980, PASS CHRISTIAN, It is three in the morning when B…
David Cronenberg’s The Fly at 40: A Love Letter to the Rot
Adam Page on David Cronenberg’s sci-fi body horror classic The Fly… There is a moment in The Fly from David Cronenberg, and if you haven’t seen it yet, stop reading, go watch it and come b…
Stella Maris
"From the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road comes the second volume of a two-volume masterpiece: Stella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence. Black River Falls, Wisconsin, 1972: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia's psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence"--
Solitary
Take a pass at Dan Bodily’s record-breaking themeless puzzle — it’s wide open.
First trailer released for western starring AI version of Val Kilmer
Footage of As Deep As the Grave screened in the US, featuring an authorised visual deepfake of the actor who died in 2025
A deep-as-you-like dive into the ATmosphere
An unfinished multilayered explainer into how Bluesky and the rest of the ATmosphere works.
White Rabbit
Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture
Society cannot recover from such an epic scale of devastation - the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and three days later on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 - but may, instead, manifest trauma as a perpetual genetic scar—ontological chasm which moves as a consumptive demon ripping up through the generations as a peripatetic wound, egregious disfigurement banished from conscious thought, inflating to cartoon benignity in a pantomime of humanity, sutured gash badly sewn and always reopening, futile replacement of scarred mortality for the immaculate technology of machines, and finally as the wholesale abandonment of frail humanity for alternative existential states.
Shadow ticket
"Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he's found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who's taken a mind to go wandering. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them"--
Coding Machines
I stopped breathing as Patrick struggled to get the plug lined up with the port. I stared at the front panel lights, and felt Dave doing the same. My eyes watered. Patrick pushed the plug in. The front lights immediately lit and flashed actively. I felt my hands and face flush, and out of the corner of my eye saw Dave sit up and open his mouth as if to speak. He then put his face down into his cupped hands, and threw up.
Vibe Graveyard
Real tech failures and postmortems from the world of rushed shipping and bad decisions.
Refugees and Searchers Go to the Movies – First of the Month
Spielberg lets the screen go black for about five seconds. The communal experience of film-going then becomes a shared nightmare. With the screen unlit, the emergency lights in the theater are the only source of illumination. If you jump (as I did), you fear for a moment that the movie has stopped—the reel fallen off its plate, the fantasy interrupted by unfunny, drop-dead reality. “Are we still alive?” whispered by Farrier’s daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) is an inquiry that invokes our own doubts about our safety, our capacity to dream, our possible awakening to dire reality. It recalls how many people felt after 9/11. Are we dreaming? Are we still alive? Bringing everyday experience and existential contemplation together so forcefully, Spielberg joins the ranks of the most audacious avant-garde filmmakers: He turns the popcorn movie experience into a consideration of the abyss.
An Explanation (Which I Would Be Very Grateful If You Took The Time To Read)
What follows is a minor modern horror story.
The New Wounded
This book addresses the issue of trauma and psychic wounds to stage a confrontation between psychoanalysis and contemporary neurobiology. In so doing, it reevaluates the brain as an organ that is not separated from psychic life but rather appears as its very locus. A philosophical approach of the “new wounded” (brain lesion patients) forms the matter of the confrontation.
Beyond Afrofuturism: Sinners, the Great Migration, and Rust Belt Gothik - Reactor
"Sinners" is a particular kind of story about migration, spirituality, and Black speculative survival skills
