The most visceral moment for me this time was in “Looking for a Plot,” when Doris sees Malik in the hospital and, at last, allows herself to wallow and wail. Often we’ve found the answer before we even know it.

“It works if it works, it doesn’t work then it doesn’t work”—so, probably not, as long as we think we’re still looking and feel like we’re getting closer with each step.

"Looking" never answers any question, which is the beauty of the show. It makes you ask whether it’s even necessary to find an answer. Why do we need answers to, What’s loyalty? What’s love? or even What do I want? Is it really about the answer?

Which makes Lynn an interesting character: he’s found Brian, love of his life, and he’ll never have that again. Dom, younger than Lynn but older than the main trio, thinks he deserves more, even if it’s not him. To keep looking, or not? Is Lynn too cynical? Is Dom naive?

It’s so real because it can be summarized as a bunch of people trying to figure out what they want: sexually, professionally, emotionally, and so on. I suspect this is at the core of the titular pun.

Desire, intimacy, identity—you can perform them (on and off screen), and they might ring true, but I'm increasingly inclined to accept the idea that they are impossible to represent. They’re ethico-epistemological: always discursive, contingent, and emergent.

It’s so real because it’s not really about representation; if anything, it complicates it. Agustín says, “I’m gay, not queer,” and in the same scene applies for a job caring for homeless trans kids. Brady seems to support sexual freedom but upholds rigid “community values.”

It’s so real that I feel obligated to suspend the critic’s vocabulary, except when warranted: my favorite episode is still “Looking for a Plot” (season 2, episode 7), proof that if you have strong, fleshed-out characters, you don’t need a plot.

The wine tasting, the many permits, the Central Valley, the Bay Bridge—though perhaps not the drug ones—and I recognized many places featured in the show. While it’s obviously fictional and dramatized, it felt even more real than a documentary.

I probably started the series just to see if Tony Kushner was right (“Heaven Is a City Much Like San Francisco”). This time around it hit so differently. Now also a Bear (as in Golden Bear, if clarification is needed) living in the Bay, I immediately got most of the references.

And of course, I can’t get enough of PB&J. I smile when Pam smiles. That “most expensive scene” defines tears of joy for me. I envy those who have yet to experience it for the first time. I can't imagine I almost missed this gem (didn't like the first few episodes several years ago, like with BBT)!

Oscar is provocatively normal and quietly subversive, except in memorable moments like, “Besides having sex with men, I would say the Finer Things Club is the gayest thing about me,” which echoes with a precision both comedic and, indeed, queerly profound.

That, to me, is the ultimate question cultural analytics must confront, interrogate, and answer for itself. The course site is now live: ca.kentkc.org. Note to prospective students: the syllabus may adapt to meet your needs—feel free to reach out! (9/9)

We wrestle with various epistemological tensions: between judgment and generalization, interpretation and representation, and so forth. What forms of validity remain and emerge when modernity is shaped by and shaping the positive force of empiricism and the negative movement of theory? (8/9)

We take up an old question with new tools—and, we hope, new connections: what does it mean to mean and represent? Cultural artifacts offer approximations of human experience and possibility; machine learning gives us ways to characterize such phenomena—at scale, or on a different plane. (7/9)

In Act III, we ask what scale affords: we move from individual texts to institutional structures and discuss how interpretation and knowledge is not simply accumulated but shaped, by labor, ideology—power, against the backdrop of the scaling laws that launched the LLM era. 6/9)

In Act II, we trace how meaning emerges not from marks on a page, but from entangled pathways through learned, latent spaces—across modalities, over time, as logic and sense scatter and settle across layers of neural networks, tokens, and video frames. (5/9)

We begin, paradoxically, with ends—a series of “deaths”—not as closure, but openings. We explore how interpretation becomes a problem of representation learning: how to operationalize what matters, estimate a construct from data, and treat sense as that which is mediated through modeling. (4/9)