digestable

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter: “Long time long time,” sings a fish in a striped shirt and tie in the opening of Niki Lindroth Von Bahr’s short film Min Börda (2017), “This is where you come if you want to stay a long time.” The stop-motion film follows four groups of anthropomorphic… Continue reading Island Life

First published as part of the Digestable newsletter Content Warning: This piece focuses exclusively on wealthy eccentric white men. Last week, Elon Musk’s company The Boring Company unveiled their most recent project, the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop. This grandchild of the fantastical hyperloop, the most stripped down and boring version of the concept anyone… Continue reading The People Mover

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter: 2020 seemed like the crest of a long 70s/80s disco nostalgia wave that’s been hitting music since the middle of last decade. I would mark the start of the nu-disco trend with the iconic, and now final (RIP) Daft Punk album Random Access Memories. The trend was… Continue reading Disco Is Dead, Long Live Disco

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter: I’ve been diving into the Marvel Cinematic Universe the past couple of weeks, out of lack of stimulation and procrastination. My friend Richard describes the films as a “concentrated sugar high:” attractive people in body-hugging outfits and an emotional whiplash of tragedy and comedy all strung together… Continue reading Thanos

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter The world lost a beautiful human and a visionary queer voice this weekend when 34 year old musician and producer Sophie Xeon died in Athens. SOPHIE’s uncanny hyperpop has been associated with the London experimental pop label PC Music, but her notoriety and the depth of her… Continue reading Immaterial Girl

This is a collection of three pieces on nitrogen, legumes, and soy originally written for the Digestable newsletter: Nitrogen Last Tuesday, 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate in a waterfront warehouse in Beirut exploded, killing over 160 people, injuring thousands more, and leaving 300,000 people without homes.  There’s been some great reporting tying this explosion to previous… Continue reading The Nitrogen Cycle

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter I listened to the radio play Saber, MN, recommended by the lovely Molly Rose, and it got me thinking about one of Minnesota’s foundational myths. The fictional town of Saber, MN was founded because of the discovery of a sabertooth tiger skull fossil by a farmer plowing… Continue reading The Kensington Runestone

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter. Okay nothing hard hitting from me this week, just a little bit of corny fun to finish out the year. I don’t really have any desire to engage with Dirty Projectors beyond the album they made with Björk but the song Up In Hudson from their last… Continue reading Take it UP!

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter. Oh— my twitchy witchy girlI think you are so nice,I give you bowls of porridgeAnd I give you bowls of iceCream.I Give you lots of kisses,And I give you lots of hugs,But I never give youSandwichesWith bugsIn. This poem appears in Neil Gaimen’s book Coraline and its… Continue reading Free Lunch

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter Let’s take a little trip back to the year 2009. I was in high school, iPhones were still all curvy looking, and T-Pain’s auto-tune was revolutionizing music and pop culture. Enter Auto-Tune the News, a video series by The Gregory Brothers that edits C-SPAN, Katie Couric, and other TV… Continue reading Auto-Tune the News: A Retrospective

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter Fellas, is it gay to miss home? This question may have been playing in the mind of Numa Barned, a Union soldier in the U.S. Civil War who reported that listening to other soldiers play the song Home! Sweet Home! made him “feel queer.” Of course Barned’s use of queer is a few iterations… Continue reading The Moose Way Home

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter I want to start by saying that it was so unreal to have watched videos of friends back home literally popping champagne in the streets this weekend and then to wake up this morning to the Irish news obsessing over Biden’s Irish heritage.  Did you know that Obama has… Continue reading Suggestions for Stolen Squash

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter I want to talk about the Netflix series The Good Place.  It’s a brightly colored entertaining series about quirky dead people navigating an even quirkier afterlife.  It’s easy to dismiss this show as another piece of streamable fluff, but the way ideas of environment and environmentalism are woven into The Good… Continue reading An Afterlife for the Anthropocene

Originally published in two parts as part of the Digestable newsletter As the smoke from unprecedented wildfires pollutes skies in east coast cities and hurricane season surges past the alphabet into Greek letters despite only being half over my mind turns as it often does to Grimes.  I know, the Canadian musician’s much anticipated album Miss Anthropocene came… Continue reading On Environmental Art Making

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter A couple of weeks ago Lee Dawson came out with the newest edition of his RuCaps series. These videos, hosted on Dailymotion like all quality content, are at their essence a remixed retelling of episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race.  Drag Race, as many of you know, is a competition reality… Continue reading I Love You No Edit

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter Last week after playing trivia with some friends (shoutout to Trivia Mafia in Minneapolis which is doing free trivia games online pretty much every night during the pandemic) we were trying to find the Ganges delta on a map – this was after the game of course, no cheating… Continue reading Satellites over the Sundarbans

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter If you told me a year ago that I’d be writing this column from day 11 of quarantining in a Dublin apartment I would not have believed you.  Of course everything that happens these days is pretty unbelievable – so much so that unbelievability has become pretty… unremarkable.  I’m… Continue reading Doctor Who

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter Last week I went on an accidental Charlie Kaufman binge.  Accidental because it wasn’t until watching Synecdoche, New York and Being John Malkovich back to back that I realized they were directed by the same person.  At that point I was on a roll so I went ahead and continued with Kaufman’s newest… Continue reading Director Dudes

Wrote this little piece for my friend Lena’s weekly newsletter Digestible. I describe myself as a critical fan of Lady Gaga which basically means that I really like her but I talk about her like I don’t. One of the things that frustrates me is that her albums (ARTPOP, Born This Way, even Joanne) start… Continue reading Coronamatica