2021 writings and miscellany
In Filmmaker magazine, for my Speculations column that appears in the print quarterly, I started the year with an essay on the use of firearms in American zombie films (and the notable absence in zombie films set and filmed elsewhere.) In the spring issue, I wrote about Amazon’s creepy YouTube recruitment videos and how the gig economy is depicted in films like Sorry We Missed You and Sorry to Bother You. Then I had a column on the twentieth anniversary of All About Lily Chou-Chou. In the latest issue, I have an essay on how the role of the android in cinema and storytelling is changing as the shortcomings of artificial intelligence are all around us.
The paperback edition of Lurking was published in February. That month, I wrote a profile of Patricia Lockwood for New York magazine on the occasion of her extraordinary novel, No One Is Talking About This.
In Technology Review, I wrote about science fiction novels set in real places and how it requires a special kind of world-building skill to develop a city when its origins are already known. Some of the books discussed in the essay include Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes, N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison.
For Dirty Furniture—a terrific design magazine based in London—I wrote about prank calls and telephone scams for the “Phone” issue. And I’ve got an essay on the “used future” in 70s science fiction for the design magazine U-Joints that I wrote about the same time but that piece is still forthcoming. (The working title is “Jalopy Spaceships and Malfunctioning Androids: The ‘Used Future’ in Film.” Basically everything I’m obsessed with in one short piece.)
For The Guardian, I wrote about the end of Yahoo Answers and how Metafilter approaches the issue of archiving a community. Then I wrote an opinion piece in praise of email as a decentralized and noncommercial system that shows what the internet was and still can be.
For Unfinished Live, I wrote a short radioplay imagining how the history of the internet will be taught in the future. Benjamen Walker from Theory of Everything produced it. You can listen to the six minute audio on my website.
I feel like I’m forgetting something (it’s been a long year) but I do know that my final piece published for the year is my essay Silicon Everywhere for the Reboot. It’s a look at the locations where the tech industry has flourished outside of Silicon Valley, with a close focus on Silicon Alley and how tech industry culture is taking over, well, everywhere.
There’s also my other newsletter where I jot off book recommendations and film recommendations and crazy stuff.
I finished my second book in 2021. It’s a good feeling to be beaming in private for now—excited to say more about this whenever I can (hopefully sooner than later). And there’s another book—a third book—which I’m writing now, and I’m currently in an intense and obsessive stage of research (a good thing).
Things have been not always been great but I feel a tremendous sense of good fortune that I get to do this writing and that I get to work with the extraordinary editors that I have this year.
Thanks for reading.