Bulk-edge Correspondence
On insiderism, fandom, and the judiciary
Thanks for reading my newsletter! The breakdown: first a personal essay, a round up of my writing, then some thoughts on my recent work experience, media I am consuming and finally some vegan food and recipe recommendations. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own.
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BULK-EDGE CORRESPONDENCE*
Ashoka Tano’s outfit changes between the second and third season of the animated show Star Wars: the Clone Wars. She loses the tube top and gets a second lightsaber, both important developments if your life’s work is fighting. Watching the show, I wondered whether this outfit change had to do with Ashoka growing older in the timeline of the show and the culture of her species. This led me to trying to remember what planet she was actually from which then took me to looking up other Togruta Jedis. After I made it through multiple pages of Wookiepedia, I had to stop because I realized I was inching too close to unintentionally spoiling one of the Star Wars shows I have not seen yet for myself.
The issue of spoilers for intricately built worlds like the one associated with Star Wars is pretty fraught. Some spoilers are virtually unavoidable because the franchise is and has in some form been a staple for many popular culture consumers for years. Other spoilers depend on how much you care about the series already and how many plot points and details already live in your mind for free.
For instance, if someone had told you that the Darksaber would appear in the hands of Moff Gideon in the season one finale of the Mandalorian, whether that was a spoiler would depend on how much of Clone Wars you may have previously watched. Spoiling the big surprise from the end of season two of the same show would have likely touched more people as it featured a character recognizable to all that have seen any of the three oldest Star Wars movies. If seeing the Darksaber immediately made you start looking for Death Watch breadcrumbs in consequent Mandalorian episodes you’re probably a fairly invested Star Wars fan. If you thought it was just a cool sword, like I first did, you may be a less committed consumer of the franchise or less of a completist.
In a sense, how much you knew already, and how much you already cared, determined what you would consider surprising, interesting and, at times, wrong or offensive.
***
My biggest asset as a staff writer at a fast-paced science magazine in these past few weeks has likely been the same as when I was an intermittent freelancer - I remember the research world well enough to often be able to pass myself off as an insider when I interview scientists.
I can say Gross-Pitaevskii without stuttering, I can nod knowingly to systems being compared to an Ising model or theories going “beyond mean field”, and I can succinctly explain how science journalism is different from publishing in peer reviewed journals because I have struggled through learning how to do both. A few days ago I reported on an experiment that involved ultracold atoms, a topic that was all over my PhD work, and a few minutes into the interview one of the researchers gave me a wide smile then plainly stated that I could probably guess what they were going to say because I am an expert too.
This does not work every single time (another researcher recently tried to explain one very basic idea from quantum mechanics to me even after I politely noted that I do in fact have training in the field) and sometimes it does backfire. If I get too carried away, I am not serving my readers who deserve more than a summary of an in-the-weeds conversation. Such technically detailed conversations sometimes feel exciting, but I recognize that giving them too much space can alienate readers that weren’t taught to think that any experiment or a calculation at hand is important to begin with.
Now that I work in an office where most people went to graduate school for journalism rather than science, the importance of expertise, and of managing the performance of that expertise, has become very obvious to me. My colleagues have a somewhat healthier remove from the topics they report on. They assess research from a viewpoint of curiosity and significance that is in line with how a reader that loves science, but has not not been trained in it might think. They are knowledgeable and passionate about the topics they report on, but they don’t speak of them as if they belonged to some cabbal that they too used to be a part of. The scent of that cabbal, on the other hand, is all over me. This is the first time in my adult life where I have been employed outside of academia, and it is now a part of my job to be something of an outsider and to work in service of other outsiders.
All of my colleagues are probably still more excited by scientific papers than the average person and the conversations in our office veer into nerd territory often. In my first week on the job, just by sitting in on a few meetings, I learned a lot about eel migration, about echidna anatomy, about postbiotics and selling your gut bacteria, about mental health effects of spending time by the sea, and about how hard it is to study ancient glass. Editors and writers in conference rooms and on Zoom screens have repeatedly blown me away by their detailed knowledge and enthusiastic care for a wide range of ideas from all subgenres of science.
