Fran Magazine

Miss Evelina May, Week 5

Fran Hoepfner — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 15:11:28 GMT

Subscribe now

Welcome back to Miss Evelina May, the month where we all ready Frances Burney’s Evelina together. This is the last week of Miss Evelina May!! I can’t believe how fast it’s all gone. Thank you all for reading along with me!

The monkey in the room

Thanks for your patience, as I know this post is coming a day late. The truth? I was assemblying too much this weekend (AKA at a wonderful wedding). I loved every second of it, but would Frances Burney have approved?

We have to work backwards this week, because the last ten pages of this novel are among the craziest conclusions I’ve eve read. We have to address the critter, the creature, the animal, and no, I’m not talking about this guy, who threw himself at not only my book but also tried to snatch my pen out of my hand multiple times while annotating.

In one of the most stirring, hilarious, and strange passages, the big penultimate scene of the novel is not, like, a grand romantic gesture between Lord Orville and our Evelina, but yet another prank from the Captain who unleashes a little monkey on Mr. Lovel, a guy I didn’t know we still cared about at all. This sequence really emphasized to me how much this novel exists in a pre-novel space — how “novel” it genuinely is. Whenever people tell me the ending of Howards End is too wacko, I’m gonna point them in the direction of Evelina.

That this scene of violence and chaos runs right up against the romantic conclusion of the novel is an apt, if not completely bizarre, send-off for the characters about whom we don’t care a ton: Coverley, Lovel, the Captain, Lady Louisa. These are but minor players, whose fates don’t really concern us, and rather than have them all misbehaving at Evelina’s forthcoming wedding, we get to see them shrieking and attacking each other. Perhaps it is Evelina’s affection towards Lord Orville that keeps her from behaving like an animal: it’s love, maybe, that tames us all.

What do we make of Orville and Evelina’s courtship? Everyone more or less seemed to conclude in past weeks that this was the most boring possible option. Sir Clement is a freak and a fop, but at least he was mostly keeping things interesting, right up until and through his final meltdown over the letter he definitely sent under Orville’s name. Thinking about Burney’s work in the context of Austen, perhaps what feels so frustrating about the resolution between Evelina and Orville is the fact that what she seems to value above all else is a kind of safety and security. That’s fine, of course. That scene with the monkey — and many scenes involving assemblies and pleasure gardens and the Captain — emphasize how unsafe this world is, and how danger lurks around every corner for someone as vulnerable and wary as Evelina. That’s not to say she’s in risk of active harm, but it’s definitely not normal out there in the big city. Orville, however, can and wants to protect her. Fair enough! The thrill of Austen, however, is the understanding that danger does appeal, to some degree. But Evelina has had her share of danger, so she goes with the guy who is boring and not even especially nice. It’s fascinating to me that this is a novel about a young woman’s entrance into the world, and if anything, the conclusion suggests she is going back to the suburbs for eternity. Ah, well. I’m happy if Reverend Villars is happy, and Reverend Villars is quite happy.

Family matters

Good news: Evelina’s one-time libertine father Sir John Belmont is claiming her, and Mr. Macartney is actually her brother, and the woman that he thought was his sister is not related to him at all! Happiness all around!

I’m glad that Mr. Macartney is spared the humiliation of all the random other characters in this, and that his affections may very well wind up being reciprocated by his one-time not-sibling and love interest. Could you recover a relationship with someone you once believed was your half-sibling? I guess this is kind of the central question at the heart of Arrested Development. Feel free to weigh in below.

I have to be honest: I was pretty unmoved by the subplot wherein we learn why Sir John Belmont did not take Evelina in, and I still believe he’s kind of a fucker, even though he was fooled into believing a different girl was his daughter. (He still shipped her off to a convent! I know that’s kind of normal for the time, but please…) The emotional core of the novel lies in the relationship between Evelina and Villars — he’s literally the dad that stepped up — and I found their final exchance of letters significantly more heartening and lovely than anything that happens between Evelina and her actual father. No Woke 1, but I do think to some extent this is a novel about “found family,” or rather, the people you hang out with who make you feel relatively normal. Evelina’s actual family is completely wackadoo, and I have to confess that I wasn’t too miffed to not return to the foibles of Mme. Duval.

Egad!

These two drive me completely nuts, and in their conversation about how they hate smart, buff women (AKA… my friends!!!), they set themselves up to be attacked by a monkey.

This exchange had me thinking, however, as our May Book Club winds down, about Evelina’s strength. She’s not physically in her best of shape in the final third of the novel, retreating to the countryside to recover from her initial heartbreak with Lord Orville, but in protecting and holding dear Mr. Macartney, I found that Evelina was preternaturally strong and generous with her time. Her commitment to him moved me: maybe this is a better book about having a sibling than anything else, a person who is your friend and family, for whom you have love and who you want to protect. Mr. Macartney’s happiness satisfies because it actually seems to please Evelina in a way that so few other things do. I would happily have read a whole spinoff about Mr. Macartney, but the world probably does have its share of novels about feeling young men who fancy themselves writers.

Out of the baths and into the pump-room

Thank you again for joining me for May book club, and let’s plan to meet next Tuesday night at 9pm ET for a little in-person chat and discussion of the book on the whole. In the meantime, I’d love to know your lingering thoughts, questions, concerns, and memorable quotes. We love you, Evelina!!!

Leave a comment

Miss Evelina May, Week 4

Fran Hoepfner — Tue, 26 May 2026 15:11:53 GMT

Subscribe now

Our book club enters its final two weeks

Welcome back to Miss Evelina May, the month where we all ready Frances Burney’s Evelina together. If you missed out on the previous entries, feel free to catch up here.

Announcements

The live discussion of Miss Evelina May will occur officially on the night of June 9th at 9pm ET, which will give stragglers time to finish the book and West Coasters an opportunity not to miss work. A link will go out to paid subscribers via the chat. Keep your eyes peeled!

Neologism moment

Frances Burney invented the concept of using “stroll” as a noun — her mind!

Help! I’m 17 Years Old and Every Man Is Horny for Me!

Let’s just get a working list of every character who has expressed interest in Evelina at this point:

Mr. Lovel
Sir Clement
Lord Orville
Mr. Smith
Mr. Branghton the son
M. Dubois
Lord Merton

To say nothing of the randy sailors and all the horrible people she runs into at various public settings!

Evelina’s frustration with everyone’s affection for her is the type of thing to make me feel sympathetic for what it’s like to be a celebrity. That’s kind of what she is — a foreign visitor with whom everyone almost immediately becomes obsessed. By the time we come to learn about Mr. Branghton the younger’s hopes to marry his cousin Evelina and M. Dubois’s affection, I really had to laugh. Or, as Burney puts it when Sir Clement comes to pay a call on the Branghtons: “The ha, ha, ha’s, and he, he, he’s grew more and more uncontrollable.” No one suffers like our poor Evelina.

The deal with Mr. Macartney

During our last chunk of reading, we got to see Evelina be vaguely heroic, snatching pistols out of the grasp of Mr. Macartney, the Branghton’s boarder AKA “the Scotch mope,” before he tried to kill himself. But why is Mr. Macartney so depressed? It can’t just be because he’s a poet, right?

The two finally get an opportunity to have a conversation, though not without some degree of difficulty when it comes to direct communication:

When we finally get Mr. Macartney’s — “whose misery has so largely excited your compassion,” as Rev. Villars writes — tragic story, it’s kind of like, yeah, okay, I probably also would want to be dead via two pistols. Mr. Macartney is a bastard, raised by his mother in Scotland, but he’s lucky enough to have one (1) friend from liberal arts college with whom he goes on a trip to Paris. While there, he falls in love with an Englishwoman raised in a convent who doesn’t speak any English. He goes to her house to hang out, when who should interrupt but her father. Macartney draws his sword; the father draws his own. Though Macartney means to retreat at the panic of his newly beloved, the father won’t stop and the two fight, with Macartney supposedly gravely injuring this woman’s father. That would be bad enough on its own, but then he goes to complain to his mother who informs him that wasn’t just some random woman and her dad: that’s his dad and his sister. OY VEY! And then his mom dies! He moves back to England with hope of reconciling with both, to some degree or another, but is unable and slowly runs out of money. Macartney winds up buying the pistols in order to become a robber whose only intention is “to frighten the passengers” in order to make money back to give the Branghtons for all the room and board.

Evelina very charitably decides to take money that Rev. Villars gave to her to give to Macartney so he can get away from the Branghtons. Someone needs to be able to escape these people, and his story is much sadder than hers.

Did Lord Orville drunk text Evelina?

Lord Orville dominates this section of the novel. He reappears at the pleasure gardens where once again a situation has befallen our Miss Evelina. During the fireworks, there’s a big explosion — someone call Dr. Robby! — and people scatter in every direction. First Evelina gets pushed around by some nasty sailors and then she gets picked up by “two ladies” — we all know what’s going on here — who speak to her in an “ironical” tone and otherwise make her look bad in high society. Of course, when I’m seeing these two ladies grab Evelina away from the nasty soldier, I’m saying, “okay, these are girlies,” but Evelina doesn’t agree, and neither does Lord Orville who walks by and doesn’t bother to make eye contact.

The two wind up back in touch before the end of the night, and Orville does something I thought he’d never do, which is actually call on Evelina. She winds up apologizing to him for being seen with those ladies and for all this mishegoss — a word I am using in every single post during Miss Evelina May, because theres a lot of it — with her horrible cousins who behave insane to him. Orville forgives her and the two seem to finally have a nice thing going on.

But then… he does something extremely weird. He writes her a letter that’s nice. Suspiciously nice.

On first read, I was like, ok yay. On second read, I was like, hmm, uh oh. Evelina goes through a similar circus of emotions. This does seem, on its face, like a nice thing to write someone, up until you take into account that it would have been seen as inappropriate to be penpals with your crush at the time and — let’s be honest — does this actually sound like Orville? Not really at all. The stress of this whole affair sends Evelina into a fit of illness during which she has to go to the spa in Bath and hang out with a lesbian1 named Mrs. Selwyn.

Eventually Orville and Evelina link up again and she comes to believe that perhaps he wrote the letter under some kind of influence. Does Orville seem like the kind of guy who would get drunk and be like, “let’s be friends”? Not really… I think we all know who this letter actually sounds like, but I’ll let you work it out in the comments.

Later: Evelina endures the greater insult of being called a toad-eater.

Mr. Lovel — your rude ass strikes again! Calling Evelina a suckup is the last straw. I’ve had it with you.

Though Orville and Evelina make romantic(ish) amends, that doesn’t come until after he has a brief freakout regarding her friendship with Mr. Macartney. All of this led me to wonder: is this worth it for Evelina? Define worth. Define it. I know I’m being pedantic, but I wonder, even in a marriage plot (!??) novel like this, whether all of Evelina’s panic and distress is worth any of these guys’s time. The thing that feels most decidedly like a learning experience is less the matter of etiquette and more her charity: how she treats Mr. Macartney is far more compelling than her ongoing will they/won’t they with Orville, who is far too sensitive and frankly unfunny to be a point of this much dismay. What is Evelina really learning from this time? I think she’s kind of coming away with a more close-minded view of “society”: her retreats back into the country/suburbs have her feeling far better than her time in the big, bad city. Perhaps what her “entrance into the world” is teaching her is, well, I’ll let Meg Stalter end this one.

What do YOU think Evelina is learning during this time? What other misadventures may follow in the novel’s remaining volume? Did you find yourself missing the Captain? (No.) Who wrote the letter from Lord Orville?!

Leave a comment

“Prithee,” whispered his Lordship, “is that queer woman your mother?” I know queer means something else back then, but I did laugh. She’s weird!

Miss Evelina May, Week 3

Fran Hoepfner — Mon, 18 May 2026 15:11:38 GMT

Subscribe now

Neologism moment

Welcome back to Miss Evelina May, the month where we all read Frances Burney’s Evelina. If you missed the first two discussion posts, they are here:

To get into the swing of things, let’s start with a really crazy development in the text. There we all were, enduring yet another spat between the Branghton siblings, when what word should turn up italicized and asterisked but “grumpy”? A brief jaunt over to the footnotes reveals something simply awesome:

Frances Burney invented “grumpy.”

Evelina-less developments

I spent the weekend in various states of illness: ailing one moment, fine the next, more exhausted than ever but losing sleep to a nagging, dry cough. So my patience was relatively thin when it came to the antics of the Captain and Mme Duval as well as that of the Branghtons. I’m not alone in this: I’m sure Evelina also wishes she was sick so she didn’t have to hang out with all these people, but if there’s one thing that felt especially apparent in this middle chunk of the book, it’s how little power and agency our Miss Evelina has.

Before we got into her countryside misadventures, there were a flurry of letters between Lady Howard and the Reverend about Evelina’s parentage, and how Mme Duval intends to sue Evelina’s awful libertine father Sir John Belmont who denies his parentage and relationship to her, claiming he has another daughter. While her London trip might be a nice adventure for Evelina to learn how to behave in third spaces — something we could all use a refresher in these days — she is largely there as a pawn while the die is being cast about her future. The lawsuit, the Reverend argues, would put Evelina in a negative position, no matter the outcome. “And for what — the attainment of wealth, which she does not want, and the gratification of vanity, which she does not feel,” he writes. I thought this was quite sweet, if not a little inaccurate. Evelina does care about these things in a modest, middle-class sort of way: she is keen to be perceived well, mostly because she herself is good.

In the country, however, most of Evelina’s time is not her own: she’s thrust once again into a full-bodied conflict between the Captain and Mme Duval. The former, in collaboration with Sir Clement, stage a whole episode for Duval, ranging from telling her that M. Dubois has been arrested to then staging a robbery when she tries to rush in a carriage off to a local judge’s house to get him out of jail. Once again, the Captain’s antics are meticulously produced if not violent. When Evelina eventually finds Mme Duval “seated upright, in a ditch,” she’s “sobbing, nay, almost roaring, and in the utmost agony and terror.” (Evelina, for her part, reactions with unfeigned concern.) She manages to untie Duval, whose feet have been tied to a branch. “What was my astonishment, when, the moment she was up, she hit me with a violent slap on the face.” No good deed, etc.

The most compelling part of all of this is the willful participation of Sir Clement, who both seems to get along with the Captain and have some modest disdain for Mme Duval, but also recognizes that the more he participates in these pranks, the more Evelina turns against him.

I, for one, especially liked when Clement said he’d return when “the violence of this boobyish humour is abated.” Tea!

Evelina gets two guns

The most surprising development in this recent section occurs back in London at the Branghtons, where Evelina winds up in lieu of going to Paris with Mme Duval. The Branghton antics are tedious — oh, all the siblings are crass and weird, the dad is rude, their servants are bad (“The dinner was ill-served, ill-cooked, and ill-managed”)— but their lodger, Mr. Macartney, is a fun little mystery. Upon meeting him, it’s clear we’ve never seen a more depressed guy ever. In a world of fun and screaming and shouting, here’s a Scottish poet who is truly dismayed at the state of things. The next time we meet him, he’s fully trying to kill himself with a gun in each hand, only to be stopped by Evelina — the most significant action she’s taken thus far outside of her social schemes.

If only Evelina kept those pistols — victim-blaming time — she could have brought them with her for the night on the town she has with the Branghtons which descends into fear and terror on the dark walks. A bunch of men start to grab and pull at Evelina, only for her to be rescued by… here he is again, Sir Clement. Literally: where is Lord Orville? If this is our great guy, we need him back in the mix. Clement, on the other hand, “saves” Evelina only to immediately be annoying again.

One may notice that Sir Clement does not actually apologize, so much as he demands forgiveness.

here is a georgian era fop

I found myself wanting more of Evelina in general in this section: her impressions of the countryside, what it feels like to return to the city, a greatest sense of what she wants out of this rapidly changing time. I think part of what delights about this book is her learning where and how she can advocate for herself and her wants, but it does feel like all these miserable people are playing tug of war with her arms, dragging her from pillar to post when all she wants to do is chill with her sweet friend Maria. I’m compelled by the way in which Burney uses the story of Evelina to show us a kaleidoscope of the predatory sorts who prey on young people entering society: we meet far more loathsome (but funny) characters than we do amiable friends or peers.

For next Tuesday

Please read up through Volume 3, Letter V!!! In the meantime, I’d love your thoughts and opinions, issues and questions. How are you feeling about the ongoing battles between the Captain and Mme Duval? Have you had enough of the Branghtons or does their crassness amuse you? Are you also (like me) constantly forgetting who Mr. Smith is in the grand scheme of things? And what do you think of poor Mr. Macartney? Is Sir Clement “too much” or is he lowkey winning you over by being around a lot? (It works for some guys, I’m told.)

Leave a comment

One more thing

I am thinking about scheduling the Evelina live Zoom chat for the evening of Tuesday, June 2. I imagine most of us will have finished the book by then (the last discussion post is the day before) and we can all gather and celebrate the end and share larger thoughts for, hmm, maybe an hour online. This will be an event for paid subscribers only, or for friends of paid subscribers who get the Zoom link. Let me know how this date sounds.

Miss Evelina May, Week 2

Fran Hoepfner — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:12:03 GMT

Subscribe now

Crinkum-crankum

Welcome to the second Monday of Miss Evelina May, the month-ish long book club where we’ll be reading Frances Burney’s Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, which we will call Evelina for short. I realized yesterday afternoon that I forgot to tell everyone where to stop in last week’s post, though it was in the original schedule memo. Hopefully you’ve read up to Volume 1, Letter XXVI, though I’m starting to realize this is a difficult book to spoil in a number of ways. If you missed last week’s post, feel free to catch up here.

Many people have told me they’re ahead on their reading mostly because they’re having such a good time with Burney’s novel, which is always a treat to hear.

You know who’s not having a good time? Our poor Miss Evelina Anville, subjected to many horrors on account of moving to the big city, including but not limited to a bunch of annoying guys, her mean grandmother, weird cousins, and the ongoing violent outbursts from the captain.

Evelina’s boys

Last week, we had the pleasure of meeting Lord Orville, who is all the things that Evelina admires in a man, and Mr. Lovel, who humiliated her when out on the town because she refused a dance with him and then went on to dance with Lord Orville. Can we blame her? No, of course not! Evelina didn’t know better, and you’d do the same thing in her shoes.

In this new section, we’re introduced to the biggest threat to Evelina’s commitment to having a good time, and his name is Sir Clement Willoughby. This guy has one of the craziest introductions into a book ever — I was cracking up reading his ongoing tormenting of poor Evelina at the ridotto.

First and foremost, they wind up going out at 11pm — a recipe for disaster if I ever heard one. Sir Clement approaches, asking Evelina to dance. She knows what happened last time she refused and then accepted someone, so tonight she comes up with a mundane lie: she is already engaged to to someone else with whom she’s supposed to dance who is just not present at the moment. Clement tries and fails to call Evelina’s bluff ten thousand times over in displays of exceeding absurdity:

And later, oh did I laugh:

Loving the meltdowns of Sir Clement, who is determined not only to ruin Evelina’s nights out, but also her daytimes inside, because he dedicates himself to winning over Captain Mirvan so he can be around all the time.

Sir Clement’s exhausting personality is all fun and games until the vague threat of violence dips in. After yet another eventful night at the opera, she winds up getting a ride home with him, and Sir Clement, we’re to understand, told his driver to take a long, bad, wrong route so the two would have time together. Evelina, quite resourcefully, tries to throw herself out of the moving carriage, but here’s where Sir Clement’s commitment to irritation gives way to something more insidious, or as Rev. Villars puts it, “artful.”

Hark you, Mrs. Frog

Much to Evelina’s surprise and dismay, her grandmother Madame Duval appears out of nowhere during this section, deciding she’s ready to be family again despite having disowned her daughter and also being kind of a wretch herself. Evelina is put off by Madame Duval’s cruelty and rudeness — Duval remarks that our heroine has a “bumpkinish air,” which, well, yes, kind of, but we love her for it — but she’s twice as put off by Duval’s ongoing beef with Captain Mirvan, who seems determined to pick a fight with Duval from the very second they are introduced.

Their back-and-forths are brilliant in the sense that you can feel Burney really having fun with each of their rhythms and cadence, but I was struck by the rather abrupt escalation of literal violence between them:

I cannot help but picture Homer strangling Bart during this interaction.

Mostly what these repeat arguments between the Captain and Duval (and sometimes also Sir Clement, who loves to hang out and take the captain’s side), is how awful it is to have the Captain around. Mrs. Mirvan and Miss Mirvan must be so happy his shouty ass is getting back on a boat soon!!!

The cousins

Madame Duval also summons the Branghtons — father, son, two daughters — east London relations who seem to have no idea what’s going on at any given time and immediately make fools of themselves by complaining about the whole vibe at the opera. I’m loving the energy of these wackos, and I don’t think Mr. Branghton Jr. was all that far off for thinking they might get a discount at the opera on account of being a large party.

