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Thom Dunn is a Boston-based writer, musician, and utterly terrible dancer. He is the singer/guitarist for the indie rock/power-pop the Roland High Life, as well as a staff writer for the New York Times’ Wirecutter and a regular contributor at BoingBoing.net. Thom enjoys Oxford commas, metaphysics, and romantic clichés (especially when they involve whiskey), and he firmly believes that Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" is the single greatest atrocity committed against mankind. He is a graduate of Clarion Writer's Workshop at UCSD ('13) & Emerson College ('08).

Some People Just Want To Watch Twitter Burn

Dia daoibh, a chairde, and greetings from the B-Side Brewery! I was on a bunch of tight deadlines this week, so it’s all been kind of a blur. I’m normally a compulsive inbox (and/or notifications) zero-er, but there were more than a few times this week that I emerged from my hyperfocused writing trance to find a dozen or more little red dots on my phone. I ultimately zeroed them all out … though whether or not I actually acted on or replied to all of them, I’m still not sure.

But hey, at least I didn’t lose $80B in stock valuation (that I only earned in the first place by extorting people who need certain life-saving drugs) all because of a stupid Elon Musk Twitter scheme!

So yeah. That kinda week. To make up for it, I’m giving y’all a free short story to read at the bottom of this newsletter. You’re welcome!

What I’m reading

I just started reading Listen To The Land Speak, the newest book from Manchán Magan. Magan is a documentarian / playwright / essayist /general cultural anthropologist whose work is largely about the indigenousness of Irishness, if that makes sense. He examines modern relationships to the Irish language, landscape, and culture, with the thoroughly thoughtful approach of a poet’s soul (Theatre friends may enjoy his play Broken Crói / Heart Briste, which is both hilarious and heartbreaking). This new book is about ancestral Irish knowledge and mythology about nature — and so far, it is just as beautiful and thought-provoking as I expected!

It’s also been a big comic book week for me:

  • Radiant Black #19 was yet another fascinating step in a series that continues to find new ways to surprise me. This series is essentially, what if Power Rangers but the morphin’ powers were scattered among a bunch of depressed millennials who are also trying to deal with their economic anxieties. (Co-creator Kyle Higgins also wrote some of the recent Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers comic reboot, which is waaaaay better than it has any right to be.)

  • Two Graves is a new series written by Genevieve Valentin, which is sort of a modern riff on the Persephone riff. The artwork by Ming Doyle and Annie Wu is split between the perspectives of the two main characters: Death, and Emilia, the maiden he’s currently escorting across the country. I’m not entirely where this is going yet, or quite how much it will actually hew to the myth I know. But it’s subtle, and gorgeous, and intriguing, so I’ll follow it for now (without looking back).

  • 3Keys #2 is another new book that I’m not sure where it’s going, but I’m intrigued enough to follow along for now. It’s got big Buffy vibes, but instead of vampire slayers, our perky woman heroes are the descendants of HP Lovecraft’s perennial protagonist, Randolph Carter, and their “Watchers,” as it were, are the beefy children of the cats of Ulthar. Between the postmodern character archetypes and the gorgeously pinup-esque artwork, this book feels like it could have come out in 2002 rather than 2022. Whether that’s a good thing or not, I guess we’ll see.

  • A.X.E.: Judgment Day Omega by Kieron Gillen and Guiu Vilanova is the final chapter of the latest Marvel universe-wide crossover. It also serves as a sort of bookend to Gillen’s recent work on Marvel’s Eternals, which he relaunched alongside the recent movie in an attempt to make literally anyone care about those weird-ass supergods for once. And damn does he succeed! A.X.E./Judgment Daymight be the most coherent superhero event comic I’ve ever read, with a clear point of view and emotional stakes (that things that are most often shoved to the side when you need to write a story about 100 popular characters facing life-changing stakes without actually being changed too much). It’s also a neat examination of faith and heresy — what we mean to our gods, what our gods mean to us, and what it means when we choose to interpret the words of our gods in different ways. I also … felt emotions for Ikaris? WTF?

  • Similarly, Sabretooth & the Exiles #1 sets up yet another brilliant exploration of the prison industrial complex, but with mutants. It’s the next stage in the story that Victor LaValle began telling in his recent Sabretooth miniseries, which uses X-Men characters to literalize the metaphor the mere existence of human-made prisons and penal systems is an incurable poison at the very core of our civilization. LaValle’s work with Sabretooth harkens back to his 2015 novella The Ballad of Black Tom, which is essentially a re-telling of a famous(ly racist) HP Lovecraft story from the point of view of the "savage” Black man at the center of it, and looks into how and why he got that way (aside from, ya know, Lovecraft being so terrified of Black people, Jews, and vaginas that he had to create an epic pantheon of indescribable cosmic horrors to try and obscure his bigotry, which obviously failed). Like with Black Tom, LaValle never makes excuses for Sabretooth’s worst behavior — but he does make you, as a reader, wonder whether you’re really so above him, and whether you should have a right to pass judgment on or punish anyone else. A+ superhero comics, this.

What I’m Watching

Welp, we finished The Watcher. I’d heard it was bad. But it’s bad. Like, it was hard to leave it on in the background while I read and did other things because it was so actively nonsensical. Most of the individual scenes were well-written and well-acted enough. But it sort of felt like every scene was written and directed in a vacuum by a completely different creative team, and then Ryan Murphy just randomly stitched together with no coherent thru-line. The best thing I can say about this show is that I think it was deliberate. There are so many ways this could have worked, and yet every choice immediately sabotaged and undermined itself, to the point that I’m half-convinced it was all a trollish avant-garde art experiment.