But I have also been in conversations where I am wading through rivers of jargon to explain why some recently peer reviewed paper is interesting and with every layer of translation washing over me realizing that I still have a physicists’ brain more than a journalists’. An editor I used to work with, and who had been an invaluable mentor to me, always cautioned me against pitching “gnarly math stories” just because I liked them. Of course, I liked them because I had trained for years to find beauty, meaning and triumph in that sort of work. It is interesting and challenging to notice and manage that part of my thinking, fully knowing that it has shaped not just my identity as a writer but my identity as a person as well. What does it mean to be so enmeshed in the academic way of assigning worth to science as I spend every day trying to celebrate science in a way that will reach as many people as possible, as honestly as possible?
The honesty piece is what seems the most tricky. We like to think that honesty is absolute, but your status as an insider or outsider can change how you judge what it means to represent a piece of work honestly. A scientific study that makes incremental progress within its field is honestly important to scientists that work on similar topics. However, the same study is also likely not going to be overly interesting or important for someone who is not a scientist, and not because someone is being dishonest about it. An article on superfluids intended for a fifteen-year old may not explicitly mention the difference between helium-3 and helium-4 and not be dishonest in that omission, but a scientist who has carefully studied both may find it uncomfortable to refer to both in the same sentence. There is a line here, but how thick it is in your mind and how far you are from jumping over it heavily depends on what institution or group you belong to.
I am pitching multiple stories to my editors every day now so I occasionally let the gnarly ones slip in. Sometimes, I do really think that my readers might care about ideas and measurements that are not firsts or described by superlatives. I don’t want to underestimate the reader. At the same time, I also cannot assume that they are more like me than they really are. It’s a balancing act, and one that takes courage and humility alike.
I want to bring more science and more varieties of science to people that think they don’t care for it. This is not in tension with the way I had previously committed myself to doing science and teaching science, but the reader that chooses to engage with my work out of curiosity is inherently different from a student that had to sit in one of my old school’s classrooms or a researcher for whom detailed, in-the-weeds science is just a normal workday. Because the reader has to choose to click on one of my articles, my blindly exerting expertise can never be enough. Expertise can, in fact, be terribly obscure and boring if it is only meant for insiders that already share your values and biases.
During my second week on the job, I asked my desk-mate, a wildlife reporter with an irresistible chaotic good aura, whether they knew what “plasma” is. They guessed it had something to do with blood rather than electrons and ions so I decided to explicitly define “plasma” in the article I was writing. Going over the transcripts of interviews I had done with scientists for the same article I realized that none of them ever asked me whether I knew what a plasma is.
***
I got interested in watching Clone Wars because I tried listening to an episode of a deep-dive podcast that was breaking down the Book of Boba Fett and realized how much I don’t know about the world of Star Wars. As a rule, I enjoy listening to people break down movies or music albums and contextualize them within their industry even if I have not spent a lot, or sometimes any, time with those specific pieces. I find all the meta stuff, the why’s and how’s of production and the cultural value imbued into media artifacts by fans, critics and dabblers, appealing even if they don’t work for me in themselves. Just like my interest in science stems from wanting to know how the world works and what we even have the capacity to say about it, my urge to consume media commentary arises from being fascinated by how culture is created and how it evolves.
Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) are prime examples of contemporary mythology and one that was engineered to be commercially viable instead of having developed as organically as old myths did. Their fictional worlds can be intricate and artful and pack huge emotional punches for fans when done right, and they can come off as craven and fall flat when mishandled. To an outsider rather than an aficionado, observing and analyzing this can be interesting and entertaining. To a fan it can be much more gut-wrenching and angering.
