It’s OK to care! — The Oscar nominations came out this morning. Oscar nominations are silly because all awards shows are silly, but of all the awards shows, the Oscars are unquestionably both the silliest and the most serious. The Academy Awards may fail at this goal constantly, but they do at least try to…

Thank God. — Tonight, my beloved Illinois Fighting Illini men’s basketball team will play the Indiana Hoosiers. It’s an important game in the Big Ten standings, but the reason the game really matters is because of the history between the two teams. Indiana hates Illinois. But Illinois really hates Indiana. And the…

An interview with the author of “Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter” — I host the People Still Read Books podcast once a month, a podcast where I talk to authors about their books, their process, their fears, the excitement and terror of writing a book. (It’s also partly a way to help promote my upcoming novel The Time Has Come.) You can…

They focused this one on TV, not literature. — As a general rule, I don’t tend to read a lot of government reports. They’re long, they’re dull, they’re full of footnotes, I’m too busy playing Uno on my phone … lots of reasons. But I read “The 9/11 Commission Report” cover to cover. The purposefully bland cover and deceptively…

Great. — In February 2017, The Wall Street Journal, surely doing some pivoting to video, put together a clever video showing, in the wake of a brawl in the Japanese Parliament, how there were often fights in the United States Senate in the 19th Century, and how common they were in the…

An annual ranking. — This was as “normal” a movie year that we’ve had since the pandemic hit, but it still had that end-of-days vibe every movie year seems to have anymore: It strikes me as a worrisome sign that so many prestige end-of-year releases had “the power of the movies” as their explicit…

Entertaining, talky, fast, not too heavy. — My family used to all go to the movies over Christmas break. We all saw The Pelican Brief in 1993, Titanic in 1997, King Kong in 2005, Black Swan in 2010. When you’re all stuck in the house together and run out of things to do other than have awkward…

Guaranteed to be wrong. — It’s almost 2023, folks. 2022 wasn’t half bad! As part of a new tradition here at Medium, I’m going to end the year with surely terrible predictions for the next year. Please do not go back and look at these in 365 days, I’ll look like an idiot. Joe Biden…

This is not the direction this usually goes. — Way back in December 2014, back when Donald Trump was in fevered negotiations about whether or not to return as the host of the television program “The Apprentice,” I wrote, for Medium, a short column called “Every Year Is The Worst Year Ever.” The premise was simple: At the end…