The only thing Eddington missed about the era of Covid lockdowns was the Great Egg Crack. What the end of WWII was to the Baby Boom, lockdown was to trans people.

when people vote for a guy who had dinner with two nazis, called white supremacists "very fine people," and promises to hunt down immigrants en masse, it's because of economic anxiety. when they vote for a guy who wants to make rent and food more affordable, it's because they are anti-semitic.

“We basically have a blank check from HBO as long as we don’t go over budget” has been in my head all week @nathanfielder.bsky.social

Me: sliving, slaying, et cetera

My actual Mother: If your grandma saw you now she’d be shimmying in her grave boots

Mike White’s big hurdle for a future season of White Lotus will be to have a gay couple as guests at the hotel. Explaining why they’re not in PV or Mykonos and hanging with all these straight families instead is gonna be a heavy lift.

Also, Gaitok’s ending is tragic. He kills for material gain and ends up without the heart that led him to love and desire Mook to begin with. In the end we see him driving off to Bangkok and leaving her and the humble life she represents in the rear view.

So much of the discourse about the White Lotus finale is based on not being able to read the time jump between the killings & twink resurrection and Gaitok’s promotion/sudden glow up.

Being loved makes a person feel special. But specialness doesn’t elicit or secure love from another.

Wanting to be special (re: fame, fortune, etc) is misapprehension of the deeper wish to feel loved. And perhaps a bit deeper than that is the need to feel that our loving another can transform them

Severance is a very labored take on eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, but neoliberal workerism is the instrument of the erasure of love and all of its traces. Which means it’s essentially social realism covered by a thin candy coating of sci fi/Lost-like mystery.

So far White Lotus Season 3 seems to have all of its characters facing death/annihilation/survival/going on being in various ways. I suspect it’ll make for a less memeable and “fun” season for most people. That said, I think there’s also going to be more self-parody of White Lotus, which I love.

a lot of great content has been lost because only the most impulsive and least reflective millennials can find the chutzpah necessary to risk being cringe, cancelled, or cooked.