact. Nor did he bring up the state of the apartment. It hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. Cockroaches crawled in and out of empty pizza boxes. The air smelled like weed, urine, and stale air freshener. He’d stopped shaving again. The bags under his eyes were colored like cheap red wine.

He left her in the entryway, went to get her things. Returned with them neatly packed in her gym bag. No malice but no feeling.

She hated herself for even thinking it, but in that moment she simply couldn’t stop herself. “I’m sorry,” she said, “for leaving you like that.”

He waved a hand dismissively “Quite alright. I wasn’t myself. I don’t respond well to being cheated.”

She’d begun to suspect in their time apart that he hadn’t really been cheated at all. He’d just made a mistake and couldn’t bear to admit it. She kept that one to herself. She was scared she’d end up like that barstool. She had to admit as well that she was scared of him.

“Anyway it’s for the best,” he continued, “I frankly don’t think we can be together.”

“Yeah I don’t think so either.”

“Thank you so much for understanding. I really do appreciate your worrying about me. And it’s not your fault.”

“What’s not my fault?”

“That you’re a jinx.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You don’t have to apologize” He tapped at his phone, showed her his balance on a new app. It was over one-hundred-and-ten thousand dollars. His futures had found the mark. He was in his much-sought-after six figures. The way he figured, she’d had him losing his edge. He’d gotten it back these past few months. He’d hit big. The numbers didn’t lie. She was the source of his bad luck.

In the car on the way home she realized she could have never been a partner to him in the way those numbers were. She could never be as compelling as his spreadsheets. As gripping as the game. She realized it was all an act. He was never getting healthier, he just wanted her to believe he was. She expected to be heartbroken, but by the time she pulled into her parents driveway there was a strange kind of relief. She didn’t have to try and help him. He didn’t want the help.

“Rocky hate Mark.”

It’s a bad time to be a millennial but, then, was it ever a good time to be a millennial?

A generation pidgeonholed as frivolous and nauseatingly self-involved almost from the moment of its debut in the public sphere has gone from young and foolish to old and uncool almost overnight. The new consensus is that millennials are ugly and childish and childless and terrible with money and shrill and shallow and hypocritical. They owned nothing, produced nothing, and accomplished nothing. The things they did make momentarily popular are widely loathed and their value system did not prove durable beyond their own generation, indeed, the bizarre hyperpolarization of their successors in Generation Z may be best explained by a simple desire to be literally anything else other than a millennial. They were so uncool that they made the kids become Nazis, in opposition to their uncoolness.

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I paint unfair strokes with a broad brush and do so intentionally. I think we’ll wake up one day, when the Zoomers are bald and fat and Gen Alpha is lampooning their tendencies with as little mercy as Gen Z is currently showing the Millennials, and we’ll conclude that perhaps we were all a little too eager to turn up our noses at the Millennial cultural project writ large. Just like the Millennials themselves seemingly got old overnight, the great Millennial blockbuster suddenly seems to be a dying breed. Marvel has never quite gotten the machine back in gear after the COVID-19 pandemic and the parade of imitators spawned by the dominant Marvel Method of jokey, bantery, ironically distant scriptwriting and plotting has dispersed in recent years. This means that 2026’s first serious blockbuster of note, Project Hail Mary, arrives as something of a curio. An honest to God smash hit in the Millennial mode.

Ryan Gosling freakin LOVES science, you guys, and he’s a bit awk, like just a bit, you know, he talks too much, like he’s doing now. He’s got graphic tees about the periodic table and rides a bike to work because, you know, #adulting is hard, and money is tight, and even though he’s a handsome genius microbiologist, he’s teaching middle school. The freakin economy dude! Not amazeballs! But now all of a sudden he’s woken up on a whole-ass SPACESHIP? Like in the middle of SPACE? Uh, yeah, that just happened.

I’ll stop before you start plotting my gory death.

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If I had to summarize Project Hail Mary in brief, it would be as follows: “Armageddon but for Democrats.” Based on the novel of the same name by Andy Weir1 the titular project concerns a critical threat to life on Earth as we know it, and the longshot effort to diagnose and solve it before it’s too late. Alien microbes2 of unknown origin are in the process of eating the sun, dimming and weakening it ever so slightly, and unless a countermeasure is found, the world will spiral into a permanent ice age within a matter of decades. The same phenomenon is affecting nearby stars all around us, except one. An advanced spacecraft is constructed to take a small crew on a one way trip to study the local phenomenon and find a solution which they can send back to earth before its too late. So rather than Michael Bay sending a crew of scowling roughneck oil drillers (and also Ben Affleck) to blow up an asteroid, we gotta send a wisecracking STEM guy to do epic whiteboard math and study samples while doing Marvel movie banter. Generally speaking, I find Weir sort of unimaginative as a plotter and so more than the actual space stuff, the odd couple buddy comedy problem solving is really the meat and potatoes here, with a tone that gently reassures you that all will be well in the end. This is very much a Does the Dog Die Dot Com coded production.

Sounds awful. But it works. This may as well be the motto for Phil Lord and Chris Miller, Hollywood’s specialists in getting good to great films out of bad ideas, and masters of the Millennial Blockbuster form. They crafted two brilliant buddy comedies bearing the name of flash in the pan cop show 21 Jump Street and somehow made The Lego Batman Movie allegedly worthwhile. I’m not surprised that they made Ryan Gosling’s self-effacing, Joss Whedonesque Ryland Grace more amusing and charming than grating. Ryan Gosling is, of course, Ryan Gosling; a genuine movie star in an era when they’re also meant to be an endangered species. Lord and Miller also have the good sense to stand back and let Sandra Huller work, and her turn here makes a dignified first stop on her 2026 Bag Chasing Tour.3 But the real star here is Rocky The Alien, which is fitting because he’s truly the most Millennial Blockbuster-coded part of the whole production. He’s Groot for 2026. Cute, charming, never quite crosses the threshold into being insufferable. Somewhere between a talking dog and a friendly foreign roommate. The introduction of the alien craft and its sole occupant is easily the best string of scenes in the film, and there are multiple contenders for that title. Project Hail Mary is easy to root for as a proper blockbuster of scale and pathos and an outlook of genuine optimism and humanism. People forget that this was another feature of the millennial project writ large. Whatever your critique of their complacency or lack of tact, the progressive consensus which still dominates the millennial generation (and is suffused through its art) is ultimately a statement of faith in the future. You can view it as insufficiently revolutionary or direct but films like these are founded on the premise that things can get better because we can make them better. In an age shot through with doom and resignation, belief in the power of human ingenuity and human virtue to save us all is something worth admiring. Project Hail Mary is a monument to that belief, that doing the right thing really might save us all.

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Enjoying the Millennial Blockbuster is sort of like supporting the Invasion of Iraq in 2004. It’s deeply unfashionable to admit it these days but you most likely did at the time. You liked the banter and the references and the winking and nodding and the evil sky beams and the post-credits scenes. I don’t care how many A24 hats you buy or Disney Adult-mocking memes you post, you wanted to know who the hell Thanos was in 2010. I know this because I was the guy, the comics guy, that you asked. There is no time more repellent to us than the recent past because it forces us to confront the people we just got done being, and a lot of you got done being graphic tee wearing, impact font memeing, Marvel Movie obsessives as the 2010s resolved. I never shame anyone for their taste, as a rule, and I’m not out here demanding we bring these back to the fore. Disco’s dead, baby, and so is the Millennial Blockbuster. I want us to recognize that we have a unique opportunity, in the form of this film, to say goodbye to an artistic and cultural movement which dominated the world for a decade. I think it’s an opportunity worth taking. I think it’s a ride worth taking.

And The Millennial in me (I’m a 1997 baby, score me where you like) finds it so delightfully ironic that this Millennial Blockbuster will lose its spot atop the Box Office charts to a Zoomer Blockbuster (The Super Mario Galaxy Movie) next week.

I rate this movie four “Savior of the Universe” paper hats out of five.

In celebration of my short story The Coat Trade being selected as a finalist for the inaugural short story contest, I’ll be reposting some of my back catalog of published short stories here over the coming weeks. While the finalist’s prize is fairly modest all told, it does represent a vital milestone; I have never been paid to write fiction until now. So thank you.

This short story originally appeared in Apocalypse Confidential in spring of 2023. It is about a man falling in love with a mummy. I hope you enjoy it.

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My job requires me to spend time with people that don’t get many visitors. As a result you develop a relationship with each of them. It wasn’t like that at first with her though. The realities of her situation made her somewhat withdrawn, and we met in such a professional context that neither of us could make a real impression on the other. A few years later I was reassigned and, given the option, chose a post in California. I didn’t know she was living in my service area around Los Angeles when I took the position. When I found out it made me certain I’d taken the right job. Having said that; I doubted she’d remember me. Our first appointment was on a Thursday. I remember setting out early, hoping to beat traffic. That’s the irony of it though, so was everyone else in the gridlock.

She’s an alchemist by trade, and a very successful one. In her business you measure your career’s prestige by your lifespan and she’s pushing three thousand. Immortality is a tricky proposition. Organs fail. Skin ages and rots. Even a mind may decay as the brain it’s housed in dies. So she did what geniuses do. She found a loophole.

She had taken a house for herself, really raised one for herself out of the sand, on the fringes of the Mojave. It was a domed mud hut designed with machinelike precision. Practical and uncomplicated, very few changes or complaints since she moved there in 1966. The ideal type of case to manage. She’d officially been with the Company from 1934 through 1974 and had retired, though no pension had ever been necessary. I remember being told by a supervisor that the previous supervisor helped her pick a spot to settle down, and that initially she’d planned on constructing a kind of cave complex for herself in the rock of Death Valley but abandoned the project after complaining to her handlers that the sun was far too intense. This was meant to be the punch line, but I didn’t really get it.

I remember my first, real, close, personal impression of her as well. She surprised me. I drove up, parked my car, walked up to the side that, given where the road came from, seemed best suited for a front door, and there she was.

She’s five feet tall on her best day, and I suspect on this occasion she was floating a few undetectable inches off the ground to maybe push for 5’2”. The mask makes her appear larger than she is. It’s a massive over-the-shoulders solid gold casing, polished to a reflective sheen and shaped to fit the face of a young woman. The whites of the eyes are filled in and surrounded by a dark line standing in for the kohl a person of her status would have worn in life. Black metal pock-marked with divots at regular intervals to simulate the texture of hair rested on her back and shoulders, ringed with bands of more gold at the bottom and adorned on the back with a small ornament in the shape of a sphinx whose wings stretched out on either side to about the diameter of the mask across. The whole thing was linked in a solid piece to a jeweled neck collar which gave her shoulders a bit more width. It appeared heavy and phenomenally uncomfortable.

When the door appeared, and then she appeared in the door, it startled me. I jumped just a bit before catching myself.

“Miss Knefera?” I asked, though there really wasn’t anyone else it could be.

She gave a sort of half bow, half nod in response and said, “We are none other.”

She always spoke like that, the royal we I guess you call it. Never really seemed to me that she was trying to act like royalty though.

She directed me in with a gloved hand and I took care not to step on the billowing knee-to-neck one piece linen tunic lined with tiny lengthwise pleats she wore under her collar, or to catch my hands in its long, loose sleeves. Her pants were of a similar construction and fit and what little could be glimpsed of her feet was tucked into some sort of moccasins.

When I got through the door it startled me again to see I was standing on nothing, in the ether above a sheer drop. It was an elevator made of glass, operated by a pulley system which is in turn operated by a pair of the miniature wax golems which act as her housekeepers, lab assistants, and as a kind of nervous system for her home and the things in it. I was impressed and being polite in a new acquaintance’s home, despite the scare, and so it wasn’t until later that I confessed to being spooked by the elevator (she was mortified when I told her, and later put down a rug to prevent the problem) and asked why she’d even made it out of glass. She just said sand was everywhere and served most of her construction needs. She was right, a lot of things in her home were made out of glass. It was a home built to serve her and only her. She was not the type to stumble around and break things and so why not live in a glass house?

Though the thing that surprised me, more than the mask or the elevator, was that she remembered me. She remembered my name.

Your ka, your spirit, naturally dwells in your blood and organs. Those break down and so to hear her tell it many of her contemporaries, similarly uninterested in the orthodox methods of guaranteeing life after death, would try putting their ka in all sorts of vessels. She decided this was a waste of effort, your body already has a perfectly good vessel, one that never wears out and doesn’t require maintenance. She theorized that human ka could be bound to one’s skeleton instead of her flesh.

I remember the elevator let out into a kind of mud room, bigger than someone who didn’t get many visitors and likely didn’t own many pairs of shoes needed. That’s what I thought anyway, and I told her so. She told me that it needed to be this big for when the men from the Company came to deliver her monthly provisions. She could just disintegrate it from where they left it on the “front porch” and reconstitute it down here without bothering with the elevator. A bigger landing area made everything so much smoother.

After that there was a hallway which opened up into a small sitting room on the left and led you into the kitchen if you continued on straight ahead. To the right there was a small nook in the wall housing a household shrine, to Bastet if I wasn’t mistaken, usually also holding small sacrifices, a lab mouse or a little desert finch, as it was on this occasion. Biggest thing I ever saw on there was the head and severed feet of a jackrabbit, one of the big floppy-eared ones from deeper in the Mojave. That was for the winter solstice though. Despite the cat goddess shrine, I never saw a cat around. Though if there wasn’t one, who was leaving those mice and finches on that altar? Best not to think about that.

I almost forgot the bread, and I’m happy there’s no way I can tell this story without it. The smell actually hit me in the elevator, this yeasty, nutty, earthy smelling sourdough bread smell just rose through the whole place and I finally found the source. Domed and rustic, it sat on her kitchen table. That just made me more curious. It’s sort of tough to be curious in private though, she could tell I was interested in the bread and so she offered me some, saying it had just been baked that morning.

“We should have had something more waiting. You must be tired,” she said. “We often forget how long the journey from your city takes. Distances are not so hard for us.”

I was curious about what exactly she meant by that too, but first I thanked her profusely, saying how excellent it smelled and how it would be lovely with just a glass of water, thanks. The bread was, predictably, excellent, which got us talking more about food and after a while I got a little too curious and said, “Well wait, you don’t have to eat, right?”

Without a word, she tore a piece off (she never saw the point of a knife for such things). It rested in her palm, on the velvety surface of her glove, for a moment before it evaporated into a plume of steam.

“We eat with our ka, not our mouth. Though we must eat, as our shabti remind us during our studies.” She pointed at one of the wax golems clearing crumbs off the table.

The appointment got more businesslike after that. I could tell it was a question she was tired of answering. Not uncomfortable about it, maybe even the opposite. Still, it was likely for the best. I had to remind myself that I was on Company time and this was work, not a social call, at least not entirely. We concluded our business, nothing out of the ordinary as far as the month’s provisions go and no other complaints. She saw me out on the elevator and I thanked her again for the bread and water as I left.

I got hung up on what I’d said for the next couple days as I was going about my other work. Not guilty per se but just kind of a nagging sense that things had been going well and then I’d hurt her feelings. Some guys who do this job act like the people they see don’t have feelings to hurt. Never wanted to be one of them.

So I decided that when I visited again the thing to do would be bringing a baked good of my own along. Of course, I put it all off until the last minute and ended up getting her a supermarket pecan pie that struck me as “good enough” while standing in the bakery section the night before. I caught myself sneaking glances at the thing as I drove out, wondering if I was just making a jackass of myself. I like pecan pie though, most people seem to. Cupcakes struck me as juvenile, donuts not special enough, and fruit Danish just a little too boring. I was between the pie and a chocolate babka and like I said, I like pecan pie.

This time she was waiting for me outside. Her mask glowed in the sun and her clothes rippled in the hot, low breeze that blows off the desert. She inquired about the supermarket plastic bag in my hand and I told her it was to thank her for the bread. Then I heard her laugh for the first time.

“You modern people are so funny about this. No debts need be repaid. We merely acted as the laws of hospitality bid us.” I insisted, however, and though she acted as if she might roll her painted-on eyes at me she relented. She bent over at the waist to take the bag from me saying simply, “You honor us.” As she did, the wind picked up and I could see for just a moment the bony little wrists and sharp vertebrae hiding under those robes. As the wind died and she straightened the moment passed and we headed inside, talking as we took the elevator down.

I said, “Let me know what you think.”

“We are sure it will provide sufficient nourishment,” she replied.

“Oh I meant to let me know how it tastes.”

She explained that she didn’t “taste” as I understood it. In fact the lack of a nervous system meant her senses were very different from mine. She still had all five, but it was all purely through her ka with, as she put it; “no organs in the way.” She “saw” whatever her perception was focused on, irrespective of which direction she was facing. She “smelled” through feeling the composition of the air. Her “touch” was achieved through spreading her ka into her gloves and using the kidskin of their construction as a substitute for the human dermis. Hearing was mostly unaffected as sound travels in detectable waves either way, though taste was another matter. She understood the chemical and aural properties of whatever she took in just by the act of “eating,” but she never got that tactile, blood and guts enjoyment out of it.

By the time she’d finished her explanation, in that practiced way scientists explain their work to you, we were back in the kitchen. Immaculate as it was before with a brand new loaf of bread on the table along with a few tall dark glass bottles of what was almost certainly wine.

“Well then I have to ask, if you can’t taste your food why bother baking such great bread?”

“Father was a baker by trade. We have fond feelings for bread of this sort. We believe your word for it is nostalgia.” That just struck me as so sweet and nice and I told her so. She seemed a bit embarrassed by my saying this and told me that it was just one of several projects she was pursuing in her retirement.

She showed me her laboratory for the first time after that. To this day I’m unsure if she was trying harder to convince me or herself that she was pursuing more serious matters beyond baking bread and making wine. You know, the sort of business befitting an immortal.

In any case the room itself wasn’t anything particularly interesting. A small room with two walls dedicated to workspaces and two dedicated to shelving and storage. Even the things that stuck out were mundane, as among the decidedly more analog implements such what appeared to be an ivory mortar and pestle there were Bunsen burners with gas lines to match and digital scales. There was also plentiful drainage and ventilation.

Her work was much more interesting. She explained that the main obstacle to making bread just like her father used to was that the kind of grain they’d harvest to make it had gone extinct. There were ways to fix that (or at least get around it) but it required a lot of catching up in biology and the natural sciences, as well as developing her long-held interest in botany. She spoke with a degree of awe that it didn’t even seem possible for a three-thousand-year-old to possess about the very concept of genetics. A lot of it was opaque to me but the basic idea seemed to be knitting two similar types of grain together on the genetic level to get something similar to what she was after. You could theoretically accomplish this through breeding, like Mendel did, but alchemy is faster and more precise.

I suspected a lot of it was going over my head but she spoke with such enthusiasm about how she was exchanging letters with botanists from Berkley, anthropologists from Oxford by way of Cairo, and even an obscure geologist on the faculty of Louisiana Tech who’d written what she described as a “brilliant” and “insightful” thesis on river delta erosion. To hear her tell it she’d gained a bit of a reputation among academics in the relevant fields as a kind of reclusive savant, the Emily Dickinson of plant genetics. She had even worked her way into the good graces of one of the world’s foremost experts on plant genetics and speciation at the University of Zurich.

We had a lively visit after that. Another absolutely tremendous home-baked loaf of bread was improved even more by the addition of some olive oil her botanist friends at Berkeley had sent her. She vaporized a piece of pecan pie and remarked that she’d never cease to be amazed by how much sugar we modern people could pack into food.

