2025 was another fantastic year for literature, and the team at MAYDAY enjoyed classics and new publications alike. Every year, we survey the team to see what their favorite books of the year, whether they’re new releases or just new to them. And this year, we had the privilege of welcoming in new team members. […]
Clement Obropta
CLEMENT TYLER OBROPTA is a Culture editor at MAYDAY. He studied film and English at Ithaca College, has a master's degree in film studies from the University of St Andrews, and his work can also be found with Film Inquiry, Film Daze, and Gen Z Critics. He lives in Scotland with his wife and cat.
MAYDAY Staff Survey: The Best Reads of 2025
The Body Expendable
by Clement Obropta
Thirty years from now, humans will be colonizing far-off planets. Legally dubious clones called expendables will be used for deadly grunt work. And everything else will be, unfortunately, very much the same. Such is the vision of the future in Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi gonzo adventure Mickey 17, starring Robert Pattison as one of those expendables […]
MAYDAY Staff Survey: The Best Reads of 2024
by MAYDAY Staff
Murder mysteries. True crime. New works by Sally Rooney, Percival Everett, and Kristin Hannah. Romantasy, YA romance, and frankly all around too much romance to read. 2024 provided so many amazing and enticing books that there’s no way any of us could possibly read them all in one year. But just in case your to-read […]
“Four Centuries On, It Is Indisputable: The Genius Of Shakespeare Will Never Be Matched” vs. “Yes It Will”
by Clement Obropta
For right-wing British newspaper The Telegraph, the past stays uninvited for an eternity. Author, columnist, and former member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan wrote on Nov. 11, 2023, “Four centuries on, it is indisputable: the genius of Shakespeare will never be matched.” In his column, he chronicles the “greatest act of literary salvage in […]
The Best Short Films of 2022
by Lisa Ströhm Winberg and Clement Obropta
Great short films are like windows on a ship. You look outside them, and you can see a tossing, furious sea, the ocean waves reaching up the porthole, submerging your perspective for an instant. Or you look out and see an endless night. Or glittering stars. Or a sunrise, the kind of sunrise you figure […]
Nothing New in the West
by Clement Obropta
The Old West is an invention, as fake as a ride at Disneyland. It’s a desert filled with paradoxes.
Firewatch as Dating Sim + Whether It Can Heal Broken Hearts
by Clement Obropta
There’s something regenerative about a wildfire; many ecosystems have grown to depend on them, and they’re good at clearing out the moldy, dead stuff at the bottom of the forest.
