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

"How the Language of TV is Influencing How We See Ourselves," The New York Times Magazine | On "main character syndrome" and frontal lobe formation

"Signs of the Times," Harper's | On the political history of the Olympic pictogram

"Marriage of Inconvenience," Notebook MUBI | On Andrew Ahn's The Wedding Banquet and green-card comedies

"One Big, Happy Family," The Baffler | On the Kardashians, the British royal family, and the Anglo-American dynasty in its flop era

"My Ancestral Home, The Mall," The Drift | On Lil Miquela and post-raciality

"Spilled Oil," Cleveland Review of Books | On Lydia Kiesling's Mobility and the "eco-anxiety novel"

"Do You Want the House Tour?" The Atlantic | On the cultural impact of MTV Cribs, 25 years after its debut

"Figure Study," Discovery | On artistry and figure skating 

"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

"Shirley Jackson Captured What Every Housewife Knows About Gothic Horror," Vulture | On the haunted homes in Shirley Jackson's novels and domestic memoirs

"No Place Like Home," Catapult | On nostalgia in art and in life