I also gratefully accepted some wine though I will admit to underestimating how much stronger the ancients liked their wine. I had to stick around even past the close of our usual business, just for a bit while I sobered up. This meant there was time to finally see her sitting room, which also functioned as her library. I don’t know how much she even figured I would understand but it was apparent to anyone, even the wax housekeepers, how long she’d been waiting to talk about her collection to someone. She even managed a joke as she half-skipped, half-levitated around the shelves carved into her walls, pulling out one regally adorned scroll and proudly identifying it as the world’s only surviving hieroglyphic translation of the Apology, rescued from the Library at Alexandria before the fire by some Ptolemy-era scholar either too lazy to return it or too broke to pay the late fees. At least that was her theory, she’d never met the man. She removed the scroll from his tomb while helping the same archeologists who dug her up excavate her neighbors in the Valley of Kings.

Anyway, I left that evening in a great mood even though the pecan pie hadn’t gone over as I’d hoped.

For a while, things went on like this. I’d make my usual visits and she’d talk about what she was working on, who she’d gotten a letter or a gift from, what she thought of the books she’d asked us to check out from local libraries. She was always so happy to see me and it was becoming more and more of a mutual thing. She was unlike anyone I’d ever met. I began to appreciate how I could read subtle changes in her tone or posture the way I’d read someone else’s face. I got wise to how she used her clothes as a kind of nervous system, gaining spatial awareness by how they billowed out around her. Most of all though I was always left in a good mood by her zest for life, how much she seemed to be enjoying the gift of immortality that she’d won for herself. I was in awe of her mind, and, I later had to admit, beginning to fall in love with her ka.

I recall that it was a Friday. By this time I’d begun scheduling her visits on Fridays so I could clock out right on time and be free to have a drink or two and socialize. I’d come to enjoy these conversations quite a bit. I’d become more reference material for her. Maybe that sounds insulting to you but I for one kind of enjoyed it. She’d ask me my perspective on things that puzzled her about the modern world. Sometimes we’d argue about it. Usually we’d end up somewhere completely different from where we started the conversation. I always like conversations like that. Lets you know people don’t want things from you, except to talk.

All of this is to say I’m not sure whether it was the wine or just the ease of talking to her but I got a little too honest. I told her my theory, about all of this.

“It’s subconscious. You’re making food that you remember because deep down you miss eating it like you used to. You’re fixated on this because you have a craving and no stomach to feel it in.”

“Is this what modern people call psychology?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“We merely wish to understand from where your premise originates.”

“Well I didn’t go to college for psychology but if you’d like to talk to one I can finally get your briefed on that Company health plan.”

“We are sympathetic but there is no need. Mortals see wise men to offer them counsel. In this time, none are wiser than We.”

She was sitting in her favored reading chair, legs crossed, arms nested on her knees so her robes billowed out just so. She looked very regal. Would have, anyway if one of her wax servants weren’t standing on her shoulder, buffing dust bunnies out of her collar and smudging off her mask with a bit of cloth. Her attempts to be bigger just made me all the more aware of how small she was.

“I’m not dropping this. I think you’ve just been nursing a craving for three thousand years.”

Her eyes almost seemed to roll again. “It has not been nearly so long. We have had flesh more recently than you may realize.”

“So what happened?”

“Far too much maintenance.” She waved a hand in the air dismissively. “The energy generated by one’s ka has better applications than keeping meat from rotting.”

She liked to deflect that way when I was a little too close. It was easier to pretend she was above it all in that way, floating above our mortal concerns like she did the ground. It may have worked with some of my colleagues but she wasn’t fooling me. There was a human girl somewhere in there, behind that mask.

The conversation carried on like that for a bit, just her evading me. I hooked her back in with the suggestion that we make it a kind of game, a test of everything she’d been working on. She could make herself some skin, I could come out early on my day off and we’d cook a whole feast.

She was quick to kill the idea that I would be involved in any way in cooking the meal, which I expected. Though I had already decided to buy another pecan pie in anticipation of the occasion, whenever that ended up being. I didn’t settle on a date that evening, or even get a definite yes from her. But she’d agreed to add the necessary chemicals and minerals for making human flesh to her monthly provisions and I took that as a win.

It was next Wednesday, if I recall correctly, when I received a note, handwritten on rough dry papyrus, informing me that she wouldn’t be needing a visit this week, but that I should come hungry the week afterwards. The time in the interim really wound up dragging. Anticipation can do that.

I bore some teasing about visiting my “girlfriend” from a few of my co-workers and took the day off to drive out early. I had my pecan pie on my passenger seat along with a plastic jug of Arnold Palmer and a little glass jar of cultured butter I’d picked up from a farmer’s market, thinking it’d go well with the bread. No one likes a dinner guest who shows up empty handed.

When she met me at the door my first impression was that she was the color of cinnamon. My second was that whoever had made that mask for her had done a pretty good job capturing her likeness. Though her real face-the face she’d made for herself, was more mature. To the world she’d shown a girlish face, with an abiding smile and bright, wide eyes. In person, face to face, she seemed much more like a full-grown woman. More elegant.

Her clothes gave that impression too, she’d eschewed her usual knee to neck smock in favor of a short-sleeved sundress arrangement made of the same fabric, with similar pleating. She’d kept that damn neck collar though and paired it with giant gold earrings that must have been about as uncomfortable. Though I suppose they’d have to be that big to stand out from the curtain of wooly black hair she’d grown for herself. Or maybe she’d grown it independent of herself. I remembered reading that the average ancient Egyptian woman would shave her head and wear a wig. Too much maintenance, I guessed. Especially when you have fleas and lice to worry about.

In any case she caught me staring. I know she did. She just didn’t bring it up. She chose instead to berate me (at least as much as was polite) for bringing my own food and not allowing her to treat me as an honored guest, then she invited me into the elevator. (She’d gotten the rug for it by this point.)

I guess I’d had the thought once or twice before then but during that elevator ride down I started thinking that maybe I should have just gone with it when the guys from the office tried to say she was my girlfriend. Seemed like a better proposition all the time.

We opened a bottle of wine and off we went. First came a tour of the new and improved house. She’d added a proper bedroom (two, in fact) as well as a bathroom with pretty modern fixtures, all things considered, and a small sunroom. This last one had been on her agenda for a while, as she needed somewhere to properly care for the gifts her growing network of botanist friends sent her. It just dovetailed nicely with her new skin’s need for vitamin D. She showed me where she’d grown it down in her lab as well. A long, shallow box (a bathtub, or a coffin, if you’re feeling more macabre) still held some of the gooey residue from her metamorphosis, though a crew of shabti was hard at work on the cleanup, naturally. She explained to me as well that it had been a simple matter to modify a few of them to serve as her beauticians and nursemaids and how they’d been helping her readjust to the hygienic and sanitary needs of human skin. I decided we should eat before the conversation could go somewhere that would adversely affect my appetite.

The food was excellent, of course. My spinach artichoke was appreciated (she’d never had it before) though it paled in comparison to her bread and the stuffed grape leaves which really ended up as the unexpected star of the meal. That one was her uncle’s recipe. He had brought it back from one of his trading voyages to Greece and it had gone straight in the family cookbook. Trendy recipes were still around back then, they just took longer to travel.

We had finished off our entrée (some lovely lamb cutlets) and were split on dessert. I was stuffed and she wouldn’t have any of the pie unless I did. We agreed, however, that bottle number three was not getting any less empty and more wine was an absolute necessity.

What we couldn’t agree on was who should go to the cellar to get more wine, and so we both went. That’s how we ended up having our first kiss. She reached up for a bottle on a high shelf, I grabbed it for her, and when the bottle came down and my eyes came down with it there was nothing between me and the shelf but her, and she was so beautiful.

“Hmmm I see now why you were so adamant that we return to flesh,” she said. I wanted to deny it, you know, act like a gentleman but she stopped me with a manicured finger on my lips. “We have desired this also.”

The sheets in her room were phenomenally soft, freshly conjured I figured, along with the rest of the furnishings. I had time to admire them since she was off in the bathroom, primping. Women are funny about that, most men I know probably don’t even care and would say so if you asked but then again their wives and girlfriends would tell you they don’t do it for their man’s benefit. Suppose it’s a confidence thing and lord knows men are just as fussy as women if not more so when their egos get bruised. I think so anyway.

She came out of the little bathroom she’d carved out of the rock adjoining to her bedroom wearing a light cotton robe. She didn’t seem to have put it on for any other purpose than taking it off and letting it fall to the floor theatrically. In the bathroom she’d rubbed herself with some sweet-smelling oil and now stood naked. The details of these sorts of things make me a bit uncomfortable so you’ll forgive me for not giving you a full account of all you may wish to know. I remember I used to read my Uncle’s old James Bond paperbacks and every single one of those suckers had a scene where the main love interest tells the reader how big their breasts are and how the women would moan so loud the paint would peel. As a teenage boy I appreciated it. As a man it’s always made me just a bit embarrassed.

Suffice it to say that I informed her I was done waiting around and demonstrated this by lifting her up in my arms (remember that she’s not a very big person) and dropping her onto her bed while she half-giggled and half protested. We exchanged another kiss. Rolled around a little. I was able to confirm that her hair was natural, both with my fingers and unintentionally with my mouth. She ended up on top of me. She winced. Then I saw why.

Do you know what “skin slip” is? I can’t recommend you do too much research on it if you have a weak stomach. It happens most often to bodies that have been in the ground for a while, getting ripe. It starts as something like a blister but as the gas and fluids from decomposition build up the surface tension of the blister goes past the point of no return. It pops, and the skin “slips” off the bone. Though as it happened in a matter of seconds on the fleshy part of her upper-arm it struck me more as a flopping than a slippage. “Skin slip” makes more sense as a medical term but Skin Flop better describes the phenomenon in terms of simple phonics. Warm, wet things like human flesh go “flop.”

It did not spread from her arm like a skin infection, it appeared all over her body at random. One of her breasts began to sag to the point of snapping off, her eyes grew jaundiced, her fingers began to melt one after the other. She was rotting alive and rippling with panic. And she was right on top of me.

I would like nothing more than to tell you that I was understanding, mature, in command. That I extricated myself calmly and told her that our fun appeared to be over tonight and that she should see to her own health. Instead, I saw blood and guts, smelled pus and rot, and did what people unused to such situations do; I vomited.

I had to sit and stew in all the oils, mine and hers, natural and cosmetic, for a while. She was in the bathroom again, sobbing with no eyes to cry from. At first I pounded on the door, I wanted to know if she was okay. All I got back was “I’m sorry” wailed again and again. It was the first time she’d ever called herself “I” when talking to me. Somehow it made things worse, a feeling like I’d destroyed her. A silly thing to think given that the reverse could have been true if she ever wanted to do so.

When the bathroom door opened again I got to see her for the first time. She was a bleached white skeleton, perfectly maintained but so small, so fragile. The air behind her stunk of lye. It became clear to me that she’d torn off what was left of her flesh and dropped it in the bathtub to dissolve.

I tried to be nice. I don’t know why. People in pain never like it when you try to be nice to them. After I apologized for vomiting, I asked if she wanted to sit up a while longer before bed. She just put her head in her bony hands and ran out the door, yelling, “We have no need for your pity.”

I slept in the chair I was in. The sheets were filthy with gore and vomit and when I woke up in the morning they hadn’t been changed. The whole house sat quiet. The wax housekeepers had dropped dead where they stood. Unlit, uncleaned, uncared for, the place felt so much like a tomb. There was no sign anywhere of Knefera, the alchemist, the immortal, the woman I realized I loved maybe just a second too late.

What else was there to do? I drove home, called up the Company, and told them I was cashing in my accumulated vacation time. Not that I did anything with it. I said I’d take the time to think about things, figure out how I felt, but that was just an excuse to drink too much and lay around the house, buried under my own self-pity. I hated myself for not having the courage to love someone as they were, I had tried to change her and I’d ruined everything.

I thought so anyway.

A month later I got a knock at my door and there she was, in a new suit of skin. It was different from the old one, though not in any way I can point to as an obvious difference. She just seemed more natural in it, more at home, maybe it was just a trick of the light. The way the California sun danced in her hair and on her light linen jumpsuit brought out the flecks of gold in her kohl-lined eyes.

I swear the moment could have gone on forever, just the horrible infinity of not knowing why she was here, what she had been doing, how she felt about me. The thought crossed my mind that maybe she was just here to reduce me to the grease spot I felt like I already was before I could gossip.

She didn’t do that. She apologized. I felt like that was wholly unnecessary and I told her so but she said she had been a bad host and a bad friend for walking out on me like that.

Then she handed me a brown paper bag with something light and loaf-shaped inside, saying, “A token of my goodwill and affection.”

I took the bag and said the first thing that came to mind: “So it’s my and I now hmm?”

She pouted. “Just because we do not choose to speak in the vernacular does not mean we are unaware of it. We addressed a great gathering of wise men and women today, to speak properly in such settings is important!”

She’d been traveling, meeting her friends at universities all over the world, first Zurich, then Istanbul, then Cairo, finally her globetrotting had brought her back here, where she’d just been the guest speaker at a faculty luncheon for the University of California-Los Angeles’ botany department.

“In any case whether you wish for continued companionship or not, We were bound to bring you the fruits of this labor. It was you who allowed for it to happen.”

“How do you figure?”

“It is somewhat embarrassing to admit but simply tasting the bread allowed for far more progress on my research than other forms of analysis. We are angered to think that we ever could have been so foolish.” She sighed. “Though it seems that we have been foolish for three thousand years.”

“Well I don’t know about any of that but this is it? This is your dad’s bread?”

“It’s better.”

“Better?”

She smiled. “You heard me.”

“Well then I gotta try it.” She looked down and away, as if searching for an exit. “Do you want to come in and see what I think?”

“I’d like that.”

I won’t speak too much on the bread, since you can’t buy it anywhere and I don’t want to make you jealous. But that night we concluded we very much wished for each other’s continued companionship, to borrow her words. We still do, all these years later.

“What’s my name!?”

You hand this to eight out of ten filmmakers and you get a boilerplate sports drama. You hand it to Michael Mann and you get an almost hubristically ambitious historical/biographical epic of conspiracy, symbology, and identity with some mind-bending boxing sequences thrown in for good measure. That’s the Mann Touch, baby.

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The Performance of Will Smith’s career. I think he’s almost supernaturally well-suited to what Mann is going for here. He’s obviously a competent face match for Ali himself but the arc of the film and what Mann is trying to state with it are so fitting for the persona of Will Smith circa 2001. The novelty hip-hopper turned TV comedian turned box office topper. Middle America’s respectable, nonthreatening black friend. More a successor of the sort of all-audiences entryism via respectability of Bill Cosby than the braggadocio and provocation of the man once called Cassius Clay. There’s the obvious level-raising dramatic potential of the role for Smith, and a prestige drama turn to avoid being typecast as a wisecracking action hero made pragmatic career sense in 2001, but I can’t help but read Smith’s performance as a conscious effort to regain a connection with his own blackness, after years in the homogenizing Hollywood machine.

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The role finds a unity between its actor and the thematic fixation of its director. Mann’s leading men are always men of principles, whether moral, professional, or simply ego-driven. They are all alike in that they will not compromise on that which they value most. Muhammad Ali fits this mold beautifully. What’s so novel and unexpected about it is how Mann and Smith take that next step in showing the consequences such a principled individual will incur when living as a public figure and cultural symbol. The Zaire stuff is such sublime apotheosis. Ali’s struggle was always identitarian in nature, asserting the right to live, speak, present, and worship as he pleased within America, and in so doing, to hold America to account for promising him the right to do all these things but never following through. In stepping outside of the American bubble, we see a man realize that even after winning his fight in courts of law and halls of power, his identity is still no longer his own. It belongs to all people that find, to paraphrase Kanye West, bravery in his bravado.

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I think we all forgot how absolutely loaded this cast is beyond Smith. Jeffery Wright. Mario Van Peebles (as Malcolm X!). Lil Jada Pinkett in a “huh, that’s interesting” type appearance. A nice little turn for Giancarlo Esposito and space for habitual Mann Character Actors Mykelti Williamson and Barry Shabaka Henley. Jon Voight scooped a deserved Oscar Nomination as Howard Cosell (man, it seems fun to have a homie you publicly loathe for branding purposes). But really, there’s such an instant director/actor connection here between Mann and Jamie Foxx. He’s electric. Little wonder they’d reunite a few more times before the decade ended. You know, come to think of it, Jada Pinkett was in Collateral, too! Not my place to proclaim this sort of thing but is Michael Mann, like, for the culture? There’s a case to be made! Not my business, as I said. But I do think there’s a case.

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There’s a cruel sort of irony to the long tail of this movie’s legacy. Will Smith was nominated for best actor at the Academy Awards and lost to, let’s face it, a superior performance by a more accomplished black thespian in Denzel Washington (in Training Day). He’d spend the next decade and change chasing another bite at this prestige filmmaking apple and never get this close again. Mann didn’t even get a sniff, either for best Picture or Best Director. Sure, it was a pretty loaded field that year, (come on, Ron Howard over Peter Jackson AND David Lynch? Shame on you people) but one of Mann’s most ambitious stylistic swings couldn’t get any juice for the squeeze. I saw Ali for the first time as a child. It was on FX or AMC, and that’s probably the same way a lot of you saw it. That’s maybe the unkindest cut of all. A movie so clearly built for a theater destined to be consumed in a lazy, Sunday afternoon haze by bored suburbanites and their Dads, both wondering why there isn’t more boxing in this boxing movie.

I rate this movie four and a half water glasses full of vodka out of five.

“They don’t just give out Pulp Man of the Year to any old fool.”

Hollywood in 2026 is an institution in retreat. Every financial statistic pulled from the box office reporters tells us this is the case. If the metaphorical Blue Ocean Event which indicates imminent collapse of the American cinematic ecosystem has not yet taken place, it’s surely close at hand. The modern viewing public has given up on the movies.

However, there is an argument to be made that the movies gave up on modern people first.

Hollywood’s retreat is not just a material one, but an artistic one. It surrenders ground to its entertainment competition as it flees into distant sci-fi futures, curated lookbook pasts, and parallel comic book presents. None of these are in and of themselves a bad thing, and all of these things are vital parts of balanced diet of cinematic visions, but the cinema of the 2020s feels uniquely afflicted by a conscious disconnect from the realities of everyday life as its ostensible audience lives it. Modern filmmaking is an art conducted in crippling fear of the smartphone. Look at the recent work of any director of note and it’s impossible to miss. The stewards of the art form would rather do anything else than attempt to confront modernity head-on.

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It doesn’t have to be this way.

Step outside of the Hollywood monoculture and you’ll find international filmmakers more game to make movies about people living as we do today. This is by no means an indicator of their quality, plenty of crap still gets made. But it’s worth acknowledging that the problems of modernity can be tackled head on, rather than obliquely nudged via allegory or association. For my money, no country’s cinema has done a better job of hog-tying modernity and jabbing at its pain points than South Korea, and the latest feature from one of their filmmakers of record is another chapter in the saga of Hollywood fumbling its role as our global storyteller, and of other countries picking up the ball with style and substance.

No Other Choice is, in my opinion, totally excellent. But then, I would think that. It’s an adaptation of one of my favorite authors, Donald Westlake1, handled with style, class, humor, and intelligence by one of my favorite working directors in Park Chan-wook. Of course I’d love it. It’s less remarkable that I loved it than it is remarkable that it’s not quite my favorite film of the year2.

In short: No Other Choice is the story of a prosperous and fulfilled family man, Yoo Man-su. Man-su has a wife, two kids, two big fluffy golden retrievers, a gorgeous home. He’s living the dream until he’s fired from his supervisory job at a paper mill after a twenty five year tenure, victimized by corporate restructuring after his company’s acquisition by American investors. That’s hard times, daddy. Facing imminent financial ruin after months of unemployment, our man happens upon the perfect opportunity to secure his comfortable existence and his children’s futures. The problem is; so has every other qualified candidate in his industry. Like I said, hard times, daddy. There aren’t enough spots on the lifeboats. What’s a man to do? Eliminate the competition, of course. In a desperate last attempt to stave off a home foreclosure, Man-su hatches a plot to kill the other candidates and win the job by default.

