Selected Writing
"Life Got Hard. The Sims Got Easy." The New York Times Magazine | On the possibilities and pitfalls of controlling life in a gamified world
"Marriage of Inconvenience," Notebook MUBI | On Andrew Ahn's The Wedding Banquet and green-card comedies
"Spilled Oil," Cleveland Review of Books | On Lydia Kiesling's Mobility and the "eco-anxiety novel"
"Signs of the Times," Harper's | On the political history of the Olympic pictogram
"Figure Study," Discovery | On artistry and figure skating
"How the Language of TV is Influencing How We See Ourselves," The New York Times Magazine | On "main character syndrome" and frontal lobe formation
"Losing the Way Home," Notebook MUBI | On The Boy and the Heron and the irrepressible unheimlich in Hayao Miyazaki's films
"Only Connect," The Baffler | On Sigrid Nunez's The Vulnerables
"Perfect Illusion: The Cinema of Artifical Intelligence," Notebook MUBI | On the narrative of AI extinction and who profits from it, through ME3GAN, S1MONE, and others
"The Tale of the Coyote-Proof Chihuahua Suit," Sierra | On being "into nature," as an aspiration and inevitability
"Little Boy Lost," The Baffler | On Fiona McFarlane's The Sun Walks Down and Australia's colonial legacy of lost child stories
"One Big, Happy Family," The Baffler | On the Kardashians, the British royal family, and the Anglo-American dynasty in its flop era
"Shirley Jackson Captured What Every Housewife Knows About Gothic Horror," Vulture | On the haunted homes in Shirley Jackson's novels and domestic memoirs
"Byron Baes is a show about influencers with no influence," Gawker | On Byron Baes and Australian attention-seeking
"My Ancestral Home, The Mall," The Drift | On Lil Miquela and post-raciality
"No Place Like Home," Catapult | On nostalgia in art and in life
"This Constructed Self of Mine," The Los Angeles Review of Books | On Margo Jefferson's Negroland, Alicia Elliott's A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, and Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings
"Pattern and Forecast Dispatch: Summer, Sydney, 2020," The Believer | On living through the 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires