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Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of my Cultural Compendium. It was a very cinema-heavy week for me and most of my reading was just political theory to try to turn my anxiety into an academic exercise. I published three pieces this week: * An essay on the idea
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Even people who experience depression and anxiety can personally subject themselves to the stigma toward depression and anxiety. I apologize for singling out one stranger, but one post in particular showed this stigma loop to me clearly. This person said (paraphrasing) that they were beginning to feel that maybe their
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The internet used to be an endless source of fuel for one of my least admirable traits. I am conflict-prone and often reactive, a combination of traits that causes me and others around me a lot of grief. It has been a core tenet of my behavior for my entire
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Recently, I endured a showing of “Mirror,” the 1975 film by Andrei Tarkovsky. The film is a depiction of one man’s life seen through the images of his memories as he lies in bed about to die. The non-linear structure of the film is baffling: The jumps between memories
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Hello and welcome to what I expect to be a weekly series on the various pieces of culture I’ve consumed this week. I invite you to take these lists as merely a record of what I’ve engaged with and enjoyed each week, but maybe you’ll find something
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There's a painting I visit nearly every week because for me, it demonstrates the potential scale of a woman’s containment and the glory of her liberation. It’s “The Seasons” by Lee Krasner, displayed prominently at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and I take every opportunity
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There’s a screenshot from TikTok that recently caused me and a group of my writer friends to lose our minds. “I’m watching Girls on HBO for the first time and I realize I wasn’t meant to be 23 in this age. I was meant to be a
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A question I am asked often by my friends — including professional writers — is how to build a practice of keeping a journal. Writing in a journal is really one of those top-tier resolutions that people make for themselves but fall out of habit quickly. For many years, the only consistent
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In September of last year, I wrote what I am now certain is the best piece of writing I will ever produce. I could write the contemporary equivalent of Moby Dick and the external critical acclaim would never satisfy me more than every time I reread this single-page journal entry
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There is a ritual I’ve developed over the span of many years in New York. When something particularly celebratory or painful happens in my life, I head to one specific restaurant for a meal. I have designated Superiority Burger as my go-to place “for the best days and the
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A debate I have with myself at the start of every new year is whether or not to keep a list of the books I read throughout the year. To me, setting reading goals feels like gamifying reading and corrupting the nature of my own reading habits. I am an
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Last week I had the fortune of watching the stupidest band that has ever lived play a two-hour set in Brooklyn. The Blood Brothers, an early aughts relic that blends just about every type of hardcore and punk ethos into one very loud and chaotic musical style, has been one