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Now I feel it’s appropriate to specify that this is a farce, a black comedy, and it succeeds in that lane. No Other Choice is by and large a society comedy shot through with moments of crushing bleakness and quiet tragedy. Yoo Man-su isn’t driven by Tyler Durden postmodern machismo or Patrick Bateman materialist insanity. He’s introduced to us as a sweet, caring man who’d like nothing more than to keep doing for his family what he’s always done. He’s by no means suited to be a killer. This makes him typically Westlake-ian. If, say, Elmore Leonard found humor in scorning the criminal class for its stupidity, Westlake saw it as a simple extension of human folly. Every crime is a comedy of errors. However, for adaptational purposes, he’s superbly portrayed by Lee Byung-hun. Lee’s a prior collaborator with Park Chan-wook, on his breakout feature Joint Security Area, but probably more familiar to American audiences for his role in Netflix’s Squid Game3. He brings the manic desperation and gaunt-eyed guilt that the script dials up for him, but I really do want to make a note of his physical acting. He’s appropriately flustered in moments of capering gone awry but also brings the requisite sensitivity and warmth of a family man trying to navigate genuine crisis, he’s the lame but lovable dad, shot through with middle-aged impotence even in his moments of trying to take the power back. Special mention is due to one of the slickest fist-bumps I have ever seen on a movie screen. You will know it when you see it.

A commitment to being a film of the moment is shot through No Other Choice, and continues the stylistic project from Park’s previous effort Decision to Leave. Park’s always had a certain style, naturally favoring an oversaturated color palette flush with vibrant foliage greens and primary colors bright enough to burn your eyes. However, in recent years he’s emerged as a student of the modern populist filmmaking of TikTok and Instagram Reels. I don’t think there’s a director working today that understands how to incorporate this stuff, this inescapable video stream of modern life, into his films in a way that feels naturalistic, but never condescending, even at its most openly parodic4. I don’t consider it a gimmick, if anything it’s an avenue by which Park can probe deeper into the social satire of the film. The spiral into poverty is marked by the surrender of status symbols and what is a curated Instagram feed if not a status symbol?

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The emotional core of the film is watching all that warmth and love exit the family unit in the ever-more frantic pursuit of financial security. It’s a modernist tragedy, a man losing touch with people that already love him so that he can win approval from people that will readily dispose of him. Victory is hollow in every sense. No Other Choice is a crime drama for the era of LinkedIn platitudes and universal precarity. It is vital and cutting because its reality, its absurd, cruel, banal reality, is our reality.

I rate this movie five Pulp Men of the Year out of five.

"How bout you wash my ass, Father? It's Tuesday, not Sunday!"

Spare a thought for the quality mid-budget film saddled with the indignity of a January/February release window. While the meat and potatoes of a multiplex audience still grazes on Christmas crowd-pleasers and the self-styled cinephiles rush around to catch sparse showing of awards hopefuls, 2026’s first proper releases stumble out into the world, anonymous and unloved. Well, all the ones that aren’t 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple at least (though even that is struggling).

Dead Man’s Wire is one such film. A charmingly-old school little true crime thriller with trendy actors at its fore and a solid hand on the sticks in Gus Van Sant, sent out to die against franchise films with bigger marketing budgets. At time of writing, the film has grossed just under $2 million and is probably headed directly for a purgatorial afterlife of streaming anonymity. Like a kid who wrote a few nice poems in the trenches and then got sawn in half by a Kraut machinegun at The Somme, the poor thing never had a chance.

I am not here to tell you this movie is great. If asked to pay the price of admission (an indignity which is beneath me these days as an AMC Stubs A-List member) I would probably tell you to save your money. But I do feel like this film is good. Its failures are more interesting than infuriating. It doesn’t overstay its welcome with a 105 minute runtime. In three months time this film will be just another tile on your streaming entertainment grid and I am here to tell you it’s worth a look.

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For the uninitiated: Dead Man’s Wire is based on a true story. In early February 1977, Indianapolis businessman Tony Kiritsis entered the offices of his mortgage broker under the pretenses of a meeting to resolve a dispute over Kiritsis’ late payments on a piece of property which he planned to develop into a shopping center. Instead, Kiritsis produced a twelve gauge shotgun, wired it to both his neck and the neck of the mortgage loan broker Richard O. Hall, and marched him out the front door and through downtown Indianapolis in full view of the police and media. Kiritsis felt he had been cheated and taken advantage of by his financial backers and incited a hostage crisis to demand the cancellation of his debts and a personal apology from the Hall family.

Kiritsis is played (in a typical though not especially egregious case of a handsome actor playing an ugly real person) by Bill Skarsgard, a name which should be very familiar to horror fans. The scion of Sweden’s famous acting family has found a profitable lane for himself as a modern-day Boris Karloff, first bringing Pennywise the Clown to life for a new generation in the recent IT films and then tackling cinema’s most famous vampire for Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu in 2024.

But there is always the danger of getting typecast, isn’t there? It happened to Karloff and so many other actors who made their bones in horror movies. I suppose that was really the draw for me. On the one hand it’s a sort of challenge to the actor in question; can he really act or does he just wear the facial prosthetics and do the funny accents well? On the other, well, it must get dreadfully hot and itchy under all that crap, right? Gotta be on set however many hours early so they can lacquer it on. Critical support for people that wanna show up to work later and abide by a less onerous dress code. It’s a winning combination of actor and role, as Skarsgard’s physicality and horror-movie grade facial acting brings a real vein of authentic rage to a character which could have turned into a middle-American caricature rather quickly in the wrong hands. There is something pathetic about him, this weird little man screaming about how he’s been cheated and he wants to get his money back. There’s no Robin Hood justification for Kiritsis, no photogenic family waiting for dad to bring home the bacon, just an empty apartment in an ugly brick mid-rise. His businesses are his children, he tells us. He’s loaded with signifiers of a pathetic, ridiculous sort of American masculinity but you’re sort of obligated to take him seriously, despite all his blustering. He’s holding the shotgun, after all.

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After the initial abduction, the film faces the issue of what exactly to do as far as keeping the audience engaged, and this is where it begins to lose focus and momentum. There’s a number of interesting potential threads to be pulled and, as is so often the case with a movie doomed to be merely pretty good, it gives them all a cursory tug without ever committing to one in particular. There’s the media angle, framed by the persistent presence of an Indianapolis area TV news anchor and her cameraman, but this never goes anywhere better films haven’t been going for years and the anchorwoman in question, played by Myha’la (who is apparently on Industry in some form or fashion), is a real dud of a performance for me. She’s done no favors by the script and I suspect Van Sant’s direction has let her down too, as she’s delivering many of her lines in this late-20th Century newscaster voice which feels overly affected, especially when compared with real archival footage from the TV coverage of the actual hostage crisis. These are the perils of having people in 1977 portrayed by actors born twenty years later. Doesn’t help that she’s sharing pseudonarrator/Greek Chorus duties with the inimitable Colman Domingo, which, holy smokes, Colman Domingo is in this! I had no idea! It’s hardly his best work when measured against his recent run of acclaimed performances in awards hopefuls that make no money but the man’s voice is ideally suited to play a drive time jazz radio DJ, one with whom Skarsgard’s character has formed a parasocial bond. I assume based on that description Domingo Hive is already rushing to book tickets and they should! It’s a good turn by him and it feels like a real missed trick by the marketing department to not play up his involvement. Probably wouldn’t have helped, but still!

Kindness Report

I suspect Van Sant is betting biggest on the psychodrama of it all, as Hall is left trying to placate his captor as the wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly towards a resolution. Dacre Montgomery (who was apparently on Stranger Things in some form or fashion) does yeoman’s work with a role that was always going to end up starved for oxygen opposite Skarsgard but manages to make his moments memorable, few as there are. There’s a gesture towards commonality between the two men. Kiritsis is the product of an abusive home and Hall’s awkward phonecall with his own father (played by Al Pacino, in a fat suit, doing a Foghorn Leghorn voice, sitting down for the entirety of his screen time) is a highlight of the second act and gives some sense of his own difficult family life. Poor fathers just have their belt, rich fathers have a whole war chest with which they can abuse you and everyone else.

However it never really comes to fruition. Van Sant throws a few more videotape filters up on the screen and the film meanders through to a third act which does regain momentum as it heads towards a conclusion. However, Van Sant and company get no points from me for that. If you’re making a film about a true story, and the true ending of the story is thematically satisfying and grimly hilarious, you don’t get credit for tracing over it. It does, however, lift Dead Man’s Wire out of the doldrums of mediocrity and into a spot from which I can earnestly advocate for it. Give it a look next time you’re scheming on a double feature.

I rate this movie three and a half Mood Charts out of five.

NEXT TIME: Something some of you will actually watch in a theater.

Edited by , , and . Their assistance was essential and they have my gratitude. Special thanks are also due to , whose recent output helped inspire this piece.

What year did your parents stop being able to reliably operate their own television? My parents can still work their TV just fine (I think), but as a younger person it’s just assumed I can work it better by default. Even then, I’m occasionally mystified. My father and I are both proponents of the digital TV antenna ($20 at Best Buy, you will not regret it) but some gremlins in the software invariably make their TV fail to remember that it can access the antenna channels. It’s become a Thanksgiving morning ritual. Dad asks me to make sure we’re set up for football, I throw on the Live TV input and wade through thousands upon thousands of free digital channels showing Hallmark movies, cooking shows, Gunsmoke reruns, Best Latino Hot Hits Party Beats, until through some intuitive process I’m greeted with the smiling faces of the alcoholics and serial philanderers that commentate on NFL games.

The analog CRT-TV gives way to the digital flatscreen gives way to the smart TV with its app menu interface until one night your mom, or dad, or grandma, or grandpa, who just wants to watch 60 Minutes or Sunday Night Football, calls you up asking if you can come over and fix the TV because they don’t know how you make it show the TV channels anymore.

This level of complication feels malicious.

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Many of our modern afflictions are attributed to a love of convenience. People run up credit card or Klarna debt because it’s more convenient to DoorDash every meal rather than driving to pick it up yourself or cooking at home. Movie theaters go bankrupt because waiting for a streaming release and then watching at home is more convenient. Children and adolescents socialize through digital playgrounds like Roblox or Fortnite because it’s more convenient than seeing each other in person. It’s such a quintessentially American diagnosis of a macro-level social problem, wherein the issue begins and ends with the weakness of the individual. Why are you DoorDashing Nashville hot chicken instead of meal-prepping high-protein power bowls as seen on YouTube Shorts? Why are you consuming streaming entertainment instead of reading Marcus Aurelius or The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck or some other viral thought-system of the month which will improve your virtue and productivity? Why are the children playing their video games instead of attending cram school? Do they want to lose to China? Truly the west has fallen and billions must die.

But surely that doesn’t add up? If convenience were the end goal, the level of complication we observe all around us, growing denser and more hostile all the time, wouldn’t exist. There wouldn’t be apps for your laundry, apps for your coffee mug, apps to use your bed. There wouldn’t be seven separate streaming services where the football game you’d like to watch could potentially be hiding. Google search wouldn’t be progressively crippling itself further with each new update. If convenience were the end goal, your parents would still be able to use their television.

The goal, I argue, is not and never has been convenience. The goal is access.

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To define what I mean by “access” let’s revisit our allegedly convenience-loving friends from a few paragraphs ago. Now, allow me to manage our collective expectations and say that it would be irresponsible to absolve the public with broad brush strokes. In life, we encounter the oppressed and depressed as well as the indolent, lazy, contrarian, and otherwise insufferable. A well-meaning admonishment of the Klarna debtor class to buy a few nonstick pans and plastic spatulas and cook something at home at least a few times a week may be met with the time-honored internet tradition of sudden and committed vitriol, free-associating a bouquet of larger social and historical forces to explain why it’s actually deeply offensive to suggest you modify your behavior in any way. Suggesting I get a rice cooker at a thrift shop and make my own Chipotle bowls is appropriating east Asian culture, or something. It’s problematic to cook when Current Political Thing is happening, and also my Morgellons is acting up, and so on and so forth.

So yes, perhaps we really are a nation of three hundred million callers into the Dave Ramsey program, explaining that we really did need to lease that Ford Raptor and buy those fifty yard line tickets to the Cowboys game even though our homes, cars, and kneecaps are due to be repossessed any day now.

However, consider my hypothesis: access, not convenience.

Is the habitual DoorDash orderer a slave to convenience? Or do they have no other means to access a daily reward for their efforts? Do you put up with the onerous fees and kabuki theater of taking delivery because you’re lazy, or because you really do need the birria tacos to convince yourself that the day’s toil was in any sense worthwhile? Are the streaming entertainment power-users simply Wall-E-esque adult babies in their trendy loungewear, disconnected from the sublime community of the cinema? Or are they simply looking to get their money’s worth? We pay monthly to access vast vaults of video entertainment across dozens of genres, the individual user will never watch the majority of what they pay for and, subconsciously, I feel we are aware of this. Therefore it makes financial sense that we use what we already pay for to access the few things on offer that we actually do want to watch. Are the children so enraptured by Roblox and Fortnite because the nefarious pied pipers that craft these digital playgrounds have dopamine-hacked our youth? Or is it just exponentially simpler to check your group chats and hop online with your pals, rather than going through the parental making of calls, checking of schedules, and begging-for of rides, to access your friends in person? Social trends have moved children away from unstructured play in public spaces (public space in America being a nebulous concept at best) and design trends in both urban development and automotive design have made the current generation of first time parents hyper-aware of the risk that their little bundle of joy incurs just crossing the street to a neighbor’s yard. Nobody wants to be the parent being harangued in a court hearing about alleged negligence after little Braxton was turned into cat food at forty miles an hour by a guy off a Zyn and a Celcius trying to cook a parlay from the driver’s seat of his Ford Raptor. Perhaps it’s best if you discuss skibidi rizz and six seven with Ranger, Maverick, and Taxler on your Roblox. Plenty of time to leave the house once you’re licensed to drive. That’s the best way to access public space, after all.

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The thing about convenience is that it generally implies a premium paid to save effort. There’s a transactional aspect, but it’s transient and transparent. Take, for instance, valet parking. You can find this as a premium service at many hotels, restaurants, and nightclubs, it removes the headache of parking your own car for a nominal fee plus tip. You feel like a big shot. You get your car brought to you on the way out. Convenient!

Access is not convenience because access is inherently a two-way street. We cannot access without opening ourselves up to be accessed. Behind the flat lettermarks and non-threatening branding of modern tech companies lie vast cubicle mazes populated by greasy flesh and prying eyes. The unaccountable, unknowable, archons of access, the hidden figures in the architecture of our screen reality. To make use of any of these modern “conveniences” requires our consent to this mutual continuum of access. Doordash needs the address and the credit card on file. The streaming service needs the right to monitor our viewing preferences so their internal algorithms can recommend new content to us. Roblox, or any other online gaming platform, requires our assent to dense and impenetrable terms of service. I’m now reminded of one of my favorite visual gags on The Simpsons. While taking a tour of the Duff Beer Brewery, Homer is shown three vats housing Duff, Duff Lite, and the brewery’s newest product, Duff Dry. A widening of the frame reveals that all three of the vats are being fed by the same tube, split into three ends. These things, these matrices of access, come in a wide variety of masks, but fundamentally they all reach the same end. There are no software companies, there are no gig work apps, there are no entertainment conglomerates, there is no big tech, just big data. Big data is just another way to say we, the people.

Data is like money, it can do a functionally infinite number of things and it knows no master. Therefore it follows that the primary aggregators, cleaners, and salesmen of data are like banks. The deepening complication and convolution of our modern tech-symbiote existence can be thought of as a land rush for data, with institutional and independent operators waging a perpetual and asymmetric struggle for the new currency. He who controls the data controls the universe.

This is, by now, a well-trod beat. Writers like , , , and have created extensive bodies of work tracing the architecture of our Access Economy. In the face of the canon of essays, interviews, books, and blogs created by these professional journalists, the back-of-the-envelope Big Data 101 rant published by a humble amateur such as myself can only serve to bore, confuse, or (heaven forbid) misinform you. What I’d like to do instead is call your attention to a phenomenon I see downstream of the Access Economy, one that I feel somewhat uniquely qualified to highlight and explain as an online weirdo. When data is currency and big data concerns are banks, then that means information must be financialized. We standardize the info-unit, the meme, to borrow a concept from Richard Dawkins, and therefore commodify it. We create, therefore, a class of commodity broker to which every standard info-unit is of equal concern.

I would like to introduce you all to DJ Key Crank.

This is DJ Key Crank, there are many accounts like his but this one is the one I found first. He’s been on hiatus since late last year, I think his original account got banned and I mourn its passing daily. However, many of his best posts have been saved for posterity by my friends and I. I began flooding our chat with these in early 2024 and they were an instant hit, this sort of 5-in-1 shower gel approach to news and current events produces a certain comedic uncanny valley effect which I find charming.

Crank and his contemporaries feel like the natural evolution of something like the Jerry Springer Show. A kind of crowdsourcing of the same ugly urges to gawk, judge, and punch down that once drove things like carnival freak shows. As in many other industries, the advent of the internet has led to the traditional Freak seeing their labor devalued. Why pay a freak when any of us could become one overnight? One video clip or social media post could see any of us pressed into service under the world-spanning bigtop of the internet, changed from audience to performer with no guarantee of a return to our original condition. The pernicious thing about the Access Economy is that it’s passive until it turns invasive with sudden and all-encompassing violence. A newly-minted Internet Freak will wake up on the day they become public property with no knowledge that their life is about to change. Perhaps it’s a good kind of change, a few heady weeks until you can hire a publicist and start a podcast. All too often, though, it’s the kind of change that ends with angry people calling your place of employment and posting your address on public forums, in the hopes that someone will arrive at your front door and, ahem, access you.

The branding of this sort of content as “hood news” comes with a whole bouquet of racist connotations. It’s a buffet style serving of the American public’s ugliest urges, to scorn the vulnerable, “deviant,” freakish, and, naturally, the nonwhite. Crank is hardly the first such person (or persons) to gain attention and at least a little money from tapping into these urges, and I’d still call Crank morally superior to, say, Don Imus, Morton Downey Jr. or Keemstar. If anything the relative non-involvement of Crank is more interesting to me than the out-front egoism of the traditional shock jock, trash TV host, or drama streamer/vlogger. He’s an online lifeform shaped by the evolutionary environment and action/reward incentives of a world constructed to enable maximum access to some novel piece of information at all times. The “why,” the “how,” and often the “who” have been discarded in the name of efficiency. Something new has always dropped and we need to access it. Not understand it, just perceive it.

The really fascinating thing, though, is that the above posts swim in the same stream, and take up the same amount of space as this:

This, to me, is where the commodification of information takes us. It’s a flattening of tone, of priority, of meaning. A war between sovereign states that could potentially kill tens of thousands in active combat and affect the lives of millions throughout the world is no less or more important than 2010 Facebook/Tumblr platitudes about relationship troubles and fake friends, influencer beefs, bizarro human interest news stories, or simply somebody “going viral.” The tone and tenor of DJ Key Crank is reflective of the pervasive mood of the Internet in the 2020s. Success comes through the reduction of all information down to one default emotion: a low-ebb hype. Information arrives like hits from a vape pen, soliciting canned reactions that send the correct signals but maintain the customary ironic distance. Friend sends good thing, react with laughing emoji, reply: “Let’s gooooo.” Friend sends bad thing, no emoji reaction, reply: “Bro this sucks.” This low-ebb tonal uniformity makes information scrollable, extracting user data by the millisecond and the microinput as you keep the app open. When we gaze into the digital abyss, the abyss gazes also into us.1

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In the Access Economy, it’s only logical that we should proceed this way. Why should any of these stories matter more than any of the other ones? They all take up the same units of data, of attention. They all “weigh” one post, and posts are how we access the news, which means they are, in turn, how the news accesses us. The great crisis of my youth was sparked by bigness in the financial sector sun amok, indulged and engorged until at last it became “too big to fail.” I fear that the great crisis of my adulthood may ensue when data, information, becomes too big, too ubiquitous, too accessible, for any of it to have real meaning, texture, context, or permanence. What happens when data becomes too big to contain meaning? We may live to know the answer.