Once you become a fan, however, it seems much harder to genuinely assess one of these pieces of media as just art. Is a bad movie a bad movie if it features a character you have been hoping to see on the big screen since childhood? Is a bad show a bad show if it hints at a theory you developed while watching a related movie and haven’t stopped thinking about since? Is a bad episode a bad episode if it features a few wholesome, adorable moments that make no narrative sense, but you just can’t help and cry through them? Insider knowledge that fans have, and their emotional investment, blurs the line between sentimental and good and between intrigue and quality.
While there is inherently not much wrong with fandom hindering objectivity (our idea of objectivity is an artificial concept that depends on our sociopolitical context anyway), the stakes become higher when one or two pockets of fandom start to dominate culture or their idiosyncrasies become the only culture available i.e. it becomes the mainstream. This leads to all sorts of rudeness and gatekeeping among fans online (and online is very much real life now). It also constrains options for filmmakers who are increasingly hiding genre movies and stories or styles they are passionate about under titles lifted from intellectual properties closest to the monoculture of the moment.
Maybe there is some poetic justice to comic book and Star Wars geeks having won the culture war, but you also have to wonder who took their place. In the past, our options included choosing between being a normie or having slightly niche interests. Now, the choice may be between being squarely inside the culture or remarkably far away from it with very little in-between. You probably don’t have to commit two hours to a podcast episode about the one-and-a-half minutes of the trailer for the Obi-Wan Kenobi show, but you sort of do have to be conversant in multiverses and baby aliens if you want to be a social person of any sort.
This past weekend a friend tried to catch me up on everything I’d need to know if I wanted to see the new Sam Raimi Dr. Strange movie. We were sitting outside in an upstate New York cafe on a gorgeously sunny day, the first such day we’ve had in a while. Over a rickety wooden table covered in half-empty vegan donut boxes and avocado toast debris, my friend started to lay out the first Dr. Strange movie, the most recent Spider Man film and the WandaVision streaming series. They said that I really didn’t need to know that much, but it still took about ten minutes and one uncanny Tilda Swinton impression to get to the end of their impromptu Cliffs Notes.
“I’m not even super invested in this stuff,” they said. “It’s just nice to have a thing you can participate in.”
***
Being an insider can make you overlook differing opinions from outside of your circle, and it blurs how you perceive what it is that binds you to other insiders. Being an insider in power can make you think that everyone has to be inside of your insider circle, no matter how small it may be, or otherwise they are wrong, maybe even the enemy.
In recent years much has been written about polarization and fractionalization of the American public. American politicians and political commentators alike have pointed out that extreme polarization translates to extreme opinions that leave little room for empathy or kindness that is not actually a quid pro quo of some sort. The minority majority Supreme Court is a symptom of this. Its five conservative justices are starting to look more and more like a circle of insiders that all speak the same jargon, feel passionately about the same kind of worldbuilding for the future, and are very much invested in making everyone know that their culture should be the culture that every other system of values has to be folded into. Because they have power, they assume that anyone even seemingly normal will eventually agree with them (and probably silently does already) and everyone else is just so weird, such an outsider that they must be deranged and adversarial.
While the recent leak of a draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade was very upsetting and made me fear that the future for people that have the kind of body that I do will be worse than I was imagining, it was the oral argument in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District that made me feel really angry and hopeless. In this case a high school football coach, coach Kennedy, is seeking the right to pray with players during football games, arguing on the basis of the First Amendment. The case is somewhat convoluted, but it does fall under the umbrella of religious liberty and exemption cases that the Court has been keen on hearing in recent years, whether they be about cake baking, charter schools, adoption agencies or resurfacing playground with old tires. There are 6 Catholics on the Supreme Court right now, a 67% of the Court’s personnel that towers over the roughly 22% Catholics in the overall American population, and many of them have shown sympathy for plaintiffs whose cause is Christianity. Of course, being religious does not make one less objective, but given how much time and money the conservative legal movement has poured into shaping the judiciary to take on cases centered on issues of exactly this flavor, it is hard to believe in coincidences.
