iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

ZOSIA MAMET / DEAD GENDER-SWAPPED KEVIN COSTNER 9/9

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

ALEX KARPOVSKY / JEFF GOLDBLUM 7/x

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

JEMIMA KIRKE / GLENN CLOSE 6/x

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

EBON MOSS-BACHRACH / KEVIN KLINE 5/x

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

CHRISTOPHER ABBOTT / TOM BERENGER 4/x

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

ALLISON WILLIAMS / JOBETH WILLIAMS 3/x

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

This is thrilling, but I'm guessing it means Lena Dunham is not working on my dream project: a Gus Van Sant-style shot-for-shot remake of THE BIG CHILL starring the GIRLS cast. For the record, here's the casting: LENA DUNHAM / MARY KAY PLACE 1/x

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

And yet, the props department went out of their way to locate this first edition of "SOMETHING" by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

a mad men screenshot of ted reading a fake book called "SOMETHING" by Ralph Waldo Emerson in a daydream

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Eagle-eyed readers might note the almost total lack of hyperlinked evidence for this paragraph's many sweeping generalizations. Among them, that young readers want TOUGH GUY cultural objects that are cruelly being denied them by all these meddlesome women, when, in fact...

A more challenging question can be asked: If more books were published by men with explicitly masculine themes, would there actually be a wider male readership? It’s the old chicken-and-egg dilemma. The audience won’t emerge because the product isn’t there, and the product isn’t there because the audience is elsewhere. Men, obviously, can read and enjoy books by women, but there is the sticky biological reality that, on balance, women will probably prefer reading women, and men may prefer reading men. Boys, especially, seem to long for male teachers and role models in the classroom. As they age, and if they want to read, they might be drawn to the fiction of writers like Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and McMurtry. They might want literature that, at the bare minimum, seems masculine.

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I cannot overestimate how auspicious an omen it is for Philadelphia that LeBron has chosen this year to go fully bald for the first time.

lebron in a press conference in a sixers jersey, holding a microphone, FULLY BALD

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

This is me, thinking about the NYT best tv list:

a screenshot of vin diesel as dom toretto saying "And what even is art?"

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Ok, I think this is what I'd say? Ideologically committed to half-hour auteur-y sadcoms broadcast by FX.

nyt card of my best shows of the 21st century: Better Things, Mad Men, 30 Rock, Atlanta, Somebody Somewhere, The Americans, Catastrophe, The Leftovers, Girls, Rez Dogs

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I love this @dwallacewells.bsky.social argument that our baffling failure to meaningfully regulate the AI industry is part of a rolling post-pandemic backlash to regulation and oversight, that encompasses everyone from anti-mask Republican governors to Abundance Dems. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/o...

As the country emerged from the pandemic emergency, it did so with a new, elite consensus: that America had grown too risk averse, too tangled in regulation and oversight, too scared of its own shadow. The critique covered the pandemic response, but its aperture was much wider: In its governing institutions, its bureaucracy, its status quo bias and its social instincts, a country forged on the libertarian frontier now found itself trapped in a safetyist prison.

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

If the AI push in higher ed were really centered around student learning, it wouldn't look like what it looks like now. The willingness to transform liberal arts education wholesale overnight cannot seriously be motivated primarily by educational principles and beliefs.

Far be it from me to deny that a subject matter or field may have special uses to which AI can be put and which some instruction can promote. But none of this requires every course to waste precious class time on this task. And finally, detailing AI’s potential shortcomings and the moral costs of AI employment will make students use it differently only if they are able to opt out. Such efforts, in other words, will meaningfully change students’ use patterns with AI only if they are able to exercise meaningful choice about when, how, and why to use it. For students to be using AI judiciously, they must be able to confidently operate without it.

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Instagram woke up this morning and thought, "well, I know he's a fan of Bluey, so maybe he might want to see some fan art about the DEATH OF CHILI."

5 panels depicting an accurate looking set of images of Chili from Bluey dying as Bandit, Bluey, and Bingo stand beside her deathbed

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Lot of people posting about Barbara Ehrenreich for the anniversary of Nickel & Dimed, so I wanted to share what a previous owner had written on the inside cover of my used first-edition of Ehrenreich's 1983 THE HEARTS OF MEN: AMERICAN DREAMS AND THE FLIGHT FROM COMMITMENT.

Inside cover of a book with the phrase "MEN: TO BOSS OR TO BE BOSSED" written inside.

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

The tools we are asked to deploy in classroom settings are largely tools crafted to expertly avoid the work of my classroom. I could choose to imagine that such a tool has rendered the knowledge I possess obsolete, or I could imagine that its creators meaningfully misunderstand that knowledge.

From the standpoint of a writer and a reader and a teacher of writing and a teacher of reading, these are not tools made for us. They were not designed by people who struggled through the work of reading and writing and want to help others. They are tools clearly designed by people who think that that work — all of it — is unnecessary, too hard, meaningless. They are tools for cheating, whether that’s how you use them or not, whether that’s what you understand “cheating” to mean or not. Imagine asking the guy who got an F in your general education intro to English literature class to design a program to help you pass it. Imagine asking the guy extinguishing the blazing butt of a robot to help you train to run the 100-meter dash.

