Severance
Story Stream
Can Everyone Be Religious? April 15, 2025
The sharpest and best insight at the core of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s recent book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, is that religious disaffiliation is effectively the new norm, in practice if not in profession. In other word...
Submitting to Cubicle Culture April 15, 2025
Everyone seems crazy about Severance. One of the first shows in a while to be a true “water cooler” show, it has a 96 percent rating from Rotten Tomatoes critics and 76 percent from audiences. It’s spawned an entire cottage industry of YouTube sleuth...
On ‘Severance’ Season Two April 07, 2025
Can human beings ever truly empathize with one another? Or even with ourselves?This is the critical question running throughout Severance, the blockbuster Apple TV+ puzzle-box show that recently wrapped its second season....
Why Can’t Our Kids Write? April 04, 2025
We need to talk about student writing.For the past decade or so, I have worked with students to help them prepare essays for applications to America’s top colleges and universities. Many of my students have historically matriculated to Ivy League and...
Just Let MLB Hitters Have Their Bulbous Bats April 02, 2025
On Saturday, the New York Yankees provided the most potent product placement since Ashton Hall’s viral video of his morning ritual caused a spike in sales of Saratoga Spring Water. True to their nickname, the Bombers bashed a franchise-record nine ho...
Titus Welliver & the Legacy of ‘Bosch’ April 02, 2025
Titus Welliver believes in fate. Several years ago, when it was decided that internationally known author and novelist Michael Connelly’s LAPD Detective Harry Bosch would be brought to life in a streaming series for Amazon, Welliver felt deep down th...
The Rules and the Game April 01, 2025
Of all the signs of spring, none is as exciting and as American as baseball’s Opening Day.Yet recently, each new season has come with fresh complaints about the sport. It’s definitely not dying as some argue. But neither is its popularity rising. Man...
Baseball Reaches Its Breaking Point April 01, 2025
Keith Meister, in the operating room of his private practice, draws a six-centimetre line on the elbow of a baseball pitcher. He slices the elbow open and stares into a mix of ligaments, tendons, and bone—any of which could be severely injured or dis...
Innies and Outies March 28, 2025
In season two, episode seven of Severance, the hit show on AppleTV+, Gemma Scout suffers through two parallel trials. The first is in flashback, shot in warm, nostalgic sixteen-millimeter film, in which she meets, marries, and tries to start a family...
‘Adolescence’ Does a Disservice to Young Men March 27, 2025
Adolescence is the new hit Netflix series everybody’s talking about, based on several instances of teen boys stabbing their female peers in the UK. The murderous protagonist, 13-year-old Jamie, is a white boy from the north of England—a fact many com...
Is ‘Severance’ a Critique of the Pro-Choice Movement? March 26, 2025
Is hit series “Severance” subtly making the case we should consider what we owe to unborn babies?...
It is Practical to Be Good March 24, 2025
This January, while Joe Biden was still president, the Washington Post published a story that revealed that a USAID official, Sonali Korde, had pressured a famine-tracking organization to downplay its findings that Gaza was in a state of famine, clea...
The Fated Family March 21, 2025
I first learned of Sophie Madeline Dess’s work when a friend sent me her story “Unfathomably Deep,” then just published in The Drift. It was sent without comment, though with the implication, I think, that here was something striking and original, th...
The Workplace Nightmares of 'Severance' March 20, 2025
Do innies have rights? By “innies,” of course, I mean the severed employees of Lumon Industries, relegated to the severed floor of the company’s offices, who work on a project whose true nature is hidden even from them. The medical procedure of sever...
Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish" at 50 March 20, 2025
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) is both dead and lives on powerfully, if subterraneously, in several contemporary forms of thought. A quick survey of some contemporary works will indicate his contemporary presence. Then, we’ll look directly at his though...
To Save Our Cities, Let’s Go to the Movies March 20, 2025
Worcester, Massachusetts, the second-largest city in New England, is undergoing something of a renaissance. Downtown has a professional theater and great places to eat. In a major coup a few years back, the city pulled what was then the Pawtucket Red...
Gay Talese’s City March 17, 2025
Any proper biography of Gay Talese would also be a history of modern American journalism, if only incidentally. Talese, now 93, started in the field as a teenager, publishing hundreds of columns in his hometown paper, New Jersey’s Ocean City Sentinel...
The Sensitive Young Meme March 12, 2025
One of the most beautiful paintings in the Caspar David Friedrich show The Soul of Nature, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 11, shows a roiling ocean crashing against a rocky coast by moonlight. The tiny figure of a monk stares o...
A Powerless Form March 07, 2025
The Australian writer Jessica Zhan Mei Yu and I spent several months exchanging emails about her 2023 novel, But the Girl, and the affinities between postcritique and contemporary fiction. We first met in 2019 when I was giving a talk at the Universi...
How “Severance” Makes a Fetish of the Office March 07, 2025
When “Severance” premièred, in 2022, it felt like an absurdist parable about the alienation of labor—a moody, eerie critique of technocapitalism that seemed in keeping with our age of “upskilling” and A.I. The four main characters worked at Lumon, a ...
The Artificial Culture March 06, 2025
I'll start with a simple premise. If we now have direct evidence that the federal government was funneling millions of dollars into supposedly free market press organs (such as Politico, which has received federal subscription payments from agencies ...
A Liberal Writer Fails to Do the Work March 05, 2025
Inspired by the anger she felt at the passing of her working-class grandfather, Disposable (America’s Contempt for the Underclass) by New York Magazine writer Sarah Jones, offers capsule summaries of the lives of several Americans and then accounts o...
High Infidelity March 04, 2025
Sunday’s Oscars ceremony was a productive night for The Brutalist, which scooped up the statuettes for cinematography, score, and best actor. Since the film’s release late last year, the deluge of acclaim for Brady Corbet’s epic, three-and-a-half hou...
‘Severance’ Gets the Internet February 13, 2025
In Episode 3 of this season of Severance, Mark and his sister, Devon, have an idea. They need to ask Mark’s innie a question, but Lumon’s famous code detectors make this impossible. Nothing with any letters or symbols on it can pass through the eleva...
DOGE and the Backlash to the Backlash February 12, 2025
Late last week, Elon Musk announced that the initiative he’s heading up, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, would rehire Marko Elez, the 25-year-old staffer who was fired after a Wall Street Journal story unearthed several offensive X ...
