I spend my time cultivating guilty pleasures.

He’s a fool and don’t I know it But a fool can have his charms I’m in love and don’t I show it Like a babe in arms… ♫

Molly Ringwald revisits the movies of her youth in the age of #MeToo: 

“It’s hard for me to understand how John Hughes was able to write with so much sensitivity, and also have such a glaring blind spot.” 

Molly Ringwald revisits the movies of her youth in the age of #MeToo: 

“It’s hard for me to understand how John Hughes was able to write with so much sensitivity, and also have such a glaring blind spot.” 

Arlene Gottfried’s New York, Through the Eyes of Her Brother, Gilbert Gottfried

From the nineteen-seventies until her death last August, at the age of sixty-six, the photographer Arlene Gottfried combed New York City’s streets, parks, beaches, subways, and night clubs, in search of the shock of recognition one sometimes finds in perfect strangers. She understood the fractions of confidence and insecurity that make a public face. She liked sharp cheekbones and weird, pillowy proportions; she liked kids who comported themselves like adults, with laden, sphinx-like features. When Gottfried died, she left behind fifteen thousand pictures.

The Great Sadness of Ben Affleck

Last Saturday, almost exactly two years after Affleck denied its existence, the back tattoo returned to haunt the headlines, itself a phoenix rising from the ashes of gossip rags past. The tattoo—so gargantuan that the bird’s tail found itself dipping below the waistband of Affleck’s blue swim trunks—was plainly visible. In one image, the actor stands alone, looking off into the middle distance. His gut is pooching outward in a way that, in a more enlightened country like, say, France, would perhaps be considered virile, not unlike the lusty Gérard Depardieu in his prime but, in fitness-fascist America, tends to read as Homer Simpsonesque. A blue-gray towel is wrapped protectively around his midsection—recalling a shy teen at the local pool. Staring at the water before him, his gaze obscure and empty, Affleck is a defeated Roman senator, or, perhaps, the most anti-Romantic version imaginable of Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 “Wanderer in the Sea of Fog.” The image suggests not just the fall of Affleck but the coming fall of man. There is something about this exhausted father that reflexively induces panic. We’ve been living in a world run by Afflecks for so long, will we even know ourselves when they’re gone?