We started the new season of White Lotus this week, which I’m enjoying just as much as I did the last one. I assumed it’d be a completely new story of Shitty American Tourists Utterly Awful People, but I was pleasantly surprised to see Jennifer Coolidge’s character returning as well. I hope that continuity is a trend going forward. If you like seeing Shitty Rich American Tourists Being Utterly Awful People, then this show is great.

We also checked out the new Netflix adaptation of Luckiest Girl Alive with Mila Kunis. The trailers make it look like a Gone Girl-esque unreliable narrator story, and I know the book received similar comparisons. That’s certainly an intriguing choice — it’s what made me agree to watch it — but that’s not actually what the movie is. There are some interesting meta-twists of the movie revealing itself to be something other than what you thought it was. That’s not because the narrator is unreliable, though; it’s more of a commentary on gaslighting than anything. This was ultimately a really powerful movie that deals with two incredibly sensitive issues (gun violence and sexual assault) — and, perhaps most remarkably, I thought it actually handled both things pretty well, with some refreshingly shocking nuance. That being said, I was surprised just how much of both issues they decided to show on screen. I’d argue it was done tastefully (inasmuch as either thing can ever be “tasteful”), in a way that served the narrative instead of just being shocking or edgy. But I can imagine it might make some folks uncomfortable. The movie does have make some Hollywood-ized choices in the narrative; I literally laughed out loud when the main character was talking about her dreams of joining the New York Times Magazine and finally making a better salary than the exact salary I make as an employee of the New York Times Company. Mila Kunis’s performance is strong enough here that somehow she still sold it.

What I’m writing

I think I wrote about 5000 words of this new podcast script this week, hence all the above. Every one of these I’ve done has been its own unique challenge, and this was no exception. There’s the inherent fun challenge of fitting into the pre-existing episode format — the commercial breaks, the story structure, et cetera. But this one came with some added layers of narrative complication, even on top of the usual Badlands balance of titillating pulp and sensitivity. I’m very eager for the world to hear this one, whenever that might be.

I also did some updates to the Wirecutter guide to the Best Outdoor Patio Heaters, although I missed the opportunity to write that whilst sitting underneath the warmth of said heaters. Maybe I should move my standing desk outside for the winter?

Oh! I added some new picks to the Wirecutter guide to the Best Christmas Lights, too.

Meanwhile, at BoingBoing…

What I’m Listening To

Last week, I stumbled onto a great rock n’ roll show at a 3-year-old’s birthday party at a brewery. Yes that was a sentence I just wrote. I was already a fan of The Spots (and we’ve been trying to set up some shows together as well), but I also discovered a great new group called Gloomy June from San Francisco, who was sort of a dance-y queer emo band. Big Cure / Joy Division energy, but with arpeggiated guitar delays instead of synths, a la Thursday (with disco beats instead of screaming breakdowns).

There’s a great episode of Hanif Abdurraqib’s Object of Sound podcast recently that paid tribute to the late Scott Hutchison, from the band Frightened Rabbit (and other). Hutchison is one of my all-time favorite songwriters, and the only “celebrity” of any sort whose death actually made me burst into tears. Abdurraqib speaks with friends, fans and fellow musicians whose lives were moved by Hutchison life and work to explore what made him such a unique soul as an artist, and as a human being. For a podcast about someone who died from suicide, it does spend a lot of time talking about hilariously embarrassing and uncomfortable sex stories — but then, that’s kind of a perfect microcosm of the unique intimacy that Hutchison brought to his work.

I’m still only like halfway through the newest episode of Cerebro — which, if you haven’t heard me talk about before, is “a podcast where a homo and his friends dig deep into the history of homo superior.” I was previously the guest on the Banshee episode, but this week finds host Connor Goldsmith and his friend Jordan Blok going five fucking hours on Threnody, a Z-list X-Men character who’s only ever appeared in a few dozen comics. Yet somehow, this episode is an utter delight, with some great conversations about depictions of Black women and mental health in media (Jordan also goes into a brilliantly hilarious rant about Beast about 90 minutes in, which I adored). I feel ridiculous that I’m going to spend 5 hours on this … but damn, it’s worth it.

I also just started the audio book of Rabbits by Terry Miles, which is sort of a conspiracy thriller about an underground AR / LARPing game gone awry. I’m only three chapters in, but it’s great.

And here’s everything else that got me through this week’s writing binge, courtesy of Last.fm:

What I’m doing

Next Wednesday, November 23 at 1pm I’ll be doing a livestream with Double Elvis / Disgraceland Talks about my new episode of the Badlands podcast I wrote, which about the troubled soccer star Diego Maradona. That episode comes out on Wednesday as well, though you can listen to it on Audible right now if you have a subscription.

My band the Roland High Life just finalized a few new shows for the coming months as well. You should come see us!

Colder Bodies, Colder Hearts (a short story)

I’m still trying to figure out exactly what I want this newsletter to be. Last week, I shared some new music, so this week, I thought I’d share some fiction. Here’s a short story I published a new years ago in Serial Pulp magazine, which I originally drafted at the 2013 Clarion Writer’s Workshop. It’s loosely based on the real-life invention of the heart lung machine, but I think a more accurate description is that it’s basically a gay Russian zombie ballet.