PicoBlog

In the predominantly white Western world in recent years it’s become almost axiomatic to claim that “religion” — usually undefined in any formerly customary sense — is a “bad thing,” that (in the words of the late Christopher Hitchens) it “poisons everything.” That non-religious and anti-religious persons say such things is hardly surprising, but it becomes comical when quite obviously religious persons do as well. So, we sometimes see the ludicrously self-contradictory spectacle on social media and elsewhere of Evangelical Christians asserting that Jesus was “against religion” or the Zen Buddhist practitioner (who regularly chants sutras and dings gongs) claiming that Zen Buddhism isn’t at all religious in character, and so on.

​​You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith and I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter. This week I am out on spring break. It’s been a while since we did a rerun, so for new listeners reruns come from Comfort Food, the sadly now retired podcast I made with my very best friend Amy Palanjian of Yummy Toddler Food.

Every year, myriad efforts exist to expand gambling in state legislatures across the United States. In recent years those efforts have included forms of online gambling, with online sports betting getting far more adoption and legalization than casino, lottery and poker. Of course, there’s zero good reason why online sports betting is somehow different than other forms of online gambling from the perspective of “should we legalize it?” But the sports betting lobbying efforts have been widespread and effective, which accounts for most of that.

On what Black History Month and the racial reckoning mean at the New York Times … Over the past week, the Times’ crossword puzzles have included many clues having to do with black culture and issues, and in fact have been by black constructors. A fine gesture for Black History Month. But then the other night we learned that longtime reporter Donald McNeil, who has done groundbreaking work on the pandemic, has been fired, at 67.

My autocorrect frequently corrects “writing” to “worrying”. This persists even after I’ve taught the algorithm to be less inquisitive, and better informed. It’s definitely not a message from the universe, I thought, until yesterday, when my phone autocorrected “reading” to “raging”. Now this is a bit more serious, and somewhat disconcerting in its philosophical and political implications. The whole thing got me thinking, and, in truth, the rightful mistake autocorrect should be making is converting “thinking” to “writing”.

3/10 Considering how long I’d been meaning to watch it, The Neon Demon was a big disappointment. It’s a good example of how a movie can have individual elements to create something special—dazzling cinematography, some decent performances, a cool electronic score by Cliff Martinez—yet fail on the most basic level of telling a coherent story or having characters who act like human beings. The film is directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, who also created the story and co-wrote the screenplay with Mary Laws and Polly Stenham.

Wow, has the world changed in twenty years. It’s not like the software merely updated on the old world; it’s like the old world disappeared, and a new one emerged. In this new world, here’s a Very Big Development: the boisterous New Atheism, the intellectual trend so au courant 15-20 years ago, is no more. Let it be pronounced in the highways and the temples: the New Atheism has crashed and burned.

“I don’t want to interrupt. I’ll just get started on the apocalypse.” — Jennifer Lawrence, Mother!  Back at The Dissolve, I wrotean essay called “The CinemaScore F-estival,” which cheekily suggested that a selection of the audience survey metric CinemaScore’s worst-rated films  would make for a compelling weekend at the movies. (“You want perplexing subtext? Excessive unpleasantness? Willfully perverse genre experimentation? Downer endings? We’ve got it all and then some.”) At the time, I discovered that five of the eight films to have earned the dreaded “F” score at that point happened to be works I liked: Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris remake, Andrew Dominick’s Great Recession thriller Killing Them Softly, the William Friedkin two-hander Bug, the Aussie extreme horror film Wolf Creek, and Richard Kelly’s sci-fi head-scratcher The Box.

[From 2008 to 2013, starting with Donnie Darko and ending with The Rapture, I wrote a column for The A.V. Club called The New Cult Canon, my homage to Danny Peary’s three Cult Movies books, which were a huge influence on my moviegoing habits as a young cinephile. My idea was to pick up where Peary’s last book left off, in 1987, and explore “The Classics, The Sleepers, The Weird and the Wonderful”—films that have inspired mad obsession since.