Tag: media

• Weird guy makes me miss hyperlocal news (August 1, 2025)

  In June, West Side Rag published a story about a weird guy bothering women at a local cineplex. The Rag is an independent online newspaper that has covered street-level goings-on in my neighborhood of Manhattan’s Upper West Side since 2011. Its story topics range from profiles of fresh political contenders to galleries of historical UWS photographs to rumors about new bagel shops. But something about the movie-pest story really struck me: it’s a good extremely-local news story, of the kind I remember growing up with in the previous century, reading in the local paper or watching on the local evening news, to name two things that don’t really exist any more in much of the country.

• Hooting Yard on the Air (July 31, 2025)

  A complete archive of Hooting Yard on the Air, hosted by the Internet Archive. Bizarre and beautiful short fictions, presented as half-hour radio shows, written and presented by Frank Key. Sort of a drily deranged Prairie Home Companion, with its locus in the murkiest boroughs of London.

• X SHIP (August 17, 2020)

  Zarf detailed a retroactively obvious but quite forgivable plot hole in Myst which nobody in that game’s fandom can recall ever having discussed before.

• “A Season of Grief and Release” (August 11, 2020)

  My relationship with New York feels like a darkly comic scene in a movie, coming after much buildup about the legendary heroism and greatness of some off-screen personality