Brice Ezell
@briceezell.bsky.social
Writer, critic (@PopMatters), teacher. ATL.
PhD in English, University of Texas.
Modern drama, theatre, and philosophy.
Writing a book on Tom Stoppard.
Also a denizen of debate-land.
https://boxd.it/1rEO5
Sir Tom Stoppard is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical bases of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997. .. more
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Brice Ezell
@briceezell.bsky.social
· Jan 14
The Southland-Vinci Theorem
Using Los Angeles as a synecdoche for the nation, these stories ambitiously try to chart the scale of America’s degradation, only to find that it’s easy to become artistically inchoate in the proce…
mid-theory.com
Years ago, I started noticing that post-2016 America could best be divided into days that felt like SOUTHLAND TALES and days that felt like TRUE DETECTIVE season two. I put this theory of mine into words for the good folks at @mid-theory.bsky.social: mid-theory.com/2025/01/14/t...
My one indulgence in this year’s B&N Criterion sale, a masterpiece of our time.
I cannot wait to see what your collection looks like if (a) you keep up with this habit and (b) this is the type of art you keep going for
I have finally gotten good at grading essays at a resonably quick pace and it is one of the best things I've done for myself professionally. Still, with that said: I begin every stack with the same sense of dread.
The Los Angeles Lakers are signing center Drew Timme to a two-way NBA deal from their South Bay team, agents Deddrick Faison and Rich Gray tell ESPN. Timme played for the Nets to finish last season and then joined Lakers' G League, averaging 25.5 points, 8 rebounds, 4 assists.
Signing a guy who looks like former Vine star Nick Colletti... very LA-vibes move for the Lakers.
Reposted by Tom Stoppard
The Los Angeles Lakers are signing center Drew Timme to a two-way NBA deal from their South Bay team, agents Deddrick Faison and Rich Gray tell ESPN. Timme played for the Nets to finish last season and then joined Lakers' G League, averaging 25.5 points, 8 rebounds, 4 assists.
I'm not convinced Frank will be the long run guy, but one thing I know for sure is that if we continue to do a roulette wheel of managers we aren't going to get any more stability or improvement.
A lot of Spurs fans seem to think that the Europa trophy was an indiciation of future trophies, rather than the dying (but glorious) gasp of the Kane/Son era as it ended. We finished SEVENTEENTH last year for God's sake.
Seeing Spurs fans call for Thomas Frank to be fired immediately is sending me into more of a doom spiral then losing 4-1 to a team that is decidedly better than us on every metric, even if that team is a hated rival.
THE LIFE OF CHUCK really surprised me. It’s not perfect, but it’s much more ambitious and free-spirited than its trailer let on (its vibes were “what if CLOUD ATLAS was THIS IS US?”). It’s certainly the best artwork in 2025 to have THE LIFE OF as its first three title words.
All-time odd bumper sticker just seen in ATL: “I used to listen to Five Iron Frenzy”
Andrew Garfield - Johnny Can't Decide (feat Vanessa Hudgens & Joshua Henry) (Official Audio)
YouTube video by Garfield
youtu.be
It’s not a good movie (not sure the original musical is much better), but the recent TICK… TICK… BOOM film has some catchy tunes that feel like direct homages. “30/90” is Billy Joel’s “Angry Young Man,” and this is straight up Prefab Sprout (attn @jessehawken.bsky.social) youtu.be/zmSprl2moqI?...
Was friends with the family of the Orthodox priest in my hometown (12 kids!), and I was told that the Orthodox actually got the trinity RIGHT, unlike those dastardly Catholics. To me the answer seemed to be "Yes to the Trinity... but also kinda not really..."
My wife tells a story of her time seeing the musical on Broadway, her first time ever seeing a stage musical, in which she stood up, applauded, and got ready to leave right after "Defying Gravity." The right reaction!
