At it again | More TK #3
I've been in a rut, so I went back and moved my entire blog off of Medium and onto Pckt (a very nice little program! excited to see how it develops!), and in the process I read my last post and it said something about writing more in the future and well
You're shocked, I can tell.
Anyway! In the interim I wrote a Talk of the Town story last May for The New Yorker about @blankcheck.bsky.social, a delightful little show that's been very meaningful to me and how I experience culture. Please give the a read below:
Incidentally, it's the second thing I've written about Blank Check for the magazine—I'd previously snuck a mention of the show into Goings On's listings section. I think there's a real 20XX meme potential built in here, where we trend towards a sort of singularity in which the entire corpus of the magazine is dedicated to this one podcast. Or maybe by then the wackos at The Ringer will have purchased all media outlets and folded any culture writing into The Big Picture, somehow. I dunno. I don't know if you noticed, but it's a depressing time to think about or be in the media industry! Even more than usual!
The Watchlist
In an effort to actually regularly contribute to this fuck-ass blog of mine, which I am apparently incapable of doing without an external pressure, I'm going to include every I logged on Letterboxd in the prior week and make that an anchor. Anyway!
Send Help (2026)
A fantastic time at da moviesh, especially in a crowded theatre. There was a guy sitting like three seats down from me where, once the eyeball stuff started happening, started actively cursing out Sam Raimi (because it's a Sam Raimi movie, and of course there was going to be eyeball stuff). Fun if functional performances from Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien. Script was kinda a snooze but who cares!
The Muppet Show (2026)
I'm not a lifelong Muppets sicko, so I don't have an encylopedic knowledge of every single character, or real quibbles about Matt Vogel's vocals (his speaking voice is kinda off, but his singing voice is great, so it's all kinda mezzo-mezzo), or a kind of thorough devotion to these characters to draw on. That said, this was an absolute delight. Sabrina Carpenter was the perfect foil for a relaunched episode (pop country album when), especially when .
Black Dynamite (2009)
Watched for movie club! It's fucking great! Very well-done satire of this kind is so hard to pull off, especially when considering that the audience's familiarity with the thing you're satirizing may be limited at best—blaxploitation movies are a blind spot for me, but Black Dynamite so thoroughly inhabits itself that it's totally comprehensible.