My heart trembles for your future tranquility

This week’s section ends not long after Evelina has left London for a trip to the countryside with the Mirvans and Madame Duval. Sounds horrible, frankly, even if the Captain is going to be away during this time. What Evelina seems to want, more than anything, is time and space with Lord Orville, who might be the only person in addition to Mrs. and Miss Mirvan to treat her like a real person. I’m liking the general handsomeness and polite quality of Orville, but the most interesting thing he’s done in this section is let on that he went to Mr. Lovel’s home to suggest he’d be willing to duel over the latter’s rudeness towards Evelina. Okay — so Orville is kind of non-committal and tough to read, but he is ready to kill for our Evelina. Good to know! I suspect that being in the countryside is going to take Lord Orville away from Evelina and us the reader, so I’m hoping there’s a new bad man she can meet out there that will make us laugh in the meantime.

I am underlining so many passages and quotes and asides here, including but not limited to Branghton’s observation of “tell a woman that any thing is reasonable, and she’ll be sure to hate it,” and Evelina’s own thoughts on being misunderstood by Lord Orville:

Wanting to kill yourself because you made a bad impression at a social event? It’s been happening for hundreds of years.

(Relatedly, I loved the scene where everyone gets into an argument about going to a second location for so long that Evelina is like, “I literally just have to go home.” REAL!!!)

What are you highlighting? What are you loving? What are you making of the brief allusions to violence? Are you #TeamCaptain or #TeamDuval? Is Sir Clement making you “jbol”?

Leave a comment

Miss Evelina May, Week 1

Fran Hoepfner — Mon, 04 May 2026 14:10:55 GMT

Subscribe now

She is quite a little rustic, and knows nothing of the world

Welcome to the first Monday1 of Miss Evelina May, the month-ish long book club where we’ll be reading Frances Burney’s Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, which we will call Evelina for short. If you are here, I’m hoping you’ve read, at the very least, the first twelve letters of the novel so far, and maybe also some front material.

A handful of people have asked how I came across this book. I will admit something shameful: I Googled “long books by women.” (Later amended to “long books by women no ducks newburyport” — KIDDING.) I had a sense of what I wanted to read, but no way to put that into words.2 Frances — also known as Fanny3 — Burney was of some familiarity to me. Her 1000-page novel Cecilia was optional reading on a syllabus for a London-centric literature course I took in college4, and I believe either Cecilia or Evelina have been floated as options for my Classics bookclub. All of which is to say that I probably did know of this book, but in the swirl of brain matter that for whatever reason knows about the Naders (?) and is keeping up with the third season of Euphoria, that information got lost in the morass.

I have done a bit of reading into Frances Burney herself, though the front matter of the Oxford World Classic has a nice timeline of events. Most of what struck me about Burney’s life — which does not really apply to Evelina — was the sheer amount of time that she was alive: Burney died at 87 years old, which feels quite remarkable for someone in the 18th century. Especially someone who had breast cancer (and surgery — without anesthesia, eat that, Dr. Robby) and continued to live for another thirty years.

Evelina was published the year she turned 26, which is quite remarkable. Madeline Cash alert!5 As the precocious daughter of a musician, brought up in a home that put great value on arts, Evelina strikes me as quite experimental. I don’t necessarily mean that in terms of form or concept, but that this is written with a kind of carefree-ness of someone who is clearly trying stuff out. As I read, I’m finding a lot of immediate pleasure in lackadaisical rhythms and various beats. To me, this is someone who is writing towards sound and event, rather than structure or philosophy. She was a talented mimic, despite being shy, which explains how and why the letters feel so distinctive. We always know who is writing them, once we get a taste for someone’s sensibilities. I get the sense that Evelina is much more observational than it is autobiographical. Burney is dreaming up an imaginary young woman to whom all this stuff could happen, versus dramatizing her own youth and upbringing. Evelina was born out of Burney’s first “book,” Caroline Evelyn, which tells the story of Evelina’s mother who was swept up by a rake and subsequently abandoned. Caroline Evelyn was more an effort in childhood imagining — she apparently wrote it when she was around ten — and that she drifted to a more spirited plot in her early 20s is not surprising. More writers should be thinking that way.

Accept the tribute — but forget the lay

Evelina opens with two different pieces of Burney-written front material: a dedication in the form of a poem and letter to magazine publishers basically being like “I understand what I’m doing and don’t go easy on me.” I was more compelled by her lovely dedication to her father, which basically says, “thank you for everything, and don’t be mad at me for writing this.” Keeping this in mind with future writing projects.

Unblest with one natural friend, she merits a thousand

Let’s get into what the hell Miss Evelina gets up to. Our novel begins with a correspondence between Reverend Arthur Villars, Evelina’s longtime guardian and confidant, and one Lady Howard, who reports that Evelina’s grandmother Mme Duval, who did not even know she existed, is suddenly keep to repair their relationship after bungling everything with Evelina’s mother Caroline, who was cast out for marrying a libertine and then taken in by Villars. In order to prevent Mme Duval from getting to Evelina, he sends her to Lady Howard’s estate so she can hang out with Lady Howard’s daughter Mrs. Mirvan and her daughter Maria6 outside of London. Only, there’s one hiccup: Mrs. Mirvan’s ship captain husband is returning to London after time out at sea, so the whole family wants to go to London and see him. Could they maybe take Evelina there? Would it be crazy to take a beautiful, naive girl to the big city? Villars gives the uneasy okay. Evelina is going to London!

god i wish this was me

Our beloved Miss E gets off to a rambunctious start in the city: she goes shopping, she goes to balls, she walks around pleasure gardens.7 Which of these activities are you most drawn to:

Most notably, Evelina runs into some trouble at her first private ball. A horrible fop named Mr. Lovel (boo! we all HATE Mr. Lovel!!!) asks her to dance but he is being too stupid, loud, and insane for her to want to engage with him. In fact, she is laughing uncontrollably at his whole deal.

Lord Orville!! Now here is a guy who is serious, described in a vaguely sexy way:

Fellas, are we taking note?! Evelina does one big fuck-up at the private ball, and it’s that she says no to dancing with Mr. Lovel but then yes to dancing with Lord Orville. Can you blame her? But apparently this breaks the rules of assembly, which leads Lovel to believe that our Miss Evelina is actually of low birth, whereas she’s just country mouse in the big city. Still: everyone seems to like her, and she’s not drifting towards a Whartonian-esque flop era for how she behaves in public.

Evelina is a spirited narrator: easy and funny and likable. She has preferences and she is judgmental, but that judgment comes from a place of keen curiosity and a self-assuredness. She is occasionally bashful, yes, but she mostly seems to know who she is and what she likes about other people. I am already loving what a fantastically social book this is, one that makes me want to go out with my friends and observe people being insane.

Word I had to look up

Ridotto — I thought this was a casino!!! Turns out it’s more like a nightclub…

Turning it over to you

How are you finding Evelina so far? What do you think of the foppish Mr. Lovel and the stately Lord Orville? Is the Captain ever going to stop embarrassing all the women or should he just spend the rest of his life on a ship?

We’ll be doing weekly discussions of Evelina every Monday in May except Memorial Day. The comments section is liveliest on Mondays but feel free to weigh in literally whenever; there are always people keen to yap.

Leave a comment

Previously these entries were called “VOLUMES,” but given this book has actual volumes.

What happened to me was basically this, but with books.

And apparently also “Fannikin” to family members.

I opted for Samuel Pepys’s diary instead, which I don’t regret. I loved Pepys!!!

I liked Lost Lambs.

If I’m reading correctly, the Mirvans actually have two daughters, but Evelina really only seems to care about her friendship with Maria.

Randomly (?), I think I know about pleasure gardens from playing Witcher 3… love that.

(Miss) Evelina May starts Monday

Fran Hoepfner — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:10:50 GMT

Subscribe now

Book club bash

Things are crazy right now, and for that I apologize, but that doesn’t mean that May book club isn’t happening. In fact: May book club is happening, and it’s never been happening more. I’m so excited to kick things off with all of you on Monday. If you’ve missed the announcements or if you’ve never done a May book club, never fear. Here’s the must-know info ahead of Miss Evelina May.

What are we reading?

Evelina by Frances Burney.

This book looks… kinda hard?

Yes — all the May book club books are challenging by nature, either because of length or language or some combination of the two. The hope and point of doing it together is that we’ll gain a greater understanding of the text and also have a lot of fun.

How much of Evelina am I supposed to read every week?

Around 90 pages or so. It’s an epistolary novel, which I suspect will make the reading go quick even if and when the language feels dense.

Do I need a specific copy?

No, but I am working with the Oxford University Press paperback edition.

What happens each Monday?

The vibe will be: “normal book club.” I will write a bit of a recap of everything that happened in the most recent section we read as well as provide some greater insight into a certain character or scene or whatever, and then everyone in the comments will go nuts talking about the book to their heart’s content. These posts wind up being active for most of the week, not just Monday, so if you fall behind, there’s always time to weigh back in. I encourage virtual socialization – reply to the comment of someone you don’t know and you might just make a friend for life…

Will there be spoilers in the Monday posts?

Probably yes.

Did Phil make a celebratory banner for this year’s book club?

YES, THANK YOU TO PHIL.

What’s the reading schedule look like?

Here is what I am thinking:

Weekish of April 29/May 4th: Front matter-Volume 1, Letter XII
Week of May 5-11th: Volume 1, Letter XIII-Volume 1, Letter XXVI
Week of May 12-18th: Volume 1, Letter XXVII-Volume 2, Letter XV
Week of May 19-26th1: Volume 2, Letter XVI-Volume 3, Letter V
Week of May 27-June 1st: Volume 3, Letter VI-end

What do you mean by “front matter”?

I go back and forth on whether or not I read the introductions of classics for fear of spoilers, and this was point of contention for Lonesome Dove, in which Larry McMurtry straight-up spoiled the end of his novel in the book’s introduction. I haven’t personally read the introduction to Evelina yet, so I can’t confirm or deny if there are spoilers. I am going to read the introduction in order to get my bearings on the book itself. That intro is followed by some material that was written by Burney (a poem, an essay) and feels like a very worthwhile thing to peruse ahead of next week’s discussion.

And last but not least: here’s Frances Burney

needing a hat like this for the rockaways this summer

Questions? Comments? Fears and anxieties? This is all going to be fun and funny, I suspect. One of the highlights of the year every year!!

Leave a comment

We’ll take the Monday of Memorial Day off because why the hell not.

Puther Summit with Larry Fitzmaurice

Fran Hoepfner — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 14:10:47 GMT

Subscribe now

Whatever’s clever

I sometimes wonder what it was specifically that led Taylor Swift and Matty Healy to “declare” (?) Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist, but in my heart, I know it’s a shared love of Puth’s 2018 album Voicenotes. The singer and producer’s sophomore album is one of the most enjoyable pop records of the last decade. Here’s what’s even crazier: kind of a lot of Charlie Puth’s music is good. He’s probably about as big artist as he should be — but it always feels like he’s never quite getting his due. When I saw him perform at the Blue Note last summer, I was amazed at the sheer levels of age diversity in the audience. There’s something there for everyone when it comes to Puth.

I share my Puther thoughts with very few people — most of my more musically-inclined friends and loved ones finding him cringe or annoying; he’s both, but that’s besides the point. Throughout the years, one of my most solid and committed Puth allies online is the writer and music critic Larry Fitzmaurice, whose taste I respect more than just about anyone. His music newsletter Last Donut of the Night is a must-read (he’s also got great opinions on film), and when Mr. Puth is back in the news, I’m always curious to know what Larry thinks. I asked Larry if he’d join me for a discussion of Puth’s latest album Whatever’s Clever, our lingering adoration of Voicenotes, and how a guy who once admitted to saying he’s “hungies” (at least briefly) won us over.

Hi Larry. I’m returning from a weekend in New Jersey, where Charlie Puth announced “there’s nothing fun to do” in his new album. Has Charlie Puth been to the Mitsuwa in Edgewater? I think he’d like it. I listened to Whatever’s Clever on the sunny Friday it came out, and I’m inclined to think there’s about half of a really good record in there. Maybe even two-thirds, as the weather warms. How is Puth’s latest sitting with you?

First off, as a former Jersey denizen, I cannot help but sympathize with our man’s generally expressed sentiment — although if he does find himself at the Mitsuwa (the takoyaki stand is goated), I should hope that he’ll continue down River Road for a relaxing excursion at Sojo Spa Club, (“My Weekend as a 28-Year-Old In Chicago TikTok” voice) which I highly recommend.

I completely agree that Whatever’s Clever is the latest almost-there album in an increasingly almost-there discography, in the tracklists of which we are starting to gain full awareness of “The Charlie Puth Problem.” A friend who works in A&R recently and very accurately described Puth as a prodigious mimic — the Ditto in pop’s Pokopia, if you will — whose ability to replicate lesser-fashionable corners of pop music’s prior half-century rivals the technically flawless, slightly antiseptic capabilities of a high-grade 3D printer. He can do anything at this point, and as a result he does — but should he?

Barring the occasional lapse in taste, which has become commonplace for Puth albums (the Jeff Goldblum-featuring “Until It Happens to You” is the kind of evil that fire can’t kill), I find myself increasingly hoping for him to lock in on one sound across an entire album, similar to how he did on the sensual R&B of Voicenotes. Instead, we get a little R&B, a dose or two of velvety yacht rock, some splashy uplift in the key of White Boy of The Year Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Phil Collins — he even gives us some straight-up goddamn J-Pop on the Hikaru Utada-featuring “Home.” (Puth’s recent mis-labeling of Utada as “city pop” caused something of an incidence of cringe in my corner of Twitter—but we’ll be revisiting the topic of “cringe” in a moment or two, I’m sure.)

Very little here sounds bad, and as you said, most of it is sounding good as the temperature rises; but I still can’t shake the feeling that Puth is someone whose desire to play with the toys in his box, as impressive as those toys are, ultimately hinders his ability to deliver a true stunner of an album.

Fran, I am extremely interested as to what led to your current card-carrying status as a Puther, beyond your initial encounters with Voicenotes. I ask because his A&R hit job of a debut Nine Track Mind, which compiles the 2010s’ worst pop trends and promptly attempts to beat our unlikely hero to death with them, was enough to scare away plenty from further paying him proper consideration. He is an extremely specific concern at this point; I improbably know more than a few Puthers across several social circles, but very curiously none of them are music critics, who have largely professed ignorance to his talents across the last eight years. (To wit: When I pitched a positive-leaning review of Voicenotes to Pitchfork back in the day, I was told that they were running a review the following day—only to be greeted with a writeup of Shawn Mendes’ whatever-you-say self-titled effort in its stead. Rude!!!) What brought you to this pivotal moment in pop-listener history?

Unfortunately, a compilation of “the 2010s’ worst pop trends” is catnip for someone like me, who has both good and bad taste in music. Just about every year, an inexplicably bad song that I hear gets lodged in my nervous system, and that was Puth’s collaboration with Meghan Trainor on the mystifyingly stupid “Marvin Gaye.” I don’t like “Marvin Gaye” at all, and I was already familiar with Trainor enough to dislike her output, but Puth compelled me. The one-two punch of his cameo in the Charli XCX “Boys” video and Voicenotes motivated me enough to invest, and Voicenotes — like CRJ’s Emotion, maybe — has become one of those pitch-perfect albums for the year in which it came out and the mood I was in upon hearing it for the first time.

I don’t like Harry Styles’s new album at all, but I do think it’s his most coherent effort to date. Just about all the songs sound the same, which I think couldn’t always be said previously and is arguably a step in the “right” direction. It also just so happens that they sound like songs I don’t really like the good versions of, let alone his. Voicenotes, as you mentioned, is Puth’s most coherent sound to date, this kind of R&B/pop blend where narratively he reminds me of Billy Joel — a not-especially-hot guy who is horny and embarrassed about it but also soldiering on in a “brave” way.

The difference between someone like Joel and Puth is that Joel is a really committed lyricist, and I think even if you don’t like his music, you can’t deny his storytelling. Puth, on the other hand… for all his vocal and production accomplishments, I feel like he very rarely finds a balance where his lyrics aren’t too stupid such that they detract from a song that sounds good. The aforementioned “New Jersey” on Whatever’s Clever should be funnier, right? More specific? Do you think Puth has ever managed to shine lyrically, on this or past albums?

If consistency has been somewhat of an emerging issue on the Puther frontlines, then the intentionality of humor has been an issue since the beginning. (Since you brought up “Marvin Gaye,” I must point to the painfully forced smooch between Charlie and Meghan at the 2015 AMAs, which still stands as one of the most excruciating 2010s pop cultural documents alongside “Sensual Pantsuit Anthem” and Iggy Azalea’s attempt at freestyling.) I too have thought about Joel frequently while listening to Charlie’s oeuvre, and yet the raconteurish, somewhat winsome approach the former has never quite emerged in the latter’s work.

If anything, the comparison I’d reach for when drawing an analogue to Puth’s lyrical POV would be Bravo-lebrity Craig Conover (blame my recent double-fisting of Summer House and Southern Charm episodes): Slightly annoying, a little douchey, full of unnecessary complaining (“You just want attention,” “How the hell did I get caught up messin’ with these L.A. girls,” the choice “New Jersey” lyric “This barely even counts as a party”), and more often than not walking the line between “endearing” and “pathetic” with an inconsistent gait. His strongest lyrics to date — for me, anyway — are on Voicenotes’ “Boy,” in which he pulls a rare “Inside-out T-shirt ‘Hey Nineteen’” by berating an older paramour for treating him like the 26-year-old he was. “You never took me seriously/ Now what the hell was that about?” he coos in a slight whine, unintentionally giving up the game when it comes to why someone might feel like they’re wasting time in his presence.

That said, Whatever’s Clever does catch Charlie revealing more of his true self than usual, even if the results are a bit uncomfortable to bear witness to. The breezy “Hey Brother,” replete with ‘70s Sesame Street-esque warmth and a typically lovely chorus, is very clearly a missive to Charlie’s less-successful songwriter sibling Stephen, which makes lyrics like “I wish you could see in you what you see in me” sound a little like Jenna Maroney claiming that she could never appear on American Idol because she has perfect pitch.

Then there’s the surprisingly confessional “I Used to Be Cringe,” which reminds me a little of Justin Bieber’s gorgeously sad “Lonely” without any of the stakes and a lot like something Ed Sheeran would cook up (as a not-so-secret Sheerio, I’m fine with this). “I used to lie, say I was taller/ And throw words around like ‘baller’” is a reasonably cute admission of past failings, but given Charlie’s current propensity to name-search on Twitter (one of the only major-minor celebrities who’s still active to such an extent on the platform, mind you), the gesture feels less like a personal exorcism and more like a promise of sorts that more “I’m hungies!”-esque moments are to come.

Let’s get to the heart of the matter, Fran: Why do you think Charlie Puth isn’t a bigger artist? I think the aforementioned personality quirks play a role; he quite simply doesn’t come off well when he’s not behind a keyboard, which only adds to the notion that he’s a man out of time. Can Charlie ever truly ascend the ranks of pop stardom in a landscape that’s more personality-driven (and, of course, less focused on things like “songwriting” and “harmonics”) than it ever has been?

I go back and forth on this question, and if it’s why isn’t Puth a bigger artist or should Puth be a bigger artist. When I think back on those aforementioned Blue Note shows, I think about how comfortable Puth felt seated at a piano with a bunch of non-famous jazz musicians doing seven-minute renditions of his songs. There were a handful of people in the crowd who behaved like they were at MSG — which, why? — but mostly he seemed comfortable and best-suited to a small room, neither overwhelmed nor indulging in that which often makes him so cringe.

I went to the Blue Note show with my beloved coworker Devon, and when I asked her if she wanted to see him at MSG with me in the spring, she was basically like, “we had a great time at Blue Note, but I am not that committed to Puth,” which also hammers home the fact that Puth is maybe just not an arena artist, despite his forthcoming show at Billy Joel’s home. He doesn’t strike me as a compelling arena artist. He just plays the piano really well and maybe asking more from him is misguided. I always saw his immediate refusal, for lack of a better word, to address what Taylor said about him in “Poets Department” as an acknowledgment of relative comfort with where he’s at rather than milking it for all it’s worth.

Beyond that, my years in cultural and entertainment writing have taught me an unglamorous and somewhat unsatisfying truth, which is that when someone isn’t “more famous,” it’s usually because they’re just not that pleasant to work with. I learned late last year that there is old drama between our other fav JADE and Puth, because the latter “behaved weird” towards her. Not a cancellable offense, per se, but not a pleasant one.

I have admittedly (embarrassingly?) never really listened to the music of John Mayer (“guy with guitar” is a hard sell for me), but if I recall, he also fell into this semi-self-aware, petulant, horny type of stereotype. It seems like he eventually fell into a good rhythm touring with The Grateful Dead in a way that keeps him out of people’s hair but still prevalent in the world of live music. I wonder if there’s a role like that for Puth, who has an undeniable talent, but can’t seem to sustain the it factor that drives so many of his peers. What do you think? Charlie Puth — touring pianist?

