Bourgeois Salvations
On Protestantism, Calvinism, Anglicanism, and their relation to capitalism. See also this previous essay. The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the...
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Review: Conclave
Carlo Maria Viganò will never recover from being portrayed as a guy who vapes in the Vatican. In the wake of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young/New Pope, there’s been ample room for more political dramas...
View ArticleAnd Once Again the Truth is Found (Part 3)
Continuing a consideration of ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark Links to all previous essays in this series may be found...
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Review: The Substance
As Demi Moore awoke from unsettling dreams one morning, she found herself transformed on her bathroom floor into Margaret Qualley. The Substance touches on a frequently quoted bit of John Berger’s...
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The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman)
Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore wrote Watchmen, which, for complicated reasons involving William S. Burroughs and the weak nuclear force, ended the Cold War and replaced it with a...
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Review: The War of the Rohirrim
Roughly half of The War of the Rohirrim‘s best decisions surface in its first scene. The opening gorgeously pans from a map of Middle-earth to its 3D details to a photorealistic shot of the Misty...
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Doctor Who Reviews Update
Just wanted to give the note that the Patreon is currently slightly short—about $20—of the threshold where my Robot Revolution review will be posted publicly. I’m reasonably confident that gap will be...
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The Robot Revolution Review
What would have been funny, if cynical, would be to use this as the featured image and then have that first term Trump photo of the orb once you click through. It’s strange, in many ways, to be back,...
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Retrospective: Twilight (and baseball)
As someone with my finger on the pulse, I naturally watched Twilight for the first time in 2025. It’s OK — trashy pulp romance. No worse than anything else Hollywood was pumping out in the Aughts, or...
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Lux Review
boo Well it’s nice that Gatwa gets a perfect episode. He’d not really had one yet, save perhaps Dot and Bubble. But here we’ve got one that it’s legitimately hard to see getting unseated as my season...
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The Well Review
Arguably this is the exact same joke as last week. More than most episodes, it pivots in the middle, at the Midnight reveal. I knew it was coming, because that’s how life is, and was sus. And I can’t...
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Lucky Day Review
Another thrilling adventure Looking at the episodes this season and what we knew about them, this one was very much the one you least knew quite what was going to be. Big dumb robot premiere was dumb,...
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The Story and the Engine Review
Is there a Doctor ho teaser image format more classic than “the Doctor points at something off-screen?” The problem here—if you even want to call it a problem—is that absolutely none of the plot beats...
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Liber Forty
“I was turning 40 and thinking, Oh dear, I’m probably going to have one of those midlife crisis things which always just bore the hell out of everybody. So it would probably be better if, rather than...
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The Interstellar Song Contest Review
Oh no! Blue thing turn red! Shooting on this season began on October 23rd, 2023, by which point five thousand people had already died in Gaza; Israel’s actual invasion of the territory would not even...
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Wish World Review
Mind Robber vibes intensify Well that was fucking rubbish. It’s entirely possible that next week, and by extension the story at large, won’t be. There are component pieces here that are lovely, after...
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The Reality War Review
We spent so much time thinking that a better world was possible that we forgot to consider that a worse one was too. It’s always useful to take stock of where you are, so hey. It’s May 31st, 2025. I...
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