ENDYMION and THE RISE OF ENDYMION are great novels, but both arguably didn't need the connection to HYPERION to tell the story they tell. (Though what a prescient connection the now-crank Simmons made in the '80s and '90s: interstellar AI collapse leads to Catholic theocracy. On point, Simmons!)
ah man, yeah, Wicked 2 really can’t overcome the play’s shoddy second act. in retrospect, maybe the best reason to have split it into two movies was allowing the first act to stand on its own. as is, Part 2 has not a moment of spark, and it somehow looks even worse than the first.
There's an article to be written about artworks that are structured around having a second part, sequel, or series, that are not made better by the story playing out that way. Dan Simmons' novel HYPERION is a masterpiece, and THE FALL OF HYPERION is so not-good that I almost never return to it.
Reposted by Tom Stoppard
Corey Atad
@coreyatad.com
· 4d
ah man, yeah, Wicked 2 really can’t overcome the play’s shoddy second act. in retrospect, maybe the best reason to have split it into two movies was allowing the first act to stand on its own. as is, Part 2 has not a moment of spark, and it somehow looks even worse than the first.
The universe gave us a quarterback with more wow and talent than Brady who immediately got results, but (1) the QB has an actual division, unlike Brady’s Pats, (2) racist mascot, (3) uneven defensive performance. Brady Luck truly cannot be overcome.
Color theory ppl: my favorite color in the world is the way these kind of streetlamps look when they hit water. Anyone got a name for the hue? (EP cover by my favorite band as example)
(This novella, by the by, is INCREDIBLE. A deathbed monologue by a character that's essentially Chilean Ross Douthat.)
Increasingly, I feel like a lot of Great Books crowd in the US feels like Father Lacroix from Bolano's BY NIGHT IN CHILE, who ine one memorable passage spends the entire Pinochet coup reading Thucydides and Aristotle, and then at the end of the coup says:
A Great Books program that did its damndest to speak out against the rise of business schools is a program whose mettle I'd trust. But too often, even when the programs aren't explicitly right-wing, they are quietist on the material conditions making Great Books study less probable.
This is particularly true at Great Books programs like Tulsa's, which charges nearly 50k in tuition annually. Those who can take the gamble/risk the student loan debt are those probably already materially comfortable for some degree. It's the unpaid internship problem.
The credentialing and careerism that Frey rightly bemoans in the original lecture I linked won't go away if we market Great Books programs really well. The exogenous pressures on students to set themselves up for career success, dictated by capital and markets, will always outweigh.
But, even supposing the best-case scenario, which seems to be the opportunity Frey had at Tulsa, where a university does invest in education-for-education's sake. In the long run, how is that vision going to hold up when there isn't strong institutional challenges to capitalism?
Trojan-Horse U — Working Classicists
The alt-right are influencing universities in unexpected ways...
www.workingclassicists.com
This piece by @esing.bsky.social documents this phenomenon well, in which the tradition of the Great Books (which is, indeed, great, though not without its faults) is used as a "trojan horse" for right-wing political agendas. www.workingclassicists.com/zine/trojan-...
While it is true that liberal education (in the sense Frey means it) is not inherently right-wing, the colleges in the US that have rushed to adopt them are religious SLACs like my alma mater, where part of the move IS very much to shore up "western tradition" against the likes of "wokeness."
Been following Frey's writing since the fracas at the U of Tulsa's Honors College (where Frey was sacked, despite doing incredible work there), and I gotta say: if this is the genuine belief of the Great Books crowd, they really gotta start getting anticapitalist. baylorlariat.com/2025/11/11/d...
Folks, there are 8 BILLION people on this planet. I'm sorry, the issue cannot be that we don't have enough kids. Does not pass the lightest bit of scrutiny.
Every "population crisis" article in western media is just "WHERE ARE THE WHITE BABIES" in disguise and we absolutely do not have to give any credence to any of them
Correct. Also, even if these articles weren't racist (explicitly or implicitly), the thing is: idk why the assumption always has to be that we have to crank out kids to keep the economic cycle going, rather than altering our economic situation to meet our population reality.