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Welcome to In the Flash, a reader-supported publication about intent and creativity in photography Share David Lynch’s 18 hours of Twin Peaks, The Return, left me astonished when I rewatched it for the third time. I took the Twin Peaks plunge after being bored through yet another much-hyped TV show that struggled to construct a darkly comic Lynchian reality out of the mundane. Disappointed and thirsty for inspiration, I went back to the mothership.

I am reading Grace Paley again. Why? Because I am sad—for reasons both self and world — or maybe sad is not quite the right word. I am feeling somewhat dead, as in, the opposite of feeling alive, and Grace Paley is full of delight and precision and life. Such as, this section from her story “Wants”: A nice thing I do remember is breakfast, my ex-husband said. I was surprised.

Today is the fourth and final installment of my January series inspired by creative laziness! By the time you’re reading this, my month-long film class at Birmingham-Southern College has just wrapped up. Well, the class portion has, at least; my students still have one more paper to turn in, which also means I have one more paper to grade. Anyway, this week, we covered horror and sci-fi films from the 21st century, including WALL-E, Most Beautiful Island, and Dual.

I originally intended for this newsletter to be a follow-up to last week’s New York Cultural Consumption Report, but as the week went on, I realized I mainly wanted to write about Oscar Levant, the subject of the play Good Night, Oscar currently running on Broadway and which I saw last week. Oscar Levant was famous for a lot of things — he was once the highest-paid concert pianist in the United States and a comic sidekick character in some great Hollywood movies — but in the mid-20th century, those things coalesced into being known primarily as a personality.

The vast majority of societies on this planet still understand family as their primary, most cherished bond. Blood relation or not, there is an understanding that forsaking these bonds is a form of unforgivable treachery, understandable only in circumstances of abject trauma. Within this paradigm, all parties should do whatever possible to maintain the bonds of family, even if those bonds require continued suffering. In some societies, this understanding is changing.

Whenever I visit the house of my grandfather, who now lives in a single room of a nursing home, I drop my stuff in the entryway and go straight to the basement, waving a rolled-up newspaper like a wand to clear a path through the cobwebs. Each of the four basement rooms is full of artefacts from his life, and I pass through them studiously like Indiana Jones at an archaeological site.

Fandom fashion is quickly becoming one of my favorite kinds of fashion — there is something so wildly fun about seeing people dress for someone they love. Below you will find one of my favorite types of newsletters: A round-up of 20 incredible looks YOU wore to Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour.  Dressing for this concert was a tall order. Queen Bey herself set the tone with 100-plus jaw-dropping looks over the course of the tour, making it clear fashion was a priority.

This week’s episode is an old home week. Andrew Coyne is, of course, the dean of Globe and Mail political columnists and a regular on the At Issue panel on Thursday nights on the CBC’s The National newscast (kids, ask your parents). I’ve known him for 30 years, and we worked together at the old Southam News, at the National Post, at Maclean’s and frequently on the CBC. Even before that, I first read his name in the pages of the old Saturday Night magazine.