MOCKINGBIRD

I don’t mean to brag, but my past inner critic could probably easily take your inner critic in a fight. It was absolutely ferocious.

I used to think that the heated and relentless hatred from the accuser in my head was a profound personal failing. But now, thanks to professional mental health treatment, I have learned something that would have been helpful to know a lo...

My fifteen-year-old’s bedroom light was still on when I came home from the theater, sometime after 11. He was sitting at his computer, across the room from his weight bench, framed by a backsplash of half-empty cologne bottles he had traded with his friends. I told him that I had just seen the craziest movie, and he looked up, amused.

“Was it Obsession?”

A typical arrangement in religious systems is one in which authorities claim the right to tell other people who they are, what’s wrong with them, how they should live and make choices, and where they stand before God. These dynamics are at play in Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, where Jesus flips the arrangement and offers a social critique of the religi...

1. After the midterms this week, everyone is talking about politics, but I’d rather zero in on topics far closer to home. So let’s check in on Ilia Malinin, aka the figure staking Quad God, who had the most disappointing Winter Olympics in recent memory. How do you recover after such a spectacular (and public) failure?

We’re back, fiends, in this first week of November to show that while stores and network TV may esteem Spooky Season done and past, the thrills and chills are never really over. Blaine Grimes and Blake Collier are with me, and we’re queuing up Dario Argento’s 1980 film, Inferno, the second installment of his Three Mothers trilogy about a trio of...