In the year 2006, my friend Erin and I were standing on a friend’s balcony beneath a night sky too light-polluted by Denver’s electrical buzz to show any real muscle on the star front. Venus was up there, probably, joined by a scattered handful of other celestial entities flexing the…

Be it resolved that everyone on ‘Succession’ lives a life of inner solitude. An occasional exception emerges with the three younger adult siblings — Kendall, Shiv, and Roman—who might experience fleeting moments of genuine fellowship. Whether the trio is reminiscing about their idiot teenage years, goofing off on the Roy…

A shopworn pop culture observation for you: mothers are mostly absent in Disney movies, in fairytales. You know this already, though. To the Disney dearth of maternal casting, Mr. Walt’s mother died from a furnace leak in a house he’d purchased for her. Many speculate that guilt sprung from this…

“What do we want from our mothers when we are children?” asks the female narrator of Zadie Smith’s 2016 novel Swing Time. I’ve often thought back to this line since reading the book six years ago. Usually, I’m pondering the question in the context of being a mother myself…

Your sole relationship that’s not transactional “is sleeping in that room.” The viewer will picture beautiful little Petra, dreaming with her stuffed felt animals tucked under her chin, but “Tár” director Todd Field doesn’t show Petra here. The camera stays right with Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) and her wife Sharon…

For aspiring authors feeling the intimidation that often accompanies beginning a new project, novelist E.L. Doctrow offered the following advice: “Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights, but you make the whole trip that way.” This little tidbit came to…

My favorite scene from Workin’ Moms comes at the close of Episode One. Kate Foster (Catherine Reitman, charming and reliably funny) is out jogging with her baby through a wooded park when she almost runs into a giant grizzly bear. An earlier news snippet cautioned of bear sightings (the show…

American culture is mostly oblivious to motherhood, but the vague ideas it manages to occasionally put forth are usually bad. The reasons for this are myriad and could fill a book, a bookshelf, a library: the sort of person who tended to immigrate here (risk-taker, individualist, and in the West…

It needs saying here at the start that I recommend Cobra Kai. I like this show. I like its sunny sheen, its ludicrous plot-lines, its full embrace of camp, and I’d frankly like to see William Zabka win an Emmy for his role as adult Johnny, because nothing about this…