Dating sims, first-person shooters, life simulators—video games give us ritual spaces for vicarious expression. They let us hold things we cannot otherwise hold. A few days ago, I thought about Robin, a girl I fell in love with in college, for the first time in a long time. Though she was the same year as […]
Culture
Firewatch as Dating Sim + Whether It Can Heal Broken Hearts
The Beautiful Myth of All Our Face Time
by Brianna Di Monda
I’m waiting for my Starbucks order, carpooling back from a weekend wine tasting in Santa Maria County for a friend’s birthday. One of my friends sends me a New York Times Magazine article, “The Beauty of 78.5 Million Followers,” shooting dopamine through my slackened neural pathways as I scroll Instagram in the coffee shop. I […]
Analog Dialogue: Playing “Telephone” with My Father
by Rocky Taormina
My dad is 92 years old. Despite age, Pops is doing well. He drives like a youngster. I believe he drives better than me. I’m old too, by the way. Each morning, he negotiates crossword puzzles and gives them what-for. It’s a rare occasion when he asks for my help. “Whip It band?” He […]
“How to with John Wilson” Brought Me Home
by Chase Hutchinson
More than a year into the pandemic, the world remains caught in the grip of a bleak future. That has brought uncertainty, isolation, and, for an unfathomable number of us, the end of everything we have ever known. It has been harrowing and relentless, exacerbated by the fact that we have been severed from one […]
Rupture, Pulse, Revise: What We Can Learn From Arthur Russell and Emily Dickinson’s Poetics of Refusal
by Grace Rogers
In the spring of 1981, New Wave group the Necessaries piled into their tour van and set out from New York City toward Washington D.C. to play a gig with R.E.M. At the time, they were signed to the Warner Brothers subsidiary Sire Records, had just finished their first studio album, and were well-received by […]
Holding Myself Together
by John R. McCoy
“Your skills are not what we need at this time.” Five years ago, my boss, Laura, not her real name, terminated my employment with these words. Face-to-face in an office the size of a coat closet, sat this middle-aged white woman, Chief Development Officer at the foundation, and I, former Director of Cause Marketing and […]
Gina Prince-Bythewood: Feminism Frame by Frame
by Jennifer Gauthier
Four minutes into The Old Guard, released this summer on Netflix, Charlize Theron’s character Andi savors a piece of baklava and pinpoints exactly where it came from: “Hazelnut, not walnut. The Black Sea. Rosewater. Pomegranate. Eastern Turkey?” She’s right, of course – anyone who has eaten baklava for 6,000 years has learned a thing or […]
6,746 Miles To My Happy Place
by Kara Donovan
Before going to Korea, I hated being Asian. Growing up in a very white community didn’t help either. I grew up where we rarely learned about other cultures, and when we did, I was beyond anxious. I thought of myself as being white, and when someone brought up my being Asian, I would be so […]
The Tender Satire of Gregory Barnes’ The Touch of the Master’s Hand
by Emily Brown
Gregory Barnes’ The Touch of the Master’s Hand is a Mormon movie, a twelve-minute short about a young missionary ashamed of his masturbation habit. It premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and won the Short Film Jury Award for U.S. Fiction. Despite its look into the cultural oddity of Mormonism, the film is relatable […]
Feminist Flashback: The Woman’s Film
by Jennifer Gauthier
I can’t remember precisely the first time I saw The Woman’s Film, a collaborative short documentary made by San Francisco Newsreel in 1971, but I do remember being struck by its boldly feminist mode of address and content. It has stuck with me for years and now I use it in class anytime I can. […]