The John Mayer comparison is something I’ve never considered before, but it adds up: Both are conservatory-school pick-me types with seemingly innate gifts that allow them to occasionally dip in and out of various Black pop styles. (Also, what is “See You Again” if not “Waiting for the World to Change” with Paul Walker as a stand-in for the broken promises of neoliberalism?) In Mayer’s case, the seemingly endless stint with Dead and Co. — his last proper solo album, the shockingly half-decent Sob Rock, was five whole years ago, an eternity by today’s standards — allows someone with a history of racist statements and a seeming predilection for younger women to essentially hide in plain sight, regularly exercising his undeniable talents for a notoriously undiscerning fanbase without having to bear the brunt of the spotlight’s harsh glow.

Short of subbing in for John Oates in his current feud with Daryl Hall, I don’t see the same future for our boy Charlie, who’s currently having enough trouble pushing tickets at the aforementioned MSG show (Floor seats under $200? Have we time-traveled back to the ‘90s?!?) that the truly patient may just end up being able to attend for the cost of chips and a drink. I think Puth’s future (Puth-ture?) might end up resembling something akin to the career of the quite noxious boy-genius-to-the-musical-stars Jacob Collier, another undeniably accomplished musical polymath whose lack of natural star power has held him back from becoming a true household name.

Even as Collier’s accomplishments are somewhat considerable (he really freaked it on SZA’s “Good Days,” for one), his sentient-TED-talk persona had lent itself to a disconcerting virality; perhaps you’ve seen the video of him “improvising” with a live orchestra in San Francisco, which was recently passed around online to much reactive chagrin. But Collier’s whole human-peptides approach to creativity has also gained the approval of blue-check tech types, who doubtlessly also fawned over Puth’s recent decision to become “chief music officer” at the AI-focused music tech company Moises.

“I’ve been using it in my own creative process for years,” he commented when the news was announced last month, and even as the conversation around AI in music remains more complicated than many will acknowledge (throw a stone in the EDM world and you’ll hit plenty of producers who have been using it since time immemorial), the fact remains that he’s taken it upon himself to be a figurative pitchman for a concept with a lower public approval rating than a government agency that kills people. Then again, he’s no stranger to shilling for crap that no one wants but everyone ends up consuming anyway, and perhaps it’ll prove easier than the currently fruitless endeavor of selling himself as an actual star.

You can read more of Larry’s writing and interviews on Last Donut of the Night. Everyone say “thank you Larry!!” for his amazing commentary and impressive knowledge of Puthdom. Do you guys think I should try to see Charlie Puth at MSG? Sound off below.

Leave a comment

3,000 words on our wedding

Fran Hoepfner — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:10:08 GMT

Subscribe now

Housekeeping

This post is too long for email… please read in Substack app or browser window.

Tying the knot

Six months ago, Phil and I got married on a slightly chilly but otherwise near-perfect fall weather day in Brooklyn. I have withheld writing about that experience not because I worried about jinxing my own relationship, but because I have wanted to sit with and process that weekend, which was very difficult to do in the throes of planning and subsequently living within. I used to not really care about other people’s wedding planning — let me know if I can help in some way! — but obviously now that I have experienced this, I am an empath and absorb any and all writing on how people get married and why they do whatever insane things they choose to do or not do.

the great alex burholt did our fab pics

How (emotionally)

I did not grow up in culture — familial or otherwise — where “having a wedding” or “getting married” was an immediate pressure or concern. I can count the number of friends I have who “dreamt of being a bride” on one hand. I had never totally convinced myself as a teen or young adult that I would get married. It seemed antiquated, maybe, or like a lot of work. When I met Phil, however, I felt with some degree of certainty that I wanted to marry him pretty soon into our relationship, and that sense never went away. The more we talked about getting engaged and wanting to get married, the more it became clear we could do it fully on our own terms. No one “made me” get married, which is part of why I had so much fun doing it. Nothing was expected of me in terms of “what type of dress” or even who officiated. Or maybe: there were expectations, but no one enforced them, and we tried our best to put together an event that pleased our families and close friends without betraying a sense of what we wanted. This didn’t necessarily make things easier, but they were less hard — which felt important.

I asked people to send in questions last fall if they had any that might guide the writing, and I have tried my best to answer all of those throughout.

Short answer: yes.

“Next chapter” of life — even in scare quotes — lends more drama to what changes there have been since getting married than is actually needed, but for the most part, the biggest change in this new chapter of life is the bizarro nature of saying the phrase “my husband” which still feels very…

sorry to use a broad city still in 2026

There are ways in which being married has changed our relationship, but those changes are both difficult to articulate in words and also too personal to delve into here. Our relationship is also constantly changing: we would have felt different at the start of this year from the year before even if there hadn’t been a wedding. The wedding gave us a big superficial thing to latch onto for the bulk of last year, and in the aftermath of all that, we’ve had to go back and get to some other less tangible conversations, all of which have been productive and exciting and difficult, but easier to navigate without a party looming over us. When we went to Mexico over Thanksgiving last year as a kind of pre-honeymoon deal while we figured out the actual honeymoon we wanted to take, the nature of conversation was kind of like, “So, anyway…” having put off a lot of conversations for the ten months we spent planning the wedding.

No — I had a lot of panic, both about marriage and growing old, but that was not one of the specific categories of panic I faced. I have always been pretty committed to spending a lot of time by myself, whether that’s an odd night in or a solo vacation or going on residency, and I think Phil and I both value our independence such that we’re confident and capable of spending relatively long stretches of time apart. Existential aloneness is, of course, another thing entirely, but I see that existing separately from my marriage. There is the question of “what if I can never be single again?” — which I think is not what you’re asking — but to that, I’m like, maybe one day I will be! For one reason or another! Who knows what will happen?

The panic I dealt with was two-fold. The first one was purely logistical panic. I think basically everyone who plans a wedding deals with this, which is that you wind up giving a lot of different people and/or organizations a lot of your money, however much a lot of money is to you, and you sign some paperwork and then you just really have to hope everyone does what they’re going to say. I had faith, of course, but you always read stories about people who are like, “wow, I paid TK VENDOR TK AMOUNT OF MONEY and then they never showed up!” and I was like, wow, I hope I don’t wind up being one of those people… I was briefly ghosted by one of our vendors but it worked out fine.1

The other panic was purely shallow: “do not perceive me” panic. This manifested in all sorts of ways. Was I going to look ugly at my wedding? Would everyone be talking about my fat arms? Did everyone think it was embarrassing I was having a wedding? Was I embarrassed to have a wedding? Was I going to have some kind of meltdown over the course of the weekend? I remember asking my brother, who got married six months before me, if he was worried about any of this stuff, and he was like, “uh, no, I am worried about my vendors.” The answer to most of these questions was “no” — something I had to just accept, which is not easy — and taking beta blockers the day of the ceremony. Thank you beta blockers and thank you to our friend Frank for the beta blockers. I don’t care what Emma Watson said on that three hour podcast — beta blockers are yay.

May book club announcement

Fran Hoepfner — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 13:09:49 GMT

Subscribe now

Sale moment

As a heads up for anyone who said, “well, I would like to buy The Field Guide to Nepo Babies, but I’m waiting for a promotional opportunity,” I have great news for you. You can preorder the book for 25% off at Barnes & Noble if you sign up for their free rewards program and use code PREORDER25 at checkout. Link to buy is here!

Celebratory moment

Fran Magazine reader Ava won our Movies Fantasy League mini-league! Congrats to Ava for knowing what KPop Demon Hunters months is months before me (I assume) and for picking my personal fav of this year’s awards movies, The Secret Agent. What a stellar line-up and a fun mini-league! Ava… your mug will be in the mail… SOON! For now, everyone say, “Great job, Ava!!!”

Book club moment

For weeks now, people have been sliding into my DMs. They’re not saying “omg you are looking hot lately” or “omg you are looking sleepy lately,” but instead I’m getting messages like “do you know what the May book will be” or “May book club announcement tn queen.”

The May book club read this year will be… … …

👗Evelina by Frances Burney👗

“What is this book? I’ve never heard of it!” you may be saying. Listen, I was in your position a few months back. But look at this image and tell me that you don’t wanna know what this chica gets up to.

To be frank and juvenile, I said, “this year we’re doing a girl book!”1 and started to delve into what our options were in terms of classics written by women. I had been tempted by Burney’s other novel — Cecilia — which is fully 1,000 pages, but after War & Peace (which I finished), I knew I couldn’t do another 1,000 page book any time soon. Or really, at all, again, this calendar year. The Oxford World Classics edition of Evelina, which is the one I am going to be reading, is 512 pages, which feels reasonable, and for what it’s worth, I think a lot of that is appendix or notes. Maybe I’m wrong on that front. But I think I’m right.

What is “the deal” with Evelina? Well…

I said, okay! I’m loving this! Like, let’s all have FUN out here, for once! I know that this selection raises a big question…

How does the “M” factor in? No alliteration this year?

I’ll be honest… I’m not totally sure… but it didn’t feel worth adhering to an arbitrary tradition for the sake of it and reading something I’m not eager to read.2 Remember how I used to do “I’m at the festival” videos and then stopped? Sometimes it’s good to stop doing things before the bit goes cold.

That said, I am committed to finding a way to make this work. Maybe it’s that we call it Miss (Evelina) May. Or maybe it’s something where like… an “E” is basically an “M” on its side, no? Evelina Eay……. Mvelina May……… Phil can maybe finagle something, graphic design-wise, where no one is overthinking anything. No one stress. It’s going to be fine.

If you haven’t joined us for a May book club before, here’s a quick rundown of the deal:

Discussion posts go up on Mondays. This year’s book club will probably stretch to June 1st just so that we can give five weeks of convo out of it. I’ll figure out the exact reading schedule as it gets closer to the start date.
Discussion posts are free! Come, hang, yap, reply, whatever.
Yes, this book is difficult — old, long, esoteric. The point of May book club is to challenge yourself in terms of language/length/whatever. Or maybe it’s easy for you (yay!). But there’s no punishment for falling behind or struggling. The comments section has been historically helpful, informative, and clarifying for those who are maybe not used to reading books from the 18th century.
NEW THIS YEAR! For paid subscribers, there will be one live conversation on Zoom with as many people who can come as possible for about an hour… maybe 90 minutes. I’m really rolling the dice on everyone “behaving normal towards each other” but the discussions for May book club have always been so fun in the comments that I think a real-time session could be a treat. Is this crazy? We’ll find out!

You have a lot of time to get your paws on a copy of the book ahead of our May 4 start date (OK, Met Gala!). This is gonna be a fun one!

Questions? Comments? Issues with me for abandoning an alliterative conceit after three years? All this and more in the comments section.

Leave a comment

Please do not buy the “girlebooks presents” edition of this novel… it’s just for you to have a chuckle at.

One of these years we’ll do Mason & Dixon May but… not after Tolstoy, please. And probably not all in the month of May lest everyone get mad at me.

Here's a concept

Fran Hoepfner — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:11:32 GMT

Subscribe now

Live, from New York

On Friday, March 27, I’ll be moderating the Q&A for the 7pm showing of Caroline Golum’s Revelations of Divine Love with Caroline and her amazing star, Tessa Strain. Tickets are available here! I had the chance to see the film last summer, but this is the official New York release and I’ll be seeing it for the first time on the big screen which — famously? nothing better. Revelations of Divine Love is the story of Julian of Norwich, the first woman who ever wrote a book. Caroline has made a gorgeous movie, dense in color and mystery and love, and Tessa gives a dazzling performance as a woman both wise beyond her years and ever-learning/yearning. It’s gonna be a fun night. See you there?

One more link for tix

May book club announcement is coming this week

Why not!? We all need something to look forward to right now, and thinking about what we’ll be reading in five weeks seems like a nice way to look ahead into the future.

An interesting idea you may want to consider

Spring is here. Aries season is here. The weather is getting marginally warmer in New York. We’re on our second (?) false start to spring1, which might as well be the real start. Whenever the temperatures and daylight hours start to creep up, I start to crave one of the great beverages in our world:

The michelada

I have a very distinct memory of going to see my brother in Tulsa and then flying back to Chicago over President’s Day weekend. I got back early in the day on Monday and we were having one of those false spring days, so a bunch of us went to the Parsons in Logan Square2 to sit outside in their backyard. Yes, everyone wore coats, but it was fifty degrees and the sun was out. Little is better than that, especially in February in Chicago. I got a michelada, which felt eating a fresh vegetable, and it was heaven on earht.

Occasionally I meet people who have never had a michelada. This is crazy to me, because they are kind of everywhere, but that’s fine. A michelada is a Mexican beverage (typically) made with a Mexican lager with clamato juice and ice plus some other stuff (Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, fish sauce, tajin, lime, whatever) with a salt and/or tajin rim. They are easy to make at home and require no actual skill. As someone who likes to have clamato juice around the house anyway3, this is one of the easiest things to make. I am not a big drinker — alcohol, generally, is a migraine trigger — but I do like to indulge in the odd dinnertime michelada if all the ingredients are there and Phil feels like making them.4

My reason for liking the michelada is mostly obvious: it is tasty. There is another reason, one that is slightly more shameful if not simply bizarre, which is that the michelada as a beverage, allows me to do something that I want to and like doing so much but otherwise would not socially acceptable in public or private:

Drink beer with a straw

Listen, I know how this sounds.5 I would not be so insane or stupid as to try to order a can of beer at a bar and ask for a straw, let alone reach across the bar to grab a little well drink mixer straw. I know as well as anyone that this is simply not done. Not every michelada is served with a straw, but depending on the amount of ice in the drink and the establishment, they’re often in the mix. Occasionally you get the candied tamarind-dipped straw — one of the world’s greatest inventions. If I’m drinking a michelada at home, however, there is a 100% chance of a glass straw sticking out of that drink.

I know for environmental reasons straws are inventions non grata but I think a straw is a brilliant thing in part because you can determine how and when you actually want to be using it.

Diet Coke without a straw? Utilitarian, necessary, being consumed without joy.

Diet Coke with a straw? Luxury, slow, relaxation. Sipping = pleasure = yay

The placement of the straw in the michelada allows you to continue to stir the different weighted ingredients as they start to drift to the bottom of the glass or incorporate any beer that gets added in later. Its purpose feels clear. You can’t just stick a straw into a pint or bottle or can of beer and be normal out in the world. But — it could be fun. Sipping a beer — straw-wise — this could be more relaxing than we know.

A brief perusal of Reddit and the horrible Google search AI suggests that drinking beer with a straw is bad because there are different levels (?) and aromas to the beverage.

i actually don’t think the straw would make me drink the beer faster but i am built different

If I am drinking a beer these days, I am almost never drinking a “nice” beer. My days of being able to consume and enjoy those are basically over, which is fine. I am either drinking a lager or whatever the cheap can is at the bar or liquor store, therefore the idea of “ruining” the beer feels pretty impossible to me. Beer = the ceiling of how good it can be when you’re trying to save money is basically low. Adding or subtracting a straw is probably not going to disrupt quality in any meaningful way. It will just look weird, which is kind of how I look already.

Will you see me out and about this summer drinking a michelada with a straw? Certainly. I’ll be stirring and sipping and generally enjoying the sensation of drinking beer and clamato juice out of a tube. Will you see me out and about this summer drinking a beer with a straw? Probably not. But maybe.

What are you drinking as the weather warms up? I also have a thing of the Island Punch Spindrifts — those are amazing.

Leave a comment

Lows go back into the 30s early in the week… sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

memba her?

shoutout spironolactone-induced low sodium

I can make them too, fwiw, but how nice is it to have a beverage handed to you… is this not the appeal of “going to a bar”?

It sounds bad.

Brief thoughts on this year's Oscar films

Fran Hoepfner — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 15:33:29 GMT

Subscribe now

I know I said I would write about Harry Styles

He keeps doing new stuff that pisses me off and then the post continues to expand. Also — for semi-related reasons — I still need to listen to the Jack Harlow album.

I don’t have predictions for you

I have no idea what’s going to happen at the Academy Awards tonight, and as is the case most late winter/early springs, I’m excited to not think or talk about these movies for many months, if not years, after the ceremony is over. In a passive sense I’m grateful that my beloved Testament of Ann Lee got completely snubbed so that people could continue to discover it and have a great time with iconic Mancunian Mother Ann, rather than have to do plate of corn style tweets about the nominated movies.

I have accumulated bits and bobs of writing over the course of the past year about many of these movies, and I’d like to expunge those from my drafts.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Woman sitting next to me walked out after the hamster scene. I love this movie, and I love Conan O’Brien as an Oscar host, but I think we must be honest with ourselves and say that he’s not very good here, as sharp as the stunt casting feels in theory.

Sinners

I like Ryan Coogler. I like Michael B. Jordan. I love Creed! I am curious about and mostly tolerate Ludwig Göransson who I believe is rapidly overhauling our understanding of movie music. I love what Miles Caton and Wunmi Mosaku are doing in this film, and I think Delroy Lindo is completely wasted. Jack O’Connell was on Skins! To me there is an undeniable Marvel-esque quality to this film, and it’s ongoing success is kind of like admitting that there are qualities to Marvel films that make them worthy of accolades, like when the camera swoops down and shows you all of our heroes before they do battle. Fun movie? Sure. Good movie? I think let’s take a step back. When everything devolves into guns in the last bit, I’m completely checked out and when there’s a post-credits scene, I’m slightly back in but in a bemused, skeptical kind of way. As far as the blend of Ideas and Spectacle go, however, we’ve had far worse and hopefully this will inspire far better.

F1

A sports movie — not unlike a musician biopic, or concert doc — has one simple job and that’s to convince me that this is the most important sport of all time, which F1 did, in a way that was mostly stupid. F1, to me, is like primo “Clintslop”: let’s look at this big beefy American man who can fix this twinky European sport by “jogging” and “throwing a tennis ball around.” Have you and your friends taken the Javier Bardem “not yet!” challenge? It’s where you leave a room shaking your finger and going “not yet!” like Javier Bardem does after Brad Pitt — sorry, “Sonny Hayes”1 — asks if he’s seen a miracle. I did it the whole month of July and can highly recommend it.

NOT YET!

It Was Just An Accident

I did not like this as much as No Bears, but it is quite excellent. Mariam Afshari, man.

Sirāt

I hate this movie. I hate it! Fake-deep, fake-edgy, fake-connected to a world that it knows nothing about. Two of those worlds, actually: raves and Morocco. There is no there there beneath the shock, and most of what film consists of is fantastically dull. I’m always apologizing to you guys for how I think Ruben Ostlund movies are funny. Well, you guys should be apologizing to me for enjoying Sirāt.

One Battle After Another

A few rows ahead of us, Christian Slater and Sam Esmail were sitting together. Some guy pushed by some people to go up to them and said, “your work changed my life!” to Sam Esmail and not Christian Slater, which felt kind of crazy to me but congrats on loving Mr. Robot that much. This film never quite lands in the “PTA magic” territory but it is quite excellent all the same. I feel depressed that Benicio del Toro — the movie’s greatest asset — dropped out of the awards conversation so quickly. I am a Sean Penn apologist but I find his performance too oversaturated in the film, the embodiment of kicking a dead horse.

The Secret Agent

I hope one day you guys also get to witness what it’s like to see Wagner Moura walk into a West Village bar full of boomers who are completely dazzled by his earring.

Sentimental Value

Masked woman on one side of me coughed the whole movie and woman on the other side of me couldn’t see behind the tall person in front of her so she leaned on my shoulder the whole time. So I confess: maybe I was predisposed not to like. I love the craft in Joachim Trier’s films but they all just have left me cold so far. Renate Reinsve is a generational talent, and I think what Elle Fanning is doing here is quite underrated. I love Stellan Skarsgard, of course, but I find the notes that character plays quite heavy-handed: the DVDs scene, I mean, you guys are like really easy marks, huh? Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas does a noble job saying the movie’s themes and ideas aloud.

Bugonia

I always randomly wind up liking all the Lanthimos films that everyone else hates. When this just feels like a chamber play, the movement is thrilling, scary, and deeply unpleasant. The score is some of the worst music I’ve heard all year.

Blue Moon

Maestro 2.

Hamnet

Remember History of Sound? I have to confess: I cried at Hamnet, but I did not cry at the end of Hamnet or when Jessie Buckley is screaming. I cried when the hawk died. That was their pet. I know Hamnet was their kid, but he got a whole play named after him (or so the movie argues). The hawk gets nothing. I’m admittedly compelled by the idea of “what if Hamlet was about something else?” but: maybe not that something else.

Marty Supreme

Like Gwyneth Paltrow, I too was fooled by Timothée Chalamet’s bad skin makeup. I thought: wow, his real acne looks amazing! The end of this movie functions like a punchline but it kind of moves me anyway. As someone who literally goes to the opera and ballet, I’m really laughing at everyone’s fake anger this past week: Sully voice can we get serious? Not enough chatter on Paltrow’s manicure in this movie.

