Hi friends,
As 2024 comes to a close, I wanted to share a wrap-up of my writing this past year.
I’ll start off with my first piece to hit escape velocity on social media. For The New Republic, I wrote about being the first member of the public to see Jerry Lewis’s footage of The Day the Clown Cried this past August: https://newrepublic.com/article/185434/watched-footage-jerry-lewis-unreleased-1972-holocaust-film. It was somewhat surreal to see film critics A.S. Hamrah and Richard Brody tweet about it (as well as the author Joyce Carol Oates!). I’m extremely grateful to Emily Cooke for commissioning and editing this piece, as well as to the staff at the Library of Congress’s Moving Image Research Center for doing such great work in making the Lewis materials accessible.
In September, Bright Wall/Dark Room published my long essay on Holocaust films: https://www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2024/09/10/screen-memory/. It was in many ways a fitting companion piece to The Day the Clown Cried. It was great to work with Fran Hoepfner through the revisions and edits, and I’m grateful to BW/DR for providing a home for this piece.
Going back to January, Protean Magazine published my essay on CompStat, the police management program and software: https://proteanmag.com/2024/01/18/violence-quantified/. I’d been interested in writing about CompStat for quite some time as part of a broader project to write about embedded software (going back to my WIRED software review piece on Microsoft Excel). Thank you to Tyler Walicek for editing this piece!
Lastly, for the October print issue of The New Republic, I wrote about the misplaced fears surrounding AI and the election: https://newrepublic.com/article/186717/stop-overhyping-ai-threats-2024-election. It was a real delight to be in the print pages of The New Republic; here’s a photo of me with a copy of the issue at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle:
Many thanks to Alex Shephard for working with me on this piece, which was a lot of fun to write!
I have a couple essays slotted to be published in early 2025, one in Issue 14 of the Bennington Review, and one in the next print issue of Current Affairs. I look forward to sharing them when they are published.
Wishing you a wonderful 2025,
BCGL