I've got a new video up on YouTube. It's about American visual culture—where it's been (derogatory) and where it's going (vaguely ominous).

Alternatively, you can watch the ad-free version on Patreon.

I hope you like it. :)

June 1, 2026

Greetings, all, from the auspicious beginnings of my own personal Tony Soprano summer. Look, Tony Soprano isn’t a guy you want to emulate, exactly. But in a media landscape full of mealy-mouthed, conflict avoidant losers, it’s a rare treat to watch a character make actual (bad) choices and deal with their actual (worse) consequences.

What I’ve been up to lately

• I’ve been watching The Sopranos. Obviously.

• Apparently in the mood to appreciate Italian American cinema, I also watched Moonstruck (1987) for the first time, and: wow! We used to be a proper country, huh?
• If you didn’t already know, I’m delighted to inform you that Nicolas Cage is hot in this movie. In one memorable scene, Cher visits his bakery and demands he make amends with his estranged brother (her fiancé). Sweat-sheened and lightly manic, he rebukes her before turning to his coworker and demanding, “Chrissy, bring me the big knife. I’m going to cut my throat.” Iconic.
• I finished reading Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. It’s about a girl from another planet who communicates with her alien superiors via dumpster-salvaged fax machine. (Oh, and she’s also Italian American! Culturally, at least.) I liked it. I made a short video about why I don’t think it’s a sci-fi novel.
• I added new section to website for reading recommendations—specifically stuff you can read for (mostly) free online. Thoughtful human curation is more important than ever, and I want to #DoMyPart. My hope is that when you’re bored in line at the DMV, you’ll think to yourself, “Doesn’t Mel have some reading recs on their site? I should check those out!”
• My most recent rec is “The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon” by Jon Greenaway for Current Affairs. It’s been making the rounds and deservedly so.
• Speaking of banal horrors, I accidentally read my first AI-generated fanfic. Well, maybe “accidentally” isn’t the right word. I was suspicious by the 30% mark, but I kept reading, unable to look away. Kind of like how I always watch the entire “Billie Jean”-dancing Chinese robot video when it crosses my feed. I’m inexplicably compelled by this robot—the awkward, frantic movements it makes before collapsing into a pitiful heap. Anyway, the experience of reading my first AI-generated fanfic was unpleasant yet edifying. I made a short video about it.
• I also made a short follow-up video about why the hell people are using AI to “write” fanfic in the first place.

• I’ve been trudging through The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, a widely beloved 2014 fantasy novel that I was sure would be a new favorite. (Hubris!) At the beginning of the book, 18-year-old Maia, the banished son of the late emperor, is unexpectedly thrust onto the throne and into the deep end. He spends the book navigating his new role in a state of perpetual mortification. It’s tedious to read! He’s the literal emperor! Grow up! But I acknowledge that is what the book’s about: growing up, shifting from a reactive frame of mind to a proactive one, learning that you can never please everybody, etc., etc. If I’d read it at 18, I probably would’ve gotten more out of it.

• It hasn’t been a great reading month, I guess, because I’m also struggling to get through Ken Liu’s All That We See or Seem. That pains me to admit, because Ken Liu is MY GUY. His short story collection The Paper Menagerie is one of the few books I’d recommend to absolutely everyone on the planet without caveat. I know what his beautiful, shimmering mind is capable of, and it’s more than All That We See or Seem. Don’t get me wrong, the book does have some of the philosophical sci-fi elements you’d expect of Liu, but they’re flattened by his attempt to force them into the genre mystery format.
• I hurt my foot, so the podiatrist put me in a boot. I have to wear it everywhere. It looks ridiculous, but it’s easy to walk in, so I’m counting my blessings. Every few weeks, I return to the podiatrist’s office, and he tells me how much longer I have to wear the boot, which is always more time than whatever he said last. While I wait for my name to be called, I stare into the swirling abyss of the waiting room accent wall and contemplate my fate.

• Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke is the buzziest novel of the year. If you haven’t heard, it’s about a Hannah Neeleman-esque tradwife who’s transported back in time to 1855 Idaho. I haven’t read it, but I have strong feelings about Christian extremism, so I did participate in a bit of discourse about it.
• I think where I’m from (small town Kentucky) and my religious upbringing (liberal Presbyterian surrounded by evangelicals and Southern Baptists) has impacted my perspective on the long tradition of evangelicals attempting to penetrate secular culture. Tradwives didn’t fall out of a coconut tree, after all. I talk more about that in this month’s Patreon bonus video.
• All the Yesteryear talk got me thinking about what’s perhaps THEE most successful satire of American evangelicalism to date, the 2004 teen comedy Saved! I made a short video about it.
• I got a new personal high score on the Jurassic Park pinball machine (Stern, 2019)! Behold the triumphant self-portrait of the reigning T-Rex Rampage Champion.

May 1, 2026

(Re)introduction

Last September, I set up this newsletter thinking I’d be writing a personal essay every few months. That was dumb. Not because writing personal essays is an unworthy or unachievable goal, but because it’s not a goal that I’ve ever actually had.

Suffice it to say, I’ve scaled back my ambitions. No personal essays. Instead, every month or two, I’ll post a rundown of everything I’ve been up to lately. Starting now.

What I’ve been up to lately

• I rebuilt my website. My old site was weird and offbeat—more of an art project than a business portal. Don’t get me wrong, my new website is also weird and offbeat, but it’s also more navigable to people primarily interested in my videos.
• I read George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, and I can’t seem to shut up about it.
• I’m reading Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. It’s lovely. I made a short video about its excellent use of embodied observation as an alternative to microexpressions.