Song Sung Blue

40% real movie, 50% fake movie, 10% something they should shoot into outer space so aliens can understand what is happening here, e.g. you can get hit by a car two times in the same place. Kate Hudson’s effervescence is good distraction from how truly worst of all time Hugh Jackman is in this movie. King Princess, however — solid!

No Other Choice

Park Chan-wook is rapidly losing me.

Josh O’Connor

Of his four movies this year, I liked the Knives Out movie the most, which is kind of dire. Remember History of Sound? Glad he’s reuniting with Alice Rohrwacher.

Best Original Score

I’ve yet to rock with what Jerskin Fendrix does — first and foremost, that name, which is fake. Joscelin Dent-Pooley — let’s try composing some music with THAT name for once, okay? Max Richter for Hamnet: this is elder abuse (he’s not that old). I’m pretending that Alexandre Desplat is in there for The Phoenician Scheme. Jonny Greenwood doesn’t have an Oscar yet, but should. For this film? Maybe. I was stunned by the extent to which a lot of contemporary composers said they were inspired by how much music Ludwig Göransson is able to get into a film — both in terms of volume and in terms of how often music is playing. That, in and of itself, is impressive to me, even if it doesn’t translate to music that is especially evocative. It felt like a pretty dire year for original scores; of course: I love what Daniel Blumberg did for Mother Ann, but that’s about it.

Best Original Song

I like the K-pop Demon Hunters song.

Frankenstein

Everything I have seen and know about this movie — including The Creature — I have seen and learned about via montages at various awards shows. Will my eyes ever see The Creature in his natural element? There’s no way to know.

This was short! What’s everyone eating tonight? It’s pizza and wings (and blogging) for me.

Leave a comment

Sonny Hayes… Jay Kelly… let’s sit with that

Fran news: I wrote a book

Fran Hoepfner — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 14:25:06 GMT

Subscribe now

Let’s not bury the lede on this one

In the fall of 2023, I started talking with an editor at Workman Publishing about writing a book about nepo babies. This was, at this point, a drawn out discourse focused primarily on the world of entertainment, but seemed to touch just about every facet of society — as it has for literal centuries. The project we dreamed into the reality was this book: The Field Guide to Nepo Babies, which is part-pop history, part-satirical field guide, part-old school magazine (yes, there are quizzes), and (smallish) part salient social commentary. I wanted the book to transcend the Hollywood aspect of nepotism, which is obviously the most prevalent form of the discourse, and bring in politics and art and finance and tech. I was, at that period of time, still somewhat freshly laid off of Gawker, and I wanted to take the skills I’d built at that job — being funny and smart and only slightly mean — and spin them into a grand thesis of how and why it feels like every generation thinks they’ve discovered the world is unfair.

I wrote the book in 2024 — in part while I had mono, memba her? — edited the book last year, and now it’s coming out on May 12, about two months from now. Just after Mother’s Day! Get your mom something that says: “Thanks for making sure it was hard for me to get a job.” (I’m kidding.) It has a lot of pictures, because you kind of have to see how people’s faces all look like one another (and it is, after all, a field guide). I’m very proud of the book, which was fun and rewarding and stupid (endorsement) to work on, as all writing can and should be when it is going well. My overarching thesis on the concept of nepotism is “net neutral,” which is kind of the only way to stay alive and not go insane.

Preorder is available from: Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and others, I’m sure. This is also a pro-library account, but for the sake of my publisher and my credit card debt, I must foreground the option to purchase.

If you live in New York, there will be one — possibly two — events the week(ish) around the release. Stay tuned! They will be fun. At least one of them will have a trivia component. If you don’t live in New York, um, we can get on a FaceTime, or something like that, and fight about whether or not Margaret Qualley was good or bad in Blue Moon. My answer may surprise you!

I felt literally insane typing all of these words <3 hence the brevity of the post, but I’ll be back later in the week to try to get at the root of what’s driving me insane about the new Harry Styles record.

In the meantime, I’ll be here to answer questions you might have about the book and/or nepo babies and/or whether or not I’m going to ever watch Frankenstein ahead of the Oscars. Say what you want about The Creature, but he is not a product of nepotism.

Leave a comment

It's not just an island

Fran Hoepfner — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:10:17 GMT

Subscribe now

We finished (re)watching Lost

I have been slowly but surely working my way through Industry on HBO. I love the show: it scratches an itch previously filled by other mean-spirited shows like The Idol and Skins. The obvious comparison would be something like Succession, because both are loosely connected to the world of “business,” but they are vastly different ways to spend an hour. Succession strived for something more literary; Industry is very clearly making it up as it goes along, establishing new rules for itself with each new go-around.

Industry is much better than The Idol — which was bad, but not boring, except for when it was boring — but in my estimation, it is about equal to the quality of Skins when Skins was really good. I think about Skins a lot while watching because every third minor character on Industry is someone who did their time on Skins (Ben Lloyd-Hughes, who played Greg on Industry,1 was infamous first gen villain Josh2; Freya Mavor was third gen as Mimi), and because it has that kind of stressful cruelty where I think everyone would be feeling way better on the show if they just took a nap. Every couple of years I’m tempted to rewatch Skins and I can never make it through more than fifteen minutes, in part because all the music cues are different in the American licensed version of the show and in part because it fills me with too much second-hand embarrassment. It’s obvious and melodramatic. Well-performed, yes, but the writing — the writing is stupid, right? It’s all been stupid?

I don’t do a ton of rewatching when it comes to TV, but Phil and I have spent the past year and change watching Lost. I’d seen Lost before — I watched when it aired and would revisit a handful of episodes in isolation3 — but Phil never had. Lost is such a maligned show now. It was a maligned show then, too, but it took a while to get there. I always liked the end of Lost. There’s stuff they did on the way there that pissed me off, but being a defender of the show’s ending has been a consistent opinion in my life — one formed in 2010 and not rethought since. I was relieved upon rewatch to mostly agree with myself about the show’s ending; I basically like all the woo-woo Damon Lindelof stuff where we have to accept that which is unknown in the world.

credit abc

To watch with Phil, however, was a blast — it’s crazy when someone doesn’t know “we’re gonna have you take the boy,” or what goes down in “Two for the Road,” or Nikki and Paolo. As if4 subjecting my roommate to six seasons of television wasn’t enough, I’ve now enlisted him to have a dialogue with me about the year we spent watching Lost. Call it “our Island year” — whatever.

A conversation about the television show Lost with my roommate Phil

Hi Phil. I think it would make sense to start at the end of Lost and the argument that has plagued the show’s legacy for more than fifteen years. Is that final episode — Lost’s “ending” — good?

Yes, the finale of LOST (it’s LOST, all caps like MF DOOM) is good, with the massive caveat that I am predisposed to be very moved by this type of bullshit about God’s infinite capacity for love and the beauty of mercy and forgiveness and how it’s never too late to make peace and be forgiven for the wrong you’ve done to yourself and others, provided it’s done in a sort of Par Lagerkvist or C.S. Lewis kind of way that doesn’t treat the reader like a toddler and isn’t clearly informed by bigotry, which is why I also basically liked Wake Up, Dead Man despite that movie being quite obviously not that good.

Okay, well I’m going to keep spelling it “Lost” even though I understand it’s formatted like TÁR, who is MF DOOM for girls (?). I think it’s fair to say that you have a greater patience than I do for convoluted lore but most of what precedes the objectively good finale is pretty shitty. You had a heads up from me about how downhill things go in the lead-up to the finale — whether that’s the sixth season or even the fifth one, or whatever — but I’m curious where you see the show wobbling the most and what wobbles you were willing to tolerate more than others.

MF DOOM is for everyone. I found that basically everything that happens on the island after Hiroyuki Sanada shows up in season six to be quite unbearable. The Jacob/Bosch stuff doesn’t work, the people in the temple suck, the way it’s hurtling clumsily to tie up the hundreds of little mysteries left open by the previous five seasons, but this is offset by the “flash sideways” stuff which, in my opinion, is some of the best stuff on the show. When LOST is bad, it’s genuinely pretty awful, but the magic of it being network TV from twenty-ish years ago is that each season is so many episodes, so you come to love all of these characters so deeply, even guys like Faraday and Miles who you thought you’d hate for sure. This means that when the show is flying off the rails and over a shark with a Dharma Initiative logo on it’s tail, you’re not feeling like the show has gotten bad so much as you are frustrated at the ignoble bullshit your dear friends are having to endure.

As far as what I was willing to tolerate, there’s a lot that seems to universally loathed by the fandom (all the season five stuff taking place in the 1970s, the “cage arc” that opens season three) that I found to be totally awesome and delightful. I love the cages! The fish biscuits!

Watching it for a second time, with a decade plus of distance and the benefit of not having to wait week-to-week (or more) for episodes I’m curious if there was stuff that was worse than you remember, or stuff that you were dreading which turned out to be not that bad?

Stuff that was worse than I remember can basically be boiled down to “the character Charlie,” who occupies a lot of time and space in early seasons of the show but really wastes a lot of time. I loved Charlie as a kid because Dominic Monaghan was one of three actors on the show I recognized (the others being Matthew Fox, from Party of Five-related TV Guide covers, and Terry O’Quinn, who I knew from Alias — another show I’m always tempted to rewatch… Bradley Cooper was on it!). Charlie, not unlike the television show Lost itself, gets a pass from fans because the end of his arc is so good. I don’t disagree about the nature of his story, but some of the stuff with him in the lead-up to all that is really tedious.

I love the cages. I love the 1970s stuff. I was dreading arcs of characters I remembered being unsatisfying: Mr. Eko, Ana Lucia, Shannon. I recall loathing a lot of Season Two from when I was a kid for reasons that I don’t fully recall — maybe fatigue with the numbers, the “Tailies,” etc. That was all fine, if not totally thrilling this time around. There’s a lot I remember being creeped out by in early seasons of Lost when I watched that now just feels very playful and mischievous — like the old Dharma Initiative videos.

We — society — watch so much streaming television now that the notion of a 22-episode season feels insane and novel. When I was rewatching Buffy and Angel in 2020, I admired how every other episode jumped between monster of the week and something more largely narrative. Lost is kind of trying to do something narrative every week, which just seems straight-up impossible at that volume unless you’re, say, our new show: Hunter X Hunter.

LOST having so few filler/bottle/Smoke Monster of the week episodes does feel crazy in a 22-episode season, but that’s exactly why it was such a cultural phenomenon at the time of its release. It’s really interesting as a document of a hugely transitory time in TV history, especially because LOST itself is more responsible for that transition than any other single television show except maybe the Battlestar Galactica reboot, which also premiered in 2004 and was hugely expensive and narrative focus and (crucially) had the 13-episode seasons that are now the norm. I watched BSG as it was airing and remember thinking it was radically different and the best television show I’d ever seen. I wonder if I would’ve felt the same way about LOST, especially during it’s first two seasons?

We will talk about Hunter X Hunter more later, when our friends Gon, Killua, Kurapika and Leorio are finished with the Hunter’s Exam.

Tea.

Like, LOST and BSG premiered many years before Breaking Bad, Mad Men, [insert third show that you, dear reader, like and see referenced often on Twitter]. The Sopranos, The Shield, and The Wire are often considered the foundational texts of “prestige TV,” but those shows, especially in their pre-LOST (and BSG) seasons, are much closer to the TV of the 1990s, with largely self-contained episodes with subtle narrative growth that lead to season finales that set the stage for the status quo of the following season. LOST is the Ur-text for “previously on” hyper-narrative water cooler TV.

LOST is probably not “worth watching” in 2026, but I’m really glad we did it because despite it falling off the rails and everyone saying that Lindelof’s whole schtick is executed so much better in The Leftovers with Beautiful Carrie Coon, the long seasons give you so much time to hang out with these characters, while the intensely serialized nature of the show’s plotting means that everyone undergoes meaningful, significant change instead of getting “Flanderized” as the show continues for season after season.

Which brings me to the ultimate question: who are and were your guys on Lost?

Desmond number one with a bullet, one of the sickest guys to ever be on TV. Sawyer Number 2. I love Hurley of course, I love Eko, I love Locke, I love Sun and Jin. Juliet, Faraday, Miles. Who’s better TV than Ben Linus? No one!

It’s been a month-and-change since we finished LOST, and I’ve already basically forgotten every plot point that is stupid or bad, and the main thing I remember is characters, and I look back on all of them so fondly, even Charlie and Ana Lucia who pissed me off, I now look back on and think, “that’s my friend.”

I think we have a lot of the same guys, but who am I missing that you think deserve a shout?

DR. ARZT. Frankly — and perhaps controversially — Jack. Matthew Fox, not unlike David Boreanaz, is just really good at being on television. I really can’t imagine watching this show and not liking Jack, and yet some people seem to do it just fine.

Jack is so tragic, and has such a thankless but necessary dramaturgical purpose, and Fox plays him with aplomb.

Jack as a character has aged so well because we live in a time of nihilistic skepticism where everyone loves doing logic and not accepting when things are random or weird. To me, he’s a much more successful anchor than Justin Theroux’s Kevin Garvey in The Leftovers because Kevin is almost instantly just a straight-up weirder guy. I’d be curious to talk to someone who likes Jack but doesn’t like the finale. Sound off below!!!

I wanna circle back on Sun and Jin briefly. I’ve maybe never seen you as angry at something not real as when we watched their still very controversial and unsatisfying death episode. People still complain about this constantly. I remember it leaking ahead of its airing in 2010 and being preemptively mad. It hasn’t aged well, and only makes the final stretch of the show almost unbearable to watch.

The night we watched Sun and Jin die was also the night I watched Bo Nix and the Denver Broncos’ Super Bowl dreams die. Immediately following a thrilling OT victory over the Buffalo Bills that made Josh Allen cry like a bitch, we found out Nix had broken his foot on the game-winning play and would be out for the remainder of the postseason — a heartbreaking end to what should’ve been a magical night where the twinkling city lights shined just a little bit brighter. I thought LOST would take my mind off things, but Sun and Jin dying only served to make me feel as though I would never get another win for the rest of my life.

It’s a testament to how good the characterization is on LOST that their bullshit death made me both sad and angry enough to cry. It’s something they barely manage to get away with because of how the finale handles the deaths of every character except for Nikki, Paolo, the guy they call Frogurt, and Arzt, who are apparently in Hell and don’t get to go to the purgatorial nondenominational Abrahamic place of worship that serves as the gates to Heaven in the show’s finale.

Mr. Eko isn’t there either. :(

Eko had already made his peace with God, I think. Also the actor was one of the traffic infraction crew who were written off of the show because they kept behaving badly behind the wheel on the island of Oahu.

Frogurt, Arzt, Nikki & Paolo were all confirmed in the afterlife, though, you see them on the plane when it lands, and Desmond didn’t try to wake them up at all, despite them dying the most horrific deaths on the whole show.

Desmond culpable. Arzt is at the high school with Ben, and Ben isn’t in the church (by choice). Maybe they have to do more blackmail before entering Heaven.

Okay, a few rapid-fire: Three best episodes?

The Constant, Nikki & Paolo, the first one after the 1970s time jump where it’s revealed that Sawyer, Juliet, Jin, and Miles have all been working at Dharma in 1976.

The way we watched The Constant the week of our wedding > > > > > Mine are probably The Constant, the S3 finale (“we have to go back”), and Not in Portland where we meet Juliet. Where are you living on the island? Caves? Beaches? Dharma houses? “The temple”?

I’m chilling in The Hatch. I’m smoking drinking Dharma Beers and smoking Dharma Cigs in the hatch and listening to Uriah Heep’s “Look At Yourself” on that hifi setup. I’m doing pull-ups. I’m pushing the button no problem.

Jack’s tattoos?

BTW, he don't have internet so he obviously don’t know what’s right or wrong…

Kate?

Evangeline Lilly is beautiful and sometimes she lets a little Canadian /aʊ/ slip out, which makes me feel joy when it happens.

Great. I have to go to bed. Last question: who on Hunter X Hunter would do best on the island?

Gon and his friends would wrap shit up in 30 episodes at most. He’d find The Others by episode 5 and beat Ben Linus’s ass and find Jacob and become friends with Richard and Locke. He would cry when he fights Bosch because he can’t fathom how someone would be unwilling or unable to see the good in people. Leorio would be so horny for Kate. Fran, you don’t even know what Nen is. We have such a journey ahead of us. Fearsome monsters, mystical animals, vast riches, hidden treasures, magical lands, secret realms. The word “unknown” exudes a magical power.

There are those who are fascinated by that power.

People call them Hunters.

Thank you for reading and I promise I’ll be posting more regularly in the future. Stay warm and safe out in the snow if you live in someplace where the snow is going crazy style right now. Are you a Lost ending defender? A Jack defender? Let’s keep the Lost discussion going below. Can you believe I’m now watching Hunter X Hunter? BTW, book club announcement is happening mid-March. Plus something else exciting in the meantime…

Leave a comment

Industry Greg > > > > > > Cousin Greg

Remember how SCARY it was when he kidnapped Effy?

Mostly The Constant.

Relentless spoilers ahead.

Altitude sickness

Fran Hoepfner — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 15:10:27 GMT

Subscribe now

Red eyes

A little before midnight on Tuesday, I boarded a plane in Salt Lake City to fly not directly back to New York — because my non-stop had been cancelled — but to Tampa from which I would then take a flight to New York. I wondered, briefly, if any celebs who had been at Sundance would have been punted onto the Florida detour. The answer was yes, in that there was someone who had been involved in a Sundance movie on my flight who was, perhaps, the only person attending the fest who did not deserve any more inconveniences for the rest of their life.

As was the case on my flight out to Utah, there was an open seat between me and the person in my row. I put on my Airpods, took off my baseball hat, put on my eye mask, and tightened my hood over my head for maximum sensory deprivation, only to then feel a tap on my shoulder. I pushed my eyemask up, and the man sitting by the window said something to me. It took three attempts — he was quiet, planes are loud, I had pods in — before I understood his question:

I laughed, because how else are you supposed to respond to a question like that, said, “kind of,” and then tried, in vain, to fall asleep.

By the time I got back to New York on Wednesday morning, I was so tired I wanted to cry. The rest of the work day was easy — no one needed much of me for anything — but I could not overcome the heaviness of exhaustion. I asked Phil to make spaghetti for dinner, not in a Bon Appetit tomato sauce from scratch type of way, but the way I had it growing up: noodles, sauce, Kraft green canister of cheese, fin. The meal was nostalgic and perfect — the antidote to a week of mostly takeout and free appetizers and Celcius for breakfast.

It was an immense privilege to go to Sundance again, because even when the movies are just okay, there’s a thrill and a pleasure to being at a film festival with people you know and like and respect. This year I saw the exact same number of films (fifteen) and did approximately eight times the number of interviews (maybe not fifteen… but something that felt like fifteen). Most of those interviews live online and most of them were not as intimidating as this.

my mom only recognized one person here besides me

Doing interviews is always a game of adrenaline. I am terrified, typically, not because I am starstruck but because I am being recorded — on video, on audio, whatever. I’m more used to it now than ever before, but it’s still an intense feeling to know that any and all fuckups could live in perpetuity. As the person asking questions, it’s your responsibility to maintain a healthy, open energy which is easy when it’s your friends and harder when it’s people you’ve just met, people who might be in any possible mood, people who do not live especially normal lives. I am not especially shy and I do not get easily starstruck — the most starstruck I have been in years was documented here. I am overwhelmed with second-hand embarrassment when I watch or read interviews where it’s clear to me that the person asking questions is far more concerned with being liked than anything else. I want to be liked, of course, but the best way to do that is mostly to be as normal as possible. I mostly don’t engage with interview subjects outside of the framework of an interview unless there is some actual connection I have to them and/or their work,1 and even then, I’m more inclined to just let their memory of me be twenty minutes of questions then moving on with their lives.

Of films I saw at Sundance, there were four promising debuts: Adam Meeks’s Union County, Vera Miao’s Rock Springs, Louis Paxton’s The Incomer, and John Wilson’s The History of Concrete. Sam wrote more eloquently than I ever could about Union County, which struck a nerve like none other. Rock Springs is the type of horror movie — or ghost story, really — that I really get something out of versus watching behind a pillow. Light on scares and shocks, heavy on what a dead thing is and can be. Not unlike Union County, it is a painfully relevant film. The Incomer is a modern take on Local Hero (“Local Hero by way of The Wicker Man” is what the director told me — which I’m inclined to believe because it is also a musically-inclined film, though certainly less dependent on horror tropes). I have quite a low tolerance for whimsy, of which there was a lot this year, but The Incomer fell right into my sweet spot of what is both enjoyable and light-hearted. The History of Concrete is such a marvelous encapsulation of what Wilson’s work can be at its very best. Watching his work I feel the way I do when I watch something by Weerasethakul or Zhangke: I have no clue how time is passing, it doesn’t matter how time is passing, I am able to relinquish control over my senses until the experience is over.

