All articles by this author
November 6, 2020
Voter suppression can be super banal. All you need is apathy.
An elder gentleman in a camel-hair overcoat and a perfectly askew black beret accosts our coordinator while trying to vote. He comes over to the scanners, still miffed. After his vote is cast, he turns to Lois and me. His issue, generally: “IT SAYS FILL THE BUBBLE TO THE LEFT. BUT THE BUBBLES ARE ABOVE THE CANDIDATES NAMES!!!”
It is not his talent that made this sentencing a watershed. It is hers.
May 30, 2014
Elliot Rodger, American Kid
On Facebook, he liked Starbucks, Armani, tourism, sunsets. He was obsessed with The Secret. Then the lottery. He thought a beautiful blond woman was the prize he deserved for being such a good boy—as if, at the county fair, he could shoot enough ducks to win a girlfriend. He was so committed to exceptionalism that he applied it all only to him. He once used the phrase “less white than me.” Less white. In fact, the more I read, the shakier all the causality felt and the more common, at core, his interpretation of “believing in himself” seemed, until I just couldn’t get over a line on the fifth page, age 5, when his family moved to Cali from England: “I now considered myself,” he writes, “an American kid.”
February 18, 2014
The scream’s a good weapon.
Terminal Island is a left-ish fata morgana by a femme with no time to lose. If James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese, and several other, male protégés of Roger Corman made B movies as practice for A movies, Rothman made B movies as a way to make movies, period, but also as blueprints for a world in which, someday, Kathryn Bigelow would beat Cameron for the Oscar.