After the leaked draft decision started to dominate all news coverage on all platforms, I saw a TikTok meme where a young woman was decrying the conservatives’ “book club”, the book being the Bible, and asserting that their view on abortion should not apply to those of us who have chosen to not join “the book club.” The joke felt appropriate and tragic at once. It reminded me of a moment in the Kennedy hearing where Justice Barrett casually referred to the “Almighty” as if we all knew and agreed on who that is.
“Even if he's not communicating to an audience, so he's completely silent, he just takes the knee, that's protected speech even if he's not trying to communicate to anyone around him, just to the Almighty?,” Barrett asked, making it clear that she assumed everyone there really was in her book club.
Later, she referred to Young Life, an evangelical Christian organization present on some college campuses, one that she did not explain or contextualize and that someone like me had to look up. The assumption that we are all on the same page here was, again, jarring.
In his questioning, Justice Kavanaugh stated that “every parent is worried about the coach exercising favoritism in terms of the starting lineup, playing time, recommendations for colleges, et cetera.”
Kavanaugh attended Yale Law School just like 11 other justices in the Court’s history and 3 others currently on the bench. 21 justices in the Court’s history attended law school at Harvard University. Certainly those experiences must have influenced their ideas about applying to prestigious education institutions. I thought I heard that in Justice Kavanaugh’s comment here as well: just like Barrett could not imagine that the coach’s “Almighty” may not be everyone else’s Almighty, Kavanaugh conveniently forgot that not everyone goes to college, that not everyone plays sports to advance in the world, that not all parents have time to scheme about letters of recommendation, that some parents just want their kids to have something to do after school. (For his own career, on the contrary, playing basketball with influential law professors was in fact rather helpful.)
Since the leaked decision, all legacy media outlets have been urgently pointing out that polls show that the majority of Americans oppose overturning Roe and they oppose the kinds of sweeping abortion bans that over a dozen states are going to pass if Roe is overturned. Statistics of this sort have also played a role in performances of outrage by everyone from politicians to social media celebrities. There are many numbers worth highlighting here. Staggerigly many people will be hurt by abortion bans in very real ways including increasing health risks and poverty. It is also worth mentioning that most people that chose abortion have children already and in no way fit the stereotype that drives so much hatred and judgement from anti-abortion pundits. But it is becoming increasingly hard to believe that data showing any of this can trickle into the circle of insiders that make all the decisions without being distorted or stripped of meaning. Here too being an insider, a leader of a strain of culture that has risen to power, makes you blind to what objective means, what good means, what right means.
And if the comparison with fandom seems crass, I am not denying that it partly is, but the way anti-choice and right-wing politicians and activists speak more and more sounds like they live in a parallel world, the worldbuilding of which is more intense than any fiction. Just think of all the recent arguments about teachers that brainwash children, about trans people that are ruining sports or doctors poisoning the public with vaccines, about the war on Christians and cancel culture - they all fit together so well and paint such a coherent picture that you may forget how little any of it has to do with reality. Just recently we have had a terrifying reminder of this when in the wake of a mass shooting so many legacy media outlets ran explainers on “replacement theory”, a piece of conspiracy lore familiar to a good portion of racist or xenophobic legislators and cable news personalities. Regardless of how many people did not know about these ideas, they still motivated someone to kill.
If I was ever bewildered by what is happening in this country, or shocked by it, those feelings have been replaced by a more terrifying realization that the people that make decisions, their book club, their fandom circle, are just getting really good at pushing their culture towards being the only culture, encasing into law the idea that if you are an outsider then your opinion on what is right just matters less.
***
Having been many different types of outsider for a good part of my adult life, including being an immigrant, I am not completely hopeless when I see circles of power shrink and close off. I know that people who stay on the outside can and do help each other. They form their own circles and work towards building the worlds that they want to live in. As more and more of our institutions turn from serving everyone to serving a few, it is important for the rest of us to live in a way that will counteract that, to widen our networks and extend kindness to others that now need it even more. Our circles need to be broad, welcoming, and malleable now.
