This week the “stranded astronauts” Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore returned to earth after an unscheduled nine months in space when Boeing’s Starliner (which they test piloted) was deemed unsafe to bring them back. I’ve been following their journey with interest, because as I repeatedly tell everyone who will listen Commander “Suni” Williams is my favourite astronaut. How do I have a favourite astronaut? So glad you asked.

Twenty-five years ago, the three crew members of Expedition 1 launched to the International Space Station atop a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan.

Here’s a cool fact you can share at the pub. That was the last time all of humanity was together on planet earth.

At the start of the pandemic, HBO dropped their adaptation of Emily St John Mandel’s book Station Eleven. If you didn’t watch it because the last thing you needed during covid was a lush miniseries about a global pandemic that wipes out 99% of the world’s population, you should go back and do it now. It’s an absolutely beautiful adaptation of a fantastic novel.

The story happens in multiple timelines, but in the post-apocalyptic world, it centres on a travelling troupe of actors performing Shakespeare, moving from town to town on a seasonal calendar.

It struck me that this was a repeating theme in things I’d been devouring recently. In Silo, the main character Juliette is named after the Shakespearean character:

This week I’ve been thinking (not for the first time) about the communities we choose to join. I’ve just finished reading Amanda Montell’s Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism. No, I’m not always thinking about cults. Well, that’s a lie, part of my brain is always thinking about cults the way part of me is always thinking about people who die climbing Everest, but this book is specifically about the use of language: how high-demand groups redefine words to mean different things, in-group/out-group phrasing and so on.

When I wrote Everything Breaks at Scale, I spent a lot of time thinking about what draws people into conspiracy thinking and causes them to stay in those groups, even in the face of ostracisation from their friends and loved ones. So much of that is about our consistent longing for community, in the absence of traditional religious frameworks of the past. In her book, Montell references a 2015 report from some Harvard Divinity grad students called How We Gather.

Millennials are less religiously affiliated than ever before. Churches are just one of many institutional casualties of the internet age in which young people are both more globally connected and more locally isolated than ever before. Against this bleak backdrop, a hopeful landscape is emerging. Millennials are flocking to a host of new organizations that deepen community in ways that are powerful, surprising, and perhaps even religious.

Even though it’s a decade old now, it’s a fascinating read, surveying groups like Crossfit and Soulcycle, summer camps for adults, dining groups and so on. They draw six themes that people are looking for when they gather:

This week I finally got along to see Olafur Eliasson’s Your Curious Journey at Auckland Art Gallery|Toi o Tāmaki. Eliasson is an Icelandic-Danish artist who does installations that often reflect on the environment around us. I first fell in love with his work when he installed The Weather Project in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall the year I was studying for my masters in London.

In the artist statement for the Auckland exhibition, he says:

When you enter Your curious journey, you will have completed some sort of voyage to get there. It may be a trip from a street around the corner or across the globe. By journey, I also mean the process you have been through emotionally or intellectually to be prepared to view the work. This may be the sum of your experiences. It might reflect your education and upbringing, or it may be the result of a chance encounter. The artworks, too, have completed a journey to meet you. Each bears the marks of its creation and the challenges that led to the particular form in front of you. They carry within them a mixture of intentions, interpretations and contexts that can never be reduced to a single thing.

Being curious, to me, means being attuned to all of this and being open to listening. It is about paying attention to things we take for granted. Your curious journey is a journey in which you do not give up on your curiosity.

I’ve been thinking about this essay from sci-fi author Charles Stross: They don’t make readers like they used to.

It’s a great essay about how to try and write the future at a time when it all feels ~waves hands~ like this, but it’s also specifically about readers’ understanding of what fiction is, and whether that’s changing. You should read the whole thing, but the crux of his argument is that, in the past we passively consumed a limited range of pop-culture, and now there’s been a seismic cultural shift where the expectation is that fans will interact with, question and reinterpret everything.

Anyway: fans raised on interactive media rather than the static printed page or celluloid reel of film invariably argue in their own heads with the official story lines they're handed. And they sometimes write down their alternative takes on the stories--not just happy endings in place of tragedies, or attempts to fix what they perceive as broken plots or world building, but their own stories that try to make sense of the worlds of the imagination they've been presented with. Fans who write fanfic or play games from the original adversary's point of view in hope of getting a happy ending are not fans who accept the author's privileged position as narrator for granted.

Stross describes himself as “a living fossil” who expects to define the parameters of his fictional universes. In his words, he’s the final authority in his fictional worlds.

