I realized most of y’all weren’t seeing my Fourth Friday collages!
April was a big month for the girlies like me who text “go look at the moon” whenever we see the moon; not to mention the girlies like me who will deliver a passionate monologue to their friend across the bistro table from them about why it’s important that we continue to fund space exploration (I’m sure there are dozens of us). Your girl was tuned in for as much of the Artemis II flyby as possible, and I’m fighting the urge to demand NASA sell Rise plushies for the rest of us. Point of interest: NASA’s merch situation is kind of complicated, but they do have an Exchange set up for Artemis II-inspired swag. Me myself personally? I’ve had one of NASA’s free Visions of the Future travel posters framed on my wall for about a decade now.
In personal news, this was my first month on the new platform, and I’m still getting used to it. Curious to know from y’all what the transition has been like, if you’ve perceived it at all!
Finally, the Fourth Friday column is typically paywalled, but I’m making it free for this month as we’re still in transition mode. I’d love it if you upgraded your subscription today, since beehiiv is a lot more expensive than Substack was, so you can get all the paywalled essays to come.
And with that, here’s everything I wrote, read, and watched that got me through everything not-moon-related this month:
Wrote
My spoilerrific thoughts on The Drama, red flags, and mercy
April’s Terrible Tuesday: a miserable walk down memory lane to the Janelle Monae-starring Antebellum
Nostalgia for 90s minimalism is hiding nostalgia for something worse, I fear
In light of Russell Brand going on Megyn Kelly’s reputation-laundering machine to deny his rape allegations, I’m running back my essay on how Megyn Kelly became the go-to defender for the scum of the earth
My essay that Melissa Harris-Perry quoted back to me when I interviewed her last month; the whole thing was very surreal!
VERY surreal!
Read
My favourite of the Michael reviews, and I’ve read em all
My dear friend Clara and I met in person for the first time this month, and she soft-launched me in half a dozen pics in her travel diary
Gabrielle Cassel’s heartfelt breakdown of how Spelman College has become a Black Excellence ambassador platform
Fellow bee Out of your League shared what has changed for them in the seven months since moving from Substack to beehiiv
The New York Times continues to justify my subscription with incredible, sobering reporting, this time on the origins of the Supreme Court’s shadow docket
Shea Serrano covered one of my all-time favourite movies, Jackie Brown, and made me desperately need to rewatch Jackie Brown (I haven’t since June 2025!)
Watched
I was a cynical teenager the first time I watched Casablanca, and none of it moved me at all. Rewatching it as an adult who has actually fallen in love, and who has developed an understanding of what it means to fight for a cause, I find it to be one of the most courageous movies of the century. It blows my mind that it was filmed in 1942, when they had no idea how World War II was going to end. They had no idea whether the La Marseillaise scene would play for future audiences as a bittersweet elegy to the French resistance, or as a retrospective sign of the victory to come. Breathtaking stuff.
One thing that may not be clear from my essay about The Drama is how much I enjoyed that movie. Seeing it first in a Parisian audience was interesting, because that audience was very plugged into the dark comedy of it all in a way that my American audience was not. I’m left wondering how much of that difference is due to the French having a higher tolerance for black comedy, and how much of it is due to Americans having a higher sensitivity to the subject matter. Hélas!
Checking one off the “finally” Letterboxd list: Sunset Boulevard, a massive gap in my classic film history. I realized while watching that I didn’t know anything about it other than lines like “I am big, it's the pictures that got small!” And gahhLEE, is it a tragic watch. It’s hard to know where the disgust of aging women ends and the critique of the disgust of aging women begins (compared with a movie like All About Eve, which draws the line pretty cleanly).
I first watched Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice pretty 😶🌫️, so I missed a pivotal 20-minute stretch due to being asleep. The parts I was awake for were really funny and surprisingly moving, though; enough that I went back a couple of weeks later to rewatch what I’d missed. I say this with so much tension in my jaw, but: Vince Vaughn is still really good at this stuff. A warning, though: it may get the song “Don’t Look Back in Anger” stuck in your head for like, two and a half weeks.
xoxo