In a recent newsletter Raechel Anne Jolie wrote that
“We have the opportunity of perspective toward the Supreme Court decision, too. This is horrific, and also (as Arendt reminds us) it is banal. This is a moment to bolster our mutual aid giving to local abortion funds and radical abortion activists, and for getting more comfortable with being part of criminalized carework. (This is, of course, another opportunity to listen to and learn from sex workers and drug users!) It’s a time to continue to fight against repressive sexual mores, transphobia, and misogyny. It’s a chance to think expansively about bodily autonomy, and autonomy more generally; to really consider what it might mean to be free. This is a chance – in this sensationally awful and terribly typical time – to imagine and to build otherwise.”
And this made me feel more strongly than any overwrought podcast, manicured public statement, or an unnecessarily clever Tweet.
Best,
Karmela
*In condensed matter physics and specifically when physicists discuss materials that are known as topological, the bulk edge correspondence refers to being able to predict how many excitations, like waves of very energetic electrons or electric currents, will reside on the material’s physical edge based on the energies that electrons inside the material, away from the edge, are allowed to have.
ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING
One of the few freelance pieces I didn’t manage to wrap up before starting at New Scientist was this Slate piece that focused on a mostly forgotten nuclear physics luminary and what her story can teach us about women in science today. Harriet Brooks worked with all the greats of early days of radioactivity research and could have been a true peer of Marie Curie had she had more support from her partner and institutions that benefited from her work. Today, especially on the heels of a pandemic that particularly devastated working women, it is worth thinking about how many contemporary talented female scientists are at risk of being forgotten because of still prevailing yet outdated notions of what it means to be a married woman or support a family. I am really grateful to have had a chance to write this!
I have written ten stories for my new home on the web at this point and they are all collected here. Since the other physics reporter on staff mostly focuses on space I have gotten to write about a very broad range of topics from old favorites like ultracold atoms and quantum encryption to some fairly new to me technology ideas such as magic mirrors and acoustic levitation. It has been really fascinating to dive into each of these ideas for a few days at a time and be yet again reminded that science is vast and vastly cool.
Additionally, I was a guest on the New Scientist Weekly podcast, talking about a chemical computer developed by a really creative team of chemists in Glasgow. It takes digital inputs and produces digital outputs but information processing happens by actually running chemical reactions in cells of a big plastic grid. All the cells ‘talk to each other’ so the chemical computer may eventually beat classical computers when it comes to certain types of parallel calculations. The whole thing is 3D printed and pretty automated so part of the challenge is just how to miniaturize it or put it on a chip. What is even more interesting is that there may be parallels between how this thing works and the human brain so this could be a new, hands-on way for researchers to study how brains may have evolved or even to interface with them.
LEARNING
Working as a staff writer at a science magazine has, not unexpectedly, been very different from being a freelance writer and a teacher. My past routine revolved around a thousand or more words of writing at a time and I could often sit with the physics and digest it for a few days before turning in a draft. A big part of my time as a freelancer was also spent crafting very precise and very enticing pitches, some basically articles in themselves. Now, I am putting together two-sentence pitches for a couple of stories every day, doing interviews most days and completing two or three short articles every week. I am working at a much faster pace, I read a lot more papers and rely on press releases less, and the language I am using has been undergoing something of a cleanse.
A 400-word news item that I put together within 48 hours of reading a preprint of a paper leaves less room for flowery analogies than a 1200-word deep dive I worked on for a week or more. The short news article also requires a lot more clarity and a very firm understanding of a study’s or experiment’s context. Articles I am writing now are aimed at readers that have lots of curiosity, but little formal experience. They may even be particularly precocious high schoolers.
Working to simplify, simplify and simplify has sort of kept my mind on fire for the past few weeks because it also means that I have to be really clear with myself on what I am trying to say and really immersed in the thing I am trying to make accessible. This has been very challenging, but I can also already sense my skillset growing and my craft advancing. I am writing punchier sentences and asking better questions in interviews (even when I worry about offending physicists by not giving their work more words). I have always known that I am at my best when I am edited somewhat ruthlessly and now I also have the benefit of a very kind, but very no-nonsense editor often sitting in the same room as me. This is making me feel supported and nurtured as a beginner journalist and I am cautiously starting to believe that I may do just fine with this new stage of my career.
