CultureWag

You’ll never find Utopia, no matter how far you run. In trying times, people hunt for Eden. It’s a venerable American folly, going back to the Bering Land Bridge, now having a Covid-borne resurgence. You may chart the current phenomenon by the wave of feature stories about refugees trading San Francisco for the Rockies, or […]

Do magazines really deserve decades of eulogies? Magazines are dead. Good heavens, everybody knows they’ve been dead since at least 2008! Wait, magazines fight on—we know this because we glimpse them at the airport, or as fleeting icons on our phones.  For ages, the Magazine Publishers Association has i…

Wag’s newsletter picks (spooky and otherwise) for Halloween Week: What is Dune about? A desert planet, some kind of trippy spice called “melange” and gigantic, creepy worms. It’s escapist fun, beautifully rendered (even if you don’t like worms). What on earth does Issa Rae have to be Insecure about? She’s got her own show! But this is the last […]

Nearly 70 years since Bond’s birth, Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and his creator still lure us into heedless adventure This essay contains content expanded from the Weekly Wag James Bond, a most durable secret agent, was born out of the crisis of a twentieth century man. In 1952, Ian Lancaster Fleming was 43, and, […]

The collapse of Ozy Media pulls back the curtain on the startup hustle My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal Wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away. —From Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley It’s rare for a poem, especially […]

Did one day change us forever, or keep us stuck? Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth […]

We’ve been powerfully distracted all these years. That has a cost. This article contains expanded information from the Weekly Wag (it’s also a bit more than 240 characters). The other day, I received a jolly message from Twitter congratulating me for having persisted on the platform for nine years, complete with illustrated balloons. This almost-decade […]

The peculiar case of Britney Spears The Weekend Wag tackles an enduring Hollywood obsession. What right do any of us have to mess up our lives? The question arises because it’s impossible to wander far in America these days without running into Britney Spears. There are good reasons to avoid this topic, among them that […]

Fights about representation in Hollywood are exhausting. But it’s the conversation we’ve always been having Writing about identity, politics (note that strategic comma), and popular culture can be a scary business. Never has there been a period when more people have been exercised about entertainment, what it means, and how it reflects—or, more to the […]

The world’s biggest, oddest film festival is back. Sort of. The Weekend Wag returns to the Riviera. And It’s ever so nice. When we last met the Cannes Film Festival, it was 2019 (approximately one million years ago) and life and art sparkled like sunshine on a sapphire Med. The winner of the coveted Palm […]

Mare of Easttown is all of us. Right about now, a great many Americans are bumping around in a melancholic fog, wondering how we, once so very sunny and optimistic, became so badly fried, so profoundly off, so obviously damaged. This is not the first time in 245 years that this has happened to us, but […]

There is no Hollywood without yearning. At this moment— at any moment—a great number of people in American entertainment are unemployed. In this regard, show business was an early forerunner for the contemporary gig economy, in that it has always been characterized by perpetual insecurity, the perennial audition, the idea that the right connection might […]