“Ever since Pixar released the masterful Toy Story on an unsuspecting public, animated films have taken on a new kind of life in the American cinematic landscape. No longer content to be opiates for masses of children worldwide, animated films are lauded for their intelligence and emotional impact—and their impact on parents in particular. There was a time adults wouldn’t be caught dead seeing a Disney film without a child in tow, but these days Pixar and their competitors attract adults to evening shows with the promise of subtle humor, clever plotting, and scenes that would make any parent with a soul shed a lake’s worth of tears.”

Read the rest at Esquire.

“I believe,” says Bill Simmons, in the ad for his new HBO series Any Given Wednesday, “that every DiCaprio movie would be just a little bit better as a Matt Damon movie.” An outlandish statement that makes one wonder what that version of The Revenant would look like, but is also not without some truth. Simmons has long offered the theory that Matt Damon could play any Leo role, but Leo would never be able to sub in for Damon in, say, The Martian. He’s probably right. That hardly makes Damon the better actor, but it signals his versatility, as well as his unique appeal. With his winsome style, Damon can charm us as the sociopathic Tom Ripley, make us fall for the dopey LaBoeuf in True Grit, and imbue the personality-free Jason Bourne with enough life to make audiences crave his return nearly a decade after The Bourne Ultimatum.

Read more at Esquire.

Let me take you back to a time long ago, an idyllic time when your local multiplex was rife with movies about kids getting caught up in wild, scary, dangerous adventures; when kids were free to be obnoxious and curse at each other; when parents put their kids to bed and went back to their bedrooms to smoke pot; when getting caught up in a government conspiracy and being chased by men in suits with guns was par for the course; and when all of that was rated PG.

I’m speaking, of course, about the early ’80s. So much of culture today is a giant nostalgia trip, with properties from our childhoods, like Ghostbusters and Pete’s Dragon, being resurrected to satiate the need to escape back to when we were young, before we had any real responsibilities. It’s been going on for years now, and hot on the heels of this apparently never ending trend is Netflix’s great new original series, Stranger Things.

Read more at Esquire.

“In 2013, Kristopher Jansma came on the scene with The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, a wild, clever, funny, heartbreaking novel. I read the book in two days and immediately vowed to follow Jansma down whatever road he’d take next.

To my great surprise, his second novel, Why We Came to the City, drops much of the manic, meta, playful energy that made Leopards so compulsively readable. In its place is an equally engaging, but altogether more serious and emotional work. It’s about five twenty-something friends—Irene, George, Sara, Jacob, and William—all trying to make it in New York when they’re suddenly forced to face the cruelty of life after Irene is diagnosed with cancer.

Jansma, also a frequently published short story writer and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY New Paltz College, drew from his own experiences for the story. His sister, Jennifer, passed away in 2008 from cancer. Why We Came to the City is at once a reckoning with death and loss and also a hopeful reflection on how people grow and change into adulthood.

I spoke with Jansma about the process of writing Why We Came to the City, what he’s learned about living in a big city, facing adulthood in his thirties, and how he worked through his own experiences in fiction.”

Read more at The Rumpus.

“Last week, a Yelp Eat24 customer service representative finally had enough. Her job was tough and unrewarding, and the pay—roughly $730, bi-weekly—barely covered her rent, with little left over for groceries or transportation. So Talia Jane, the 25-year old Yelp employee, took to Medium to pen an open letter to Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, alerting him and the rest of the world to the low wages being paid to entry-level employees living and working in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in North America. She wrote about how her experience at Yelp is hardly unique. “Every single one of my coworkers is struggling,” she noted. “They’re taking side jobs, they’re living at home.””

Read more at Broadly.