In addition to learning how to be a more technically solid writer, I have also been learning what the consequences of writing professionally instead of having it be a side-hustle are. What I mean by that is that I have been learning how to actually leave my work at work, how to not write at the kitchen table at 8pm and how to not reply to emails on my phone as I’m coming home from boxing class. So far I have been lucky to work with writers and editors that really do seem to believe that work stops at the end of the workday, and after years of working in and around academia, that has been a huge change. I haven’t cultivated any wildly impressive or engaging hobbies yet, and the guilt and restlessness associated with having actual free time here and there when you have never felt like that was option before have been quite difficult to let go off, but I can tell that I am a little more awake when my partner and I sit to eat dinner, and a little less doom-struck as I walk to work in the morning. I am finding myself making more weekend plans with more friends, maybe even trying to make new friends, and I am grateful to have the chance to learn, albeit as an awkward 30-year-old, how to let life transcend my profession.
READING
Fear of the Black Universe by Brown physicist Stephon Alexander has been at times fascinating, but also often confusing and frustrating. The thing that is troubling me with this book,other than its liberal use of physics jargon, is that I cannot figure out who it is meant to be for. The level of technical detail and all discussions of best research practices makes me think that it is intended for graduate students or even early career professional researchers in physics, but Alexander also spends more than a few chapters breaking down topics in modern physics that almost anyone that is actually working in research would already be familiar with. I found his attempts to insert social commentary equally confounding as almost every physicist he names as an idol is a problematic white man. He discusses his own blackness here and there, but the whiteness of his idols is barely acknowledged, even though there is a whole chapter about what physicists could learn about being more inclusive from (a few) social science studies. More than once I found myself wishing that there was more space for Alexander to give his story more fully instead of almost always treating personal experiences as a peg for a more high reaching punchline. To be fair, as a condensed matter physicist, I am learning lots of new things about particle physics and cosmology from Alexander, but everything about this book except for those facts just doesn’t click for me.
This Wired article titled The Age of Everything Culture Is Here grappling with micro- and macro-trends on the Internet and what they probably don’t mean for whatever it is we are now calling the real world is quite good and thought-provoking. Jason Parham writes
A generation’s currency is measured in trends. They are the moments that make an era mouthwateringly memorable. Only these fads are no longer dictated by a handful of tastemakers. Instead, what gets crowned as cool is often determined by how well a trend appeals to the rhythms of a specific platform. An idea’s artistic or cultural cachet depends on how easily it can be executed with the tools provided.
And, later on,
Ours is a period of increasing noise. Everything is bleeding into everything around it. All trends, large and small, now suggest a new cultural mood—but only until the next Vaseline-smeared obsession comes along. The years ahead will be a time defined by our transient impulses, spurred by smarter technologies and momentary trends. I used to think the rate at which we metabolized culture was a bad thing. I believed our fleeting curiosities cheapened digital life—that we were moving too quickly and too recklessly—but perhaps that’s what the future we built feels like: a carousel in constant motion, a doomed thrill ride with no exit.
This Utopian Drivel essay about vilification of LGBTQ+ people in connection to the war in Ukraine also struck me as very insightful. The historical context it offers may be rather valuable as we move towards a future less and less friendly and safe for queer folks. Huw Lemmey writes
They’re intended to suggest that sexual liberalism and the rights of LGBTQ people are things that fundamentally morally weaken societies, and that in weakening them, leave them open to destruction or conquest. Queerness has made us weak and Russia has seen that weakness and taken advantage in order to strike. They wink at a political position that will later be made explicitly, once the seed is sown: that tolerance for LGBTQ people is a weakness in the good times that becomes an existential risk in the bad. Sure, the queers might look weak, so weak they can’t possibly threaten you, Joe Public, who is just trying to pay your rent and be a nice enough guy - but they can weaken us as a nation so severely that our foes - and specifically our foes to the East - will be able to overrun us.
