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Who are these people? They’re Jennifer Lim and Louis Ozawa Changchien, but they’re pretending to be Wang Min and Lin Bo, and who are they? And why are they in a box? (The photo was taken by Carol Rosegg—I know that much)

On a social-media website just now, I saw something that asked whether I understand Snapchat. Because I talk back to ads in my head (Don’t you? How else to fend off their insidious persuasions?), I started formulating a response: “It is not a matter of understanding Snapchat....

No, really, I’ve been busy: engineer Gordon Clark (played by Scoot McNairy) in a Season Three moment from Halt and Catch Fire (photo by Tina Rowden/AMC)

I’ve essentially completed a long commentary on the AMC drama Halt and Catch Fire, about which I’d like to say, as a Noël Coward–like character in a play says about something he just wrote, “It’s so good it frightens me.�� I’m not sure it’s that good, but I’ve pitched it, defying common practice, to a publication or two and am waiting to hear...

An observation on word choice, which I posted (with a few minor differences) on Facebook yesterday:

“Chauvinism,�� “sexism,�� and “misogyny�� are not, for a careful writer, interchangeable. If you’re looking for the word with the greatest impact, you’re likely to choose “misogyny,�� but you ought to be aware that, though milder definitions can be found, the roots of the word add up to “hatred of women.�� If hatred is really what you’re describing, fine, but if it’s only prejudice or discrimination...

An actor acquaintance of mine, Jeff Still, recently shared on Facebook an about the contortions that film actors have begun going through in the name of creating a character. Surely you’ve heard of a few. Jared Leto acted like the Joker throughout the production of the recent Suicide Squad film, a process that included pranking the cast with used condoms and a dead pig. Leonardo DiCaprio, a committed vegetarian, felt he had to eat real meat in a scene of The Revenant. Adrien...

Representatives of scores of nations gather to jostle for recognition, an upper hand, maybe even dominance: no, it’s not the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, and not the usual swirl of commuters in Grand Central Terminal either. It’s another Olympics summer—sing that to the tune of “Tequila Sunrise�� if you’d like—which means another quadrennial parade of marvels, oddities, and controversies, some of it in the realm of sports, some not. An oddity that occurred to me just now: it’s...

Astrophysicist and author Janna Levin has a good nose. In the late naughts, catching a rising swell of attention to Alan Turing as the centenary of his birth drew near, she wrote a novel that intertwined his life with that of logician Kurt Gödel, which she called, with a knack for alluring but sometimes twisty language, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. Sure, anyone could’ve looked up the date of Turing’s birth, but few would’ve guessed he’d soon be the subject of a major American film. A...

Unexpectedly, I’ve become a published author of fiction, with a piece in a recently published anthology. As its cover suggests, Identity & Anonymity is a collection of responses, both visual and verbal, to two subjects that have grown increasingly problematic in recent decades, for cultural as well as technological reasons. The contributors include a number of art-world creators—unsurprising, since the volume was assembled as an adjunct to —such as Judy Chicago and the Guerri...

Language is one of the things we’re fond of here at Je Suis��; we find ourselves resorting to it quite often, in fact. (A character in Tom Stoppard’s After Magritte insists at one point, “Now there’s no need to use language!�� We disagree, and besides, she’s talking about something else.) Not long ago, our eye was caught by a particular profusion of word forms, which we forwarded to the editor of the newsletter but didn’t think to post here until now. This is the second paragra...

At one point in my youth, my father thought I was spending too much time reading and unceremoniously instructed me to go outside and do something. According to family legend, I went out the front door with a book, sat under a tree, and resumed reading. Lately I’ve been indulging my reading hunger with books on a couple of subjects that have fascinated me since childhood: aircraft carriers and physics. Geoff Dyer’s account of a visit to a carrier, which I read last week, came out in 2014; my t...

When I was a teenager, I liked bicycles, and I often visited a bicycle shop that was only a couple of blocks from where I lived. I don’t know quite what I did there. Presumably it was the same thing I did in the college bookstore that was also near me, or the camera store a little farther down, or the antique-weapons shop just beyond: I looked at what was there and adjusted yet again my sense of how many things were in the world, what they did, how they worked, who used them and for what—and...