​Look. I know I only update my blog about twice a year. This is my greatest shame. The plus side is, my lack of attention to the website means I’ve been busy with paid assignments, and I will have some exciting news to share on that front very soon.
 
So with that in mind, here’s everything I’ve been up to since May 2019 (oy)…

​I’m working on a podcast! That’s the biggest news. It’s a show about Father Coughlin, the fascist, anti-Semitic “radio priest” who seduced America during the Great Depression… from right outside my Michigan hometown. With our modern-day return to fascist demagoguery, conspiracy theories, and violent hate groups, the world Coughlin created seems to be coming back in style. I want to explore my personal obsession with him and investigate the lasting influence he’s left on our country.
 
I completed a pilot for the show with the good folks at Michigan Radio, and I’m currently shopping for institutional partners to turn it into a full series. Read more about it here. I also appeared on WDET’s Detroit Today to discuss Coughlin’s legacy with Stephen Henderson.
 
If you’d like to talk about ways we can partner on this, get in touch!

I've had a strangely busy first half of the year. Here's what I've been writing:

For NPR, I covered the fire at the Notre Dame cathedral from my perch in Paris. The web piece briefly led the entire NPR.org homepage. I also appeared on Morning Edition to discuss the piece with Steve Inskeep. You can listen below.

​It’s been a depressing year for film criticism. More publications shuttered; more giants in the field lost paid opportunities to write; more outlets cut back on serious, thoughtful discussion of the arts in favor of rushed, facile coverage of whatever’s trending that week.
 
We, all of us, have to adapt or die. So I’ve done my best to adapt.
 
Rather than restrict myself to the same kinds of dwindling chance to just write 600-word movie and TV reviews, I’ve tried to forge new pathways in 2018. I developed new contacts, polished off a different set of skills, and tried to develop my voice beyond arts writing. I’ve appeared on the radio, embarked on a reporting fellowship, found a new social media audience, written new kinds of features with cross-coastal and international bylines, and developed new analytics tools for media organizations. I’ve tried to make myself a multi-hyphenate, because I’m not confident I could survive as a writer otherwise.
 
That’s not to say I feel at peace with my economic situation – no one in the media landscape ever is. In 2019 I’ll keep maneuvering into new channels of work, always conscious of the fact that the old channels can disappear at any moment. There are big things ahead: I’ve got several long-term projects in the works, including a podcast that I desperately want to finish, and I will be spending the majority of the year in Europe. It’s a scary world out there for writers and aspiring creatives. It’s up to us to tame it.
 
Some of my 2018 highlights:

It's the end of the year, and time to catch up on my output for the last six months. Because apparently I only do these posts twice a year now.

I've been writing for NPR since 2011, but had never actually produced a piece for air... until now. For Here & Now, a nationally syndicated midday news program produced by Boston's WBUR, I talked about the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar and shared some of my (totally wrong) picks for what would make the shortlist. I predict you'll be hearing more from me soon.

My biggest and most rewarding personal challenge of 2017 was teaching myself how to produce, host and edit a podcast. By coincidence I wound up crafting the 100th episode of "The Pub," Current's show about public media. I posed the question: should public media employers be more willing to pay relocation fees for new hires, and what kind of talent are they missing out on when they don't?

The best advice I can give about the experience is: Don't try editing sound in GarageBand. Spring for Adobe Audition or something even nicer. Your full head of hair will thank you.

During a fall sojourn in the Bay Area, I hosted a live Q&A in San Francisco with the director and subjects of the documentary California Typewriter, which I reviewed favorably for NPR.

​It was a great experience, and I hope to develop my skills as a live-event emcee in the future. Contact me if you have a film event that needs moderating!

By far the coolest thing I got to do this year was cover the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival for IndieWire. In early July I trekked to the Czech Republic resort town to interview honoree James Newton Howard and take a deep dive into how European cinema is wrestling with the most pressing issues on the Continent.

Also, there was a lot of sausage.

I've been writing for Michigan Alumnus for years, and I'm so excited they've recently begun to post their bigger stories online (with a spiffy site redesign, too). The magazine gives me the space to tackle bigger, more ambitious features than I get to write for my usual outlets.

This year I wrote about recent U-M Flint graduate Amir Hekmati, a Marine veteran who was kidnapped and held as a prisoner of the Iranian government for nearly five years until he was released as part of the larger nuclear deal between our two countries. Amir returned home to Flint just as our eventual president was publicly disparaging his family's religion, and just as his hometown was wrestling with a gigantic, self-made public health crisis. To me, Amir's story -- from service to imprisonment to release -- circled many of the larger problems America has had to confront about itself over the last few years. Though he wouldn't grant me an interview owing to his ongoing lawsuit with Iran, I tried to do him justice all the same.