Perhaps if you’re that Joe Public, mild-mannered, tolerant enough and with no dog in the game, what I’ve just said will seem desperately hyperbolic. But the concept of supposed sexual immorality or gender deviance being an existential weakness within societies that opens them up to conquest from the East is a long and pernicious one in Europe that dates back to early Christian narratives of the decline of Rome. In the Enlightenment and Victorian era, contemporary anxieties around sexual immorality and especially homosexuality were retroactively projected onto the Roman Empire, and the “fall of Rome” attributed to a culture of licentiousness, ease and moral degeneracy of an Empire made weak by comfort and perversion. As history, it’s entirely untrue: Rome was at its most powerful at a time where it had largely adopted the more open Greek models of same-sex relationships, and at its territorial and military zenith under Trajan and Hadrian, who were hardly paragons of heterosexual fidelity. In fact, the fall of Rome occurred under Christian management, after centuries of increasing prohibitions on same-sex desire
And, further down,
It might seem that these braying numbskulls’ fears that Putin is rubbing his hands with glee at the prospect of a they/them NATO is prime idiocy designed to be cheap fodder for a culture war. Yet beneath their jokes lies a deep-seated fear that moral degeneracy is fatally sapping the strength of their nation, a fear that can easily metastasize across society in times of crisis when a scapegoat is required. We can see that’s as foolish as the idea that men bumming brought down the Roman Empire, but the fact that the fear has persisted for so long illustrates how deeply entrenched it is within the generalised fear of sexual and gender difference. Pledging loyalty to the myths of nationhood won’t counter this gender and sexual paranoia, this deep-seated conservative desire for a rigid gender order; it’s only by making anti-imperialism an intrinsic part of our LGBTQ politics that we can combat and dismantle an ideology which ties together masculinity with nationhood.
WATCHING
Northman was both visually terrific and terrifying, but also barely made sense at times and probably did not need to be so long. I understand that obsessively detailed research is Robert Eggers’s whole thing and I did appreciate how unpretentious and un-Hollywood-y this movie felt (Nicole Kidman gives maybe her best performance in years exactly because there are so few frills here), but it could have benefitted from being just a little more tight and streamlined.
Because my partner and I are always looking to watch more clever crime movies, we spent one Saturday night with the 2003 Ridley Scott, Nicolas Cage and Sam Rockwell conman extravaganza Matchstick Men. The portrayal of mental illness in this movie did not age well, but Cage is at his best and letting out the turned-up-past-eleven intensity he is notorious for only when absolutely necessary, the story is propulsive and at times genuinely touching and the twist ending did surprise both me and my partner, two self-proclaimed crime movie cynics. This film may not be a cinematic masterpiece, but it is well done and truly very entertaining.
We have been keeping up with a fair amount of so-called prestige TV so we finished HBO’s Winning Time then moved on to the incoherent Twin-Peaks-meets-Yellowstone story of Outer Range on Hulu, Apple’s British spy drama Slow Horses and then back to HBO for the spiritual successor of the Wire called We Own This City.
Outer Range just did not work for me, probably because it was trying to do too much with too little finesse (including bundling all their diversity and inclusion efforts into one character of color who is also queer) and too many flat tropes in place of character development. In theory I love the idea of a slightly corny cowboy show with some terrifying magic thrown in, but Outer Range just felt like it was trying to very shallowly emulate past hits and be weird for weirdness sake.
Slow Horses was as solid as I expected when I saw that it revolves around Gary Oldman playing a disgraced MI5 agent. Though the themes of the central plotline did slightly surprise me in their racial politics (the show is based on an older series of novels), this series is mostly a nicely executed version of characters and scenes we have seen and liked before, all stitched together into a few pretty fun hours of television. I’d be happy to watch more, maybe even relieved to reinvest in a series that is not trying to out-prestige prestige TV.