The biggest film of the festival before it began was The Moment. I thought it was fine: competent and stylish (no one can deny that Aidan Zamiri has a knack for this kind of thing) but weighed down by a sort of self-seriousness the whole movie is built around making fun of. There are jokes, sure, but not enough of them. I have great affection for Charli XCX’s music, but part of the appeal of brat — and the subsequent remix album — was that it was a piece of music that really spoke for itself. Now we’re on month, what, 19? of explaining what brat is and was and could be. Let’s wrap it up and get to what is sure to be a horrible Harry Styles album. The biggest film of the festival now is Josephine, the sophomore feature from Beth de Araújo, starring Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan as parents of a child who witnesses a violent sexual assault and grapple with the aftermath of how to deal with such a thing — legally, emotionally, psychologically. The film is not quite artful or abstract enough to be an image-driven work of impressionism, nor is it quite smart or humble enough in its seriousness to be a harrowing work of social reckoning. People say this all the time, but the thing that makes Kenneth Lonergan movies good is that they are kinda funny. Trying to tackle a subject this miserable and scary and upsetting without even a hint of irony or levity actually feels more absurd and inappropriate.

The best time I had at the movies at the festival was at the premiere of David Wain’s Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass. I’m surprised at how divisive it’s been between critics; to me, it is a perfect return to form. I love to laugh and smile and to look at Ken Marino on screen. The best time I had watching a TV show was the pilot adaptation of Alexandra Tanner’s Worry called Worried — directed by Nicole Holofcener, starring Gideon Adlon, Rachel Kaly, and Devin Bostick, in a script by Alex and Leslie Arfin. Again: I love to laugh and smile. This show doesn’t have Ken Marino in it (yet?) but I’m not holding it against anyone.

I got a bit of extra time towards the end of my stint in Utah to see friends: some in from New York, some in from LA, others now local Utah. I have felt surprisingly emotional since coming back, crying on Thursday night and Saturday night for reasons that never warranted tears in the first place. Exhaustion, maybe, and some latent stress, but also gratitude. It is nice to have a respite where I can talk about new things, new people, and new ideas during a time of year where everything feels the same kind of stale it did at the end of last year. I owe people emails and I’m behind on journaling, but today the sun was out when I woke up — just as bright and golden as it was when I arrived in Utah last week.

Do you have questions about my “Sundance experience”? Brand activations? The Chase Sapphire Lounge? (I didn’t go this year.) I kind of liked the Gregg Araki movie to my surprise. What have you been watching and reading? Do you think I will ever get around to seeing Frankenstein?

Leave a comment

Ideally it is an literal connection — like a friend or acquaintance in common, or we’ve met previously doing an interview — though a connection to their art — have I seen them on stage? are they in one of my actual favorite movies of all time? — is also loosely valid enough for me to break through the barrier of professionalism.

Unhealthy Girl's Guide to Eating Healthy in the New Year

Fran Hoepfner — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 17:12:30 GMT

Subscribe now

Intermission

I — me — Fran — am in Park City for the town’s last ever Sundance Film Festival ahead of its move to Boulder, Colorado. While I am busy seeing a lot of movies and being the most sleepy woman alive, I’m happy to welcome Claire back to the publication with a guest post. She previously wrote about movie dogs and The Eternal Daughter, and now she’s here to talk about FOOD! I’ll see you all next week.

illustration by Erin Krogh

“I don’t like food, I love it. If I don’t love it, I don’t swallow.”
— Anton Ego

I was a voracious child, blessed with a fast metabolism and cursed with an eating disorder they hadn’t come up with yet.1 For about two decades I ate whatever I wanted, only what I wanted, and lots of it — as a 95lb 15-year-old it was not at all unusual for me to put away six slices of pizza for dinner, and I did not so much as touch a vegetable until I was probably 19, when I got my first on-campus apartment and figured out you could put lemon juice on broccoli. As I got older I slowly but surely expanded my palate until I could boast enjoyment of more than ten different vegetables (!), but since I wasn’t fat, I never felt any real pressure to change the underlying relationship I had with food. Sure, I should eat better, because that’s what adults do, but ultimately I’m free to do so at my own pace.

That’s what I thought; then I turned 30, and the doctor told me in no uncertain terms it was time to “make some changes.” So, I turned my whole diet upside down. I hadn’t been eating like a teenager anymore––I have a fiancé to feed now, and he likes eating vegetables and fish, but I still made primarily carb-heavy staples like pasta, breaded chicken, noodles, and rice dishes. Now it was absolutely no fried food, no dessert, no beef or pork, whole wheat everything including sandwich bread, and don’t even think about putting mayo on that sandwich. Everyone praised me and my “discipline,” but I was not being disciplined, I was being spartan. Worst of all, the first great love of my life, eating, was now joyless, at best a necessary task to be completed three times a day, like brushing my teeth, and at worst, a trial of endurance against my sensitive palate. I snapped in about two weeks.

Then, after an especially good cry I dialed it back in, and have now found a balance much more suited to serving both my heart (physical) and my heart (emotional). Mentally I can attest to being less miserable and insane, and in terms of health, while I haven’t retested my blood, I know I’m on the right track because when I eat like I used to — literally just a few months ago — I feel, physically, quite wretched.

What follows is my advice based on my own experience with a “health journey” so far. I am absolutely not an expert, or even a convincing fake expert that posts healthy recipes on Instagram — just a normal person to whom this does not come easily, but is nonetheless doing her best. So take it with a grain of salt… HAH!

Be specific

There are plenty of years between 19 and 30 (notably, eleven of them), so why now? Why didn’t I “eat healthy” all those times before, when I thought about it and decided I probably should? For me it was the magic word: cholesterol. Not because cholesterol is the be-all-end-all of health by any means, but because it is one specific metric, with specific associated levers that must be pulled or not pulled in order to improve it.

“Healthy” is a moving target, and a very opaque one. Without even getting into “what is healthy for one person’s body may not… etc,” just determining what is healthy for you to eat can be deceptively challenging. If you have ever tried to “eat healthy” your first move was probably to start reading nutrition fact labels, but for me this invited paralyzing anxiety; I could understand what each individual value meant, but the overall good (or harm) of the item compared to a similar one — this granola mix versus another, say — was indecipherable as long as I was weighing each of those values equally. Should I go with the one that has more fat, or more sugar? The conundrum would leave me staring into space at the grocery store for minutes on end, and ultimately I’d get so stressed I wouldn’t buy anything.

My suggestion is, pick something specific to improve, connected to a specific result. Since I am trying to lower my cholesterol, I’m focusing on reducing sugar and animal fat and increasing fiber. This means no more ice cream in the freezer, no more chicken skin on my sandwiches,2 and a whole lot less pasta. Meanwhile, avocados, black beans, and oatmeal are in. But equally important to the changes I have made are the changes I’m not making, the many many things I could also be obsessing over which I have decided to let go: sodium, nitrates (or nitrites?), macros, calories, portion size, vitamins… we simply cannot do it all at once. At least, I couldn’t. If I’m going to eat the vegetables, they need to have salt on them––they just do. But by making this small concession, I have made my priorities much more achievable. Now when I look at the nutrition facts, my eye goes right to the sugar line, the saturated fat next, and then I do not worry about the rest. When the rules are clear, the decision is easy; I’m not agonizing over pros and cons, and I don’t feel guilty that I should be doing more.

Meal prepping, meal planning

Some benefits of meal prepping — cooking more than one meal ahead — are obvious (time, energy, cost), but the true value for me is eliminating choice fatigue. One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced so far is a kind of existential dread, walking into the kitchen to make lunch and getting hit with the thought “what do I even eat anymore?” OK, so I’m definitely not putting chicken skin on the sandwich but then… what should go on it? I could answer that question once, a few times, but since my old solutions no longer worked, I felt like I was hitting a wall meal after meal; it’s like the autopilot for cooking I’d spent years developing has been turned off.

Meal prepping solves this by reducing the number of decisions you need to make in order to take the correct action (eating healthy lunch). Every choice about what needs to go in the burrito, what needs to get left out, and the quantities, has already been made by my past self, leaving my present self to enjoy the peace-inducing process of eating lunch without ever having to think about my nutrition. I cannot stress enough how important that is to me, a person that virtually never worried about her nutrition until she was suddenly inundated with crushing guilt for doing it wrong.

The logic here applies to planning meals as well; the execution may happen later, but you can still frontload the difficult part, deciding what to make, well ahead of time. Rather than dumping recipes into a folder (the choice paralysis problem will appear again as soon as you open it), I recommend assigning specific meals to specific days. For instance, if your goal is to eat vegan more frequently, find four vegan recipes and assign them to your four easiest weeknights that month. On the topic of planning…

When to go “off-piste”

I know it’s OK to make exceptions — we all know that. So why does doing it feel so bad? Here is what I have discovered: eating an “unhealthy” food, or any given food, doesn’t feel bad, what feels bad is breaking a promise to yourself. When you put it like that, the solution is obvious: make a promise you can keep. I’m not going to give up Popeyes forever, so pretending to swear off it would ring hollow. What I can promise is not to eat Popeyes on impulse; if I want Popeyes I have to decide, while I am of sound body and mind, that I’m having Popeyes for dinner — no stumbling in because I happen to be passing by on my way home from a bar. Similarly, I will decide before I leave the house for a coffee shop if today is a croissant day. This way, I don’t get there, see that it looks “so good,” and splurge, then feel bad about myself for lacking control. Having self control in the moment is hard, so I keep self control as far away from the moment as I can. Then I don’t battle with “should I, or shouldn’t I?” The battle is over before it begins.

The reason this works is, counterintuitively, because I sometimes say yes; if someone told you “not today” every single day for your entire life, how long would it take you to start thinking that was code for “never”? Trust is a two way street, even within yourself — because I trust myself to say yes once in a while, I also trust myself to stay firm when the answer is no. When friends compliment my “discipline,” I think this is what they’re really referring to. Just like interpersonal trust, trust in yourself grows slowly, but it will happen if you consistently honor your decisions, whatever they may be. Then there’s really no such thing as “cheating” on your diet, because it’s all part of the plan.

Saying no — verbally

Many well-meaning friends will make what you are doing harder.3 At a point, you will need to put your foot down — either that or, if they really don’t get it, stop explaining and start lying, say you’re full or you’ll finish it later or you have diarrhea, whatever you need to say. I do plan out exceptions to my rules based on my social calendar, but everything on my social calendar, I quickly realized, cannot be an exception if I want to succeed. It sucks to be the person vetoing the Thai restaurant because my favorite dish, pad see ew, has 230% my daily value of cholesterol, and ordering something else while everyone else ate it would make me deeply unhappy. But making sacrifices for your health isn’t just about buying whole wheat bread; lifestyle changes can be harder to adapt to than the food itself. I’m not sure if it helps, but here are some things people have said to me, and what I say now:

“Want to meet at the sports bar?”

“Sure, but do you mind if I eat first? I’m trying to avoid fried food.”

“You can’t have any!?” / “You can’t have chips!?” / “You can’t even have one!?”

“I can, I just don’t want to right now.”

“But you love ice cream!”

“Yep, I do. I don’t need any today, though.”

Meal logging

I am a “planner girlie.” I love my journal, my fountain pens, my sticker collection, and I love using all of the above to document anything and everything in my life — this is Twitter for me. But I maintain that meal logging, meal planning’s neglected sister, is helpful even if you’re not into all that. It doesn’t have to be crazy detailed, with complicated stats or calorie counts (unless those are important to you), just make a table for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and write “oatmeal” or whatever. This is actually a trick I’ve carried over from budgeting; even without setting a hard limit on my spending I found that just the act of writing down what I did after the fact made me more mindful in the moment, and kept me more accountable.

Additionally, you might end up learning something about yourself from the process; maybe you eat way more pizza than you realized, or maybe you don’t eat as poorly as you thought. Either way, logging has been especially helpful at the start of my journey. If nothing else has worked for you, I really recommend picking a short, set period of time and giving this one a try.

Go to the damn doctor

There’s no nice way to say this but I’m saying it because I needed to hear it too: I know some of you out there haven’t had an annual checkup this year, or last year, or since you moved to the city. This is your sign: go on zocdoc or whatever, plug in your health insurance and “PCP,” and make yourself an appointment. How are you supposed to “be healthier” if you don’t even know what’s wrong with you? Mom, if you are reading this, you were right.

Do not eat food you hate

Some people can do what my friend Tyler does: reach into the fridge once a day and eat five tightly-balled fistfuls of raw spinach. I cannot. Eating strictly for nutrition is just too demotivating, too sad. “Losing” so many of my favorite foods, at least in the sense of them being part of my everyday diet, was difficult, but for someone like me, who still has some extremely restrictive sensory issues when it comes to food, choking down something I don’t like is my personal hell. It has been absolutely essential for me to focus on the positives — by that I don’t necessarily mean “look on the bright side” so much as “what can I say yes to?” If I try something new and it’s still a hard pass, I will never force it — I want experimenting to be rewarding at best and worth trying at worst, never punishing. And when it comes to the successes, I’ve tried to prioritize discovering and iterating on new favorites, new skills, and new techniques, so that the process of cooking stays joyful. A lifetime of healthy habits is the ultimate goal, and keeping that joy, not suffering through perfectly balanced but horrible meals, is what is going to get me there.

Thank you for reading, thank you for your support as I have complained about my diet these past few months, and good luck doing whatever’s good for you too!

I am not diagnosed with ARFID but this is just one of those things where you read the description and you’re like “yep.”

Loyal FranMag readers will remember my article about making the most out of your chicken from this time last year––I think all of the advice there still stands, but skip the schmaltz if you are watching your cholesterol like me.

Fran note: sorry.

Whats going on with mycomplexion

Fran Hoepfner — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 15:11:00 GMT

The Fran Magazine Best of 2025 Extravaganza

Fran Hoepfner — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 17:02:32 GMT

Subscribe now

Goodbye to 2025

My favorite year-end tradition of every year has been soliciting year-end lists from the Fran Magazine inner circle. As I texted a friend yesterday, this year’s lists really showcase a full spectrum of human emotion. I’m so grateful to everyone who wrote and submitted lists, and to all who read and comment and share anything here in Fran Magazine. Happy new year!

🚨THIS POST IS TOO LONG FOR EMAIL 📧 PLEASE CLICK THE BUTTON ON THE TOP RIGHT THAT SAYS “READ IN APP” FOR MAXIMUM LIST ENJOYMENT 📋

The best album of 2025 was Hayley Williams’s Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party. I drove “Kill Me” into the ground and we are currently heading toward the Earth’s core.
However the best song of 2025, measured in the amount of time I’ve spent lip-syncing in the mirror, is a tie between Taylor Swift’s “Father Figure” and Lady Gaga’s “How Bad Do U Want Me.”
I read a terrifying amount this year, mostly for research, so I’m going to pick the first story I read this year that comes to mind as my story of the year: “Ginungagap,” Michael Swanwick.
The most problematic author I started getting into was Alice Munro, which I’m thinking about mostly because I couldn’t remember a Munro story for entry three.
My favorite food discovery of the year was the House Foods Tofu Cutlet, if there is anything bad to know about the House Foods Tofu Cutlet, do not tell me, because it is tasty and I like it and I just eat it out of the package it’s good.

Ben Empey

Top ten movies I watched this year that made me shake my head and think “this is exactly what is happening to me here in 2025” (alphabetical)

Avatar: Fire and Ash — I saw my world torn limb from limb and I had to fight
Days of Wine and Roses (1962) — I got sober
Field of Dreams (1989) — I began a spiritual journey that I didn’t understand
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You — I couldn’t see beyond my suffering like literally even for a second
Is This Thing On? — I started doing standup comedy just to feel something
It Was Just an Accident — I was faced with moral decisions roughly hourly
One Battle After Another — I felt like I was being chased every single day
Steve — I was afraid every single day
The Testament of Ann Lee — I experienced delusions of grandeur and I frequently moved my body in visually distressing but cathartic ways
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) — I experienced psychosis

Blythe Roberson

City, Michael Heizer. Nothing in the world could convince me to “go to Vegas on vacation” except getting to spend three hours in the desert exploring this mile-and-a-half long masterpiece of land art, which I did in May and which totally amazed, inspired, baffled, delighted me. Shoutout to Ed, the septuagenarian who drove us the final 90 minutes to City on dirt roads, and who met his wife when she was a barrel racer at the rodeo. I said, “Ed, on Yellowstone they say barrel racer girls are crazy,” and Ed said, “Well yes, they are.”
ER. Incredible The Pitt prequel. I love to watch ER and tell my boyfriend when Noah Wyle is standing in front of the building where I interned at The Onion.
Lonesome Dove. I didn’t invent 2025 being the year of Lonesome Dove, I just invented Lonesome Dove (also Texas).
Outlaw Music Festival. There comes a time when you realize Willie Nelson is 92 and Bob Dylan is 84 and you have to see them right now or they’re gonna die. I had to take an Amtrak AND a ferry but I made it to Camden, NJ to see the Outlaw Fest featuring Willie, Bob, Waxahatchee, Sheryl Crow, and Sheryl Crow’s chihuahua in a Baby Bjorn playing congas on “Everyday Is A Winding Road.” Bob Dylan SHOCKED me by playing the hits and INFURIATED everyone else by doing the whole thing while crouched behind a piano and hidden under a cloak — genuinely hilarious!!
One Battle After Another. Lunatics, haters, and punk trash :)
Georgia O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiú, New Mexico. If you can figure out how to get there while it’s open, do.
69 Atlantic. One of the great pleasures of heterosexual monogamy IN MY EXPERIENCE is the time I have spent this year seeing magic, gasping in disbelief that that was, in fact, my card. I’ve seen it all over the place (Tannen’s Magic Shop, Speakeasy Magick, Penn & Teller in Vegas, a demonstration in Pike Place’s magic store, repeatedly begging my boyfriend to do One Trick For Me), but the highlight has been my many visits to see some of the world’s best magicians at 69 Atlantic, a new venue for sleight-of-hand magic in Brooklyn. They like to maintain the mystery so I will just say… go !!!
Italy. It is psycho that it look this long for me, a Catholic-themed woman who loves to dress like a beautiful widow and eat tomatoes… a woman who is fluent in Italian (aka conversational in Spanish and 100% sure that’s the same thing)... to go to Italy, but I did this summer, and it turns out Italy is cool.
“Beer Never Broke My Heart” by Luke Combs. I barely drink and I certainly do not drink beer (😔bloating😔) but I love to listen to and line dance to this song. I said “Can you believe this is my #3 most played song of the year?” and my boyfriend said “I cannot listen to this again.”
Quaker Meeting at the Friends Cemetery in Prospect Park. Tied with “Squirrel Hunting in Wisconsin” for best hour(s) spent sitting outside, totally silent, looking at trees, wondering how best to live.

Bobby Finger

TOP TEN ITEMS I ACQUIRED IN FORTNITE IN 2025

10. Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga “Die With a Smile” Emote
9. Ford Mustang Shelby GT500 Car
8. Itchy Sidekick (The Simpsons)
7. Chani Skin (Dune)
6. Marge Simpson Skin (The Simpsons)
5. Elton John “Rocket Man” Jam Track
4. Nike Air Force 3 Nigo Shoes
3. "The Best Cat" Winston Sidekick
2. The Killers “Mr. Brightside” Emote
1. Xenomorph Skin (Alien Film Version, not Alien: Earth Version, which is uglier)

Brad Efford

Top 10 things I love about Bed-Stuy, my neighborhood where I live:

Ursula vegan nachos
The fact that the bodega by the Bed-Stuy aquarium changed its name to be in theme with the aquarium and then the aquarium dried up so now it makes no sense
When the Outshines at MetFresh are on sale for $3.99
The Fulton PureGym fka Blink
Running into Fran randomly #random
DJ Bird’s Soup Stop Sign
The Word is Change
Alive Herbals II / the house music that’s always playing at Alive Herbals II
The Bed-Stuy Pickleball Club WhatsApp chat
All of the dogs at Glorietta Baldy

Brendan Boyle

10 rejected needledrops from Miroirs no. 3

Cam

The Random Supporting Roles In Films That Have Haunted Me All Year (Complimentary):

Aisling Francoisi as Marcie in Twinless: A really savvy performance that threads the needle on what I believe is James Sweeney’s commentary about how gay men unfortunately view straight women as disposable playthings? The fact that Marcie & Clare from The Nightingale are played by the same person is mind-boggling to me.
Bridget Everett as Louise in Wake Up Dead Man: When she showed up on screen I immediately gasped & clenched my boyfriend’s thigh so hard. Best scene of the film by far. If the acclaim for Somebody Somewhere means Bridget gets to show up for one scene & steal movies for the next decade or so, I will die happy.
Danny Huston as Richard Cane in The Naked Gun: It would’ve been so easy for this movie to play it straight with the villain, making him actually scary & dangerous and let the loopy comedy bounce off of that, so it’s to my great delight that Downtown Danny Huston gets to cut loose here. Nothing made me laugh harder this year than his overreaction to getting punched in the “tummy” by Neeson.
Isaac Mizrahi as Merle in Marty Supreme: Of course Paltrow’s Kay Stone has a gay bestie running her shit. What does he have, two, three lines? I don’t care, Merle is fabulous. In a movie full of impressive turns from non-professional actors, Mizrahi tickled me the most.
Jayme Lawson as Pearline in Sinners: Okay, first of all, stunning. And with all of those incredible musical performances, I feel like her unbridled, post-coital, barn-storming “Pale, Pale Moon” — just as the shit stars to hit the fan — doesn’t get enough credit.
Junglepussy as Junglepussy in One Battle After Another: This one’s for all the Support The Girls super-fans out there. Centuries from now they’ll still be quoting her speech as she struts across the bank counter. “See my face? See my face!” Ugh, perfection!!!
Lucy Liu as Rebekah in Presence: I haven’t seen Rosemead yet (Sorry! Should I? I should, right?) but it drives me crazy how underutilized she’s been in Hollywood. I didn’t love every beat of this movie, but my god when she locks eyes with the camera at the end??? Goosebumps! What a star!
Marisa Abela as Clarissa in Black Bag: Nothing has made me feel like more of an idiot for having not watched Industry yet than seeing Marisa absolutely DEVOUR in this. Everything about this movie had me grinning from ear to ear, so whenever she was on screen I grinned so hard I nearly chipped a tooth.
Udo Kier as Hans in The Secret Agent: I feel like people have already talked about his big scene as a perfect grace note to his legendary career, but am I crazy or do we also briefly see him later dancing in the crowd during Carnival celebrations?1 Because, if so, I’m obsessed with THAT as an image to go out on. What a marvelous man.
Zach Fox as Swett in Lurker: Funny, but more importantly hot, but more importantly lowkey unsettling in this, and I hope we see more from him in all kinds of movies!!!