SPOILERS AHEAD, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

“I give him meaning! You just give him money! I give him a purpose!”

You know I suspect this’ll hit the memory hole at lightspeed now that Marty Supreme has arrived at the tail end of the kind of marketing campaign they’ll teach college courses about one day and pretty much obliterated any remaining collective memory we had of Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine (which I gave 2.5 stars here) but a lot of you people were talking some cash shit about The Safdie Bros Divorce and who the likely winner would be. I sure haven’t forgotten. “Oh Benny’s working with Paul Thomas Anderson. He’s such a natural actor. He’s so talented. The studios really like Benny. He’s got so many projects in the works. Josh just wants to fuck twentysomethings in Dimes Square and do blow with podcasters.” Ah well, victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan. You’ll get the next one, Benny-boy. Don’t believe any of that stuff about there not being any second acts in American lives. That wimp Fitzgerald didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. American lives are arguably mostly second acts.

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Buried somewhere within all the pomp and circumstance and shock and awe and shameless self involvement of Marty Supreme is a fascinating meditation on American self-image. It’s about a self-declared underdog who also, in one of the film’s more striking moments, declares himself a Great Man, ad altiora natus, born for higher things. A person with a purpose. So which is it? Are you the scrappy child of New York tenements, chasing a dream nobody believes in, facing the world alone with naught but talent, hard work, and self-belief? Or are you The Chosen One? The once in a generation talent, showman, sportsman, businessman, that can take something from a Game to a Sport with nothing but his presence and performance. Are you a self-styled “villain,” using the gift of gab to draw a crowd to root against you? Or are you just kind of a punk who likes having a ready excuse for people’s natural reactions to an unrepentant liar cheater and thief?

This, I am convinced, is a foundational American malady. We all wanna have it both ways. You see it now more than ever. Our celebrities wanna be normal people entitled to privacy. Our billionaire captains of industry wanna be working class populists. People who live aspirational lives want you to know how much it sucks. We dream of stability and pastoral virtue but also of luxury and novelty. These twin urges pull at every person walking this Earth, but it’s the curse of the American century that so many of us simply cannot resolve this contradiction. We can’t pick, we want it all, without exception or exclusion or tough decisions. It’s a fascinating basis for a character study, one that tips its hand in elegant fashion by introducing, as a foil to Our Boy Marty, an actual underdog. A child of a war torn nation who overcame a disability and the political headwinds of his age to become both a world champion as well as the kind of national hero Marty claims to want to be. The big dramatic finish of the first act makes the conclusion inevitable, it’s written in the stars of everyone involved. Endo-san just went home and built his clocks, Marty. He didn’t get to see the world with the Harlem Globetrotters. You’re too good to sell shoes from 9 to 5 and practice at night? Hell I bet he doesn’t even manage the clock store, your family at least owns the shoe store and you wanna tell me you’re too good to manage the shoe store? I thought this was your dream, your destiny, where’s your hustle, big dawg? Where’s that (Joey Diaz voice) Immigrant Mentality? The thing about being a national hero is that (in most cases) you have to be heroic. The thing about being great is that you have to (in most cases) be worthy of greatness. Marty Mauser is none of these things. He reminds me of Barry Lyndon, not an antihero, just an unworthy one, doomed to reach no good end despite all his talent, valor, and charisma. Like Christofuh before him, the regularness of life is simply too much for poor little Marty.

(I stand by this)

I’ve recently defended the public persona and career decision making of Tim Chalamet (he can get me to type his full given name by becoming a paid subscriber for $5 a month) and that same whole body, whole heart, no hedge against failure, capital-c commitment is present in Marty Supreme. I’m reminded less of Adam Sandler’s Howie Bling in Uncut Gems than I am of Al Pacino’s Tony Montana in Scarface. Like Tony, Marty Mauser is a creature of ambition and shamelessness, seeking to bend a world he only sort of understands to his will by faking it until he makes it. It’s an impressive feat to be this vile and this much of a movie and still have me rooting for you. Marty’s not likeable, but he’s charming! It’s a tightrope walk of a performance, constructing this sort of scoundrel, lovable scamp one moment and cruel manipulator the next. Frankly, if this character does what I suspect it’s going to do and embeds itself into pop culture for the next three to five years, I don’t wanna hear any more of this nonsense about the necessity of “likable protagonists.” That’s over, done, take that Dudley Do Right shit behind the barn with the shotgun.

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Tim C has help, it must be said. Tyler, The Creator kind of an ideal feat of stunt casting here. He’s as electric onscreen as he is on stage and deployed with just enough restraint in the broader story to make you think you want more. Genuinely very funny that his request to link with Tim delivered all those years ago in “Okra” has finally panned out.

Tell Tim Chalamet to come get at me
Skin glowin', clear of acne (Yuh)

(I didn’t forget!)

You can repeat those comments with Kevin O’Leary, who adds to the Safdie bros tradition of getting good work out of non-actors (though “Mister Wonderful” is somewhat stretching the definition of “non-actor”). Odessa A’Zion seems to be winning a lot of plaudits, but if I’m honest, I was much more engaged by Gwyneth Paltrow. She’s got a shockingly natural chemistry with Tim and provides an interesting foil to Marty as someone who “made it” but never found any happiness in it. Nice to see Fran Drescher as well, wish she had something to do!

Mirroring my thoughts on Marty himself I’m charmed by the audacity of the whole production but left wondering how much longer Josh Safdie can keep getting away with it. Once again we get a Safdie movie where a weird little amoral creep who can’t get out of his own way navigates a scary, mazelike New York to avoid people he’s cheated that want some degree of recompense, restitution, or revenge. I think it’s a pretty obviously superior film to The Smashing Machine but at least Benny seemed to want to get out of the box of just making “Safdie Bros Movies.” The second act of Marty Supreme is like a heavily fan-modded version of Good Time (mostly complimentary) but that effectively means it’s an entirely separate movie living inside another movie. I hate to blaspheme against the great man Abel Ferrara but I really could have done without the lost dog subplot! It’s shocking, engaging, but prefunctory and predictable. One could say Marty has an Addiction. But he really does want to be King of New York. First, though, he has to get to Tokyo and check into the New Rose Hotel. Uhhhhh, something something Bad Lieutenant, ah fuck it I’m out of shtick. Movie’s pretty great.

I rate this movie four and a half falling bathtubs out of five.

(I also stand by this)

“Don’t shoot anyone you love.”

SPOILERS. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

James Cameron real as hell for making two gigantic movies about how rad it would be to fall in love and raise a family with the princess of a utopian tribe of hunter-gatherers that can talk to God and then turning around to make another gigantic movie about how rad it would be to have a torrid drug-and-violence-fueled affair with the Aztec high priestess who fucking loves giving hearts and skulls to the Volcano God.

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Structurally flawed like a beautiful home on stilts in the Hollywood Hills that will collapse catastrophically if anyone over 200 lbs jumps on the floor in the kitchen. Cameron is Frankensteining a DLC expansion for Way of Water onto the planned Return of the Jedi-like plot for Avatar 3 that we had in 201X. The results are fascinating but entropy is getting into the bones here. For the first time we detect a lack of innovation, that trump card of this franchise so far. Having said all of that, I do have to praise some of what’s here.

Stephen Lang is the best part of these movies by far and we need to be more active in having that discussion. I actually think Cameron may see more of himself in his ostensible one note villain from the first movie than in any of his heroes. Both are old men made vital again by technology, both are doing business with corporate bean counters that they despise, even if they exist at their pleasure. Cameron and his villain are alike in that they’re both so deeply enmeshed in the corporate architecture, so shaped by these capitalist power structures they claim to be against, that it’s not even really clear they’re the same people anymore.

If this had been two hours and twenty minutes and been the Quaritch movie I’d probably say it’s the best one so far. Lang and Oona Chaplin are really good together (like better than Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana have ever been) and the novelty of BP/Raytheon/Tesla/Exxon-Mobil arming the Aztecs of Pandora with RPG’s is such a fun plot that it throws the stagnation of the rest of the cast into such stark relief. I understand that Spider the white boy dreads surfer dude is a Jar Jar Binks situation for some people but I can tolerate him well enough. It’s just a shame that nobody else can develop, at all. Again, I could forgive this is the movie was shorter and just meant to be a pure cliffhanger setup for Avatar 4 but we’re getting the Disney Franchise Maintenance second act special here and so nobody is permitted to move from where they were at the end of the last movie. My main criticism of Way of Water was that it was a great two and a half hour movie forced to be three hours. I have the same criticism here but even more so. Cameron’s infinite resources mean he’s always choosing to do more and the results are meandering and bloated when there’s a really decisive and efficient setup/payoff buried in here. The movie is asking me for grace so it can sort things out before the next time skip and then refusing to do anything with the majority of these characters. Even the new additions from Way of Water who could have really benefited from like one expository scene to provide some dimension get zilch. General Carmela Soprano is really getting no favors from this script!

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Honestly what makes me angriest about this movie is how afraid it is to take a big swing with all that extra time it insists on taking for itself. We’re told we’re gonna get our first proper look at this human colonial society on Pandora and we get nothing! There’s an oil refinery and some people taking pictures on their smartphones and some CNN-like News Channel but it all feels so safe, like placeholder assets. I understand if Cameron is just too good to pay a podcaster to be like a future space influencer but give me SOMETHING. I’d love a fucked up union hall for space whalers or a cigar bar for RDA execs. Something mean. The meanness is there in the script. Cameron’s Greenpeace War (Greenwar?) agenda is bleeding through more than ever and leads to the highest human body count in the franchise. So much of it passes without any weight, though. This is where the lack of novelty really negatively impacts the film, we’re playing the hits, which is a real danger signal with two more of these allegedly in production.

It’s a shame because I really do love so much of what we’re doing here in terms of paying stuff off. The Sully/Quaritch Solid Snake/Liquid Snake fistfight is rad as hell! I think the Sigourney thing is progressed as well as it could be but we’re still more in expansion pack territory there than true sequel range. The Sky Traders are a bit too Monster Hunter-coded to really wow me but I was Nodding and Raising my eyebrows at The Implication that the Na’vi do in fact have a rudimentary understanding of mercantile capitalism. I think it’s fun that Jake’s failson gets the whales to understand the utility of self defense! Pandora remains a very fun setting with a lot of potential, but this was the point where Cameron needed to give characters texture and he just passed on it. That’s forgivable in a two hour and twenty minute action movie. Less so in a three hour and change sci-fi epic. I had a good time but I’m mad!

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I rate this movie three and a half symbiotic mycelium out of five.

At the end of the day, I suppose I gotta thank .

A few months into my posting tenure on Notes I offered a list of profile names free to a good home. “Klaus Zynski” was atop the list. Pop Shit came into my replies and commented that it was easily the best of the lot. I asked if I should just use it myself. He said yes, and here we are.

I don’t think I even had a hundred subs back then. I had one fiction publication, two thirds of a draft of a novel, and an itch to get back into writing essays on something like a regular schedule. I resolved to do three things in 2025. First, finish the draft. Second, expand my social scene. Third, give Substack another shot. All three of these went very well, and it’s vital to remind myself of these facts.

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I have a bad habit of feeling like I wasted my year as we round into the autumn (always late in coming and somehow sudden despite the months of heat and humidity here in DC). I often lose track of how much I’ve actually managed to get done. I’ve gone from one fiction publication to six (one pending in the new year). I’ve got a novel to edit and sell. I’ve found vibrant and welcoming communities through my regular presence at The Alley fighting game tournament series and ’s regular events. Plus, I now have a date and a venue for a wedding. It has been a very good year, and through it all I’ve been humbled by this miraculous little niche I’ve fallen into on this strange little website.

The Strange Case of J.W. Yablonsky and Mr. Zynski

“I’ve created a monster! Cause nobody wants to see Marshall no more. They want Shady. I’m chopped liver.”

• Eminem, “Without Me”

When my mother called me Klaus for the first time I began to suspect I’d made a huge mistake.

My first modest branding success as an anonymous internet gremlin has spurred a crisis of identity. I got on this site in the first place because I wanted somewhere to send people that read my external publications in case they wanted more. Now I fear the funnel has inverted. I’ve become a Substack personality trying to get published externally. My process has changed, but remains in line with my own principles. My results have also improved exponentially. There’s a framework taking shape, a foundation upon which I can continue to build.

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Still, though, I remain uneasy. My Real Life is going very well, thank you for asking. I’m getting married. I’ve been to the gym about one out of every three days this year and am perilously close to developing abs. Liz and I keep a cozy little Hobbit hole with a well-equipped kitchen and The Creature is at a healthy weight, though her skepticism of modern medicine and inability to cough mean she’s congested at virtually all hours. I feel more qualified and confident in my professional life. Despite what feels like a fallow period to end the year, I’m feeling very good about my creative life and the two mental roommates that enable it. Klaus has been a pretty benign presence, all told, finding productive ends for jokes that randomly occur from my inner monologue and allowing (as anonymity often does) for a degree of freedom and honesty, free from the pain of being known.

I have a sort of nagging sense that there will come a time that I’ll have to take ol’ Klaus out behind the woodshed and send him off to meet God. Chalk it up to a fear of getting typecast. I’ve already confessed to a friend that I’ll likely die of embarrassment if I’m obligated to publish my debut novel as Substack’s Klaus Zynski rather than as JW Yablonsky or, heaven forbid, Under The Government Name. I’ve gotten exactly what I wished for out of this whole arrangement and so of course I’m finding new and novel ways to be unhappy with it. I’m getting greedy. I want to pitch and publish externally and do you have any idea how ridiculous I’d feel appending “AKA Klaus Zynski” at the end of my emails? But of course, I remember how few of you there were before I decided I’d give being Klaus a try and then I grow hesitant again. But surely nothing bad will come of killing the golden goose, I mean, it’ll make getting those eggs so much quicker!

It’s gotten to the point where people ask me things about Klaus. Mostly they ask about the avi. It’s Michael Ironside in David Cronenberg’s 1981 sci-fi thriller Scanners. Most people don’t clock it because they’re used to Bald Ironside, they’re used to Lt. Rasczak. The first time I met some friends from DC Movie Club in meatspace they were shocked to discover I don’t actually look Like That. I’ll admit I got a kick out of it.

I didn’t decide to use it for any particularly profound reason, I liked the visual, liked the expression Ironside was making at the particular moment I took the screenshot, liked the image of the third-eye bandage. If you want me to go a level deeper that’s really the main thing. When this blog used to be called BRAINWORMS, it made a bit more sense. The scene that particular shot is from ends with Ironside’s character pulling off the bandage to reveal the wound from a hole he tried to drill into his forehead. That was the idea. I’m gonna drill that hole and you’re gonna see what falls out. I don’t think I ever quite put that into practice. I don’t like the way I sound when I write personal essays, and you seem to prefer it when I shift my gaze externally, anyway.

Funnily enough, I have yet to be asked about the title of the blog. I assume people who get the joke know what I’m doing and have a little sensible chuckle about it. For everyone else, to quote the great Will Ferrell; “no one knows what it means, but it’s provocative.”

So Klaus has been a success. JW, though, I’m less sure about. He seems gaunt lately, shriveled, diminished. He’s gotten listless on me since he finished drafting his debut novel. Klaus is sucking up all the oxygen and pushing JW out to the margins. Granted, he’s generally pretty comfortable out there. JW has always been about the work and the work has gone well this year. Perhaps he’ll regain primacy as I shift into editing the novel and seeking further external publication, which will be my focus in the new year. I’m already in the process of pitching a few essays I’ve got in the on-deck circle and trying to prove myself a solid citizen of this new literary community. But that doesn’t mean I can’t celebrate the gains I’ve already made, and celebrate the people that have helped me make them.

“It’s Called Gratitude, and That’s Right”

I always feel like such an ass swelling with pride over my audience of less than a thousand. It’s peanuts in the grand scheme of things but the pathetic truth of it is that I’ve never enjoyed a platform this big. I spent my early and mid twenties banging my head against the brick wall of literature and media and feel at last that the stone is beginning to bleed at or near the same rate I bleed. It’s been a good year. I’ve come a long way. Now I want more. But for now I am content, deeply deeply content, to offer thanks and appreciation.

First, I want to express love and gratitude to my colleagues at KINDNESS REPORT. I thank , maybe my first proper acquaintance on this site, for his clarity of vision, trust in me as an editor and proofreader and unswerving commitment in marching to his own beat. I thank for his steady, quiet dedication to doing the little things that keep it all running smoothly. I thank and for their singular sense of style and ability to conjure new material for the mag seemingly from thin air. I thank for doing with images what can never be done with words. I thank for seeing all of us smearing shit on the walls of the internet like dadaist dingleberries and stopping to wonder if we might be onto something, artistically speaking. Last, but certainly not least, I thank , our fearless leader and creative dynamo. From the very beginning of this process it was Evanie that drew us into the orbit of what would become KR. No one has done more to shape the look, feel, and attitude of the magazine. The smartest move I’ve made as a part of this merry band is simply getting out of the way and letting Evanie cook.

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Getting one magazine onto an actual website was miraculous enough but the second made me truly feel blessed. I had merely hoped for a few able contributors to expand the magazine and take some of the workload out of our hands. I could have never predicted the sheer flood of talent that would enter our inbox, all with no expectation of a financial reward. To our distinguished contributors, you honor us, one and all. The privilege of evaluating and editing your work is not one I take lightly.

Next, because he’s such a good guy that he can handle the indignity of second billing, I’d like to thank my longtime friend and collaborator . Alex has been invaluable in editing many of my essays you’ve read on here and stepped in as a beta reader for the novel. As per usual his taste is impeccable and his feedback was superb. He does most of his posting on Bluesky or Letterboxd these days but it’s my earnest hope that he re-tests the waters on Substack in the coming year. He’s a very talented critic and this platform could use someone with his meticulous dedication to excavating an argument from primary sources.

Hell, all the IRL Substack friends deserve some love. , my former part-time comrade, has made some gestures towards getting more active on here and I hope he gives it a shot. He’d be great at it. was the first fellow Substacker I ever met in the wild and his consistent high-quality output is nothing short of astounding. FilmStack should take notice. In that neighborhood, also deserves your attention, their film and cultural criticism originates in the kind of marginalized viewpoint rarely substantiated with the kind of clarity and confidence they can boast. has been busy directing a whole-ass movie for most of 2025, so it’s understandable if he has better things to do but someone with his knowledge of and love for the form can only be a net positive to Substack’s community of cinema lovers. has also joined the growing film conversation on here and I have no doubt his taste and thoughtfulness will see him become a solid citizen of FilmStack before long. Finally, I must pay homage to . He goes last because he’s turned me green with envy by getting himself paid for a short story before I’ve managed it (I jest (or do I?)). I can’t feel too hard done, however, as his dedication to and love for his craft as a horror writer made it inevitable that someone would take notice.

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Beyond these men, women, and others, honorable personages one and all, I must make space for . She’s my rock, my constant, my companion in life. If we reach a Klaus: Year Two around this time next year, she’ll be my wife, and what an honor that will be. I don’t know if I could ever properly communicate to her how much it means to me that she supports me in all of this. One of the most meaningful moments I had all year came a few months ago. I was mired in the finale of the Travelogue and unsure if it was even worth finishing. The immediacy of prior entries was lost to me over the months since I’d been home and I had no real hope of recapturing it. I told her I might just punt on the whole thing, and she told me I needed to finish it, for the simple reason that she’d want to consult it in the years to come, so she could remember what it had been like. She cared enough to want me to finish.

