Welcome to Certain Hungers

This is a newsletter about books, films, and the persistent human habit of wanting more than is advisable.

I’ll be writing long reviews of ambitious novels, elegant failures, glossy melodramas, and films that understand that desire is rarely subtle and almost never polite. I am less interested in whether a work is “likable” than whether it knows what it wants and whether it has the nerve to pursue it.

The subjects will recur. Masculinity. Glamour. Power. Money. Sex. Taste. These are not scandalous themes. They are simply unfashionable to discuss without apology. I see no reason to apologize.

In addition to criticism and essays, there will be short fiction which will feature stories about men who are lucid about their appetites and occasionally unwise about their execution. Consequences will be observed. Judgment will be applied sparingly, if at all.

This is not a space for outrage choreography or consensus building exercises. It is a place for close reading, close looking, and the mild suspicion that culture is most honest when it stops pretending to be virtuous.

If that sounds severe, it isn’t. It’s simply attentive.

This is not a wellness space nor is it a moral instruction manual. I am not particularly concerned with being agreeable.

Everyone has certain hungers.

Some of us prefer to examine them in good lighting.