March 2026

Yesterday, for the first time, I closed my site. Any page you visited turned you away with this message:

This site is closed on Sundays. I’m trying to avoid screens at least one day out of the week, and this is my way of encouraging others to consider doing the same. I’d apologize for the inconvenience, but I think in many ways modern expectations of convenience have gotten way out of hand, don’t you? Feel… See more →

A watch list for progressive masochists from Becca Rothfeld’s “The MAGA Theory of Art” in Art in America.

Just as Weimar and Nazi films pandered to white-collar workers who refused to confront a new economic reality, evangelical films pander to a rural class that clings to an outmoded notion of small-town affluence—and thereby to a bygone socio-economic order. They present the rural as a refuge from modernity, a realm that economic history has happily bypassed. To… See more →

A project has been in the works for a couple years to replace a number of Notre-Dame’s stained-glass windows with contemporary designs, which has unsurprisingly caused an uproar. While the arguments for and against generally take familiar shapes—whether historic architecture should accommodate modern expression, whether these decisions should be top-down or community-driven—one functional aspect of the kerfuffle caught my attention:

The windows’ light gray, non-figurative glass allows more light to enter the cathedral, achieved via… See more →

I was at a funeral today and felt all the appropriate funeral feelings but I also could not stop thinking about Coffin Flop