My family have been so supportive of this whole journey, almost without exception. Mom, Dad, Aunts, Uncles, Cousins. Everyone seems to want me to do well, everyone seems to enjoy what I do here. Everyone is so kind.

I feel blessed, truly.

What the hell did I ever do to deserve all this love in my life?

“I Think We’re Just Getting Started”

The sad fact of the matter is this: I will likely devote less time to Substack in the new year. I’m sure you’ll get dedicated essays when the mood strikes me and I do have a few ideas for simpler, shorter, more straightforward newsletters to keep the lights on, but between a full time job, editing a novel and maybe beginning a few others, seeking external publications and planning a wedding, my calendar is looking full before the year even begins. I want to keep my priorities in order and continue to grow this blog. The trick will be finding balance between my ambitions. You can help me get a sense of what that balance will look like by filling out the inaugural Genius of Loathe reader survey, linked for your convenience below.

Reader Survey

Moreover, if you’d like me to forget all this charging at windmills trying to be a “real” freelance writer and supply you with the Good Shit here on Substack, then I invite you to consider a paid subscription to Genius of Loathe. I have no current plans to paywall past or future essays and consider any monetary support I receive from my audience to be a bonus to the satisfaction of simply having an audience, but if you want more, there’s an obvious way to encourage me towards it. The same goes for KINDNESS REPORT, any tip we receive by means of our Ko-Fi is strictly voluntary but it’ll certainly encourage us to start thinking about Volume 2 and beyond. If you’d like to give us some feedback on that front, may I direct you to our inaugural Kindness Report reader survey, also enclosed for your convenience.

Kindness Reader Survey

Finally, with all the boring business out of the way, I’d like to reiterate my gratitude towards anyone who spent time reading this blog in the past year. I am deeply thankful for your support and hope to prove worthy of it again in the upcoming year, but for now I feel it’s prudent to spend some time reading, writing, pitching, and getting my ducks in a row to make 2026 even better. Whatever your traditions this time of year, please be good to yourself, be good to the people that love you, and take a moment to appreciate the year’s victories.

• JW

It is not yet Christmas at time of writing and the Oklahoma City Thunder are currently +150 on DraftKings Sportsbook to win the NBA finals. The next closest teams are the Denver Nuggets at +600 and then the Houston Rockets at +1000. We quickly enter longshot territory thereafter. The disparity is striking, but unsurprising. The Thunder are 22-1 at time of writing and making a shark tank of a Western Conference look more like a koi pond. They are dominant to the extent that their best player, reigning league MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, is generally afforded the privilege of working half days. It’s the NBA, of course, and so nothing can be said to actually matter until February at the earliest, but a grim fatalism is setting in about not just this season but the three or four seasons which may ensue thereafter. These Thunder are young, deep, and possess the assets to draft or trade for a solution to any deficiency they may acquire. If you want to imagine the future of professional basketball, imagine a Converse Shai 001 stomping on a human face, forever.

How the hell did we get here?

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Machiavellianism with Pat Riley Characteristics

In 2010 LeBron James destroyed the world as we knew it.

No I don’t mean like that.

On July 8, 2010, ESPN broadcast The Decision, a live TV special wherein LeBron would announce his err– decision about where he’d be playing basketball in the coming years. The broad strokes of the story are a matter of public record. King James chose to take his talents to South Beach and join the Miami Heat. The result was a seismic shift. An already very good Heat team became almost inconceivably talented with the addition of James and the criminally underappreciated Chris Bosh, who’d already signed in free agency from Toronto when James made his Decision. It took a rising hero of the sport and turned him into a loathed villain almost immediately. The Decision was cowardly, cynical, anticompetitive. Magic Johnson and Bird Larry would never have teamed up in Chicago with Michael Jordan, or so a billion Facebook memes proclaimed.

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What this narrative ignores is that the dreaded “superteam” has always been a part of NBA basketball. What were those Showtime Lakers, those Larry Bird Celtics, those Jordan Bulls, if not superteams? I don’t wanna hear any nonsense about “doing it the right way,” none of these teams were built by The Power of Friendship and hard work, this isn’t a movie or a sports anime. I never hear anyone bitch and moan about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar leaving Milwaukee, Bill Walton leaving Portland, Dennis Rodman leaving Detroit and then leaving San Antonio, or, for that matter, Shaq leaving Orlando in Free Agency. Hell, the Boston Celtics literally had a super team when LeBron decided to go to Miami, as they acquired Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen in 2007 to supplement their homegrown star in Paul Pierce. It worked! The Celtics won a ring in 2008 with that all-star core and made another finals appearance in 2010, notably eliminating LeBron’s Cavaliers in the East Finals and perhaps even creating the impetus for The Decision.

If you give a professional athlete the choice between being loved as a loser and being hated as a winner, they’ll take the second choice nine times out of ten. This was the choice Pat Riley, noted winner and President of the Heat, gave LeBron. You wanna stay in Cleveland and pretend you can get it done with Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Anderson Varejao, Jamario Moon, and the bloated carcass of Shaquille O’Neal? Or do you wanna win? Loved or feared? Easy choice. Losers are lovable. Winners inspire fear. Riley’s an Irish-American, but his taste in menswear is as Italian as the House of Medici, and his approach to building and wielding power is similarly Machiavellian.

LeNapoleon JaBonaparte

The “Heatles” (nobody called them this until like 2020) made four straight NBA finals appearances and won two. We all had a good time watching them choke that first finals appearance away against a scrappy, veteran Dallas Mavericks squad carried by the brilliance of Dirk Nowitzki and the clutch shooting of Jason Terry. The whole saga even got a cathartic finale as the San Antonio Spurs played some of the most beautiful team basketball ever seen to take the 2014 finals in five games. America’s ball coach dads stood laughing, Budweiser in hand, and told their sons and daughters that this was how the game was played, not like these pampered, petulant divas on the Heat. But the rec league Dads don’t run NBA franchises. The Thermidorian Reaction against the excesses of the Heatles would be short lived, and a new Imperial phase would soon ensue.

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The Heatles dissolved almost as quickly as they came together, and for a moment it seemed that the Superteam Revolution would be a blip. LeBron returned to Cleveland like a man going back to his wife after a wild, scandalous fling. The Cavaliers had re-armed after a few years of basement-dwelling, and dutifully sold off some project players to acquire Kevin Love and complete the now-customary superstar triad for The Return of the King. Love accepted the downgrade from superstardom to play the thankless third option Chris Bosh role alongside an emerging Kyrie Irving’s more mercurial Dwayne Wade and just like that we had Heatles North.

It’s interesting to consider the evolution of our erstwhile protagonist in all this. LeBron’s move to South beach was seen by many as an abdication of responsibility and internal accounts from the time certainly support this. LeBron was fed up carrying the scoring duties for a whole roster and wanted to move into more of a jack of all trades point forward role, slashing, shooting, and distributing all at an elite level. There is no running from destiny, however. It didn’t take long to become clear that even with Wade and Bosh’s prodigious talents, the Heat offense ran through LeBron James. There was no talk of a reduced scoring load for LeBron on the Cavs. Going to Miami meant accepting a crown from someone qualified to bestow it in Pat Riley, going back to Cleveland meant that like Napoleon before him, The King would crown himself.

The 18th Brumaire of Kevin Durant

LeBron’s move to Miami didn’t just reset the competitive meta for all professional basketball, it sparked an economic crisis in the league. The emergence of the superstar triad to supplant the traditional superstar tandem (e.g. Shaq and Kobe, MJ and Scottie) meant that teams blessed with traditionally strong rosters were no longer rich enough and the contender class were now at critical risk of falling into poverty. If assembling as many high volume scorers as possible was now the meta, and lack of support for a superstar was sure to result in a free agency departure or forced trade on less than ideal terms, then the hyperinflation in both contract and trade value for perceived stars was inevitable. The league would see a bank run on name brand talent, as teams sold good players at a loss to acquire players they thought could make them great. Quieter, less catastrophic failures would also ensue, as teams with reasonably strong situations would hold pat and wait for free agency to land that one special piece that would take them over the top, rather than pursuing a more aggressive program of team building.

What people failed to remember was that “Superteams” are generally a very risky business. Remember Karl Malone and Gary Payton on the Shaq/Kobe Lakers? Real heads will remember the Houston Rockets ill-fated “Superfriends,” where Charles Barkley, Scottie Pippen, and Hakeem Olajuwon united to be old, grumpy, and often-injured together. Hell, a big expensive star-laden roster that would achieve nothing already existed in New York at the time Superteam Mania got underway in earnest, as Carmelo Anthony, J.R. Smith, and Amar’e Stoudemire united in the Big Apple to be much better in NBA 2K than they ever were in real life.

Ironically, the next true “superteam” to emerge would be built the old fashioned way. Under the stewardship of Steve Kerr, a vital role player on the late-era Jordan Bulls, the Golden State Warriors would develop a homegrown star trio of Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, and Wardell Stephen Curry II, who you likely know better by his middle name. These Warriors would pioneer a futuristic approach to the game that stressed the primacy of the three point shot. Crucially, they bucked the trend of a third star scorer. Draymond Green’s commitment to defense, rebounding, and dirty work allowed Steph and Klay, “The Splash Brothers,” the freedom to fire at will. The result was a dominance built on balance. The Warriors defeated the Cavaliers in the first edition of what would become an iconic run of four finals meetings between the two juggernauts. The Cavs would get their revenge and deny the Warriors the honor of a claim to the greatest season ever played after a record setting 73-9 regular season, as LeBron masterminded the first ever finals comeback from a 3-1 series disadvantage to win Cleveland’s first sporting championship in over 50 years.

Enter Kevin Durant. Six feet, eleven inches tall. Built like Jack Skellington. Scores from anywhere on the floor. The year is 2016. He is a Free Agent two seasons removed from winning an MVP award. He is taking his talents to the Bay Area to join the Golden State Warriors.

Karl Marx teaches us that historical events appear twice, first as tragedy, then as farce. Durant’s move to the Bay was the farcical recurrence of The Decision. The irony doubles when we consider that this hyperinflation of the Superteam concept came about as a result of near miss with superteam building the old fashioned way. The Oklahoma CIty Thunder of the early 2010s somehow had three future MVP’s on their roster and never won a ring. James Harden departed for Houston just as he was emerging as a generational scorer, owing to a cap crunch that would soon be resolved by an improved TV deal and an expanded salary cap. The remaining tandem of Russell Westbrook and and Durant fell short again and again, losing to the Warriors in the West finals to precipitate Durant’s departure.

The Heatles were at least a big bold experiment, an ambitious personnel swing to take a good team and make them great. The Next Chapter, The Slim Reaper arriving as a ringer in the Bay, was what people thought The Decision was. Superteam inflation became superteam hyperinflation, The Best Regular Season Team Ever just added a consensus top 5 player in the world. How can any team be “super” enough to compete?

The answer is grim and obvious. They couldn’t. The Warriors won the next two Finals and enshrined their dynasty, after which Durant would exit, owing in large part to acrimony with Draymond Green. For my own part I’ll say I’ve always been an admirer of The Durantula, especially as a foil to LeBron. LeBron James is a great basketball player. Kevin Durant is a great scorer. LeBron James is a great brand manager. Kevin Durant is a great poster. In embracing villainy he became a kind of sin eater for the ills of his age. But he’ll never be forgiven as LeBron was. He’ll never be loved in the same way as he enters his gray eminence years. Perhaps it could have been if he’d brought an elusive first Larry O’Brien trophy to Phoenix along with Chris Paul and Devin Booker, but it simply wasn’t to be. If only, if only.

“Real Superteamism Has Never Been Tried”

If I keep doing this as a linear history I’m gonna write a book. Neither of us signed up for that. Let’s embrace the entropy inherent in all sports conversation and Remember Some Guys.

2012–2013: Los Angeles Lakers

I’ll begin in a spirit of fellowship and good faith by shoving the shaving-cream pie in my own face but before I do let me just say that David Stern will be Getting These Hands in the afterlife for not letting Chris Paul become a Los Angeles Laker in 2012. I mean it was disgraceful even at the time for the commissioner of the league to intervene in a trade like that and it’s even worse now that one of the generational talents of the 2000s and 2010s will retire ringless. I mean– oh shit here comes the pie lemme post the Infamous Magazine Cover real quick.

In reacting to the rise of The Heatles, the Lakers decided they’d play a golden oldie and poach an MVP caliber big man from the Orlando Magic. He’s a bit of a punch line these days but people forget how dominant prime Dwight was. He was on the outs in Orlando after a deeply cringe inducing feud with head coach Stan Van Gundy and Pau Gasol’s relationship with the Lakers was mortally wounded after an abortive trade attempt. It made a lot of sense at the time!

It failed simply because an aging Steve Nash is no substitute for prime Chris Paul. Even with CP3 it’s hard to imagine it working. Kobe getting old and grouchy. Dwight out here playing with Legos and eating Starburst and whatever the hell else he does. (The Personal Life Section of Dwight Howard’s wikipedia page makes for interesting reading to say the least.) The vibes were off with this one from the jump. Even after the cessation of the Dwightmare, the ensuing rebuild meant Lakers basketball was No Fun At All until Kobe retired.

2013-2014 Brooklyn Nets

I’m stretching the definition of “superteam” here somewhat. I’ll be honest, I mostly just wanted to post The Clip.

Ah, there we go.

This one’s even simpler. KG old. Paul Pierce old. Deron Williams should really be talked about more, as he was one of the best guards in basketball at his peak. Injuries began to get the best of him in Brooklyn, however, and he never recovered. I’d watch Joe Johnson highlights like right now but it’s rare that a player that ball dominant can ever play winning basketball, at least as a centerpiece. This would be a common theme in the superteam era. Pierce and Williams needed to shoot and slash too. How are they gonna get touches if Iso Joe is recording an AND-1 Mixtape on every possession? These Nets made the second round of the playoffs and got embarrassed by the Heatles. Paul Pierce went into a rather entertaining journeyman bench scorer arc afterwards and KG retired. It was over pretty quickly.

The long term consequences, however, continue to this day. The initial trade package that brought the aging superstars to Brooklyn allowed the Celtics to assemble their current title-winning core. It’s worth pointing out that while Boston was first to market on the Big 3/Superteam trend, they were also among the first to abandon it in favor of a deeper, more balanced team concept. The draft picks secured by demolishing the remaining pillars of the Big 3 allowed them to turn it around in short order and contend sustainably, something that’s difficult to do when you’ve bet the farm on high end talent.

2017-2018 Oklahoma City Thunder

This one’s tragic.

Without franchise centerpiece Durant, Russell Westbrook was forced to put on the greatest one man show in modern basketball to keep the bottom from falling out in OKC. Backup arrived in 2017, in the form of a badly aging Carmelo Anthony, about whom the less is said, the better, and Paul George.

Everyone has jokes for PG-13. Wayoff P. Pandemic P. Podcast P. But I think he may be the greatest individual victim of the super team era. He left a slumping Indiana Pacers team to chase something greater in OKC only to find it had left just before he arrived. This fate would follow him wherever he went, and he was far from finished moving in 2018. The essential sin of the age, neglecting the opportunity to grow and turn things around, to turn bad situations into better ones in favor of pursing the maximum advantage in the moment, can be read in Paul George’s long slow decline, from a guy who looked like he could be one of the faces of basketball, to just another veteran mercenary. Always well paid, never beloved. When those Indiana Pacers played for a title this past year, I wonder if Paul George ever considered that he could have been there, maybe even helped them win, if he’d just stayed put.

2021-2022 Brooklyn Nets

History somehow repeats as farce again in the vicinity of Kevin Durant! These Nets were supposed to be the New Cavs!

The Warrior Winning Machine finally tore itself apart (as all winning machines must) in 2019. More on that later. Durant suffered a torn achilles in game five of the Finals and joined Kyrie Irving in signing for the perpetual little brother of NYC basketball in the Brooklyn Nets, who then acquired James Harden and seemingly every other veteran chasing a ring that summer.

This is an odd one and I’m gonna punt here just because, like, it worked when everyone played together! It just never happened, for some reason! The eventual champion Milwaukee Bucks needed overtime to eliminate this team in seven games! The Greatest Team That Never Was. If there’s a tell-all book in the works I bet it’ll be bonkers. Kyrie nearly retired to do Black Israelite shit full time!

The Philadelphia 76ers Since Roughly 2018

“Bro, trust the process. Bro, Ben Simmons is the new LeBron. Bro, Markelle Fultz is going to be a star. Bro, Brett Brown is the problem. Bro, Jimmy Butler is the problem. Bro, Ben Simmons is the problem. Bro, we should have paid Jimmy Butler. Bro, Tobias Harris is the problem. Bro, we got James Harden bro we’re winning it all. Bro, Joel Embiid is the real MVP. Bro, Tyrese Maxey is so much better than James Harden. Bro, Doc Rivers is the problem. Bro, we got Paul George. Bro, we just need to trust the process a little more. Just a few more years, bro. I know Embiid can’t jump anymore but he sucks anyway. Oh now they did a magazine feature and I like him again. Bro, have you seen VJ Edgecombe? Bro, where are you going? Bro?”

The Los Angeles Clippers Lehman Brothers Arc

In 2019, the Superteam Era seemed to be drawing to its natural end. Kawhi Leonard and a misfit Toronto Raptors team had gone on a genuinely magical run to the finals and beaten the Warriors in six games. Durant was leaving The Bay, LeBron was a Los Angeles Laker, and a new generation of emergent talent was making the league’s hegemonic powers begin to show their age. The passing of the torch came in the MVP race, as the leagues best player was assessed as not a LeBron James, a Steph Curry, or a former/current member of the Oklahoma CIty Thunder, but instead honored Giannis Antetokounmpo, the centerpiece of an emergent contender in Milwaukee of all places. Contenders seemed to be popping up everywhere, Denver, Phoenix, Dallas, and, of course, the reigning champs in the great white north.

Then Kawhi Leonard did something dumb.

The Klaw had us all thinking he could walk on water for a few months. It wasn’t just a phenomenal performance, it was poetic. After playing the role of the emerging star on the last San Antonio Spurs title team, Leonard had been mired in a long term spat with his employers over alleged mismanagement of a hard to pin down injury. He was traded to a Toronto Raptors team which had been receiving a regularly scheduled playoff asskicking from LeBron and the Cavs for the past five years and immediately revealed himself as not only the missing ingredient for a Raptors core which was accustomed to heartbreak but as arguably one of the world’s best players. The superstar no one wanted led a team of scrappy misfits to win his adopted franchise its inaugural championship.

Then he left.

Like we said before, this isn’t a movie. If it were, Kawhi (played maybe by Michael B. Jordan) would have met some local girl in a flattering pair of mom jeans and discovered the charms of this chilly little Canuck metropolis. In a movie he’d have stayed. In real life, he signed with the Los Angeles Clippers. He didn’t wanna deal with the winters, didn’t wanna pay the Canadian taxes, didn’t wanna be a Raptor. He never did. The Board Man wanted to get paid.

Kawhi’s move to the Clippers was dumb in the way a man buying a Corvette with all the trimmings after winning the lottery is dumb. It’s ripe for parody but not malicious, just silly. It’s what happened next, what the Clippers did in order to court their new franchise player, that was truly, historically, league-breakingly stupid.

Enter Paul George. Cue the Infamous Magazine Cover.

It had to be him. Who else? God hates Paul George, I am convinced. Go watch the video of him breaking his leg and tell me that man isn’t predestined to suffer. Don’t actually do that, it’s worse than you remember. I hope it doesn’t still ache, Paul. You have enough pain in your life.