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

In that spirit, it has been a welcome relief to watch and share all these new videos of robots eating shit from the World Humanoid Robot Games. From the anecdata I've collected on Instagram, a lot of my writer and teacher friends have felt the same.

So: the aforementioned robots eating shit. Last week, I posted countless America’s Funniest Home Videos-level clips of the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on my Instagram stories. Rarely have I posted anything on social media that’s been met with such an overwhelming wave of approval. My messages are filled with near-identical expressions of hilarity and happiness at the sight of these images. The inadvertent slapstick of these humanoid robots is virtuosic. I gasp and marvel at the hairpin turns they take from fluid mastery to absolute catastrophe. No Warner Bros. animator could capture the chaotic flailing of the “Billie Jean” robot struggling to climb a stair in rhythm. I find it hard, with my paltry words, to describe what’s so enlivening about these terminators biting it, but it far outstrips any feeling of awe I might have at their feats of strength and dexterity. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many of the crying-laughing emoji responses I’ve been collecting are coming from fellow teachers and writers.

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

At the beginning of every semester, I give a little speech to my students about AI. This is, for the most part, it:

Last week was also the start of the fall college semester, and so, three times in a row on Monday, I delivered an impassioned plea to a roomful of undergraduates on the virtue and necessity of creating and submitting human-made work themselves. This course is about writing, I tell them. We will read and discuss the work of both creative writers and critics, analyze the meaning of their words, and speculate about how the writer produced that meaning. You will also be asked to produce writing yourself, and to account for your experience, understanding, and critical perspective on the course topics and readings. When I ask you to do research, you will be searching for sources, assessing their value and merit, synthesizing their arguments, and responsibly citing their authors. These processes — reading, writing, research — are not secondary to the work of this course; they ARE the work of this course, I say. I have been heartened, this week, to see some higher ed institutions — in Chicago and in Boston — release thoughtful statements and policies affirming how necessary this work is.

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Critics have a responsibility to each other, and to the future, her writing always reminded me. longreads.com/2019/05/03/c...

I am not saying that climate change must be shoehorned into every article‚ though even a non sequitur would be better than nothing — but I am saying that just as identity politics is now a consideration when we write, our planet should be too. What I am asking for is simply a widening of perspective, besides economics, besides race, beyond all things human, toward a cultural carbon footprint, one which becomes part of the DNA of our critiques and determines what we choose to talk about and what we say when we do. After more than 60 years of doing virtually the same thing, even nonagenarian David Attenborough knew he had to change tacks; it wasn’t enough just to show the loss of natural beauty, he had to point out how it affects us directly. As he told the International Monetary Fund last month: “We are in terrible, terrible trouble and the longer we wait to do something about it the worse it is going to get.” In Our Planet, Attenborough reminds us over and over that our survival depends on the earth’s. For criticism to survive, it must remind us just as readily.

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The weird thing isn't that people say they only "care about story." It's that people who know better increasingly insist that that's a view that exists in opposition to "aesthetics." Everybody thinks movies are just stories until they learn different. This isn't a debate, but people act like it is.

a tweet that says, "I'll say one more thing. I've spent the last two weeks interviewing movie watchers and one of the reasons they do not read critics is because they do not care about the things critics write about (cinematography, color, aesthetics, pacing)... all they care about is story!" quote tweeted by Richard Brody with this text: "These movie-watchers are mistaken: the story, as they experience it, depends almost entirely on all the elements they think they don't care about; all the more reason for critics to emphasize those elements and to make clear the connection (even the possible misunderstanding)."

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Ok, predicting the reception of each Beatles movie: JOHN // Easily the worst one. Every review mentions how good Anna Sawai is in it; she gets an Oscar nom. Harris Dickinson's wigs are an embarrassment. His accent is weirdly too good relative to how little he's able to physically embody Lennon.

four guys dressed vaguely like the beatles, flipping you off

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Emmy Rossum has been around for a while — this is an incredibly mature star performance. Again, no boring choices. In particular, the choice to play this incredibly damaged character as, also, incredibly funny. She has chemistry with EVERY actor who shares the screen with her. It's nuts.

emmy rossum, hair tied back, wearing an FBI jacket, talking to some people

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Lola Petticrew blew the doors off of the starring role in SAY NOTHING last year, but they are maybe even better here? They don't make a single boring choice playing a character we're supposed to be scared of and scared for.

lola petticrew in FURIOUS, wearing a red wig and holding the hand of a scared lady

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Is this a man who's got it all figured out, or is this the loneliest man in America?

a guy standing on an electric unicycle, like that's a thing a sane person would ever do

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Every line reading Quincy Tyler Bernstine does on FURIOUS is the best line-reading on the show since the last time Quincy Tyler Bernstine spoke. Gang, you gotta be watching this show.

a screenshot of Quincy Tyler Bernstine looking cool as hell in sunglasses a red checked button up and a pinstripe suit on Furious

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Has anybody written about the contrasting arcs of the movie industry since the aughts on one hand and the careers of RPattz and KStew on the other hand? Their paired repudiation of and negotiation with the film culture they helped create is really fascinating.