On a lighter note, I also got to write my first-ever music feature, about Ann Arbor funk band Vulfpeck. These guys have become a cult sensation without signing to a major label, and their music-world pranks (like a spat with Spotify) have made national news.

In December, "A Prairie Home Companion" as we know it ceased to exist. Before that happened, I wrote a feature on how the show (which had already been without Garrison Keillor for a year) has progressed under its new leadership. Chris Thile already had an uphill battle with this property; now his challenge has increased tenfold. We may need another update in another year.

A new hopeful PBS show is like "StoryCorps" meets "Finding Your Roots." Thomas Allen Harris spoke to me about embracing family history with "Family Pictures USA" and shooting the pilot in Detroit for the 50th anniversary of the city's civil unrest.

I reviewed Errol Morris's new docu-drama hybrid for Vulture, episode-by-episode. You can find links to full coverage here.

As always, I continued my frantic, insane one-a-week pace of film reviews. All reviews for NPR unless otherwise noted.

• Downsizing: Alexander Payne's smarmy satire about people who shrink themselves for a better life was like a tiny gag reflex. I coughed up so much bile watching this thing that WBEZ's Milos Stehlik called me a "terrible critic" on air. Milos and I have been friendly before, so I think this was performative on his part, but I can't be sure. (12/21/17)
• Birdboy: The Forgotten Children: A hand-drawn Spanish animated feature destined for all the smart, surly teens dying to cast off their Disney childhoods. (12/14/17)
• I, Tonya: Tonya Harding might be America's ultimate rehab project, but this crackling and disarmingly funny biopic goes a long way toward livening her public image. Plus, reviewing this was a nice reward for being forced to usher all of my sister's ice shows when we were little. (12/9/17)
  
• Wonder Wheel: A strong candidate for the worst screenplay Woody Allen has ever written, the director's first post-Weinstein release is not the one to make the case for continuing to take this man seriously as an artist. But at least he gave my editor, Glen Weldon, the chance to make a legendary headline pun. (11/30/17)
  

• Mudbound: Dee Rees delivers a lush, sweeping historical epic that touches the soul of humanity, a rare bit of total honesty in cinema about the Jim Crow South. (11/15/17)
  
• Mayhem: What should have been just a silly office splatter comedy felt borderline irresponsible coming so soon after yet another round of mass shootings. (11/9/17)
  
• My Friend Dahmer: America's most notorious cannibal had something approaching a normal childhood, and this film somehow makes the grisliest of subject matter positively compelling. (11/2/17)
  
• Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold: A lionized author gets her due, and I get to indulge my literary side. (10/26/17)
  

• BPM: Beats Per Minute: The story of the foundation of ACT UP Paris is a vibrant portrait of warriors fighting for the right to live. (10/19/17)
  
• The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected): Understood if the upsetting news about Dustin Hoffman will keep you away from Noah Baumbach's latest film, but for Baumbach die-hards like myself, this is a perfect and wildly entertaining distillation of his ethos. (Note: some readers criticized me for a line in this review that they interpreted as anti-Semitic. I respectfully disagree with their assessment.)(10/12/17)
  
• Faces Places: Agnes Varda is back for more, baby! This delightful documentary about her latest country-spanning art project celebrates age, youth, and just... people. All people. It's a treasure. (10/5/17)
  
• Lucky: A lovely showcase for Harry Dean Stanton, who died just before this film's premiere. It's OK if the movie never manages to be much more than that. (9/28/17)
  

• Rat Film: The best documentary of the year was about rats in Baltimore. But not just rats, and not just Baltimore. Everyone, everywhere, and their institutional failings... and also rats. (9/14/17)
• The Unknown Girl: Those rascally Dardenne brothers, making a whodunit mystery just as everyone expects them to crank out another social realist drama! (9/8/17)
  
• Death Note: Ugh. This movie is dumb enough to disregard without even getting into why it's offensive. (8/24/17)
  
• California Typewriter: You see, children, before computers there used to be things called "typewriters," and... well, this documentary's historical value seems obvious. Also gives us one last conversation with Sam Shepard. (8/17/17)
  
• The Glass Castle: I can't explain why an adaptation of the bestselling memoir from the people who made the excellent Short Term 12 unforgivably cheapens the psychological toil of child abuse in order to usher us toward an unearned Hollywood happy ending. All I know is this movie made me angry. (For Uproxx.) (8/10/17)
  