Kawhi decided he needed one more star to make championship contention happen, it was decided, whether by noted Fun Guy Kawhi Leonard or noted Flop Sweat Enthusiast Steve Ballmer, that Paul George was the man. The Oklahoma City Thunder could name their price, any price. And Sam Presti, GM of the Thunder, the hidden figure that makes the whole equation make sense, did just that.

Look at all those fucking draft picks! Look at them! It’s five years hence and the Thunder Still Have Draft Picks From This Trade! You sold them the steel to build the Death Star, you clowns!

Once you’re done admiring the dragon’s hoard of draft picks that turned into championship level contributors, and remembering Danilo Gallinari, look a little further up, and you’ll notice a young, lanky, sneaky athletic project guard (a Canadian, no less!) by the name of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Sam Presti didn’t just get a dragon’s hoard in return for Paul George, he got an actual baby dragon, one which has now become an adult dragon, wearing annoying clothes and burninating the countryside.

What happened next was like a train wreck in slow motion. The alleged superteam Clippers fiddled, recalibrated, rearmed, reimagined, but never seriously contended. They couldn’t pivot. They couldn’t blow it up and tank (with what draft picks)? The folly of the superteam era becomes crystal clear in their decline. The Clippers became too big to fail, but there are no bailouts for catastrophic bad bets in professional sports. At time of writing they are 6-16, 13th in the West, and owe the Thunder their first round draft pick. Paul George is no longer a Clipper. James Harden’s brilliance is the only thing standing between the league’s best team and a draft lottery pick. Kawhi Leonard spent the 2020s as the most consistently inconsistent man in basketball, brilliant when healthy but often injured, and has most recently become mired in a bizarre no show job scandal. I suppose the Board Man really did wanna get paid.

So, what did we learn?

Well, as Joni Mitchell famously put it; “you don’t know what you got till it’s gone,” and it can go rather quickly in our modern age. Sam Presti is merely the exemplar of a school of thought which has governed basketball in the 2020s, one that seeks a return to more holistic team building, finding balance and value. Consider the Denver Nuggets, who won their own inaugural championship with a home-grown core built around the unique genius of Nikola Jokic. Jokic began his career as the sort of moonshot project player that would have been waived in an instant by a team facing the financial realities of paying two or three or more name brand stars. By simply waiting for him to come good alongside erstwhile costars Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr, along with the value pickup of Aaron Gordon, the Nuggets built a monster their own way, and reaped the rewards of the long game. Consider, as well, the Boston Celtics, who finally got over the hump for their first title since that 2008 superteam with a home grown, home developed star tandem of Jaylen Brown and Jason Tatum after years of going close with a series of free agent stars.

The Thunder can be thought of as an expansion of this same phenomenon. Whether he meant to do so or not, Sam Presti illustrated that when your competitors will pay any price too capture the present before it slips away, you can often buy the future for pennies on the dollar.

NOTE: While a general effort has been made to avoid spoilers and minimize discussion of plot and lore specifics, any serious examination of these games requires a degree of excavation into their mechanics, including player choice and consequence. If you wanna go in truly blind, you absolutely should. I love these games and hope you do too.

In 2148, human colonists on Mars discover a subterranean vault containing ruins from an advanced, extinct, spacefaring civilization called the Protheans. One year later, scientists decoding information contained in the vault make the real discovery; Pluto’s moon Charon is, in fact, not a moon at all. It’s a frozen megastructure which, when reactivated, serves as a kind of portal. The first ship to venture through the newly-reactivated “relay” finds itself transported thirty-six light years in the blink of an eye to a near-identical megastructure which can return it to our solar system as easily as it left. The infinite distances inherent in space travel become manageable, maybe even mundane, overnight. Humanity takes its first halting steps into the great unknown, only to discover that not only are we not alone in the universe, we’re several thousand years late to the party. In graduating to the galactic stage, we enter a diverse, cosmopolitan, ideologically pluralistic society, shaped not by the jingoism of a Heinlein or the idealism of a Roddenberry but by more mundane, cynical, modern forces. Galactic society in this Milky Way littered with the marvels of our absent Prothean predecessors is wealthy, rules-based, ordered, and more or less peaceful, but scratch at the veneers, and you’ll soon see how much atrocity is ignored for the sake of a few rich, peaceful pockets. Indeed, the galaxy is a place shaped by the all-too-human forces of division, hate, fear, bigotry, greed, exploitation, and ambition, and if we can’t overcome those barriers, then we stand no chance whatsoever against whatever it is that killed the Protheans, whatever it is that might be coming back for us. Welcome to Mass Effect.

Mass Effect might just be my favorite science fiction setting. I thought this before beginning my long-overdue replay of BioWare’s venerable trilogy of action RPG’s by means of the excellent Legendary Edition remaster. Now, after three games, one-hundred-and-thirty hours of gameplay, and all the dizzying highs, punishing lows, and creamy middles which separated 2007’s Mass Effect from 2012’s Mass Effect 3, I retain an unreserved affection for the franchise. This was never going to be a critical reevaluation. Mass Effect was my adolescence and the time I’ve spent replaying it has been like a long vacation in my hometown, amidst old friends, each just as I’d left them. I’m different, however, and from a new vantage point I think of new things. Mass Effect’s time as a premier brand in gaming overlapped in large part with the 7th Console Generation. It’s no serious stretch to say that when Mass Effect died, and it is dead, let’s be clear on that, the 7th Gen died with it. Given that Legendary Edition provides the player with the ability to reduce that 5 year window into a cohesive, relatively seamless experience, it allows us to find and read the signs of those changing times.

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How BioWare Got “Effective”

Founded in 1995 by a trio of medical school buddies in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, BioWare spent the next decade forging a reputation for strong character, plot, and scenario writing and a house style predicated on player choice and consequence. The fledgling studio found its claim to fame with the original Baldur’s Gate, which digitized the pen-and-paper Dungeons and Dragons ruleset and set the expectation of what a “BioWare game” would be like for years to come. Many role playing games tell memorable stories, BioWare’s games tell “choose your own adventure” stories, the kind that reflect the moments of player agency and choice which form the analog foundation for RPG’s as a genre. Hero A and his brave companions chase dastardly wizard B through evil castle C as it burns to the ground around them. Wizard B could be cornered and killed, winning the party a handsome reward, or the party could take a detour to rescue D villagers captive in the dungeon. Saving the villagers before the castle burns down is obviously good, but if wizard B gets away, maybe he’ll hurt even more innocent people. Might have to consider sacrificing a few innocents to stop that wizard. The majority of the fun of an RPG isn’t rolling 20 sided dice to cast lightning bolt, it’s making those choices and seeing the places they take you.

If BioWare won an enthusiast fanbase with Baldur’s Gate and its sequel, the true breakthrough into the gaming mainstream would come with 2003’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. KOTOR was another successful application of the BioWare storytelling formula, but won a far wider audience, owing to its more approachable systems, wide home console release, and the bulletproof brand identity of the Star Wars IP. While BioWare had proven bona fides as hitmakers by this point, they’d done it by relying on licensing agreements with LucasArts and Wizards of the Coast. With KOTOR in the rear view, an original IP was the obvious next step, something the company could own and iterate on for years to come, something that could take advantage of their commercial momentum and expand the player base even further, marrying the storytelling and scenario design techniques that had become the company’s bread and butter with the approachable, action-driven gameplay which was growing to hegemonic popularity in console gaming.

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The 7th console generation’s early years were defined by growing pains, as developers and publishers grew accustomed to the never-before-seen costs associated with high-definition graphics. For many ambitious independent devs, accustomed to doing a lot with meager resources, this wall would prove too high to climb. But BioWare was different. In 2007, the studio was acquired by Electronic Arts. EA and Microsoft’s commercial muscle grew the imminent release of Mass Effect from an exciting new project from a proven dev to a unit-shifting XBOX-exclusive blockbuster release.

Mass Effect, Or: Space Ranger Jack Bauer Destroys the Al-Qaeda Mothership

Mass Effect starts like this: you are Commander Shepard, executive officer of a cutting edge starship called Normandy. In recognition of your exemplary service record as an officer in the Human Systems Alliance military, and the personal recommendation of Normandy’s captain, David Anderson (voiced in all three games by the inimitable Keith David) you’ve been recommended for induction into the Spectres, a kind of extralegal, multinational special operations force empowered by the galaxy’s equivalent of the UN. Spectres operate with an extremely high degree of independence to resolve the most sensitive situations threatening galactic peace. They are the elite of the elite, and fifteen years after mankind made first contact, you’re about to become the first human to ever hold the title.

Your informal final exam before joining up officially takes you to the thriving human colony of Eden Prime, where recent excavations have discovered more Prothean artifacts. Normandy has been dispatched to Eden Prime to collect the artifact and take it somewhere it can be studied, should be a milk run. Awwww wouldn’t you know it, the colony is currently being slaughtered. A race of sentient, self-replicating machines called the Geth have rolled up and started impaling colonists on big spikes that turn them into techno-organic zombies. This is, suffice it to say, a bit odd. After rebelling against their creators and evicting them off their planets and into space 300 years ago, the Geth have pretty much kept to themselves. Furthermore, after clearing the Geth forces via combat tutorial and reaching the artifact you were sent to retrieve, Shepard experiences an incoherent apocalyptic vision of Prothean civilization being wiped out 50,000 years ago by a far bigger, far older, and far nastier race of machines.

The evidence for the massacre on Eden Prime implicates another Spectre, but you can’t prove anything, and nobody seems eager to believe the new guy from the uppity new species that showed up a decade and a half ago. Your mission is clear; put a team together, hunt down the rogue Spectre, foil his plans, and unravel the mystery of galaxy-wide extinction before it’s too late. How you do that is up to you. Hell, who’s doing that is up to you.

Shepard is a player-created avatar, with his or her features and background decided by the player. Where did this person come from? How did they get to be this renowned hero? It’s little more than window dressing in the grand scheme of things but it starts the player off in the appropriate mindset for role-playing. What kind of Shepard are you trying to play1? You’re going to get many many chances to more fully articulate what sort of person Commander Shepard is, and that begins from the moment you start the game.

We’ve already spoken a lot about choices, and so an explanation of how exactly those choices work is long overdue. When making Knights of the Old Republic, BioWare would lean on the Star Wars mythos; moral choices are either classified as light side or dark side. In Mass Effect, this binary, red team/blue team system would remain, albeit with significant alterations. From big choices to small dialog exchanges, the Mass Effect games assess the player’s alignment as either Paragon or Renegade. What exactly this means would change from game to game, and how exactly these games reflect the values and culture of the time by means of these choices is one of the most consistently compelling things about them, but it’s never as simple as good/evil. Paragon Shep can be a bit of an insufferable goody two shoes at points and Renegade Shep can be a cold, callous motherfucker, but in general I would summarize the system as follows. Paragon Shep thinks he’s the protagonist of an Aaron Sorkin show. Renegade Shep thinks he’s the protagonist of a Taylor Sheridan show.

The first thing you notice about Mass Effect is that it is most certainly a game from 2007. This is not a comment on the graphics, which, thanks to Legendary Edition, are actually quite good. No, what feels so 00s coded about this game is the way it approaches the real world influences of its broader story, which is to say, ahem: a massive terror attack on a symbol of human civilization killed thousands, and our quest to avenge the innocents that died on that day is not receiving the support of the international community due to a lack of evidence.

Surprise! It’s a 9/11 game! Sort of. Stay with me now.

Far from some Global War On Terror paranoiac screed, the original Mass Effect does what good speculative fiction often does; it takes a real world problem out of its context and, in the process, alters our perspective. Adding the interactive storytelling of the video game medium to the mix just allows space for the big, mature questions to unfurl and affect players differently. Because these are big, mature questions and they deserve consideration. This stupid space ranger pew pew game actually houses a pretty compelling debate about the merits and limits of neoliberal internationalism. It’s easy to reduce the Paragon/Renegade question in the first game to tolerance, patience, humility, and cooperation versus paranoid space racism but I found myself shocked by how often I thought “well shit, maybe they have a point” while interacting with more militarist, xenophobic human characters. This is a galaxy pockmarked by interstellar war, state sanctioned genocide, and a political order that postures towards egalitarianism while hoarding power and influence among only a handful of the intelligent species you’ll encounter in the Milky Way. Hell, even in the fifteen years we’ve been a proper player in galactic politics, humanity has already found itself embroiled in one major war against a rogue state of pirates and slavers. The supposed champions of peace and unity didn’t lift a finger to help us then2. Maybe the gaps between cultures really do become too wide to bridge when we stop being able to call upon shared humanity as a unifying force. Maybe speaking softly and carrying a big stick is the most prudent path forward. Hell, maybe what this galaxy needs is a swift kick in the ass from a boot crafted with good old fashioned human ingenuity. Maybe we need to stop asking politely, and if the system won’t help us, then maybe we need a new system.

But then my thoughts travel back in the opposite direction. There’s a certain appeal in advocating for the death of the system, highlighting its myriad injustices and failures. In certain historical moments, it can become frighteningly easy to topple these old orders. But the path back to normalcy, towards forging a new order, can be long and bloody. Look at real-world human societies where, whether by means of warfare, revolution, or social strife, it really did all burn down, and the people left over really did have to start again from scratch. You’ll find there’s far less interest in that sort of thinking among people who really have lived through the deaths of old ways. Hating “The System,” whether in a fictional setting or in real life, is easy. It feels good, and it’s often justified. Do you have the courage to dream of a system that works? Do you have the patience to compromise towards that goal? Can you look at people quite unlike yourself, understand their alien perspective, and take the leaps of faith required to forge a more just tomorrow? Or would you just like to shoot big guns at the things you don’t understand in the hopes that they go away and don’t bother you again? Lord knows that always works so well.

Before I run too far afield here, I’d like to make it clear that like most good video game stories, Mass Effect can be deeply, sublimely dumb. It’s dumb in its big sweeping movements and dumb in its mundane interactions. It’s loaded with dumb design decisions from its clunky inventory management to its dialog options that may as well just be labeled “Get Racist (For the Fifth Time Today).” But that’s the beauty of it, you see. High culture is dead and not coming back. Intelligence is isolating. Stories that attempt importance are labeled pretentious by a general audience sensitive to condescension from egoist authors. Being dumb is liberating. Dumb stories are stories for the people.

Mass Effect 2 Or: I’m Commander Shepard and This is My Favorite Game in the Franchise

Commander Shepard is fucking dead! Don’t worry, they’ll get better.

Just a few months after the events of the first game, Normandy is ambushed by a massive dreadnought of unknown origin and destroyed. Shepard dies a hero, evacuating the last of their crew before being ejected into the vacuum of space. The surviving crew are scattered, and two years pass.

And then Shepard wakes up.

After your space-frozen carcass was recovered, the human supremacist paramilitary (read: space terrorist) organization Cerberus spent an incalculable amount of money bringing you back to life. They, naturally, see the whole “terrorist cell” label as a gross mischaracterization of their mission and ideology3. But more importantly, they need you. Whole human colonies are going missing in the blink of an eye, no bodies, no signs of armed attack, just vanished. Once again, the response from the proper authorities is less than encouraging. Fresh off the slab and at the helm of a new and improved Normandy, Shepard will be working outside the law as they assemble a crew of old allies and new faces, explore a new, seedier side of the Milky Way, and get to the bottom of another terrifying mystery, all under the watchful eye of Cerberus’ charismatic leader, played by none other than Martin Fucking Sheen!

Ooooooooooooo this is a good-ass game.

Mass Effect’s critical and commercial success would pave the way for a hotly anticipated sequel. By this time the high-definition growing pains had for the most part subsided and gaming as a whole was reaching new levels of popularity. A booming new media industry around gaming was generating hype at never before seen levels and broadcasting it to a larger audience than ever before. Booth babes, horse armor, “No Russian,” graphic tees, weekly web shows, impact font memes, the bad-ass seal of approval, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Sensing the potential of hot new IP in their portfolio, Electronic Arts would adopt a policy of widening the tent, directing development houses under their corporate umbrella to focus on attracting broader audiences to traditionally niche genres. Fresh off the launch of another original IP in 2009’s Dragon Age: Origins, BioWare would stretch its personnel to the breaking point in a mad crunch to complete, polish, and ship Mass Effect 2 in January 2010, to almost universal acclaim.

BioWare demonstrated a clarity of vision in developing Mass Effect 2 that I can’t help but admire. The philosophy was simple, brutal, and brilliant. Double down on what works, cut everything that doesn’t. It’s rare to see a sequel that adds so much by subtraction. The first game wanted the player to feel like they were exploring a vast and wild stellar frontier, landing on sparsely populated worlds to investigate distress beacons and collect mineral deposits, skirmishing with dangerous alien fauna and the odd enemy patrol as they did so. In practice, it made the world feel empty. It often felt like busywork padding out the game as I wrestled with the janky, unresponsive controls of my big dumb lunar rover tank. So they cut it! Awesome! Now there’s fewer missions where I drive across a field and then up a hill and then get out of my tank and interact with a waypoint and more missions where I’m playing cat and mouse with thousand year old serial killers or taking a vat grown super soldier for his alien Bar Mitzvah or acting as a party member’s defense attorney at her court-martial or, you know, riding around in a van solving mysteries. After being told about so much of these alien cultures in the first game, the player is now shown them directly. Often you’ll see through the eyes of your companions, as you assist them on personal errands to win their loyalty, learning more about them and where they come from as you go. The broader approach to scenario design works in tandem with a renewed commitment to engaging character writing, leading to a cast of bizarre, loveable oddballs with a degree of pathos and identity that’s difficult to match. I can say without reservation that it’s my favorite RPG party of all time4.

Scenario design really is the secret sauce for a game like this. Compelling situations lead to compelling choices, compelling choices shape compelling character arcs. Without that initial buy-in, this is just another in a parade of samey third person shooters starring generico space marines, bro-y sidekicks, and hypersexualized women5. It’s worth pointing out that, for all its confidence, momentum, and variety, Mass Effect 2 did represent a fairly significant step in the direction of bro shooters. Not that there’s anything wrong with that6. The testosterone fueled angry meathead gray-and-brown bro-ness of games like Gears of War has become something of an aesthetic whipping boy for the ills of this era in gaming, but when we make fun of how these games look, what they value, and how they tell a story, it often goes by the wayside how good they can feel to play. The one-two punch of Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War perfecting the third person shooter was as consequential a gameplay development as we’d seen since the original Doom. That’s a useful segue, because when we talk about Doom, we have to talk about John Carmack, and can therefore recall his notorious declaration that story in a video game is like story in a porno. You expect its presence, but you don’t really need it. Games, even at their most eloquent and artful as a storytelling medium, are ultimately meant to be played, and if the lion’s share of your gameplay involves blasting creeps in rooms and hallways with big cool rayguns, then it helps for the rayguns, the hallways and rooms, the creeps, and the blasting to all be entertaining. Mass Effect 2 isn’t quite touching the upper echelons of the genre in that regard but it’s a noted improvement from the original game’s occasionally clunky combat.

Share Genius of Loathe

It’s another case of addition by subtraction. BioWare would cut the first game’s endless redundant looting and comparing numbers between pistol X-7 and pistol Z-6 to determine which is better in favor of a smaller roster of weapons that feel more distinct. I’m never gonna be excited about fewer rayguns in my raygun game but what’s here is good, and the new slate of heavy weapons in particular are all deeply entertaining portable war crimes. Love that black hole generator! Though this commitment to the tactile over the data-driven, a de-emphasis of classic RPG stats and stat-checks to accommodate a wider audience, would lead to negative knock-on effects. The game isn’t just about shooting, after all. One thing BioWare cut from the first game in the name of simplicity and accessibility was the speech skills; Charm and Intimidate. If you invest skill points into them they give you dialog options that otherwise wouldn’t be available, usually better ones. Maybe they let you avoid a fight, maybe they let you get better rewards. They’re gone now, but the speech checks, dialog options linked to them, remain. This is a problem.