Caroline Golum

Watching sunrise on the winter solstice between the pillars of Stonehenge: A heady mix of floral garlands, Santa hats (it's a Pagan holiday!), wizard staffs and drums, every man there looked like the Ghost of Christmas Present. Wandering around the perimeter of the "Stones" watching hippies dance barefoot and chant in Gaelic I felt as if I'd just pulled an all-nighter at the world's first rave. Half-asleep and totally alone, I met cute with an older witchy lady who smoked me out - my first taste of the Devil's lettuce in two weeks (get with the program Europe!). When I told her Christianity was not indigenous to the British Isles she gave me a "fook yeah" and we exchanged WhatsApp info. I am forever changed.
World premiere of my film, with Tessa, in France!

Caroline Symons

top 10 livestreams from the NBC4 LA news chopper

from september 9

May 15 - White Ford Escape - westbound 10
May 20 - Motorcycle - downtown LA west of Main east of the 110
May 22 - Dodge Challenger - Olympic Blvd to the 110 overpass
August 3 - Landscaping truck - PCH to Wilshire to Alvarado
August 15 - Mustang - southbound 5 to the 2 off-ramp
July 8 - Cop Car - stationary (plowed halfway into the side of warehouse in East LA)
Sept 9 - Shipping Containers - San Pedro harbor (they had fallen in)
October 2 - no vehicle - live feed following westbound 10 that takes a moment to zoom in on So Fi in the distance and holds for like 2 full minutes while adjusting focal length
October 27 25 - Kia Soul - southbound 5 to CA-60 to cul-de-sac in Ontario
Nov 2 - various vehicles doing donuts after Dodgers win game 7 in extra innings - Van Nuys Blvd and Haddon Ave

Claire Cohen

I got engaged this year, but more importantly I 100%'d Hollow Knight: Silksong with all mementos. If you know what that means, you already know. If you don't: I'm referring to a hard video game and bragging about how good I am at it.

TOP SEVEN SILKSONG BOSSES!

First Sinner: Most fun fight in the game. Mysterious, fast, sick music, and it builds on stuff you already know from Widow so you can jump right in and feel good at it. Canceling the heal feels awesome.
Skarrsinger Karmelita: The hardest, sexiest, and most badass. Tops many lists and for good reason. She fights with her eyes closed while singing!
Final boss of act 3: No spoilers just in case, but this is a fight worthy of capping off this beautiful game and the cutscene after made me emotional.
Cogwork Dancers: Best lore and gayest. The final "phase" where you have to kill the lone dancer is so depressing, and the more you learn about these two, the sadder it gets. Not the most challenging but so fun in concept and execution.
Groal the Great: The worst fight, the worst runback, the nastiest, the least fun. But every story needs a villain and fans of a beloved game need something to hate about it. In a way he brought us all closer together and that's the true meaning of Silksong.
Shrine Guardian Seth: Best IRL lore. An adorable design based on the drawing of a sick child who passed away before he could see the character come to life. He would be proud to know it's a super tough fight with great atmosphere.
Shakra: Best NPC. This is a fight where nobody dies! I respect her fighting skills, map skills, and beautiful singing, so making her respect me too is a really satisfying way to end her story. Poshanka!

Clare Frances

NOBU
The Tweet: "Watched Materialists last night and really what I found most striking was that Dakota’s hair was styled in a way that almost evoked the image of a hijab which I found quite stunning."

Austin Butler telling Kareem Rahma his friends are named "Adam, Sean, and Browne."

Seeing Steve Martin and Martin Short order soup at The Odeon, still in suits from the Disney+ Upfront.
Everything and anything that is not ALIEN: EARTH.
Addison, the person and her musical album.
Drinking alcohol and being drunk.
Austin Butler posting about his dead mom on Instagram.

Brady Corbet's stunning and dramatic weight loss.
WARFARE

Dayna

Top 6 Best Times to Go to Bed, From Least Good to Best

11pm
10:30pm
10pm
8pm
8:30pm
9pm

Debi

Superbon yellow paprika chips: they kind of taste like nothing but are also the platonic ideal of a potato chip
Faience blue: the color of all time, also the color of the Sambas I bought in April and Sandoz brand generic Adderall IR 10mg
Fast Blood, Frightened Rabbit (Regretting You) / I’ll Believe in Anything, Wolf Parade (Heated Rivalry): an unexpectedly beautiful choice to needle drop c. 2007 kill yourself guitar rock in a commercial romance property not once but two times this year!
Marc Marquez #morethananumber — 32-year-old La Roche-Posay spokesmodel with one working arm mounts cinematic Michael Jordan comeback to win his 9th championship in a dog walk while the entire MotoGP media apparatus commemorates the 10th anniversary of his psychosexual feud with the previous king of the sport

J.Crew 2025 rollneck™ sweater: great sweater no notes2
28 Years Later: putting “do not separate” stickers on Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's foreheads
Century of Progress Homes: One day a year you can pay $35 to ride a school bus full of retired midwestern architecture enthusiasts and tour five houses from the 1933 World’s Fair that were barged across the lake and dropped in the middle of the Indiana Dunes
Time Song: Journeys in Search of a Submerged Land, Julia Blackburn / Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds, Thomas Halliday / The Underworld: Journeys to the Depth of the Oceans, Susan Casey: oddly and miraculously calming to read nothing but nonfiction subtitle journeys about the vastness of geological time and the sea
Being back on Tumblr: also oddly and miraculously calming to post for nobody
Small wine glasses: I'm becoming my mother but I also just think they're chic

Eli Sands

Hearing Tortoise live, thinking they were so-so, then immediately getting VERY into Tortoise. “In Sarah, Mencken, Christ, and Beethoven There Were Women and Men.”
Pretty much looping Curse by Unknown Mortal Orchestra. Every band gets its Halloween album; this is a great one. “With a prayer to protect you from ghosts.”
Viewing Slugs (1988, dir. Juan Piquer Simón) as the last film of my 20’s. “Brady and I are going to go kill some man-eating slugs.”
Reading Jazz by Toni Morrison. “Talking to you and hearing you answer—that’s the kick.”
Reading Underworld by Don Delillo. “Because waste is the secret history, the underhistory, the way archaeologists dig out the history of early cultures, every sort of bone heap and broken tool, literally from under the ground.”
Hearing Brian Cox in conversation with Dr. Julie Craword. “And that’s why America is so fucked.”
Watching Jacob Geller’s thoughtful video essay about Breakout. “Wouldn’t the efficiency kick be short-lived?”
Epiphany-ing at MoMA’s Hilma af Klimt: What Stands Behind the Flowers, my favorite museum exhibition of recent memory. “Help me improve the spleen and (liver) of mankind.”
Rethinking the significance of marriages and birthdays. I attended six and a half weddings this year (including that of the founder and editor-in-chief of Fran Magazine). The act of speaking vows and the content of those speeches made me still and watchful. I held my 30th birthday gathering in Sheep Meadow. People I care about gathered together in one of the world’s best parks made me move and speak.
Spoiling Dick Cheney’s death in the group chat (then immediately getting one-upped).

Elias ZX

10 Things [in Media] That Made Me Say “Holy Shit!” (positive) This Year.

There is a subtle but important distinction between this list and what would otherwise be described as a ‘favorite things’ list, the difference is I think all of these things, which I was introduced to this year, made me say ‘holy shit.’ Media is a very loose definition and choices are ranked by a rough chronological order. The first draft of this list was way too long, so if you see me in person, please yell at me. I will tell you what the other contenders were.

The extended catalog of The Beach Boys (the songs She’s Going Bald, Johnny Carson, and Vege-tables in particular)
The first bite I took of Eleanor’s tuna melt from Agi’s Counter
Hearing the song “Love Takes Miles” by Cameron Winter for the first time
Season 2 of The Rehearsal, more specifically the season finale, which I spent weeks calling “the greatest television episode ever”
The first 20 minutes and every subsequent minute of Eureka (dir. Nicholas Roeg) at Walter Reade Theater
Mackerel Toast and Octopus from Theodora in Brooklyn
The election of Zohran Mamdani, both times, and the fact it was decided within an hour of polls closing, both times
The roller coaster Wildcat’s Revenge at Hershey Park
Watching Step Up 3D (dir. Jon M. Chu) on Evan’s 3D projector
The novel Summer Fun by Jeanne Thornton
The girl reading this :) Happy New Year, Fran Magazine readers!!!

Emma Kearney

Top Ten characters that most reminded me of my terrier, Steve

Monkey Robbie Williams in Better Man
Jason Mantzoukas on Taskmaster
Dennis Whitaker on The Pitt
Everand Bone in Excellent Women
Simon from Cracking the Cryptic
Ilya Rozanov in Heated Rivalry
Scott McTominay
Derpy the Magical Tiger from KPop Demon Hunters
The protagonist of Nobody's Son by Sabrina Carpenter
Mickey 17 of Mickey 17

Emma Stefansky

10 THINGS I LOVED THIS YEAR THAT ARE NOT MY CAT/FAMILY/BOYFRIEND/BUGS:

Finishing Mad Men rewatch
Sinners IMAX 70mm
Is a River Alive? by Robert MacFarlane
Last fall’s snowdrop bulbs blooming
Diptyque L’eau Papier solid balm
Regensburg, Germany with my mom
Random recipe for butternut squash wild rice soup
Oh, Mary! with Jane Krakowski
Thai bbq at Unglo
Alex Mill Nottinghill sweater

Fries McRib

A real highlight of my year has been the hashtag #YearOfSmiling (also enjoyed by Fran of Fran Magazine). I’m kind of cheating the assignment here, but here are the candidates for the hashtag of 2026:

#YearOfTheFog — Girl… the fog… We all know The Fog is closing in. Will it finally consume us next year? Excited to find out!
#YearOfHusbands — Welcome to our new member, Phil! Husbands have been on a cold streak lately, but next year could be the year we finally win it all.
#YearOfNothing — It’s entirely possible that absolutely nothing happens next year. Everything will be the exact same.
#YearOfAcceptance — In the unlikely event that things continue to happen, I think we can all agree that they will be mostly bad and not cool. It’s mostly out of my control, so all I can do is accept this.
#YearOfSmiling — Maybe we’ll all have another nice year next year. It could be our first ever back-to-back hashtag champion. Wishing all FranMag fans a happy new year and a second #YearOfSmiling to all!

Fran Hoepfner (me)

Ten great days this year

January 14th: Greenwich Park, engagement, bright and perfect sky, Manteca for dinner.
January 23rd: First day at Sundance, completely exhausted, lunch with Cameron, low oxygen, bright and perfect sky.
March 4th: Casino with my parents in a big rainstorm for Mom’s birthday, proved to them it’s easy and fun and NOT irresponsible (kidding) to play roulette.
March 29th: Beat Elden Ring.
April 18th: New roommate moved in.

the way he highkey changed my life>>>>>>>>

June 7th: Spent the day with many people I know and love in Chicago.
July 4th: Spent the day with many people I know and love in Los Angeles.
August 9th: Spent the day many people I know and love in Narrowsburg.
October 10/11th (tie): Spent the day with many people I know and love at my own wedding in New York City.
December 8th: Saw third Avatar film (which did not give me a migraine — a victory unto itself) then dragged Phil to a work-related party under the auspices of “Dua Lipa might show up.” Dua Lipa did show up. I have become mostly numb to seeing famous people from ten feet away, but she was so beautiful and tall and magnetic in real life that we were both literally speechless. Most starstruck I’ve been in my life. She wore a fur coat and kitten heels. We did not approach — just seeing her was enough.

Frank Falisi

Here’s to getting out from under grand narratives and unseating reasonable despair: here was a year with as much love in it as there was death. “The sun came up about as often as it went down, in the long run” (rest in peace Tom Stoppard, rest in peace too many others), and Bruce Springsteen unleashed 110 or so mostly-wholly new-to-our-ears recordings, poached from an archive spanning forty years or more. Even as the advertiser authors of our would-be-desires insisted that the pinnacle of Springsteen studies in 2025 was a TV movie (somehow slopped into cinemas) here was a trove to be processed in the image of its own composition: in study and consideration of an America expected to be better, doomed to be less, and mediated in melody somewhere in between. As a multi-decade circumnavigation of tastes and inspirations, this lot finds Springsteen not as rock and roll prophet or Broadway boomer profiteer (roles he’s been perhaps too-willing to play in recent years) but as tinkerer, as willing to inhabit a Bacharach schmaltz as he is an apocalyptic synth. The gifts of past (new) years offer themselves up — improbable as it may seem — only as we stomp together towards the future. Here then, is an NJ transmission of our better angels and least-requited desires, presented not in ranked order but as a theoretical mixtape from my year to yours.

10 best (sort of) new Bruce Springsteen songs:

“One Love”
“On the Prowl”
“Rain in the River”
“Blind Spot”
“Sunday Love”
“Waiting on the End of the World”
“Downbound Train” (Electric Nebraska)
“Don’t Back Down”
“Janey Don’t You Lose Heart”
“Follow That Dream”

Haley W.

Top 10 stuff from 2025 in no particular order:

Seeing Michael Clayton in theaters: you don’t want the money?
Love: so many of my friends got married and engaged this year! #yearofsmiling
Passing the bar exam: sorry I know but it had to be mentioned .
One Battle After Another: scratched my itch for a movie that is simply really fucking good.
Fort Greene farmers market: I love getting my silly vegetables and flowers while dodging children on scooters and bisexual women with baggus.
Coney Island: I have lived in New York for 10 years and I finally went on the rides! Who needs a chiropractor when we have the Cyclone?
Pokémon Go: some friends randomly got me back into this over the summer and it’s been a big part of my year.
The JellyCat fish and chips experience in London: what could be more classic.
Denzel Washington: randomly watched like 10 Denzel movies this year and basically loved most of them. He really is an American treasure.
Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude: I was inspired to read this by Dua Lipa and it really is so good, I’ve been thinking about it for months since I finished it.

Harris Mayersohn

Best Replacements for WTF w/ Marc Maron (Ranked In Terms of Fidelity)

For over a decade, “WTF w/ Marc Maron” has scratched a quite particular itch for me. Engaging. Petty. Comforting. Annoying. Confessional. Funny. With its ending this year, I’ve found a few ways to get a similar fix.

The Louis Theroux Podcast
90s Late Night YouTube clips (Specifically, Conan or Letterman when their disdain for a guest spills over into active mocking/contempt)
Journaling
Doomscroll with Joshua Citarella
Silence. Not trying to quiet a racing mind.
Non-fiction audiobooks (Funny Because It’s True, my #1 of the year)
Looking at/petting my beautiful dog, Frida (pictured below)
Old WTF episodes you passed over the first go around (often for a reason)

Jack Riedy

Trust Fall screenings at the Davis Theater: Chicago’s Oscarbate film group puts on surprise screenings of real grindhouse shit: nunsploitation, Hong Kong action, softcore, giallo, oh my. Like finding a new favorite song from an excellent DJ, but for movies.
comedian Geoffrey Asmus: If you too were relieved to see Anthony Jeselnik mock “anti-cancel culture” hacks while promoting literacy, you will like Geoffrey Asmus. one of the best comics around. A great intellect used in service of gross and stupid jokes, always brings great openers too, one of the best comics around.
Saga of the Swamp Thing by Alan Moore: Every “graphic novel” I’ve read in my lifetime has pulled something from Moore’s blend of American Gothic horror, cosmic sci-fi, and post-hippie eco-sexuality, and I can’t believe it took me until this year to read it. Best experienced outside on a humid summer day.
Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991 by Paul Tingen: Tingen’s 2001 book decodes the transmissions from Miles’ electric period, when the prince of darkness sought to capture the music of the entire planet and drag it into the future, and he basically succeeded. One of the best music books I’ve read in years.
Live music YouTube playlist: The best habit I developed this year: Whenever you come across a live concert (or clip or talk show performance or acoustic set or DJ set), save it to a playlist, and put this playlist on shuffle any time you feel tempted to scroll a short-form video feed.
Percepticide: The Death of Reality by Pixel Grip: Superhard industrial beats with aggressive sound design, dance rhythms influenced by house and techno, and vocals from Rita Lukea that sound like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo fronting a punk band.
Juke rap: “Top of Cars” by Lil M.U., “Throw Dat Mfa” by Fendi DaRappa, “Fairy” by Myaap, “Move Pt. 2” by Mello Buckzz and Monaleo
Living your dreams: This year I released my first album, started a band with my friends, and played a bunch of shows in town. And you can too.

James Odin Wade

A Bunch of Things I Enjoyed in 2025

The Crucible by Arthur Miller. As a playwright, this was a huge blindspot I finally filled in. Good play, tbh.
Ryo Fukui - Scenery. This is a lovely jazz album from 1976 that I’ve been listening to all year.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. I’ve been following the exploits of these goofballs since 2009, and this might be the funniest movie I’ve seen in years.
Andor Season 2. There are so many little gifts in this show, one of my favourites being every time Ben Mendelsohn says, “Ghorman”.
The Mountain Goats. For whatever reason, The Mountain Goats just really hit this year. My spouse showed me “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” and it started me on this adventure.
Long Story Short. I was really enamoured with this animated time-jumping family portrait series from Raphael Bob-Waksberg.
One Battle After Another. What a picture, as they say.
Rilo Kiley live. A bit surreal seeing my 19-year-old self’s favourite band play all the songs I loved, 19 years later. Great band!
Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me. No house in any movie has ever been as scary as Laura Palmer’s house.
Having 2-4 beers with your friends. A thing of beauty.

Kyle Amato

Top ten non-2025 movies I watched in 2025 - a shockingly easy list to curate. I really do mostly watch bullshit!

Hi, Mom! (1970) dir. Brian De Palma
Targets (1968) dir. Peter Bogdanovich
The Sword of Doom (1966) dir. Kihachi Okamoto
Night of the Juggler (1980) dir. Robert Butler & Sidney J. Furie
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) dir. Sam Peckinpah
The Company of Strangers/Strangers in Good Company (1990) dir. Cynthia Scott
Harakiri (1962) dir. Masaki Kobayashi
Ugetsu (1953) dir. Kenji Mizoguchi
Love & Pop (1998) dir. Hideaki Anno
Shall We Dance? (1996) dir. Masayuki Suo

Laura H., Fran’s mom

2025 was a deeply personal year: my milestone birthday, TWO WEDDINGS, a law school graduation on a gorgeous June day, my milestone wedding anniversary, and far too many colonoscopies. Other things that happened, in no particular order:

The thrill of reading Lonesome Dove again, 39 years after my first reading. Very humbling to now be older than every character in the book.
Going to WWE Friday Night Smackdown to see John Cena’s farewell appearance in Chicago.
Seeing my celebrity crushes Michael Urie (Oh Mary! on Broadway) and Peter Dinklage (on the NYC Subway).
Getting sprayed by a skunk for the first time. IN MY OWN BACKYARD. Hazel and Polly got the brunt of it and that was terrifying, but we were all okay. Steve was magnificent cleaning up the girls.
Money can buy happiness category (four-way tie): ethnic-specific genetic testing, a coronary calcium scan, the Coach outlet store, and the Lindt outlet store.
Spending more time GAMING at Dave & Buster’s than DRIVING there. I still miss the Addison location, but thank you Village of Schaumburg.
Fifteen uninterrupted minutes looking at the Neapolitan Creche at the Art Institute with only Steve, a security guard, and a lighting technician in the gallery. BLISS.
Bucket list achievement: finally made it to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. My Mother, her parents, and my paternal grandmother’s younger sister all arrived in America at this location. Incredibly emotional experience on the rainiest of days.
Marking the 75th anniversary of my Dad’s college graduation by creating a scholarship in his name at Roosevelt University of Chicago. It’s for undergraduates majoring in either English or Education.