• In This Corner of the World: An account of life in Hiroshima before, during, and after the atomic bomb, this quiet and haunting anime lingered with me long after I had seen it. (8/10/17)
  
• Brigsby Bear: TV saves and TV destroys. (7/27/17)
  
• The Untamed: My bemused review of this Mexican film about, in part, tentacle sex provoked some amazing reactions on NPR's Facebook page. (7/20/17)
  
• Chasing Coral: It's probably too late for our coral reefs, but that won't stop well-meaning documentaries from trying to educate us about their peril. (7/13/17)
  
• Okja: Giant pig teaches us to love! (6/29/17)

• The Big Sick: Smart about religion, smart about culture, smart about romance, smart about illness. (6/22/17)
  
• The Beguiled: Sofia Coppola will always be who she is, and if you're cool with that, you'll dig her swooning Civil War chamber drama. (For NPR's Monkey See.) (6/23/17)
  
• Cars 3: The exhaustion of a franchise that should have ended two films ago races the poignancy of a movie celebrating the act of stepping aside when it's your time to go. (6/15/17) 
  
• Buena Vista Social Club: Adios: I regret that I had to file my review for this documentary sequel before I could read the stories about how creative control was wrested away from director Lucy Walker. The backstory goes a long way toward explaining why this film was so unsatisfying. (5/26/17)
  
• The Commune: Other critics were lukewarm on Thomas Vinterberg's hippiedom time capsule, but I saw a lot of truth in the way the film challenges "traditional" family relationships. (5/18/17)

I haven't updated in a while. Much to share.

One year after hitting our fundraising goal, I was able to present the first annual Kavi Shekhar Pandey Arts Writer Scholarship on April 23, at the Michigan Daily's annual commencement ceremony in Ann Arbor. Shekhar's family was there with me, and I gave a brief speech. 

You can read more about the event and scholarship efforts here. And, if you are feeling generous, you can donate here.

 Happy 2017 to the world. In the final month of last year I continued to churn out stories at a furious rate. Though I didn't complete a Top Ten list for any outlet, I've compiled a Letterboxd ranking of the films that mattered most to me this year. There is only a granular difference in the rankings of any of my top 15 films; I will be equally delighted no matter which you make the time to see.

Here's to a new year of continued writing opportunities.

For Vulture, I reviewed every episode of the odd, fascinating, and wildly inconsistent surprise Netflix show The OA. They can all be found on the site's series page here.

The year is winding down, and the wheels keep turning. I've been working nonstop on one thing or another. 

For Current, I filed dispatches from the 2016 Third Coast conference in Chicago, which gathered together audio producers of every stripe. Because it happened to fall immediately after the election, the atmosphere was a nonstop strain of what-now.

• Public radio's biggest politics reporters (Bob Garfield, Sam Sanders, Maria Hinojosa, Zoe Chace) discussed their efforts covering the election and how they can hope to approach the new state of America.
• The weekend's award winners centered around mothers, trauma, and personal narratives.
• NPR announced it would shortly begin distributing the Spanish-language podcast Radio Ambulante.
• Julie Snyder, executive producer of Serial, shared her insights into the podcast's first and second seasons.
• In my wrap-up report, we see how big money may (or may not) be changing the face of podcasting as we know it.

At Vulture (and later reblogged at Slate, so choose your favorite), I argue the sports-recovery narrative of boxing movie Bleed For This cheats its audience by concluding that serious medical injury is just another problem that can be solved by "believing in yourself."

This piece prompted an interesting Twitter debate with someone in the public TV/documentary system. I have Storified the exchange.

My weekly reviews for NPR, from mid-October to now.

• The Eyes of My Mother: Horror through a new lens. (12/1/16)
• Moana: Disney does right by its princess. (11/23/16)
• Manchester by the Sea: A gorgeous meditation on loss and rebuilding. (11/17/16)
• Arrival: Language will give us hope, give us life. (11/10/16)
• Gimme Danger: Iggy and the Stooges brought Ann Arbor cool to the world. (10/27/16)
• Keeping Up With the Joneses​: Like watching a terrible sitcom cast watching Mr. and Mrs. Smith. (10/20/16)

I've been busy for the last three months. In addition to my work with the Chicago International Film Festival, I've been churning out stories for several places: some old haunts of mine, some brand-new. Consider this my most up-to-date work portfolio.

My latest NPR reviews: Finding Dory and Taika Waititi's Hunt For The Wilderpeople.

This is not my first Pixar joint for NPR -- I also reviewed their past two efforts, Inside Out and The Good Dinosaur. (I'd put Dory somewhere in the middle of those two. They haven't lost their magic completely yet, but there are some warning signs.)