Alex Sayf Cummings 🌹

I'm excited to say that my essay about After Hours and Safe just came out in the UK's great illustrated film journal Beneficial Shock. I have been wanting to write about Safe in particular for years and years and years

a left-wing political satire based on a novel by THOMAS mufucking PYNCHON makes $200 million... I'd say that's something else

One Battle After Another: Why this year's most acclaimed film flopped Paul Thomas Anderson's political thriller One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, has been critically acclaimed, but won't break even at the box office.

It seems incredible to me to call a movie that's already made 200 million dollars a "flop" www.bbc.com/culture/arti...

‘The Life of Chuck’ and the Extraordinary Breeziness of a Dreamcatcher The film offers a commitment to what is real, whether it’s as seemingly ironclad as mathematics or physics or if it’s as subjective as one being in an endless universe’s tiny meaning-seeking in the…

It might be a little schmaltzy, but I'm championing this film because it's gotten kind of overlooked. It connected to something deep in me tropicsofmeta.com/2025/11/06/t...

Booker, Boozman to speak with David Sacks as Senate Ag nears draft crypto deal Lawmakers on the Agriculture panel are nearing a draft deal on its portion of a sweeping crypto bill.

How fucked are things when I'm actually agreeing with a right wing senator from Kansas over a so-called liberal Democrat
www.politico.com/live-updates...

I’m just being real right now. Curtis Sliwa is the GOAT. He lives in a studio apartment with like 17 cats, wears a red beret everywhere, and cheated at a matzoh ball eating contest. I don't think I could ever vote for a republican but I might make an exception for him

I went and voted today. It felt kind of pointless but I still did it. Much like sex

Dick Wolf is my favorite indie band

Reading Fanon’s Psychiatric Papers I never once encountered Frantz Fanon on the page in my nine years of Canadian medical training. He is not in the medical curriculum at all.

Dr. Emily Lu on Fanon's radical approach to psychiatry tropicsofmeta.com/2025/11/03/r...

Out of the Blue, Into the Black The Good Place’s finale reminds us of things we never knew — like the impossibility of Heaven, and the reality of our singular, inescapable loneliness.

This was the last column I published before COVID completely took over our lives. It feels really weird to look back at it now
tropicsofmeta.com/2020/02/01/o...

“I Govy, You Govy, We All Govy for Wegovy: Dana Simmons on the Dark History of Hunger in America”: Alex Sayf Cummings on Simmons’s *On Hunger* | Society for US Intellectual History “They say you gotta stay hungry. Hey baby, I’m just about starvin’ tonight.” In Bruce Springsteen’s deceptively upbeat 1984 hit “Dancing in the Dark,” he describes a frustrated, working-class, would-b...

What is famine, then? Is it what at least a half or even two-thirds of Simmons's students at Riverside are experiencing, skipping meals to stretch their budget and avoid taking on more debt? s-usih.org/2025/08/i-go...

The incredible and absurd baked-in instinct toward reflexive propaganda about heinous acts in US/UK media still never ceases to amaze me

Reason # 498,527,688 why I will never give a dime to the @nytimes

Around 2007 I had a freelance gig that took me to Trump Tower in Manhattan. In the hotel room where we met there were Trump branded bottles in the minifridge and i thought, oh yeah that’s that washed up guy who was on TV

Happy Tuesday

@ebwhamilton.bsky.social When people ask me what I write about, I just say "zoning" and that pretty much shuts down the conversation

Okay. No more shenanigans. No more tomfoolery. No more ballyhoo. I'm actually coming over here

It seems like people might actually be moving over here. As long as some real morons sign up, I'm all in

Soon the only extant species of bear will be the Bad News Bears

The album that changed my life is The Velvet Underground and Nick

I don’t understand how anything bad could happen when people go to the desert in the middle of nowhere to recreate the Wicker Man
#burningman

i.guim.co.uk/img/media/82...

Watching Taylor Fritz go on to the court was truly like watching Old Yeller get walked out to be put down. It's so crazy #USopen

‎Throughline: By Accident of Birth (2022) on Apple Podcasts ‎Show Throughline, Ep By Accident of Birth (2022) - Aug 23, 2023

What an amazing episode… it’s hard to listen to this as a US historian and not as a child of an immigrant. The 14th amendment is the ship and all else is the sea. It’s a miracle that the birthright citizenship clause ever got passed podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Labor Day reminder: If the min wage increased at the rate of inflation & productivity since 1960 it'd be $26 today—not $7.25. Meaning—billionaires & corps have stolen at least $19/hour from working Americans for 60 years.

We don't suffer a lack of resources—but an excess of greed.

Sunday funday, I’m gonna make Rob Ford my iPhone screen

I wish the TED Radio Hour was just about Bill & Ted and Theodore Roosevelt

Spare the Rod Dreher, spoil the child

They will stop at absolutely nothing to ensure that women know they are property www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

God I played this almost every day when I was a kid. I had no idea what it was about but it was endlessly fascinating

‎Longform: Episode 548: Susan Burton on Apple Podcasts ‎Show Longform, Ep Episode 548: Susan Burton - Aug 30, 2023

Wonderful and insightful interview with Susan Burton about written vs audio media and telling stories about women’s pain podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/l...