• I read the nichely viral There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm. I made a short video about it, and I delved a bit deeper in this month’s Patreon video.I can’t say I recommend the novel, exactly, but I wholeheartedly recommend qntm’s short story “Lena.” You can read it for free on his website.
• The (fictional) SCP Foundation-inspired organization to which the (fictional) Antimemetics Division belongs got me thinking about the last season of Angel. Do y’all remember Angel? I don’t blame you if you don’t, it aired over 20 years ago, but it’s great. I talked about it in this month’s Patreon video.

• I’ve been slowly making my way through Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation and Other Essays. I made a short video about what the titular 1964 essay has to say about LLMs-as-literary-digests.
• According to Last.FM, I’ve streamed “Call It Easy” by Racing Mount Pleasant 123 times in the last 30 days. Pitchfork called the record “ambitious but underwhelming, filled with grand gestures that arrive at foregone conclusions.” I basically agree, but I love it anyway. What’s life about if not euphorically discovering for yourself the things that everybody else already seems to know?
• I finally finished Charlie Adhara’s Big Bad Wolf series, in which, over the course of five books, we follow Cooper and Park as they solve werewolf-related crimes and fall in love—not necessarily in that order. I had a lot of fun with these books, and I talked about them in… you guessed it (this month's Patreon video).

• Stewing in a soup of ideas about power (the mysterious Organization to which the Antimemetics Division belongs; the evil law firm that serves as Angel’s chief antagonist; Charlie Adhara’s insular werewolf crime-solving agency, The Trust), I finally watched Conclave (2024). I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn’t such a powerful rejection of cynicism wrapped up in a locked room mystery.
• My local pinball bar bought Stern’s new Pokemon machine. It’s fun. I’m not very good at it yet—my highest score is in the 50 million range (amateur hour, trust me)—but I’m not worried. Pinball is like all institutions. It’s not tradition; it’s not the past. It’s what you do next.

Oct 3, 2025

By Mel Thomas

Music used to be a thing we did together. To hear music, we had to make it, and what we made was sacred. Then music became a place. Operas, symphonies, concerts. Then music came into our homes. Phonographs, radios, home stereo systems. Then those systems shrank down to fit in our pockets.

My parents gave me a Sony Walkman for my 9th birthday. As I liberated it from its hard plastic packaging, my mom solemnly explained its rules of use. I wasn’t allowed to listen to it at school, at church, or at the dinner table. I don’t remember chafing against these constraints. Instead, I found that they created opportunities.

As the ‘90s gave way the ‘00s, I swapped out my Walkman for its less ergonomic younger brother, the Discman.

By that time, I was old enough to hang out at the mall unsupervised. My mom would drop me off in front of FYE on Friday evenings, equipped with the handwritten list that would serve as my guide.

The list was an ongoing labor of love. Throughout the week I’d jot down the names of bands that VH1’s talking heads lauded as important or influential (The Clash, Nirvana, Radiohead) as well as bands that my friends featured on their Xanga sites (Bright Eyes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Neutral Milk Hotel). Armed with my list and working in alphabetical order, I’d flick through each row of CDs, plastic anti-theft devices clacking together as I assembled a stack of candidates.

At the listening kiosk I’d work through each 30-second track sample, twirling the coiled headphone cord as I listened. I’d stand there until closing time, whittling my selection pool down to a singular winner, which I’d purchase with my $20 allowance.

At home later that night, I’d sit cross-legged on my bedroom floor, new CD whirring in my Discman as I pored over the liner notes. The CD was no longer just the music it contained, but a sigil of my own creation. It was a totem. It was the artifact of the curatorial decisions of a 14-year-old suburban oddball, at once mass-produced and utterly unique to me. It was magic.

Even at the time, I sensed I was standing on shifting sands. When I was 14 in 2004, MP3 players had already found a foothold, and by 2007 my friends had started selling off their CDs for extra cash. In 2009 I followed suit, offloading my entire collection for a cool $150 at Coconuts in Evansville, Indiana. CDs continued to drop precipitously in value throughout the 2010s, and for a long time, it felt like I’d gotten a good deal.

But something is changing. The denizens of the tech-critical internet are calling for, among other things, a return to physical media. I like that idea. I’m charmed by the thought of a scruffy 19-year-old discovering a Matchbox Twenty CD at the bottom of a Goodwill bin. But it's not enough to cancel your Spotify subscription and buy used Y2K-era CDs by the binful. I came of age in the '00s, after all. I vividly remember that specific flavor of virulence, which is why I’m skeptical of nostalgia for it cloaked as progress. As we build the future, we can look back, but we have a responsibility to look forward too.

I think we’re on the right track, though—indulging the desire to sift through the bins, to shepherd our own collections, to hold magic in our hands.

Updates

• Speaking of nostalgia, I recently made a short video about Walmart-in-2002 AI slop.
• Pagemelt.zone remains my pride and joy. I’m always tinkering with it, trying to strike the right balance between quirky and accessible. I’ve recently added a Treasure Box page, which I'm already in the process of redesigining. So it goes.
• I just released a new Patreon-exclusive video — "the purpose of a system is what it does”. In it, I talk about bribing kids to read and whether or not AI can be art, among other things. If you like my work, consider supporting me for $3/month so I can make even more of it.
• I'll be cross-posting a version of this post on my Substack, but this is the canonical version.

Sep 17, 2025

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