One of the issues games centered around morality systems and big choices often run into is that players don’t want to choose. They don’t want to be forced to sacrifice or give things up. They want the best solution. The original Mass Effect made you sacrifice in other ways to access those best possible solutions. You had to eschew improving your ability to shoot big guns or explode a motherfucker with your not-Jedi mind powers to invest those points into being better at talking. This is good because sometimes talking is not gonna solve things, period. But when it does, when it could have, you may find yourself wishing you’d understood the power of the pen over the raygun. Mass Effect 2’s lack of speech skills means these dialog options are simply tied to your Paragon/Renegade points, which creates the problem of meta-gaming. You want those best solutions, you stop role-playing, stop thinking of what Shepard would say here, and start thinking about how you need either red or blue tokens to get the best dialog options and glide through the difficult social situations still to come with your command of Facts and Logic. You are, in fact, encouraged to do this. The various clashing personalities and backgrounds of your crew are inevitably going to lead to conflicts, and if you don’t resolve them amicably by means of a Red or Blue dialog option, you risk getting a companion killed, and you wanna see what they get up to in the next game, right? This basic criticism, that the sequels encouraged the player to mindlessly commit to one path and blast through conversations without even bothering to read the dialog or consider the consequences, is difficult to disprove.

Having said all that, you can of course choose not to meta-game. Furthermore, none of what I said invalidates my earlier point about scenario design making games like this tick. Just because I know the Best Outcome and have access to it doesn’t mean that the writers and I are going to agree which outcome is best. The foibles of the situation you’re presented with ultimately shape player choice more than the simple hunt for experience points. In that respect, Mass Effect 2 saves its best for last. The Suicide Mission, the impossible crusade which saw you schlepping all over the galaxy assembling this Dirty Dozen, is the absolute crown jewel of BioWare’s catalog, and fittingly enough it’s a return to the company’s roots. That ambition to bring the nuances of pen and paper RPG’s into videogames was still there, still driving them forward. The Suicide Mission is a symphony of hidden dice rolls, skill checks, big choices, bespoke systems. If you play it right, you feel like a genius. If you don’t, casualties are guaranteed. This is the way in which great scenario design neutralizes the temptation to meta-game, to play with the guide open, making sure you get the “best” outcome. Perfect outcomes lack the jagged edges that believable storytelling often requires. You could always reload the save and try it again, but doesn’t that take the fun out of it? Won’t it make the conclusion more meaningful, remembering all the friends that you lost along the way?

Well, it’s funny you should mention that, actually.

Mass Effect 3 Or: The World Famous Plot Resolution Hallway, Now With Fanservice

Mass Effect 3 is much more than its infamous, notorious ending, but nothing I can say will ever loom larger than that dumbass evil space beam hallway with the stupid God-child telling you to press one of three buttons and get one of three endings. It was a credibility-shredding controversy for BioWare and for the games press which rubber stamped Mass Effect 3 with the expected 8’s and 9’s out of 10 upon its arrival in March 2012. More than a flop, it was a rejection, maybe the first proper launch controversy of its kind, and lord knows we’ve had no shortage of those in the decade-and-change since 2012. The founding myth, the sales pitch that sold the first game and then the two after it, was as follows: you are getting a trilogy, and you’re going to shape it based on how you play. Every choice you make in the first game is still going to matter by the third game. This would be difficult under ideal circumstances and BioWare was not working under ideal circumstances.

We glossed over this when discussing Mass Effect 2, but that game had a somewhat troubled development cycle as well. This was fairly normal for BioWare, which operated on the philosophy that dysfunction is simply part of the process. It was normal to build the plane as it taxied down the runway, routine. Many games studios, especially in this era, had a similar approach. A core team feels its way through the fog inherent in any large-scale project, and then enters a “Crunch” period to finish the game and get it ready for prime time. Devs in Crunch cycles often work 18 or 20 hour days and hire vast armies of temp workers, intending to burn through them over the brutal death march to D-Day. This is one of those classic situations where it’s only really a problem if people don’t like the outcomes. Winning solves everything, and in 2012, BioWare were proven, pedigreed winners. The grind of consistent output can wear us all down, however. Mass Effect 3 was not only operating on a shorter dev cycle than its predecessor, as EA wanted to strike while the iron was still hot, it was BioWare’s fourth game in four years. In between Mass Effect 2 and 3, the company managed to ship another Dragon Age game in 2011. Granted, these are different dev teams, but another feature of this sort of “Crunch Until It’s Out” development schedule is the consolidation of separate project teams into one big workforce. When everyone is burnt out, it’s easy to see how the overall output suffers. Frankly, when you do a bit of behind the scenes reading on the infamously fraught making of Mass Effect 3, it’s somewhat miraculous that they got this game to market at all. A climate of wishful thinking seems to have set in among the senior leadership. Stories within BioWare from around that time are riddled with team leaders and upper management making appeals to that same “BioWare Magic” that led to their prior hits coming together as they battled the clock and the limits of human endurance. As we’ve previously discussed on this blog, when companies start alluding to some sort of “magic” they can access in times of crisis, it’s usually a good idea to get worried.

Putting aside the technical issues, which may have been alleviated with time and resources, we encounter a much more hard/fast sort of issue. Writing. As the cast and crew of Game of Thrones found out, when you promise a big epic conclusion amid years of fan speculation, you better be prepared to deliver. This is difficult enough in the first place with trilogies, and there’s an added degree of difficulty when the trilogy in question intends to raise the stakes and multiply the scale with each installment. There’s a sense of painting oneself into a corner. When the threats become so massive, the stakes grow so absurdly high, the potential for the audience’s suspension of disbelief to break down rises in stereo with those stakes. If you get your heroes into a seemingly hopeless situation, you better have some convincing way of getting them out again. Mass Effect 3 is forever marked by its failure to do this, the infamy of its launch, the “worst ending ever,” follows it through the years. To me, though, the sheer boneheadedness of its conclusion is just a score multiplier for the narrative blunders made all up and down the game’s runtime.

Mass Effect 3 is the series first proper run at a level of scale and danger to rival something like Star Wars or the more crisis and conflict oriented story arcs of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The galaxy-spanning conflict promised since the very beginning of the first game is here at last, and Shepard is tasked with marshaling disparate forces from across the civilizations of the Milky Way for one climactic battle. It’s not a bad setup at first glance, as the godfather of the series, Casey Hudson, was set to step away from BioWare after the conclusion of the trilogy, and any good science fiction fan can tell you how awry things can go when an ongoing story changes authors before reaching its resolution. It’s a good opportunity for longtime fans to get closure on plot threads they’d been following for five years and a neat inversion of the first game’s ideological debate between cooperation and self-interest. Forget self-interest, humanity’s survival is now reliant upon securing the cooperation of various alien species. We need the biggest tent possible or they’re gonna shut down the whole circus.

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So it’s fine on paper but then you actually have to play the damn thing and then you hit the immediate problem that some players will never quite get over. This is the third straight plot where Shepard goes to the space UN hoping for help and is greeted with shrugs and condolences. That made sense in the first game, where you’re literally just some guy, and still held water in the second, where you were showing up after being dead for two years. It always suited the cynical view of international politics as a concept that the series chose to take from the jump. Whatever the problem was, it was just Human Stuff, it’s not really their job to get involved. The scale of the third game, the astronomical body count growing with each passing day, means that This Is Now Everyone’s Problem. Why the fuck do I need to resolve your problems now? You are all gonna die too if we don’t get it together here. I just, I can’t, I-

Deep breaths! We’ll get through this!

I can roll my eyes at shoddy exposition and move on because well, if it were as easy as just asking for help then the rest of the game couldn’t happen7. But you’ll get no argument from me if this plot goes sour for you within five hours of booting the game up. Another somewhat disappointing development in that regard is Cerberus. While Shepard’s (mis)adventures with Martin Sheen and the Sheenettes made it pretty clear that Cerberus is in that category of sci-fi organization that mostly spends large amounts of money getting its own people killed, they at least remained believable as a bunch of reactionary, xenophobic “ends justify the means” boneheads with too much money and a fetish for poking bears. Now they’re not even that, making up at least a plurality of enemy encounters in the game with their infinity of generico power armor troopers that could be confused for any other XBOX 360 bro shooter enemy faction. They’re fine, I guess, but I detect the marks of corporate meddling. A renewed effort to expand the player base means we need to get more boring, lest our imagined ideal new player get spooked by the variety and go back to screaming slurs in 2012 Call of Duty lobbies. There is a certain bitter irony to shooting infinite humans in the face in your quest to save humankind, but more than anything it just feels like they ran out of ideas8. Given how engaging and fresh The Illusive Man stuff felt in 2, this feels like a real dropped ball, especially when you still have Martin Sheen on the payroll.

Kindness Report

So we’re off to a rough start in plot terms, that’s fine, whatever. Trilogies are tough. How many guys have you heard advocating for Return of the Jedi as their favorite Star Wars? Plus, Carmack’s Law, remember? Videogames are about gameplay, and unfortunately in many respects the gameplay has also taken a step back. Let’s start from the macro and drill down.

We know exactly where we’re going from the very beginning of Mass Effect 3, and assembling the biggest force possible for the final battle is the player’s main objective. Whether you’re getting whole civilizations behind you after story missions or making pit stops behind enemy lines to rescue stranded troops, ships, or civilians, it all ends up in the same big pot. Your readiness is a tangible resource, and you’ll get a better ending the higher this number goes. There’s a tertiary criticism here, as all of this stuff existing in a menu means you basically never get to see it in action, contributing to the feeling that the actual war is happening in the background while you complete fetch quests, but that’s just the tip of a much bigger iceberg. Remember what I said about meta-gaming? About how these things are more meaningful when you avoid the temptation to play with the guide open, and force yourself to live with your choices, your failures? Turns out I lied! What you should have done is make sure everyone survived the Suicide Mission so you could play their side quests in Mass Effect 3 and make sure they’re contributing to the overall war meter. They can’t do that if they’ve already died heroically! The war readiness stat is literally a big meter to indicate how well you’re meta-gaming! It pushes the central mechanic of the game, the choices you make, to the point of total systemic collapse. Role-playing is no longer the correct way to engage with this role-playing game! Picking anything but the ideal solution to the problem will give you fewer good boy points and increase the risk of feeling like you spent 120+ hours on these games just to feel like you did a mediocre to bad job. This is just an appetizer before the actual systemic collapse of the “linked trilogy” concept as a whole. Remember the sales pitch, you’re the star of this story and you’re making choices that will shape the narrative throughout all 3 games. But in a frustrating number of instances, Mass Effect 3 makes the player feel like their prior choices just didn’t matter. BioWare’s vaunted and accomplished scenario writing gives way to frustrating railroading. Perhaps a greater variety of outcomes from prior choices was a casualty of a messy development cycle, maybe they were just fed up and wanted to be done.

The really galling thing is that there is at least one major questline that manages to fulfill the promises of the earlier games. It’s also the first one! Your trip to the nuke-scarred wasteland planet of Tuchanka to resolve a centuries old conflict between three separate alien species and win their support is genuinely some of the best stuff in the trilogy. It consistently reminds the player of their prior choices, tempts you with cynical self-interest, tackles one of the setting’s biggest atrocities, and pays off the arcs of multiple fan favorite characters in pitch-perfect fashion9. Starting off on such a high note before slouching through an uninspired act two and towards an ending that feels so narrow and perfunctory just makes it all the more bitter. There sad, sweet moments littered throughout this story, years-long arcs paid off by writers and artists whose care for their work is tangible, but when the load-bearing systems that allow games to tell meaningful stories fall out of alignment this dramatically, resolution just feels like fan-service. Weightless fluff to mollify the player.

You feel it as you play, the mania for doing the little things that marked out Mass Effect 2 as an all time classic just was not feasible for this game. The collision physics are odd, things don’t always load in as they’re supposed to, checkpointing occasionally breaks down, Mass Effect 3 feels held together with spit, duct tape, and prayers. This makes it all the more remarkable that it’s the best pure action game in the franchise. Shepard is more agile than ever before, the new enemies make combat more frenetic and exciting, and for the first time in series history we have a lineup of weaponry that reflects the diverse civilizations of the setting. The expanded and vastly improved weapons locker captures the odd priorities of this game in a nutshell. It often feels like the tertiary stuff was given the highest degree of care. Our new party member is boring and the dozen people who’ve seen the anime tie-in movie where he debuted tell me he’s not much better there, but he’s voiced by Freddie Prinze Jr. We get another “celebrity” cameo from Jessica Chobot, known at the time as the host of G4’s Attack of the Show and IGN’s Daily Fix. The game launched with a co-op multiplayer mode that proved shockingly well-done and addictive. You feel the meddling from EA at every level of this thing, compounding the problems of an already troubled production. The little tie-in’s, brand synergy and marketing opportunities, were given the spotlight while the actual game floundered. This feeling would persist through much of the post-launch work meant to triage the fan outcry, most notably the Citadel DLC, a double-barrel load of pseudo-canon fanservice meant to send the player on one last wacky adventure with the gang. It’s fun but any suggestion that it “fixes” Mass Effect 3 is not one I can co-sign. It gives me the feeling of fan fiction, everyone just a little too happy to see each other. One last party at the end of the world, get your jokes in now.

It’s very fitting. I told you at the beginning of this essay that Mass Effect died in stereo with the era which birthed it. One era dying just means a new one is being born, and the last ten years of gaming, playing games, reading about games, talking about games, has felt a whole lot more like Mass Effect 3 than either of its predecessors.

To Andromeda, and Beyond

When you get older you have to confront the idea that whatever sublime, meaningful quality you felt towards the things you loved as a teenager was just the novelty of youth. Coming out on the other end of this experience has made it clear to me that at least in this one instance, this is not the case. Gaming really has lost some of the magic it once had. Perhaps it’s an ethereal thing in the first place, a golden ratio of capitalists, artists, and technicians working in harmony to produce something greater than the sum of their efforts. It can’t last. The money men get greedy, the artists lose their rapport with the audience and run out of ideas, the technicians encounter problems that no amount of effort or ingenuity can solve.

The money men most certainly got greedy. Electronic Arts’ hunt for bigger and bigger hits would see them kill multiple golden geese in this period. Visceral’s Dead Space trilogy would suffer a similar fate under the EA umbrella, starting strong and improving a winning formula in a more popular sequel before Dead Space 3’s lukewarm reception killed the studio. Black Box’s popular Skate games also wouldn’t save them from closure. While the results drew loathing from fans and industry professionals, EA’s process certainly had its admirers. They were ahead of their time in understanding the potential of the game as a platform to build a broader brand. Tie-in media, particularly anime and TV shows, along with the usual compliment of shirts, hoodies, gamer chairs, props, and so on, are now, more than ever, a vital part of any big important game’s marketing strategy. The game is no longer just about the game. Not even close.

Changing times also mean changing politics. The resentment towards a gaming press perceived as dishonest and captured by corporate interests, reduced to little more than ad men in disguise, would spill over into an ugly campaign of harassment and abuse known as Gamergate in 2014. The broken bonds of trust between media and consumers, along with the financial struggles of new media as a whole, would create space for a new class of hustler, feeding on grievance and controversy, driving reaction and rage. Among the luminaries of Gamergate, you can find more than a handful of people who would make tidy incomes for themselves as self-styled “political commentators” and “thought leaders” amid the first Trump presidency.

But what of BioWare? Transitioning to the new hardware hitting the market, the PS4 and XBOX One, at first seemed to reinvigorate them. Dragon Age Inquisition would mark a return to form for the company, considered by some to be 2014’s game of the year. However, it would prove more of a swan song. Mass Effect: Andromeda, an attempted soft-reboot meant to put as much distance as possible between the IP and its disastrous third installment, would arrive as an all new, all different catastrophe. Quite obviously undercooked and riddled with embarassing glitches, fans were even less likely to be kind to a game that had none of the momentum or warm feelings engendered by prior successes. BioWare would enter the 2020s mired in the hell of the videogame industry’s “Live Service” boondoggle, as 2019’s Anthem, their attempt at a new IP, would fail to find an audience at launch and run mostly unnoticed until its announced end of service in January, 2026.

The “live service” trend really is the best encapsulation of how videogames have willfully stripped themselves of charm. On paper, it’s reasonable enough, a project supported for a decade or more with updates large and small, the world changing and growing with the player. In practice, it’s a cynical ploy to suck up as much of the player’s time as possible. It turns your hobby into a job, compelling you to log in and complete your tasks for the day, lest you miss something you want. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent trying to build games in this model and the vast majority have failed utterly. When games ask for all of your time, many players will simply play a game that promises an end at some point, endings give stories meaning. Without them, you’re not being told a story so much as you’re being distracted indefinitely.

A pivot back to the old way of doing things, 2024’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard, arrived to mixed reviews. BioWare are still hanging on, despite their decade wandering in the wilderness, but it seems that the headsman’s axe is coming for it, and more and more of that falling blade seems to enter the picture every year. With EA set to be acquired and taken private, BioWare’s future is more uncertain than ever.

Mass Effect 5? What about it? That game isn’t real and it can’t hurt me. If you suggest otherwise you are spreading misinformation on the internet and engaging in targeted harassment.

If you could not tell, this essay has gotten somewhat out of hand. In searching for a conclusion, I fear I have no better solution than re-treading old ground. Once again, we find an industry which promised and prided itself on innovation reduced to extraction and optimization. Once again, we have to confront the fact that we’re no longer the free actors in the market to be catered to and serviced, but the resource marked for exploitation. Once again, we have to look back at a lost decade and change, and conclude that it did in fact get worse, and that we do in fact bear some of the blame10.

One thing about modernity that never ceases to annoy me is that the scriptwriters/booking committee have no sense of subtlety and no trust in their unseen, presumably extradimensional audience’s reading comprehension. We have a social media platform called “Discord” that allegedly houses terror networks grooming vulnerable youth into committing mass shootings and plutocrat nerds naming dystopian private surveillance concerns after concepts from Lord of the Rings. The hacks have a stranglehold on the worldbuilding and this does not appear to be changing any time soon. Such is the case with the new taco restaurant around the corner from my condo. After a long run-up towards launch in the strip mall with the worst parking lot in the state, “Torchy’s Tacos,” arrived festooned with chibi demon babies and other such devilish signifiers. I suspect it may be evil. What a surprise.

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Torchy’s Tacos. Allegedly founded in Austin. Google SEO copy from the company website: “At Torchy’s, we make Damn Good food that breaks the mold. Order online or through the Torchy’s App for delivery or skip the line when pick-up today.” Google My Business page SEO copy: “Buzzy chain serving Mexican street-food-style tacos in inventive varieties, including for breakfast.” Explaining its evil will take us in several potentially contradictory directions, as is often the case when we attempt to comprehend evil.

“White People Tacos”

I refer to Torchy’s as “a taco restaurant” and not “A Mexican restaurant” intentionally. Note the Google business copy above “Mexican street-food-style tacos.” “Style” is the operative word there, in my opinion. “Street food” is a meaningless descriptor serving no purpose beyond marketing. This just leaves us with “Mexican style,” in contrast to “Mexican.” The phrasing is that of extraction, ethnicity-as-commodity. Tex-Mex. Tacos dreamt and executed by white people. Not even the fast-food deracination of something like Taco Bell, which strips any cultural signifiers from the food in service of a lower overhead operating costs, but fully American rebranding.

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This is reflected in the approach to Menu design. Tacos with names like The Tipsy Chick, the Hogfather, the Broski Bowl. There are tacos named The Democrat and The Republican, seemingly built from the ground up to be ordered by Barack Obama on a campaign stop. It’s very much in that new strike zone for instagram friendly restaurants, “elevated” fast food staples with house condiments called like Bammin Sauce.