LINDSEY WEBER :)

11 GREAT ROMANCE NOVELS I READ THIS YEAR (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER)

ALICE RUE EVADES THE TRUTH, EMILY ZIPPS
DANDELION IS DEAD, ROSIE STOREY
WASP'S NEST, KAT STODDARD
FLIRTING WITH DISASTER, NAINA KUMAR
FIRST TIME CALLER, B.K. BORISON
THE HEARTBREAK HOTEL, ELLEN O'CLOVER
FAKE IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT, MEGAN MURPHY
FINDING GRACE, LORETTA ROTHSCHILD
SET PIECE, LANA SCHWARTZ (OK, BUT I LOVE EVERYTHING FROM 831 STORIES)
HEART THE LOVER, LILY KING
IT'S DIFFERENT THIS TIME, JOSS RICHARD

Marian Bull

this year I got really into manically crocheting granny squares. I am currently finishing up my second quilt of 2025. these are the top 10 movies I distractedly watched while crocheting.

Crossing Delancey
What's Up Doc?
The Bodyguard
The Lady Eve
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (rewatch)
The Accountant
Sing Sing
10 Things I Hate About You (rewatch)
Gosford Park
The Big Sleep (no idea what happened there!)

Matt Erspamer

My 10 Favorite Things of 2025

Seeing Patti Smith perform ‘Horses’ live — Seattle was the first stop of her 50th anniversary tour for the greatest album of all time. A revelatory evening.
Vancouver International Film Festival — My first time getting festival accreditation! VIFF has pretty great programming, and I hope to see its popularity continue to grow… but not by too much because I selfishly enjoy how easy it is to navigate.
Texting random Facebook graphics to friends out of context

Starting a movie club — I love creating a community around movie-watching that, as an added bonus, does not require me to leave my apartment.
Bleak Week in Portland — I stayed in Portland for a week during a brutal heat wave, and caught 35mm screenings of some amazingly depressing films at the Hollywood Theatre: Salo, Cries & Whispers, and Dancer in the Dark.
Chicago — Visiting Chicago for the first time since moving to the PNW made a strong case for relocating… should I ever feel the need to do that again.3
Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy and What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell — The two best books I read this year: Thorny, compact tales of queer lust and longing.
Razor Clamming — Something fun and kind of strange that you can do out here is buy a license, grab a big plastic pipe, and go digging around on Washington beaches for razor clams. They are delicious when sautéed with white wine and garlic.
The Shrouds — My favorite new release of the year!
‘Tether’ by Annahstasia- My favorite new album of the year!

Matthew Schnipper

Personal Disappointments

Wasn’t cast in Marty Supreme
Still have no idea how to pronounce Eusexua
Forced to become aware of something called “Cumtown”
No Frank Ocean album
Mamdani significantly younger than me

MMF

Top Ten Bites of the Year (Unordered)

French fries from Superiority Burger every time.
Sticky toffee pudding at Cafe Luxembourg after Fran and Phil’s wedding and before Is This Thing On? at NYFF.
Smoked salmon with potato rosti at Wallse on a whim.
Miso black cod at Nobu Fifty Seven over Valentine’s Day weekend.
Chicken tenders and fries with Heinz Simply Honey Mustard at The Artist's Palette at Disney's Saratoga Springs Resort & Spa at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida.
Two Minute Calamari & Calamarata “Sicilian lifeguard style” pasta at Babbo during its soft re-opening.
Summer corn ravioli at Leon’s where we were basically the only people in the dining room on a Saturday night.
The popcorn from the post-flood AMC Lincoln Square basement level concession stand that was the freshest I have ever had at any location of the chain, into which I dumped multiple “fun size” packets of peanut and peanut butter M&M’S that Clare had brought home from Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party at Walt Disney World.
The pissaladiere “tavernetta” at Ops in the East Village, which I had twice.
The sesame focaccia and cultured butter at Foul Witch (RIP), which was on this list last year but is too good to not include a second time.

Nicholas Russell

Vanity plates in the southwest continue to astound and baffle! Haley and I clocked way more than these, and in other states, but this selection felt representative.

Nick!

Top 10 ideas I obsessed over this year with 0 follow through

Fixing my insanely deviated septum (costs $one million and I would probably still snore)
Writing prehistoric body horror novel/novella/short story in that order (still a good idea)
Getting into cardigans (got one!)
Fixing watches (replaced one watch battery with $30 kit from Amazon and rode that high for a bit, other watch still broken)
“Doing something with my hair” (asked barber to cut off a half inch less for two haircuts in a row, got scared, stopped)
Learning piano (we literally own one, didn’t even try)
Getting in shape (bought walking pad with FSA, walked/ran 5 miles/day for one month while rewatching Twin Peaks, finished The Return, never used walking pad again)
Watching the Chicago Bears football team (by all accounts this would have been the season of all seasons, and yet!)
Becoming a tinned fish guy (saw YouTube short of Marco Pierre White making a sardine sandwich, made it once/loved it, bought expensive tinned fish to make more stuff, never opened them, too nervous I won’t like them)
Living a true life without fear of judgment, failure, or regret (tried real hard)

Phil (Fran Husband)

Guys from seasons 1 thru 5 of Lost.

10. Vincent: Dog
9. Daniel Faraday: Weird guy but when he squints and half-whispers some mysterious bullshit I say “that's aura”
8. Sayid: Near endless aura and hype moments
7. Charlie: Didn’t expect myself to rank Charlie this high, but there’s something to be said for being so sick of a guy’s bullshit for three straight seasons only for you to find you look back on him fondly because his death is handled so well
6. Sun: She’s hot AND sensitive and kinda badass with it
5. John Locke: Don’t Tell Him What He Can Or Can’t Do! Definitely the most compelling arc/narrative in the show: tragic, frustrating, mysterious, very funny, and cool
4. Jin: He’s hot AND sensitive and kinda badass with it!!!
3. Sawyer: He’s hot AND sensitive and kinda badass with it and he's SUCH A BITCH
2. Ben Linus: one of the great freaks of our time
1. Desmond: DPMO

Rafaela Bassili

Top 10 discoveries, re-discoveries and experiences of 2025:

Getting married
Taking my American friends to Rio
Brown eyeliner in the upper waterline
The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton
‘90s female singer-songwriters, but especially Aimee Mann
The return of Heavyweight by Jonathan Goldstein
Running without headphones
Sandwiches, but especially tuna melts
Earl grey tea with warm milk and honey at 4:30pm, like an English person
Getting a Russian builder gel manicure; ignoring the credit card charge

Sam Bodrojan

Assembling the perfectly tailored suit
Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
The Mortadella Sandwich from Emmer in Toronto
Attending the opera for the first time
Mirabilis By Daphné Bugey
Hollow Knight: Silksong
A Domestic Chicken My Friend And I Saw On Our Walks This Summer
Seeing The Secret Agent on Brazilian Independence Day with Kleber Medoça Filho and Wagner Moura present
Visiting Philadelphia Typewriter
Moving in with my partner

Sonia Saraiya

top ten-ish coffees in a year of cope.

Phil & Sebastian half-sweet vanilla bean latte on ice. I live in a neighborhood with a dozen coffeeshops and this local chain is my go-to for everything.
Phil & Sebastian caffe misto with oat milk (secret menu item). Sometimes I bother them for a big cup of the Smooth Operator caffe misto with oat milk, which is technically not on the menu but unfortunately, very good
McCafé instant coffee. Naturally I was like Instant Coffee? From McDonald’s?? but this beverage has truly converted me. I look forward to it every morning!!
Too fancy espresso shop soy cappuccino. Started copying my sister and ordering the soy cappuccino anytime I wasn’t sure what else to get. It’s chic and usually tastes fine.
The Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte. Iced OR hot. Oat Base, 1 or 2 fewer pumps of syrup, whip if you’re nasty
Half and half. Paul W. Downs is right (in two different videos). It is very nice to have a little bit of coffee with a splash of half and half.

@cbsmornings A half and half PSA from Hacks co-creator Paul W. Downs 🫡 #cbsmornings #paulwdowns #hacks

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Tims Hortons iced coffee with soy milk. But be warned, sometimes they don’t have soy milk. Pair it with three to five birthday cake Timbits.
Tim Hortons Iced Capp. A classic for a reason. They do not mind if you order this with three to five birthday cake Timbits.
Tim Hortons dark roast with double cream. As I learned when I googled “how to order coffee from Tim Hortons” in a panic one weekend in a drive thru, the dark roast was added to the menu for “admirers of stronger, more robust coffee.” I like a small with two creams. Pairs well, actually, with three to five birthday cake Timbits.

Spencer Williams

Matthew McConaughey’s much anticipated poetry collection Poems & Prayers features both poems AND prayers. Allegedly some of these poems were written when he was 18, and some of them even (kind of) rhyme! Poet Laureate material... also this was the year I learned he has a Professorship at UT!
Listened to Blawan’s SickElixir while having to shit so bad on my way to my FRIEND’s wedding party in New York City baybeeeee... felt like I was in Good Time. Anyways, great album, maybe my fav of the year and GREAT wedding party.
The local Buffalo urgent care’s lobby’s slushie machine. Red flavor and also blue flavor. Both indistinguishable from the other in terms of taste.
Birth mom sent me a meme starring Christ’s ultrasound picture... can't get it out of my head to the tune of Kylie Minogue.
My therapist said / nothing about the color contacts / they wore again /
for our zoom appointment.
Considered sports-adjacent hobbies involving hand-to-hand combat, but stopped on account of my hormones.
Questioned the power of vitamin D gummies “for women,” the flavor of Target tropical. Do they still work on me? Or do they clock my tea going down?
Jojo Siwa Cruise ticket prices start at $1,107.00 with a $250.00 deposit per person
Obsessed with the perfume Warm Bulb by Clue. Smells literally like if you poured warm tea all over a lightbulb (positive). 2025 was the year of spending a ridiculous amount of money to smell like objects that had fruity alcoholic beverages spilled on them.
All’s Fair starring Kim Kardashian, Glenn Close, Naomi Watts, Niecy Nash, Teyana Taylor, Sarah Paulson, Jessica Simpson, Hari Nef, some guy, and other women of Mother experience. Created by known domestic terrorist Ryan Murphy. Like watching electrocution compilations on Youtube. Need this show in the form of an IV drip.

Steve (Fran's Dad)

In late 2024, Fran gave me a subscription to Storyworth for my 65th birthday. For the next year, I received a weekly e-mail with a question that I was supposed to answer with a brief essay. At the end of the year, I had written 60 essays. Writing these essays was time-consuming, challenging, enlightening, comforting, fulfilling, habit-forming, stimulating, fun, sad — all at once.
The questions ran the gamut from mundane to meaningful. Here are some of my favorites. I challenge you to answer one or two of them yourself, or better yet, ask one of your own older relatives to answer them. They will be grateful to you for asking, and you may be surprised by the answer!

What's a small decision you made that ended up having a big impact on your life?
What games or toys did you enjoy most when you were young?
What advice would you give your 20-year-old self?
What traits do you share with your father?
How would you describe your childhood bedroom?
What were you like when you were 30?
Did you have any pets growing up?
Do you have a family member you wish you'd gotten to know better?
What do you admire the most about each of your siblings?
What’s a funny or embarrassing story your family likes to tell about you?

Sydney Jin Choi

Most nights, I have dreams. Here are some I wrote in my notes app/texted my friends.

1/2/25: Using my Rutgers MBA (fake) to figure out how to sell Kraft Mac n Cheese better.
2/6/25 (To Spencer): Had a dream you were driving us around in Buffalo. The scenery was like a city at dusk in an old video game. You drove us off the highway into the water between Buffalo and Canada. I was like, "Welp," as we sunk into the water. You were like, "I guess we die now," and closed your eyes. I was like, "What! We can just float to the top!" I started swimming and dragging you by the collar after you let your body go limp.
2/16/25: Spent an afternoon online shopping with Mom and Myles (my brother). They have some super sale, and we are gonna get like $1,000 worth of stuff for $75, but Mom gets obsessed with writing to customer service about her experience, and won't just place the order.
3/20/25: Talking about taxes is so arbitrary. "Like why do I need to measure 3 M&M's at the beginning? What if my M&M's aren't the same size? I always use the peanut ones — realizing I should maybe be using the normal ones. I guess it's the average of 3's, but what if I happen to have 3 mini M&M's or 3 large ones? That shouldn't determine how much I have to pay! Like what is the access to M&M's proving?" Whoever I'm talking to thinks I'm very stupid.
5/8/25 (To Fran): I had all these dreams about you... (TL;DR she touched a bat but wouldn't admit she touched a bat. Phil and I made her go to the hospital to get rabies shots.)
7/4/25 (To Myles): Had a dream I was pushing you around in a stroller, but you were the age you are now but small and wearing a diaper (like a medieval painting of Jesus). You were just chatting as I pushed you around. I was taking you to work.
7/9/25: Spencer and I get on a plane that is like a field of grass. We are all going in the wrong direction. Many people will miss their plans. Rocky landing. I sit on the wing with Spencer and it's very scary, but she shows me TikToks as we land, and she laughs the whole time.
10/31/25: Took out my night guard to try on more night guards.
11/20/25: Mom and I are trying to make a CD player work, but she keeps putting in CDs, so I can't figure out the problem.
12/21/25: I'm on a roof hanging out watching my laundry bag flying in the sky, but it's really long and actually a dragon. I try to take a picture with my phone, but it's too far.

Tessa Strain

Top 10 phrases I heard this year that I couldn’t stop quietly repeating to myself (and their origins)

The Shrouds…at GraveTech Cemetery (The Shrouds)
Momence: the home of experiences (the home screen of the app I have to use to book Pilates classes)
Top Christ-Following Man of the Year (The Righteous Gemstones)
Black bag 😉 (Black Bag)
Morning Pages Baby Tee (name of product on the Free People website)
a few small beers (One Battle After Another — I did eventually get sick of hearing this one)
SHOWER MISHAP (copy on an Instagram graphic about Freddie Freeman’s ankle injury)
Pulp Man of the Year (No Other Choice) (huge year for fake awards with great names)
The need for blood remains constant (email from American Red Cross that sounded like Dracula)
miscellaneous uncs (Twitter user @mjkjuice12)

Veronica Fitzpatrick

Ten Pleasures

The guys who spoon-feed heaping bites into the blindfolded judges’ mouths on Season 2 of Culinary Class Wars
Cornelia James leather gloves
Every minute of my honeymoon but especially Modena, blackout karaoke and tortellini en brodo
Severe, exacting sentences in Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman and Lena Andersson’s Acts of Infidelity
Languid, confessional sentences in Sylvia Kristel’s memoir Undressing Emmanuelle
When the room chanted FRAN! at Fran’s wedding reception
Handing diplomas to (and the surprise of receiving hugs from) the graduating class of 2025
Effectively cowriting something rather big with new-found kindred spirit Elissa Suh
Buying a new couch after 16 years with a Craigslist relic
Getting the last single bar seat at Raoul’s and sharing profiteroles with a nameless benefactor

Vikram Murthi

Top 10 Older Films I Saw in Repertory Cinema (Chronological Order)

The Brother From Another Planet [John Sayles, 1984, Metrograph, 35mm]
Veronika Voss [Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982, Metrograph, 35mm]
Passing Through [Larry Clark, 1977, Walter Reade Theater (Lincoln Center), 16mm-to-DCP]
Dance, Girl, Dance [Dorothy Arzner, 1940, Nitehawk Prospect Park, 35mm]
Platform [Jia Zhangke, 2000, IFC Center, 35mm]
The Castle [Michael Haneke, 1997, BFI Southbank, DCP]
Stay Hungry [Bob Rafelson, 1976, Nitehawk Prospect Park, 35mm]
Ruggles of Red Gap [Leo McCarrey, 1935, Anthology Film Archives, 35mm]
The Leopard [Luchino Visconti, 1963, Metrograph, 35mm]
Paris Awakens (1991) / A New Life (1993) [Olivier Assayas, 4K Restoration DCP, BAM]

Will Feinstein

This meme about Bert from Sesame Street: Nothing brought me more delight this year than this image (that I just learned is a few years old). It looks just like Bert! I showed everyone. I laughed and laughed.
Shohei Ohtani striking out 10 batters AND hitting three home runs in Game 4 of the NLCS: It’s just impossibly cool that we got to watch one of the greatest single-game performances of all time as it happened. (The World Series was also a blast. I love Vladdy Jr. and every throwback to him as a kid with his dad, but I’ll never forget the joy of watching the Dodgers win the nail-biting seventh game on an iPhone with a small, dedicated group in the back corner of a loud Halloween party.)
Happyend (dir. Neo Sora): Sora’s first fiction feature film is melancholy, prescient, and funny! Go seek it out if a) you love bittersweet high school movies about evolving friendships, and b) you dislike surveillance-based, authoritarian approaches to safety.
Buying a heated shiatsu foot massager: I run this thing under my desk like ten times a day! It feels good and also fixed the foot pain I had after not using my right leg for two months (following fracturing my tibial plateau in a freak beach accident). You too can buy one for like $70! Why would you not own one?
Two great Caroline Polachek features: Two of my favorite songs of the year featured Polachek in a guest spot. Here’s the first one, by another Caroline (the band caroline). And here’s the second one, by Blood Orange (built from a Durutti Column song!).
June Squibb in the Criterion Closet: I loved hearing her talk about seeing Children of Paradise at an arthouse cinema in the 1940s! She’s super sharp at 95.
Robot Karaoke: Let’s see if I can explain this: it’s real karaoke with songs you know, but the lyrics are replaced with rhyming phrases live-generated from a text input of your choice (say, “Mr. Brightside” but the lyrics are from Bernie Sanders email subject lines or negative Glassdoor reviews). Created by Jamie Brew (The Onion, ClickHole), Robot Karaoke is a joyful live experience, whether you’re the one singing or just watching a room full of uninitiated bystanders slowly embrace (and participate in!) the novel concept.
This weird monkey with a flat nose that makes funny sounds: Earlier in the year, I watched a lot of Instagram reels of this creature. At the time, I looked up what the species is called, but now I don’t remember. He’s just for me. Listen to that guy. Look at him.
System of A Down at MetLife Stadium: I had a great time sitting alone in the ADA section to see a band I liked in high school live for the first time. It was like a time capsule, since they haven’t put out music since then. Daron’s stage banter sure was embarrassing! I also caught the last song from Korn before System of a Down started, but I thankfully arrived too late to see this happen.
David Ortiz setting himself up to say that rookie Yankee starter Cam Schlittler’s last name “sounds like Hitler.”

Wyatt Fair!

THE TOP GUYS OF 2025

Declaring 2025 the official “YEAR OF THE GUY” (in a joking way and only as a carvable lane for this publication), let’s hope they’ll let me get away with this.

DAVID LYNCH: Apologies for being so obvious! I will miss this strange man and his unforgettable reveries…
HENRY OF SKALITZ: Sessioned more new game releases than usual — leaning toward Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 as the top dog. My type of shit, sort of an anti-power fantasy. Less swordplay, more mead drinking, painting insignias on cows, heaving bags of flour for a scheming miller.
TOM SANDOVAL/THE WEEKND: Behold! The fusion that no one but me asked for.
“DAN” x 3: Three fantastic Dan-based records this year — Dan’s Boogie, Friendship’s Caveman Wakes Up, and the second full-length dose of “ecstatic black metal” from Agriculture, The Spiritual Sound. Sometimes the list just writes itself!
BI GAN: This man is smoking on some new shit… dioramas and silhouettes…
GABRIEL SUMMERS: As the de facto Fran Mag skateboarding consultant (no one asked me) I will declare that Australian madman Gabriel Summers shed more blood to achieve a dream than any other guy this year. Watch a lovely portrait of him here — and then try not to cry after this final trick.
BRANDON DALEY: Brandon is one of my oldest friends – we GChat every day at the power tools company that we both send emails on behalf of. He also wrote and directed $POSITIONS, one of the best new comedy features that I’ve seen in a minute. When it tours your city…go see it!
THE “MAIN GUY” FROM COMMON SIDE EFFECTS???: Best TV show of the year. Props to Joe Bennett (a guy)
THE MASTERMIND: That’s right… the slick bastard who stole the paintings and drank pop-top beer at Gaby Hoffman’s house… but who created that guy… KELLY REICHARDT!!!!!!!!

Zach Low

Over the summer, I watched 35 movies directed by Robert Altman. Some I saw at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of their retrospective celebrating Altman’s centennial, but mostly I watched them at home. Supplemented by reading Mitchell Zuckoff’s oral biography (which I highly recommend), the experience was one of the most rewarding deep dives into a filmmaker’s body of work I’ve ever undertaken.