Four episodes in, We Own This City is not the easiest show to follow and not the most pleasant story to spend time with, but it is also likely the best piece of television I have seen this year. It takes place in a Baltimore police department, it was created based on a true story and it is run and designed by the same luminaries that had given us the Wire, but this show is much more raw in its depiction of crime among both criminals and police officers than the Wire ever was. It rarely gives the viewer a chance to engage in any sort of nostalgia or misguided fondness for any of its terrible characters. Here, the bad guys are just bad. Though their motivations can be rationalized and some of them are very charismatic (Jon Bernthal has never been so terrifyingly good) it is always clear that they have done so much structural damage that we cannot zoom in on one of them and make up a narrative that would offer some absolution. This show is probably not for everyone yet I would recommend it pretty widely, even if just for the shock value of how broken the police system is in America.
LISTENING
We saw Orville Peck in concert at Brooklyn Steel and it was sort of perfect. He is committed to his bit to a tee, his band is fantastic, everything sounded even better than on the records, and by the time we spilled out of the venue and into the warm summer night, my heart was really full.
We have been listening to The Ringer’s 60 Songs that Explain the 90s and I am really loving it. Instead of picking songs we have heard off or have a relationship with, we started from the first episode and just kept going and though I have not found a new favorite song yet, Rob Harvilla’s introductory essays and short conversations about music theory with his producer have really scratched my itch for understanding why and how culture happens. Harvilla does not pretend to be objective and many of his guests do feel very strongly about songs they are discussing which adds texture to this very satisfying project of capturing a moment in time and various ways in which different people experienced it through something as universal as loving music. The show has some of the warmth and attitude that Supercontext had, though it is not nearly as systematic and academic, some of the irreverence and haughtiness of Jon Caramanica’s Popcast, though it is more kind, and some of the catalog expertise that I’d expect from Chris Molanphy on Hit Parade, but with less bookishness. The mix of it all is really enjoyable.
I’m not sure whether Rosalia’s Motomami is a good record, but it is interesting enough to have spent the first few weeks of May lodged deeply into my brain. It jumps between genres at a breakneck pace, dabbles in both very pop sensibilities and very obscure and obscene themes, and its fast songs like Saoko and Chicken Teriyaki are incredibly propulsive.
Wet Leg’s self-titled debut album is just 37 minutes of corny indie rock earworms, but in a very fun way. It struck me as a version of Wild Flag with less emotional baggage or a kind of millenial girl-rock that is bound to be a needledrop in every Netflix show about young people in the next few years. I listened to it lots as I was walking to work or running and it gave me some solid main character energy.
I heard an interview with L’Rain on Object of Sound and in that conversation Taja Cheek spoke about looping vocals and samples to achieve ambient and surreal sounds. This got me interested enough to listen to Fatigue, the artist’s latest, and I was sort of taken by its softness. This is a pleasant record to have on loop as whole throughout a workday, great for days that feel slow, or days that call for more kindness and escapism.
On the harsher front, Devil Master’s punk inspired black metal really worked for me on Ecstasies of Never Ending Night and I also spent time with Spectral Wound’s A Diabolic Thirst which is the kind of dark, grating and heavy that gets to me no matter how much I try to explore other sounds and genres.
EATING
Incredible donuts from Peaceful Provisions in Beacon. The only better donuts I ever tasted were my mom’s and the very creative flavor selection at this legendary upstate New York bakery has very few competitors. The maple pecan was my favorite and the yeasted chocolate dough on another donut was one of the most interesting things I’ve tasted in a bakery in a long time.
On a similar note: really impeccable vegan-but-it’s-hard-to-tell pizza at Scarr’s in Manhattan and Pauli Gee’s in Brooklyn. Both are worth the wait.
This fennel and garlic cream recipe from Bon Appetit but with tofu instead of fish and this Veggiekins salad recipe with arugula and basil instead of cabbage and chives, topped with silken tofu and all the accouterments.
A barley, pear, chickpea salad that was so good I actually wrote down the recipe.