James A. Reeves
The Agony of Eros was my first encounter with Han's philosophy, and I was especially struck by his argument that, despite being a trendy thing to say at dinner parties, capitalism is very much not a religion. Every religion operates with both debt (guilt) and relief (pardon). But capitalism only...
beew
Bill Walton was a one-man Venn diagram. When you trace the circles of his life, they seem to belong to different people. He won championships, followed the Grateful Dead with religious devotion, got himself arrested for protesting the Vietnam War, and became, against every reasonable expectation,...
alban
When I work with my hands, like on a woodworking or home improvement project, I have moments of frustration, but most of the experience is joy. There are small incremental improvement all leading to the end of the project. But when I write, I write in loops, and it always hurts. I write something...
James A. Reeves
Hiromi Kawakami's Under the Eye of the Big Bird begins as an austere fable in the vein of Woman in the Dunes or Never Let Me Go before it unfurls into a uniquely strange creature. Centuries pass. New modes of consciousness emerge.“My brothers, my father, my mother—they all wanted to be understood....
beew
Parents have been raising children since the beginning of time. They learned from watching their parents and grandparents and from the accumulated wisdom of a trusted whisper network that had already figured out everything worth knowing. It was a gloriously imperfect improvisation in all the ways...
James A. Reeves
It's so soft. And I already have "Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space" tattooed on my arm.
James A. Reeves
In January of 1995, I snuck out alone to St. Andrew’s Hall, where the militant thump of Phylyps Trak II drew me upstairs to the dark third floor. Club kids in overalls, drag queens in chartreuse wigs, a man in a three-piece suit—all lock-stepping in a grid, heads bowed before the bassbin like an...
James A. Reeves
A fine-grained collision between existential anxiety and end-game capitalism—and a masterclass in dialogue. The first three minutes might be my favorite opening scene in cinema: cosmic horror soundtracks the ultramundane. More.
beew
Download PDF There is a man named Plinko who used to work as a clown on kids' night at a Ground Round restaurant in Jackson, Michigan. He was in his late forties or early fifties. His mother died of cancer, and somewhere in his grief he'd taken his name from a game on The Price Is Right. The math...
beew
I’m half-working, half-staring out the window, when the opening synth line threads through the room. That pulsing, driving riff curdles my insides before I understand why. My body goes warm. An involuntary smile spreads across my face. This song matters to me. It hits me with the force of...
alban
There's something I love about opening a text-only webpage. They're a refuge from the GDPR cookie banners, the trashy ads, the email opt-ins, and the god-forsaken auto-play video. A text-only webpage is clean. It's readable. It's fast and it's simple. The page is just made of text, so it's...