First off, I’m thrilled to be speaking at Sunrise Australia in Sydney (30 April - 1 May). Earlybird tickets are now on sale. Here’s what I’m going to be talking about:

the american imperialism movies

I’ve been rewatching the first phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe this week, partly because there’s a new Captain America movie out, but mostly because a new trailer for Thunderbolts dropped, and Yelena Belova and Bucky Barnes are really the only MCU characters I still care about.

Let’s talk about the hot firefighter show.

If you don’t spend much of your day on tumblr, it’s possible that network drama 9-1-1 has passed you by. It’s a procedural about first responders in Los Angeles, inexplicably headed by A-List actors Angela Bassett and Peter Krause (get that bag, I guess).

9-1-1 is about as ridiculous as we’ve come to expect a network procedural to be, increasing the disaster level every season, while never killing off any of the main characters, making it one of those low-stakes, empty-calorie shows that you can watch any episode of.

In my favourite movie, Truth or Dare (In Bed with Madonna) there’s a scene in which Madonna is being treated by a doctor for her throat while on tour, and her then-boyfriend Warren Beatty is in the background. He can’t understand why she wants to do this, talking to her doctor about a serious medical issue, on camera. “Does no-one talk about this?” he asks. “The insanity of doing all this on a documentary?”

Madonna’s response: “Why should I stop here?”

I’ve been thinking about that scene this week in the context of a bunch of disconnected but deeply related stories about family vloggers. Tread carefully with this one, it’s a minefield of content warnings about child abuse.

First off, hello to the new subscribers here from Culture Vulture! It’s so nice to see you. For the rest of you, I wrote a piece for Luce’s great pop culture newsletter on my lifetime hatred-affair with high heels: Emma Thompson told me she’s never wearing heels again. Me neither.

Second, yes I was hit by a tornado last night, but I’m fine. I lost a tree and my BBQ cover, but my house is in one piece. Do not recommend.

roll your own

In the aftermath of the inauguration, it’s become even clearer that the owners of our online social infrastructure are all from the bad place.

what does a mandalorian look like?

In November, I was working with my friend Adam at the Supanova cons in Australia (think ComicCon or Armageddon). Convention culture hasn’t historically been part of my fandom experience, until Adam invited me to cosplay with him at New York ComicCon a couple of years back. But it meant that the day after the US election, when I would ordinarily have felt extremely depressed, I instead got to spend the whole day surrounded by thousands of fans who were so excited to meet their faves, to show off the incredible things they’d created, and to share in the uninhibited joy of being a fan.

One of the things that struck me as a very casual Star Wars fan was the incredible array of Mandalorian armour on display. Cosplayers weren’t just recreating Boba Fett’s or Din Djarin’s costumes — they were making their own amazing variations. I saw a Mountain Dew Mando, and these amazing Micky and Minnie Mandos:

I’d love to say happy new year, internet friends, but 2025 is getting off to a rocky start, between the war crimes and wildfires, maga nonsense and our own brand of political bs here in Aoteaoroa. But none of that is what prompted me to write to you, you can get enough of the doom and gloom literally everywhere else.

No, instead it was Zuck’s mask-off reveal that Meta’s products would circle the drain like everything else, unlocking a slur pack and chasing a more “masculine energy” for his company.

Anyway, you don’t need me to tell you that these platforms are rotten — I’ve been talking about it since Webstock in 2019. You can read great writing on this loads of places (Cory Doctorow calls it “enshittification”, Ed Zitron calls it the “rot economy”).

When I asked you to give me your email address, it was just as twitter was starting to circle the drain. I promised you I wasn’t starting a newsletter, so much as finding a way to continue to share what I was thinking and reading and writing about once that platform no longer existed. It’s certainly true that twitter still (technically) exists, but it doesn’t work in any meaningful way anymore – no tweet achieves any kind of reach, and the bots and nazis make it a horrible place to visit even briefly. 

Honestly I’m still grieving that on some level. Yes, I can discover new things on TikTok and share my Eras Tour costume on Instagram and (shudder) network on LinkedIn. But nothing has replaced the learning and discovery and serendipity and fun. Where am I supposed to do my annual announcement that it’s marshmallow egg season?

Anyway, as promised – here are the things I’ve written lately that you might enjoy reading:

Public Passions/Private Spaces for The Pantograph Punch’s Carving Space issue – thinking about how we make thriving neighbourhoods online.