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

It's obviously more complicated than this, every kid has different obstacles and predilections, but it is also true that fewer families than you'd think do or prioritize any of this stuff.

a tweet from la diabless that reads: "I love to read because my mother read to me, and encouraged me to read myself as I got older. she took us to the library every weekend, and books were the only thing she never refused to buy. she gave us books she loved as a kid. it's not hard." quote-tweeting a tweet that says: "It's time to accept the fact that trying to raise children who read recreationally is about to be like trying to raise opera fans."

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Imagine thinking The Age of Innocence is bad.

tweet that says: Can you name a director who has only made great movies??? (Remember: Spielberg made 1941, Coppola made Jack, Scorsese made Age of Innocence, Tarantino made Death Proof, Nolan made Following and the Coens made The Ladykillers." And don't be cheeky by saying Charles Laughton.)

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

The five-season transition of the Fak brothers on THE BEAR from lovable goofballs to Adult Babies is one of the strangest TV arcs I can think of.

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

No shit, in 1986, a Mr. Mom sitcom about a guy who has to become full-time caregiver to his kids because his wife is at work and who outsources his parenting decisions to an series of wacky robots he controls would have run for five seasons.

tweet from Justin Murphy that says, "Our full-time nanny is taking a month off for the summer, and my oldest son's summer camp is off for a week, and my wife recently chose to take a job for the first time in a while... This means starting tomorrow I'll be spending multiple hours a day with my two sons (1 and 4), every day this week. I'm choosing to do this. I want to reset my attitude toward family and work.

To achieve my goal, I need serious advice from fathers. Specifically, my goal is to use AI agents from my phone as much as possible during these hours, and insulate myself as much as possible from their noise (crying, whining, unreasonably excessive entreaties to play, etc.) while staying responsible, present, and loving in between.

So please, what are your most advanced tactics, workflows, apps, hardware—anything—that help you get quality work done while you're watching and moving through the world with kids?"

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

I got mogged by Kurt Vonnegut at the Waxahatchee show in Bloomington. So it goes.

a giant puppet of Kurt Vonnegut looming over me, in a sixers hat giving a thumbs up

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Danielle Haim is the Donte DiVincenzo of Haim tonight.

taylor swift with alana and este haim courtside at the knicks game

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Adventures in early 20th century parenting manuals!

Should the Mother never kiss the Baby?

There is a sensible way of treating children.
Treat them as though they were young
adults. Dress them, bathe them with care
and circumspection. Let your behaviour always
be objective and kindly firm. Never hug and
kiss them, never let them sit in your lap.
If you must, kiss them once on the forehead
when they say good night. Shake hands with
them in the morning. Give them a pat on the
head if they have made an extraordinarily
good job of a difficult task. Try it out.

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

The Sixers keep using this picture, and then Gansey shows up to the intro press conference looking like the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch.

mike gansey with a sharp beard and long slicked back hair in front of a microphone at a sixers press conference

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

This is a pretty wild disclaimer to read at the top of a document called "Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences." In other words, if this would not pass peer-review, why has it been released?

But with occasional exceptions, our conclusions about the overall state of humanistic scholarship, and in particular about the extent of the problems we have identified, are not yet supported by the kind of quantitative evidence that would be expected in a peer-reviewed study of these matters. In this connection we must stress that the examples cited below are meant to illustrate the phenomena we have identified, not to establish their prevalence.

In part for this reason we must urge caution on the part of administrators who might wish to act on the basis of our report.

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Catching up on the Graham Platner discourse.

tim robinson looking puzzled and disturbed with the subtitle, "I'm worried that the baby thinks people can't change"

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

People offended by the phrase "toxic masculinity" who defend Platner's actions as "relatable" youthful indiscretions ultimately have a much grimmer view of masculinity than the caricature they might paint of misandrist feminists out to cancel everybody for the crime of having been a lil' boy once.

a free press article called "Why the Attacks on Graham Platner Don't Work" with the subhed "The evidence of past affairs is the latest of many scandals. Yet none have stuck because his troubles strike many as relatable."

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

I've taught PERSEPOLIS (book & movie) more times than I can count. Two epic masterpieces, but, more than that, two texts that find their way to young people. I've never had a class that didn't *get* PERSEPOLIS, and that's a miracle of its own. Satrapi's voice and imagination are so alive. RIP.

little Marjane in bed talking to a giant bearded god in the clouds

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

I was trying to look up the wording of Chris Fleming's "LASIK for your third eye" joke in Widow's Bay, and this popped up as the AI preview on Google. So, just so you know, it can't happen. Also: watch WIDOW'S BAY for goodness sake!

$Traditional LASIK corrects refractive vision errors by using lasers to reshape the physical cornea. However, the concept of a "third eye" relates to the pineal gland or chakra system rather than a physical optical lens, and it cannot be altered or "opened" through refractive eye surgery$

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

We started watching AMAZING RACE — which I've never seen — with the girls, and the aughts period specificity is off the charts. There's an elderly couple who are referred to, every episode, as "Internet Dating Couple," and this is their image in the opening credits.

bob and joyce an elderly couple framing a CHONKY desktop computer

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