Commercial Carcinization, or “Everything is Target Now”

Are you familiar with Carcinization? It’s a pattern in evolution where various other forms of crustaceans evolve into crabs. One feels this principle in action, standing in the dining room at Torchy’s Taco’s. There is a sense of evolutionary convergence. The relaxed seating arrangement and unmonitored soda fountain of a quality fast-food hangout, but also a bar, with draft beer, cocktails, adult slushies. The kitchen hums behind the bar, separated from the dining room by swinging double doors. In general I find their turnaround time ahead of the industry standard. It’s not fast food, it’s pricier and aspires to something more artisanal. It’s not fast casual, they serve booze. It’s not a chain restaurant of the 20th century, it doesn’t require a wait staff. There are TV’s but it’s not really a sports bar, though what exactly is the threshold? What’s the difference? The feeling is something like watching the race car taking shape in the wind tunnel, calibrating itself for maximum efficiency. The hunt for yield, growth, innovation, is a brutal process of natural and unnatural selection. In restaurants, it leads to something like Torchy’s. A place that can be anything. Once there was fast food and “sit down” restaurants, then “fast casual” came to exploit the gray areas, combining the best of both models. Now, the forward-looking models would seem to suggest that all areas are gray. If your concept cannot be universal, you’re losing money by omission.

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In tech, this same school of thought leads to your smartphone. Once we had calculators and portable gaming systems and pagers and then, eventually, portable telephones. Now the portable telephone fills all these other functions. Modern circumstances encourage the adoption of business models where the intentionality and purpose driven character of any sort of product, tool, or experience is filed down and smoothed out until we’re left with something that can theoretically address the widest range of needs but ends up alienating, sedating, and paralyzing through its universality. It’s a general attitude of risk-aversion, which is so common in tech these days. Again, it’s extractive and iterative, not innovative. Tech has ceased to aspire towards a higher ideal and so has fallen into the brutal logic of evolution. Evolution doesn’t pursue perfection. “Good enough” is always the buzzword for any evolutionary process. What we call “enshittification” is merely that unceasing drive towards “good enough.” Good enough so long as the numbers go up.

What’s interesting to me about this is that the ideal evolutionary form, the crab that all organs of the broader capitalist system are seeking to contort themselves into, is so cynical. I wrote on this before, when exploring the terrors of the Taco Bell Cantina, but I regard the underlying marketing at play here as so dire in narrative terms. In essence, all of these places, businesses, websites, apps, et cetera, are Target. All present a sort of middle class identity with a veneer of millennial eternal youth. All of which is to say that “middle class” ain’t what it used to be. When we engage with brands like Target, Torchy’s, Five Guys Burgers, Whole Foods, Raising Cane’s, we’re making a declaration of identity about ourselves. We are consciously choosing to pay a bit more to avoid association with the alternative consumption avenues. You pay more at Target to avoid Wal-Mart. You pay more at Whole Foods to avoid Kroger, Giant, or Publix. You pay more at Five Guys to avoid McDonalds. Middle class used to mean upward mobility. Now it means the same stasis and precarity as the “working class,” but access to a better stratum of daily treat, and distance from the plebs forced to settle for the lowest rung of treats. Just several doors down from Torchy’s rests a well-trafficked Crumbl cookies, where people pay a premium for sugary manhole covers baked by Mormons because their TikTok told them to. The model clearly works.

It’s Actually Quite Good

In my view there’s no better endorsement of the deviltry at play here than Torchy’s Tacos actually being a quality establishment. You get a full meal in just two tacos, beer’s cheap, the tortillas seem high quality and the ingredients seem fresh and not from a can. The prices are competitive with modern fast food, which is always the kryptonite with gringo tacos, that and portion size, neither of which are a concern here. I would recommend going with a group and splitting an order of churros, which are very cheap and excellent, made in house. Can’t beat it.

Kindness Report

The thing is, even if you’re weird, like me, and you go around looking at the brands that mediate our daily lives with this sort of suspicious, probing eye, this does not immunize you from hitting your marks and delivering your lines in the daily dramas they direct us through. The pernicious thing about this sort of hyper-optimized, data-driven, utility over artistry modern capitalist product that we increasingly refer to as “slop” is that its contradictions melt away when we’re faced with the sedative effect of consumption itself. The persistence of a modern economy where grown up financial milestones are denied to more and more people is owed to mass availability of treats, this global balancing act is a testament to man’s power to find sublime joy and fulfillment in the little things, in the face of a cold world which only seems to grow colder.

I spent my summer (wasted my summer, some might say) reading Vineland. The logic was simple, I am an alleged Thomas Pynchon fan, the copy of Vineland I own had sat untouched on the Big Important Unwieldy books portion of my shelf for some time and Paul Thomas Anderson was hard at work on adapting the novel into his latest picture, entitled One Battle After Another.

I thoroughly enjoyed but did not capital-L love Vineland and felt I gained something from the experience. It has some of Pynchon’s very best, most heartfelt and warming prose and some of his most interminable and ill-advised experiments. I moved on by midsummer and found my efforts rewarded with a few brief weeks as the ranking expert on the new PTA movie. “Oh, it’s based on a book?” They’d ask me. Yes, it is! Supposedly. I mean all the character names are different so we’ll see.

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One Battle After Another has arrived to almost hyperbolic universal acclaim and boxed out the frontrunner’s spot for all major film awards like a prime Charles Barkley eyeing up a rebound. It is nothing like Vineland and for many reasons I feel this was the right decision. One Battle is an epic of tension with the good fortune to be nearly perfectly calibrated for America’s current political climate. It makes three hours disappear faster than virtually any film not named Goodfellas. Vineland is a hazy, jokey mobius strip wherein a lapsed hippie, still stoned but no longer young and wild, reflects on what exactly became of himself, his times, his revolution, and America, the nation where the revolution failed most bitterly. Vineland is a story about a guy on disability checks borrowing money (again) from a hack actor who runs a landscaping company called the Marquis De Sod so he can hide out at a weed farm while his daughter is entrusted to a feminist weeaboo cult (benign, by all appearances) with the worst cafeteria cooking on the California corporate wellness retreat circuit. It digresses and unfolds and muses and reflects and sets a record for uses of the word “ninjette.” One Battle After Another does very few of the same things in plot terms and only a handful of the same things in thematic terms. It’s a take no prisoners approach to adaptation, conducted with the machete and duct tape rather than the scalpel and sutures, the exact inverse of PTA’s previous Pynchon adaptation, Inherent Vice.

To be clear, I think this is a successful strategy and I love the film. But dangling threads of intentionality, points lost in translation between Pynchon’s novel and Anderson’s film, continue to bedevil me. I’d like to do some reflection of my own.

Same “Land,” Different “Battle”

Let’s begin with the shared DNA and work our way out. Vineland/One Battle After Another is the story of Zoyd Wheeler/Bob Ferguson and his daughter Prairie/Willa. Zoyd/Bob has raised Willa/Prairie as an overall pretty good single father despite being the kind of slacker burnout whose lifestyle you can smell (that is both a weed joke and not a weed joke). His ex-wife Frenesi/Perfidia is not in the picture and her whereabouts are unknown. Frenesi/Perfidia was a major player in a radical group known as fps24/The French 75 and played the Judas role in the group’s apocalyptic downfall, turning state’s evidence at the behest of the fascist federale Brock Vond/Steve Lockjaw, with whom she was also sleeping at the time. Prairie/Willa showed up just in time for Zoyd/Bob to spirit her away to relative safety while the house of cards was falling around them. The intervening years pass in relative quiet, until one day Vond/Lockjaw arrives with a federal law enforcement task force, forcing our heroes on the lam. With me so far?

The content remains the same across both versions of this basic setup, but the context is very different. Let’s begin where One Battle After Another kicks off, in the revolutionary glory days. The French 75 are a sort of pastiche of the Weather Underground/Symbionese Revolutionary Army mode of 20th century urban guerilla, albeit with updated politics. This is a phenomenally successful gambit on Anderson’s part, as dozens of other Substack film essayists can explain how vital, cutting, and ripped from the headlines the distinct pro-immigrant character of the French 75’s direct action feels in 2025. However, it’s an elementary change with knock-on effects throughout the story. In Vineland, fps24 are a radical documentary filmmaking collective, embedding on the front lines of street battles between Vietnam era protesters and riot police. Central to the ideology of the group (better and longer articulated as one might expect from a novel, at least in comparison to a film) is the idea of the film camera as a weapon. While divorced from the bombings, bank robberies, and liberationary raiding of the French 75, fps24 incur regular risks to life and limb, all premised on the idea that a living record of these clashes between a state and its people will serve as a radicalizing tool. It’s only in the wake of their movement’s ultimate failure that the jaded, defeated, directionless members of fps24 realize the essential flaw in their ideology and methodology. When all the set dressing fell away and the sheer brutality of the facts could fester through the presidencies of Nixon, Ford, and Carter, they each realized that ultimately, all they really did was stand around and watch while the violence of the state reduced their revolution to less than zero.

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The French 75 have no such issue, from the very beginning of the film they find themselves on the other side of the hard/fast line of political violence from their Vineland counterparts. While fps24 aren’t played as naive, squeamish hippies, the plot positions them as the sort of hive of dysfunction and infighting which seems to be timeless in leftist spaces. Frenesi Gates is both the center of gravity drawing weirdos into the universe of fps24 and the faulty support system which dooms it to collapse. She’s gorgeous, charismatic, mysterious, raised in a left-political tradition stretching back generations, but none of this insulates her from the simple fact of being a flake. Because Frenesi is America, in a sense, and America flakes in the face of rising authoritarianism, or so goes Pynchon’s thematic line.

In One Battle After Another, the character of Perfidia shares this trait, but the context is once again very different. A lot of this context can be mined from her relationship with the story’s central antagonist. The gulf between the original novel’s Brock Vond and Sean Penn’s Col. Steve Lockjaw is vast and murky. Sean Penn’s distillation of the character is a bizarre, gripping, creatine addled ball of right-wing masculine anxieties, with personal grooming and physical tics easily comparable to Trump administration freaks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth. It works (boy, does it work) but it fundamentally changes the character. When Vineland was published, Vond’s closest antecedents in reality were men like Al Haig and Ollie North, career Cold Warriors riding high on the Reagan Reaction. I do find a certain 80s Vietnam revisionist pang in Vond’s return with a militarized police task force, aiming to root out cannabis farmers while settling his personal beef with the scattered Wheeler-Gates clan. After hiding behind the state’s pen-and-paper enforcement powers, subpoenas and grand juries, during the years of actual danger he’s shown up in full battle-rattle 15 years after everyone lost their appetite for revolutions, ready to win the “war” against a population that’s lost the motivation to fight, the fucker.

OBAA plays Perfidia’s tryst with Lockjaw for laughs. He’s sexually obsessed with her, she’s not dealing with the stresses of new motherhood and domestic life well, it’s straightforward and the jokes land. It’s easy to imagine the simple catharsis of it for her and easier still to laugh along with the movie. It would be absurd to say that there’s any real there there. Vineland is very different. Frenesi is promiscuous (it’s the 60s, everyone is) but Pynchon takes the risk Anderson doesn’t; suggesting that she is, in fact, emotionally drawn to the smug, cruel Brock Vond. Not in spite of himself, not on suspicion of some dormant good within him, but simply because he is smug, cruel, condescending and contemptuous of all she believes and claims to value. It’s a typically Pynchonian exploration of the sexual dynamics of authoritarianism, an admission that even at our most potentially revolutionary the American people may still be vulnerable to the charms of a handsome, well groomed prick in uniform, telling us all how it’s going to be in soothing, paternal tones. The sublime aesthetics of state oppression. The divinity of the jackboot and the phallic grandeur of the nightstick. OBAA still has two hours of movie left when it hits this point in the plot and therefore cannot afford to lose the audience in the sort of broad-spectrum ambiguity which defines Pynchon’s vision of the character. Perfidia gets to defy Lockjaw, disappearing into exiled splendor, sainted by her absence, compromised by her status as an informant but more like a martyr than a true betrayer. Victim and victimizer. Frenesi Gates undergoes a more slow-motion martyrdom. She has to take a deal, plant the gun, get on the stand and testify. Years later we find her still enmeshed in the invisible machinery of federal informants and anti-subversive fixers, living in some anonymous Sun Belt subdivision on a government stipend, married to some other guy with some other kid, watching TV, making frozen pizzas, and ignoring politics. It’s a gut punch, one which adds dimensions to Frenesi which Teyonna Taylor, for all her undeniable energy, cannot grant Perfidia.

As a dedicated American conspiracist, Pynchon is happy to assert that the institutional subversion of popular movements was a key part of the strategy which snuffed American politics as they reached their most revolutionary, but he’s willing to admit culpability on his own part as well. The revolutionary mood of the 60s was murdered at the ballot box and in senate subcommittee hearings, but it also died because its most able soldiers suffered from deficits of commitment to the cause. When it came time to fight, people decided they’d rather switch. A generation were offered the ball or the sword and they overwhelmingly chose the ball.

I Love My Wife’s Daughter and They Can’t Make Me Feel Bad About It

So, you may be asking, where does the guy Leo plays fit into all of this? I’m so happy you asked.

In One Battle After Another, Bob Ferguson (alias Ghetto Pat) is the French 75’s demolitions specialist, a supporting player but undeniably a part of the game. He’s drawn to and ultimately enmeshed with Perfidia through the adrenaline of their outlaw lifestyle and grows apart from her by suggesting they need to pump the breaks with the new member of their family in the picture.

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In Vineland, Zoyd Wheeler has nothing to do with fps24. He’s a surf bum, an itinerant musician and vocational stoner, caught up in the petty dramas of the 60s drug game and leaned on by his DEA acquaintances but ultimately Just Some Guy. A wannabee, in over his head and haunted, even years later, by his all-too-brief marriage to Frenesi. He’s not involved for any reason grander than being the right guy in the right place at the right time, a fact he admits in disputes with Frenesi elsewhere in the book. Zoyd isn’t so much a revolutionary as he is a collection of cultural totems associated with a more revolutionary time, made inert with distance from the original events of the 60s. He’s a hippie halloween costume, he’s the parody of what those times meant.

I read Zoyd as Pynchon’s sly comment on the way the revolutionary mood of the 60s, his mood, from his time, was perverted through the 70s and 80s, and robbed of dimension, context, venom, direction, and the propulsive force of public outrage. It’s about how revolution becomes kitsch. How “revolutionaries” left over in reactionary times become the pathetic surrogates for their more committed comrades, most if not all of whom have been killed, compromised, exiled, marginalized, or otherwise rendered neutral and irrelevant to modernity.

In taking the long way around the barn, however, Vineland is able to reach a kind of stoned zen state. Zoyd may be a bum and a wholly unfit father (on paper, anyway) but his essential goodness shines through these deficiencies. In one of the book’s more stirring passages, Pynchon illustrates the extent to which this small act of growing up as much as he was able and abandoning his prior life to raise his infant daughter, was the event which lent his life meaning.

“After a while Zoyd was allowed into the Traverse-Becker annual reunions, as long as he brought Prairie, who at about the age of three or four got sick one Vineland winter, and looked up at him with dull hot eyes, snot crusted on her face, hair in a snarl, and croaked, “Dad? Am I ever gonna get bett-or?” pronouncing it like Mr. Spock, and he had his belated moment of welcome to the planet Earth, in which he knew, dismayingly, that he would, would have to, do anything to keep this dear small life from harm, up to and including Brock Vond, a possibility he wasn’t too happy with. But as he watched her then, year by year, among these reunion faces her own was growing more and more to look like, continuing to feel no least premonitory sign of governmental interest from over the horizon beyond the mental-disability checks that arrived faithfully as the moon, he at last began, even out scuffling every day, to relax some, to understand that this had been the place to bring her and himself after all, that for the few years anyway, he must have chosen right for a change, that time they’d come through the slides and storms to put in here, to harbor in Vineland, Vineland the Good.”

Zoyd Wheeler, for all his faults, loves his daughter, and it’s this capacity to love by simply doing one’s best, by being there, that qualifies him to maintain whatever meagre flame he can keep burning for all those left in the bloody, chaotic, foolish past.

The more propulsive, action driven character of One Battle After Another means that Zoyd and Bob end up as very different characters. Bob is a guy who lost it, who got old and washed up absent comrades who never had that chance. Zoyd never had it to begin with. It makes Bob a more movie-friendly protagonist, as you see him trying to get his groove back in the flailing, half-stoned Lebowskiite mode, whereas Zoyd’s born loserdom allows him to disappear without consequence and let other threads of the story take center stage. What animates the two characters, though, remains remarkably similar. Anderson and Leonardo DiCaprio deserve mutual credit for this feat, as adapting a roundabout story into a straightforward thriller lends less of the “getting to know you” time that the novel format allows (and Zoyd is maybe 100 pages of a 300+ page novel).

Kindness Report

The story’s gutsiest flourish, however, comes in making explicit what Pynchon leaves ambiguous. In Vineland, the truncated circumstances leading up to Prairie’s birth leave the question of her parentage somewhat ambiguous. In One Battle After Another, this question of parentage drives the whole plot, as Lockjaw’s reemergence to terrorize Bob, Willa, and their community is all just a cover for him to administer a paternity test to Willa. Lockjaw, as it happens, has moved up in the world in the years since Willa’s birth, and is currently attempting to win admission into a cabal of well-monied white supremacists called “The Christmas Adventurer’s Club.” None of this is in the book, by the way. This club are a fairly picky bunch, and a biracial daughter is the sort of thing that could complicate things for the Colonel. Best to get ahead of it, eh?

This, I feel, is the ultimate conflict between Bob and Lockjaw. The politics of it are secondary at best. What are American politics if not the sum of each American’s choices? Lockjaw chose self-important prestige and grabby self interest. He chose to use, exploit, and dehumanize, imagining that this would enlarge himself. The thing about a life spent stepping on people is that you never get any higher-up. You just flatten all that lies beneath you. Bob chose self-sacrifice. Chose an imperfect sort of love. Chose to try, to be there, to be a father, no matter how ill-equipped for the task he was. It’s the sort of American conception of The Good Life we once took for granted. We’re nearly a hundred years removed from George Bailey, maybe American fiction’s most perfectly imperfect father, standing on that snowy bridge and screaming that he doesn’t care what happens to him anymore, just get him back to his family. The ideal of American masculinity that valorizes that self sacrifice, that morally and spiritually elevates the good man in the household and the community over the great man of material wealth and social prestige, has diminished in modernity. The cultural superstructure inundates men with personal anxieties to sell them selfishness masquerading as strength and cruelty as stoicism, as all the while we turn into hypochondriacs and paranoids. “Bro she’s using you for money.” “Bro she’s draining your testosterone.” “Bro you gotta worry about your sperm count.” “Bro you need to stack crypto.” “Bro, get a prenup.” Men atomized, out in the cold without a community, whether through the extended, messy blood relations of Vineland or the caring friends and neighbors of OBAA, reach the end of this content delivery funnel and wonder why all the dick and hair pills, premium podcasts, investment assets, and cultural signifiers they’ve armored themselves in can’t bring them happiness in any lasting sense. The flaws in the “logic” (for men who see the world as a zero sum game love to wield this idea of “logic” as a bludgeon) underpinning this approach to participation in the human race are built into its very foundations. When you view people as something to be managed and kept in line, the world becomes a very narrow, cold, and dangerous place. When you treat people as neighbors, as friends, maybe even as something approaching family, you may feel like a sucker some times, but you’ll often be surprised by how much love you get in return for the bare minimum of kindness and decency.

Absent anything as grandiose as “love,” they might give you a few small beers, at least.