PicoBlog

Hollywood doesn’t care about you and it has no integrity. All Hollywood knows how to do these days is destroy. When Tolkien fans heard Amazon was making a new Lord of the Rings show, they called for one thing above all else: an honest retelling of Tolkien’s work with reverence and accuracy to the original source material. Yet despite this being shouted from the rooftops by every Tolkien nerd with a twitter account, Amazon has decided with its new Rings of Power show to embrace the wokeness and push “the message.

Her new book is out now from MacMillan Press: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250269621/dirtbag Amber A'Lee Frost is a writer and former co-host of Chapo Trap House. Find her writing in Jacobin Magazine, Catalyst, Damage Magazine, The Baffler, American Affairs and many others. IG: https://instagram.com/amberaleefrost ncG1vNJzZmiin6i1tq3CoquaqpWhuaJ60q6ZrKyRmLhvr86mZqlnkaKvpr6MmqOenV2bv7C%2F02amp2WUnr%2B1rsCg

About two months ago I became aware of a guy on Twitter named David Hrusovsky. His account featured lots of annotated images of high school baseball fields with unusual outfield configurations. Some had really short outfield distances, like the bizarre center field in the graphic shown above. Others were just the opposite, with really long outfield distances. Still others had fairly conventional distances, but their outfield walls followed jagged paths due to adjacent buildings:

This is the weekly edition of Men Yell at Me. The weekly newsletter about power, politics, and personhood in red-state America. To support this work, become a subscriber. In Ohio, a woman is being charged with a felony after suffering from a miscarriage. Brittany Watts, a 33-year-old Black woman, had a miscarriage at week 22 of her pregnancy. The fetus came out through the birth canal and into the toilet. Despite medical evidence that the fetus was non-viable, prosecutors still pressed for the felony “abuse of a corpse” charge.

It’s a tiny diner with an oversized personality and palate. Sassy waitresses tease customers and pass out complimentary shots of liquor. An employee emerges from the kitchen to act as a ringmaster, letting everyone in the restaurant know his opinions. It’s as if you’ve stepped into the role of an extra on the set of a sitcom during filming. And the food? Absolutely magnificent. To me, this is the Best Breakfast in America.

Over the past few years, Chris Rufo has emerged as one of the most effective conservative activists in the United States. As far as I can tell, he got his start in 2019 after reporting on non-profit and government employees who mystifyingly decided to hire a black-trans stripper to give a raunchy performance at a conference on homelessness in Seattle. The demeaning racial overtones and spectacle of exploitation and waste in the event seem pretty obvious to any normal person.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite comic book series was called The Immortal Iron Fist. The series drew inspiration from Chinese mythologies and had a character roster of several Asian superheroes. Having only previously read comics with white superheroes like Batman and Spider-man, Iron Fist quickly became my favorite comic for several reasons: it was well-written, the art was fantastic, and most of all, it felt validating seeing my culture and Chinese characters displayed in a positive light as the series mixed classic superhero stories with the Wuxia genre.

*Edit 5/1/23: I now know there are even more of you still out there. For Sten Molin victims who haven’t signed NDAs, if you were assaulted in New York and were 18 or over at the time, please please get a good lawyer. Comment or email me directly if you have any questions at all. A very warm welcome to The Landing’s latest subscribers! (Except for Mr. Dick and Balls, who gets an instant block, not least for his woeful lack of originality).

Ninety minutes into “American Fiction,” I asked myself what in the world this movie was. With no solid answer at that point, I was going to tell you that this is the rare, decent film that shifts its intentions too much for its own good. You could even carve three different movies out of it. Give me 25 minutes to cut from it, and I could either make a biting race satire, a middle-aged schlub satire, or an aging-male melodrama.