John Griswold

Audiences might ask, what do those three hours “do”? The answer may be: to portray the helpless, confused feeling of disbelief at our not-knowing in a world where enormous, supra-state power is wielded by gangsters, weirdos, grifters, criminals, and haters, whose choices weaken our societies and make our lives worse.

Loser Back Home (LBH), who prefers to remain pseudonymous, is traveling through China right now. He has made some 31 social media videos—which began with the series title, “Day [9, 11, 18, 28, 62, etc.] of Not Understanding Anything in China”—as he has passed through, eg, Ganzhou, Ningming, Wuhan, Yueyang, Shaoshan, Chongqing, Chengdu, the Three Gorges area, Zhang Zhou, and other places, including non-Chinese cities Bangkok and Vientiane.

“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” is by turns charming, troubling, funny, dark, romantic, nonsensical, and weird. More than many other movies, it continues to inspire questions about its layers of inventiveness, even though its premise—that specific inputs cannot explain magical output—is in the news every morning now.

Why my interest in jackets? I cannot say, though others are taken by them too, a great tribe of jacket lovers. Of course, people are taken by all sorts of things—jeans, scarves, shoes, hats, suits, winter coats—but I have little interest in those things, except for their utility, and I own only a few. But […]

My mother would have said, “He’s a mess,” but Leon had a punk attitude, loved performative wildness, and was hugely capable. Is it a surprise what came next?

Bargoers said aloud by rote, cynically but accurately, “That ain’t no Jimmy Dean,” because whatever the meat was, it was not pork sausage. Everybody called it monkey meat, or mystery meat, which did not diminish patrons’ appetites and in fact sold more skewers due to its mystery.

"Nobody should want to run a business like the lighter factory, with its puny, per-unit profit scheme. No American company would even try to do what the Chinese do, by hyper-control of their people."

What could class mean now in America, where populists decry education as brainwashing, influencers look rich in things and lifestyles, and oligarchs spend their time pasting fool’s-gold to everything instead of governing for the benefit of the people?

I laughed and told my son that the singer reminded me of myself in high school—gawky, skinny, comic not handsome, watching everyone else but doing your own thing a little too enthusiastically.

What to call this Anton Chekhov, whom I first encountered in 1988? The Master, perhaps—of vision, decency, modesty, and industry, and, one might hope, in the old game of love.

The best thing about writing for oneself is that you always own your own work and can do exactly as you like with it.

Predictably, a court in Russia banned the documentary film “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” ruling it “propagates extremism and terrorism”; Russia has named Talankin, the film’s main character, a “foreign agent.”

Friends of Vintage Flight must make strategic decisions when they choose a project, based on the group’s capabilities, the condition of available aircraft, and their historical significance. The Curtiss Robin has a fascinating history as one of the most commercially successful aircraft of the period between the world wars, and began production the year after Lindbergh made the first solo trans-Atlantic flight in 1927.

As I was being vetted, administrators asked what I would do if my Ukrainian partner wanted to talk about hardships and loss. I said I could listen. What else could I do?

I had a busy morning but by 1:00 was in Seoul Taco on Delmar with the communists.

In the end, the only thing to be done with a movie like this is to throw it to the wolves of Reddit.

A few days ago, a man in Memphis messaged me by LinkedIn to ask if I was the person who had offered to help him market his book. When I said no, he showed me the email that offered to make his novel a smash hit.

The women of Lota, Chile, or Lotinas, represent a long feminist movement to preserve cultural memory and reinvigorate the economy of their city. At the end of March 2026, they flew more than 20 hours to be in residency for a week at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where they led workshops on art “as a tool of historical storytelling and civic activism.”

Poetry is a different embodiment in words of the experience of being human. AI does not (yet) understand the mysteries, perspectives, uncertainties, and feelings—the experience itself—of inhabiting a body in the physical world.

The impulse is to think that someone who makes plans for something else also helps bring it about. That fantasy does not seem to be doing us much good as a body politic, but the idea has taken root everywhere, including at Department of State.