Selected Writing
"Spilled Oil," Cleveland Review of Books, August 2024 | On Lydia Kiesling's Mobility and the "eco-anxiety novel"
"Signs of the Times," Harper's, July 2024 | On the political history of the Olympic pictogram
"Figure Study," Discovery, June 2024 | On artistry and figure skating
"How the Language of TV is Influencing How We See Ourselves," The New York Times Magazine, May 2024 | On "main character syndrome" and frontal lobe formation
"Losing the Way Home," Notebook MUBI, March 2024 | On The Boy and the Heron and the irrepressible unheimlich in Hayao Miyazaki's films
"Only Connect," The Baffler, January 2024 | On Sigrid Nunez's The Vulnerables
"Perfect Illusion: The Cinema of Artifical Intelligence," Notebook MUBI, June 2023 | 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, June 2023 | On being "into nature," as an aspiration and inevitability
"Little Boy Lost," The Baffler, March 2023 | On Fiona McFarlane's The Sun Walks Down and Australia's colonial legacy of lost child stories
"One Big, Happy Family," The Baffler, November 2022 | 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, October 2022 | On the haunted homes in Shirley Jackson's novels and domestic memoirs
"Byron Baes is a show about influencers with no influence," Gawker, April 2022 | On Byron Baes and Australian attention-seeking
"My Ancestral Home, The Mall," The Drift, January 2022 | On Lil Miquela and post-raciality
"No Place Like Home," Catapult, September 2021 | On nostalgia in art and in life
"This Constructed Self of Mine," The Los Angeles Review of Books, November 2020 | 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, March 2020 | On living through the 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires