ALT My “why” is because I’m a sucker for anything that requires endurance. It’s because I used to go to the Mystic Seaport Museum as a kid and couldn’t pass up the chance to spend a night in its recreated historic village. It’s because Mystic’s marathon takes place on a tall ship called the Charles W. Morgan, America’s oldest still-floating commercial vessel and the last survivor of a 19th century American whaling fleet. I also went because.. the marathon sounded like the opposite of the way I spend most of my days camped out in front of my computer, pinned between the despairing onslaught of the news and the relentless pressure of running a business. I wanted to be with strangers I didn’t know from online, with a paper book before me; I wanted ropes and wood and water; I wanted to do something weird and silly and most likely miserable that was about as far from my daily life as I could get.

ALT That there is a somewhat radical bent to the movie’s gender politics has helped Conclave find a broader audience, but that thread has also drawn more attention to those things in the Church and religion at large.... Conclave’s final twist shows a glimpse of a possible future for the Church—progress not as some incremental compromise but as a total alternative to all the familiar and terrible futures the movie’s other papal candidates can offer. It shows how even something like the Catholic Church can not just be changed by people, but changed radically and instantly. These days, as more of our institutions feel unstoppably regressive, as they steamroll actual humans in their pursuit of their own ends, Conclave has let people imagine an alternative. We can make up stories about and root for our favorite real-life papal candidates, but through that, in ways big and small, we’re imagining and championing a new future, and we’re believing that this future can come to be.

ALT I was intrigued by the idea of the show, but I never quite got why it had to be a one-person cast. Especially with a major star at the helm, it could easily be a vanity project, or the kind of twist a revival shoehorns in to justify itself. But here, the solo cast amplifies the way Vanya’s characters are both obsessed with and ignorant of each other’s internal lives, how it feels like they’re fighting over the world’s limited amount of happiness like a game of capture the flag. You could read it, maybe, as a metaphor for our country these days, one body being torn apart by competing desires, the arm blaming the leg for why it can’t reach what it wants. You could see it, as I did in this viewing, as a symbol of how hard it is to follow our desires when we can want so many things, of not becoming bitter over our own choices, of seeing all our possibilities....

ALT It’s strange to be so angry and sad about the loss of horizons I never thought it was possible to sail toward, but while the Trump administration might own the institutions, they can’t ultimately do away with trans art in any meaningful sense. At my core, I’m not afraid of them; Trump and his cohort don’t matter to me in a way that really matters, despite how very bad and dangerous and even unlivable they are eager to make my life. My confidence comes from a lot of places–my politics, my faith–but also from trans art, from the work we’ve made with and for each other for decades upon decades, which didn’t depend on them for its existence and doesn’t now. I’m sad about the losses we’ll see in the next four years and maybe beyond; I mourn the art we won’t get because of this. But that art found its way before, and will still, and will again. We never needed them, and we still don’t need them, and they’ve never been able to stop us.

ALT Peretti putting the onus for some of this on AI is laughable when his own company has axed its Pulitzer Prize-winning news desk and conducted mass layoffs, leaning its full weight into AI and content creators instead. If it’s algorithms over people that’s driving all this, wouldn’t the smart alternative be thoughtful content created by real people; i.e., hiring journalists? If the AI-driven social media platforms are the problem, why would the solution be for Peretti to create his own social media platform “built specifically to spread joy and enable playful creative expression”? Peretti writes that “this social media platform will use AI to give users agency instead of stealing their agency,” whatever that means technologically, and whatever “agency” looks like when held up against a platform whose defining feature seems to be “good vibes only.”

ALT Peretti can’t even make it through a paragraph about his own outlets before pivoting back into celebrating the very problems he rails against, an AI-driven tech platform that incentivizes creators. The main difference seems to be not just that it’s, you know, nice stuff, but that it’s his nice stuff. “I’m fed up with giving the platform companies advice about how to fix the internet, if we want this done right, we have to do it ourselves!” he writes. This is a man who claims to both “look forward to counter-programming with our human creativity fighting against the machine,” and a man who in December sold Hot Ones, a wildly popular interview food show that sounds exactly like what Peretti seems to think the internet needs, except that it is made by and for actual humans, and as such cannot be turned into a tech product.