Here are 10 performances from those films that I really loved, in chronological order:

Sandy Dennis as Frances Austen in That Cold Day in the Park (1969)
Tom Skerritt as Duke Forrest in M*A*S*H (1970)
Geraldine Chaplin as Opal in Nashville (1975)
Joel Grey as The Producer (Nate Salisbury) in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976)
Carol Burnett as Gloria Burbank in HealtH (1980)
Marta Heflin as Edna Louise in Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982)
Madeleine Stowe as Sherri Shepard in Short Cuts (1993)
Kim Basinger as Kitty Potter in Prêt-à-Porter (1994)
Harry Belafonte as Seldom Seen in Kansas City (1996)
Charles S. Dutton as Willis Richland in Cookie’s Fortune (1999)

📬🎊 That’s all, folks! What made your best-of list this year? Thanks as always for reading. I love you!!! 😚💌

Cam is not crazy — we do see this.

Fran note: I have this sweater also. It’s great.

Fran note: Fran Magazine endorses any and all moves to Chicago, Illinois.

My 20 favorite films of 2025

Fran Hoepfner — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 15:10:18 GMT

Subscribe now

Let’s not waste time

Was it a “good year for movies”? A “bad year for movies”? I have no idea. Probably the latter but maybe the former.

The Shrouds, David Cronenberg

Much of your enjoyment of this film relies on your tolerance for “late style,” which is to say Cronenberg’s ugly digital era, and how much you are willing to abandon the idea that it’s ever going to make sense. In an endless churn of art about trauma and death, I found this one of the funniest and strangest musings on mourning and sex and desire. Like — when something bad happens, it’s actually not insane to spiral out about some kind of semi-related conspiracy to take your mind off the finality of bodily existence, right? Vincent Cassel is such a funny Cronenberg stand-in, Guy Pearce is funnier here than in The Brutalist, and the concept of “The Shrouds” — live feed of watching your dead relative/friend decompose in the grave — is one of Cronenberg’s great silly ideas. Not for nothing, I think this is also one of his most Jewish movies too. The Shrouds does not really reach as high highs as the romantic but incomplete-feeling Crimes of the Future, but it did give us this tweet.

source

Train Dreams, Clint Bentley

I have no interest in dipping into the great Train Dreams wars. The main issue that I know other critics seem to have with the film — a misrepresentation of the book — does not really bother me at all. I have only once said “this is a misrepresentation of what the book is doing” and it was about Benedetta (lol). Mostly the deal is: I love Joel Edgerton and I love Terrence Malick movies so much that most “budget Malick” attempts win me over by reminding me of other stuff I like more.1

Boys Go to Jupiter, Julian Glander

credit: glanderco/cartuna

I don’t see a lot of animated movies because there is only so much time in the day and most of them are for children. I have child relatives with whom it’s more fun to see these types of flicks at the end of the year rather than solo outing to Regal Essex at 11am to catch Zootopia 2 with other people in their thirties.2 Boys Go to Jupiter, however, is not really a children’s movie, nor is it one of those, like, “animated things for adults” that drive me crazy3, but exists in some strange in-between like a classic young adult type of feature we don’t get anymore. It’s the type of thing where if I saw this freshman year of high school, I’d be obsessed with it — the soundtrack would be my whole personality. In turn, my affection for the film feels nostalgically motivated: this is something I wish found me at the age in which I would love it so perfectly. Instead, it catches me a little older and wiser, and I see the film as much more sad and wistful. I love that something this accessible can have this anti-capitalist bent, and I think its musings on work and economy feel clever without being smug about it. There’s a lot of generosity in crafting these characters, who feel whole and complicated in a way so few animated characters can and will ever be. And on top of that: a lot of good jokes, a lot of good songs, and a lot of good voice performances from alt comedians. I wrote a bit more about the film here.

Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie

I like when this feels like a sports movie and less so when it feels like a run-of-the-mill Safdie feature, chockablock with various seedy IRL figures whose stunt casting is meant to impress or distract. There are either quite a few great three-quarters thoughts in this movie, or it’s all just an amusement park ride. Most of what moves me about the film is Jack Fisk’s wondrous production design and the marimba-forward score by Daniel Lopatin.

Misericordia, Alain Guiraudie

Stomachache (endorsement).

Friendship, Andrew DeYoung

“Give me the reason to have my lawyer smile” is one of this year’s most memorable (and edited out) turns of phrase. I talked to DeYoung about all the cigarettes in the movie.

Black Bag, Steven Soderbergh

I love The Traitors (UK).

Eddington, Ari Aster

Earlier in the year, one of my main groupchats ranked everyone from most to least anti-woke, and inexplicably, I was voted most anti-woke for reasons that escape me — perhaps because of my low tolerance for stuff like when people on X the Everything App got mad at the idea of a “public defender” — imo one of the most noble jobs you can have — because they sometimes have to defend rapists and murderers. When I confessed my affection for Eddington at a party, someone laughed and said, “You really are the most-anti woke!” Obviously this is all fun and games, but I don’t really think that a) I am anti-woke at all or b) Eddington is an anti-woke text so much as it is a mean encapsulation of what it is like to live now. For all of its 2020 signifiers, I found Eddington a much more compelling movie about 2025: the aftermath and the wreckage of trying and failing to care for one another during an upending global crisis. To me, it’s also Aster’s most technically achieved film to date, which is not nothing. Joaquin Phoenix, an actor I’d all but completely turned on over the past few years4, delivers one of the most nuanced and tragic performances of his career, also while acting like he is slowly getting COVID. There’s some great fake coughing in this movie which is no mean feat. That’s not to say it all comes together for me5, but I think Eddington’s ability to poke and prod at lingering sensitivities wound up garnering a bad faith reaction. What’s more 2025 than that?

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Mary Bronstein

The more cosmic horror elements of this film do not really work for me, but the breathless agita otherwise pummeled me into raucous submission. This was such a fun movie to see with a full audience; the woman in front of me walked out at one point. Seeing this in January and Marty Supreme in December was a fascinating way to bookend the year with whatever the hell is going on in the Bronstein household. I think you kind of can’t have this film or Marty Supreme without the other — they are so in direct conversation! I had a long talk with Rose Byrne about the film at Sundance — she was awesome to chat with: so, so funny and generous and thoughtful and kind, which meant a lot to me, someone who loves rewatching Spy.

One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson

I know some people may be disappointed to see PTA’s latest at the #11 spot on my list, but longtime FranHeads know that I am something of a PTA skeptic and the middle-of-the-best ranking of the film ought to be considered quite good news given my past irritation with some of his films. I have great affection for One Battle After Another, but it never quite reaches the heights of my favorite films by Anderson6. One of the problems I have with OBAA is a problem I have with several films this year — including others on this list — which is that it seems like the accelerating collapse of the film industry has prompted everyone to make the most movie as opposed to the best movie. There is a blatant lack of restraint all around, often to frustrating effect.7 I find this most apparent with Sean Penn’s performance and character in One Battle After Another: it is an excellent performance, dulled over the course of the film’s runtime by Anderson’s inability to look away from the sideshow of it all. It’s indulgent. While I’m glad art can (and often should) be indulgent, these impulses still push up against my own taste.

Avatar: Fire and Ash, James Cameron

Listen: I’m as surprised as you. I am a lifelong Avatar hater. I was poised to loathe and came away from the three-hour experience completely won over. I have no idea how it happened. I just kept waiting to turn on the film and I never did. I think there’s something to be said about the sheer weirdness of this third one — the systems feel more esoteric and baffling and strange — and that there’s much less throat-clearing than there was in the last two. This one felt very “either you know who all these guys are or you don’t, but hold on,” which I appreciated compared to the long-winded nature of every other major blockbuster film this year. Deciding to rock with Spider can add years onto your life. I promise.

It Was Just An Accident, Jafar Panahi

Mariam Afshari gives one of my favorite performances of the year.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, Michael Morris

I hear you: there’s no way the director of To Leslie made a Bridget Jones fourthquel that’s actually any good, let alone worthy of being on a top ten list. You cried so hard your head hurt during Hamnet? That’s nice. I cried so hard my head hurt during Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. This is not a franchise in which I necessarily stake any part of my personality. I didn’t see the original Bridget Jones until only a few years ago, and I binged the other sequels the day I had to go see this one. This thing is overstuffed and full of goopy romcom logic, yes, but it’s also a stark and loving exploration of aging beside people you’ve known in a number of contexts over the course of your life. Hugh Grant, once-cinematic cad, is rendered stoic and gentle — no one has the energy to be pissed off at each other anymore. That this series manages to get most of the same players back time and time again — Sally Phillips! Shirley Henderson! James Callis from Slow Horses — to sit around and drink cocktails and commiserate and that they all still feel like a plausible group of friends is no small feat. Bridget Jones: she’s a great character! Let’s see her again in another ten years.

The Phoenician Scheme, Wes Anderson

Blue Moon, Richard Linklater

Agonizing and awesome — perhaps the most acidic Linklater has allowed himself to be in recent memory. This would make a great double feature with Peter Hujar’s Day, both explorations of jealousy and self-obsession and a desire to know where you stand in the world. You could also pair it alongside something like Showing Up and feel like shit all day.

Splitsville, Michael Angelo Covino

Thank god there was a romantic screwball comedy this year about sex and love and “the point of marriage” and all that’s transactional about the way we treat one another and also had actual real set-up/punchline jokes in it.

The Testament of Ann Lee, Mona Fastvold

source

I have spent the last couple of years saying to anyone who will listen that of the Corbet-Fastvold creative partnership, I think it’s Fastvold who has the upper hand, in part because she seems to not give a shit about being a wacky little enfant terrible and can otherwise coast on “being Norwegian” when it comes to her arthouse bonafides. Her 2020 film The World to Come is quite good, but The Testament of Ann Lee blows it out of the water. Here is an immersive and sincere film about faith and diligence, not without humor and not without the erotic. The musical sequences are the true standout, but I think not unlike…. dare I say….. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, this is a film about what can be accomplished and beheld when you hold the people dear to you close. Amanda Seyfried is great; her Mancunian accent is better (and very lol). There’s a type of movie about faith — A Hidden Life, for instance — wherein a character’s relationship to God is rendered without irony or distance, buying wholeheartedly into their own belief system, that feels increasingly rare and difficult to parse. The audience with whom I saw this film seemed to have no idea what to make of Ann Lee’s devotion, but Fastvold gives you everything you need: the sun, the snow, and footsteps in an empty room.

The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho

I told a friend that this is the most grad school movie of all time and she was like, “wait, how do you mean that?” and I forgot that I frequently call movies (Tenet, etc.) “grad school” without explaining. The Secret Agent is quite literally about grad school: there are two different plots about academia in it, and it is most movingly about the limits of what research and archival understanding can do for us emotionally. There is a very human story here — many of them, in fact — filtered through tapes and records and identification cards. It’s a truly singular film that exist on its own terms, often frustrating and beguiling in its refusal to state overtly what it’s about until the movie is more than halfway through. Set in a rich palate of greens and blues and tans, The Secret Agent is imbued with such good feeling that you forget, at times, how brutal it can be, a film set in both hell and paradise. There is suffering, plain and clear, but there are also cold beers and beach days and cats. I’ve seen this film a few times now, and I never get sick of the shaggy dog rhythms or the wide cast of characters. What Wagner Moura does in the film’s third act is a miracle of pathos.

Peter Hujar’s Day, Ira Sachs

How fun to follow up something as acerbic and sexy and wry as Passages was with a film driven by tenderness and curiosity and simplicity. I love thinking about the singular pan of the film I read whose main issue was “they yap too much.” Well, yes, in fact, they do.

Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke

It’s been about fifteen months since I saw Caught by the Tides for the first time — a 2024 NYFF selection that is technically a 2025 release, and far and away the best movie of the past two years by my count. A documentary, an epic, a musical, a historiography — a film that has absolutely everything.

Fran Magazine will be back on Wednesday for the fourth annual Best of 2025 Extravaganza. In the meantime: what is your favorite movie of the year?

Leave a comment

This is where Hamnet fails: too much faffing about re: revisionist feminism and not enough Malickian shots of a tree. If this thing tried to be like 30% more Tree of Life (also a movie about a son dying!!!) then it might have won me over.

My niece’s review of Zootopia 2 is that it’s “scary and the sloth gets poked” (?).

Bojack Horseman, etc.

I am one of the few people who saw Napoleon… memba him?

I felt as though both Emma Stone and Austin Butler were miscast and/or possibly victims of having a number of their scenes cut such that those sections of the film feel incomplete.

My personal favorites are Phantom Thread and Boogie Nights… sorry to those offended.

Eddington has this problem. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You has this problem. Friendship has this problem.

Something fun to watch on your TV

Fran Hoepfner — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 04:11:06 GMT

Subscribe now

A recommendation

On Saturday afternoon, before all hell broke loose, I finished watching UK Celebrity Traitors with some friends — an activity we’d split over three weekends over cheese and tinned fish and crackers. The season consists of nine 1-hour(ish) episodes currently streaming on Peacock and is some of the best television I’ve watched this year.1 I have spent the past 48 hours recommending it to anyone and everyone who will listen, and now I am recommending it to you. It is light viewing, both compelling but crucially not stressful,2 devoid of that which makes most American reality TV difficult to watch. There are clear and satisfying narrative arcs. It is frequently laugh-out-loud funny and profoundly absurd.

Please allow me to make my impassioned plea to Fran Magazine readers here and now.

I don’t even know what Traitors is, let alone Celebrity Traitors

Traitors is basically Mafia (or Assassin, or Werewolf) — a party game that was a staple of my high school and college experience, but perhaps not yours. The game consists of a group of people, some of whom are tasked with “killing” (usually via passing a note) other people, and then everyone has a little communal where they try to figure out who is doing the killing. It is a game of deceit and strategy, where every single person is telling each other they’re innocent and it’s up to you to figure out who is lying to your face.

I don’t like reality TV

I basically don’t either, and I have more or less turned on The Great British Baking Show, whose nicecore aesthetic is now too dull and uninspired. UK Celebrity Traitors is both completely nice while allowing people to yell at each other across a table.

How is this any different from US Celebrity Traitors?

Great question — and this, I think, is the key to what made UK Celebrity Traitors so satisfying.

The American Traitors involves two kinds of contestants, both of whom come from reality television:

“Game players” — aka people from Survivor, The Challenge, and Big Brother — who are adept at social games and strategy. I remember having a conversation with one of my family members a few years back about how Survivor isn’t even about “building fires” anymore; it’s only a strategy game that now takes place on an island.
Non-gamers — aka people from various Housewives, Bachelor/ette, real estate, cooking show reality joints — who basically go to play the game on vibes only. These types of people are voting each other out based on who raised their voice at the round table.

Occasionally there are comedians and athletes and other randos.3

These people make their living being on reality television, and The Traitors is no different. This is a game to them, yes, but it’s also income. They want to win, because they want to get paid.

UK Celebrity Traitors is not about reality television stars competing against each other, but rather various forms of non-reality celebrity — public figures, BBC talking heads, journalists, musicians, comedians, athletes, actors of varying prestige — competing for money that will go to a charity of their choosing. The money, in turn, does not matter in as much as these people do not need it. They are playing the game to play the game. This removes the pressure valve that makes people on the American Traitors behave insane — why are they all always crying — and instead allows these contestants to be sillier with it.

I don’t know anything about British celebrities.

That’s fine; I understand that not everyone has the disease that I have where I’ve known who Jonathan Ross was since I was 13 years old. First and foremost, I’d have a hard time believing you don’t know at least one person in this cast: Stephen Fry and Celia Imrie are from movies, Tom Daley is from the Olympics and knitting Instagram, Nick Mohammed was on Ted Lasso (boo) and Taskmaster (yay) and Slow Horses (yay).

The other people may only be known to freaks like me and even then there are some new randomistas in the mix. That’s fine — basically all of these contestants are plenty likable, and even at their most unlikable, they are all still pleasant to one another.

Are these people better at the game than the American Traitors?

Here’s where it gets interesting: no. I’d go so far as to say they are all way worse, but these people don’t make a living strategizing on CBS shows. They have other jobs, and perhaps like to think of themselves as being good at puzzles and games when actually they’re not. You’d think this would make for worse television, but it actually makes the arc of the series even more dramatic and entertaining.

Whereas the American Traitors are doing weird mind games with each other and forming alliances, the UK Traitors are doing something far weirder: they’re considering the grand scheme of the game from an outside perspective, taking into account each other’s public personas and how that might have inspired (or not inspired) producers to designate them as traitors. Whereas in American Traitors people vote for someone like Tom Sandoval because he’s annoying on TV and also apparently in life, the UK Traitors try to do mental math in order to determine how the designated traitors may be assigned based on their level of fame, the power they wield within culture, and how being a traitor (or not) intersects with their public persona. It’s a much more adept game about being a celebrity, and a certain type of class system within the world of celebrity. They’re also all realizing in real time that Stephen Fry — despite being billed as a public intellectual for most of his life — is actually not very smart at all.

So mostly these people are having a laugh?

Yes, exactly. Without spoiling anything about where the season goes — though it has everything: a lovable underdog, multiple betrayals, an athlete who is not conventionally attractive who somehow gets hotter and hotter every episode — the final five minutes depict all the finalists laughing and hugging. It is literally just a game. All nine episodes basically feel like this.

@gregdaviesyes You could be my grandson #gregdavies #taskmaster #nevermindthebuzzcoks #ntbc #nmtbc #fyp #foryou #foryoupage #funny #comedy #jamalimaddix #aitch #daisymaycooper

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Show me another clip please

In conclusion

UK Celebrity Traitors is, to me, what television ought to be:

some stupid convoluted bullshit
that goes down easy
but is also entertaining
and very funny
involving people who are mostly totally likable, if not lovable
while also involving some people who it’s fun to be mad at for no reason
but no one’s livelihood actually depends on their own skill or intellect
and in fact, that’s probably for the best

If you watch or watched, please sound off below.

Please mark spoilers as such in the comments. Don’t you think — regardless of age, gender, race, or sexuality — that it would be so awesome to be picked up by Joe Marler?

Leave a comment

Probably the “best” TV I’ve seen this year is The Rehearsal Season 2, but given my own fear of flying, it’s not exactly “perpetual rewatch” material.

Okay, it’s a little stressful — but it’s not serious.

Last season had “the first out gay royal” from England — right. This forthcoming season’s version of this is Donna Kelce.

This thing will never be on

Fran Hoepfner — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 17:04:13 GMT

Subscribe now

Suffering

Promotional opportunities

This past Tuesday, I got a chance to dual-celebrate two of my former Gawker coworkers in their creative successes: George Civeris’s comedy special A Sense of Urgency and Tarpley Hitt’s Barbieland. I watched the former after enduring the four-part Sean Combs documentary on Netflix (do not recommend), and I have been reading the latter bit by bit to break up the atrocious vibes of Seth Harp’s The Fort Bragg Cartel (do recommend!! but maybe not as bedtime reading).

One for me

We will have a new book club here at Fran Magazine next May, but in case you missed out on McMurtry May or want another opportunity to dig into Lonesome Dove or you have a friend you want to force to read the book, I am teaching a class on Lonesome Dove through McNally Jackson this February. It’s virtual, which means you can be anywhere! I am bulking up on my McMurtry research in prep, and I think this will feel like a slightly more slower paced, more form-driven exploration of how the book is working, while also digging into some of the novel’s myriad enduring qualities. I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun! I have really missed teaching over the past year and a half, and I’m excited to get to know a whole new group of students of all ages.

Poolside

We went to Cancun for a not-quite-honeymoon (“holdovermoon”) over Thanksgiving, which was mostly an opportunity to lie down outside and read. I finished both My Husband by Maud Ventura and Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li, and then read and finished Three to Kill by Jean-Patrick Manchette1, Comedic Timing by Upasna Barath, and Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. Rebecca — this thing is crazy! I keep recommending it left and right. It always feels weird to recommend a classic so enthusiastically — y’all ever heard of THE GODFATHER? — but du Maurier’s book is both lush and detailed while reading like an airport paperback. Call me crazy, but I like when an annoying woman narrates a book. We should have done du Maurier May… sad.

It’s been fifteen years since I’d been to an all-inclusive type of deal, and I think truly a decade since I took a “no plans, beach only” type of vacation. It was great to eavesdrop on all manner of couples — including a husband and wife at the omelette bar, the former of whom could not remember “what ingredients” he likes, to which the latter said, “are you fucking kidding?” My formal complaint about time is that it passes too quickly, but on trips like this — when the express purpose is to do as little as possible — I find time actually can pass quite slow. We had to deal with less daylight than we would have in a different time of year, but it was so great to feel like the day was maybe winding down only to learn it was two in the afternoon. The theoretical aspect of taking a trip like this was to determine the extent to which we might want to dedicate a honeymoon towards “exploring” vs. “lying down,” and it’s starting to look like the second one is winning out.

We also saw a lot of critters, including coatimundis, which I deserve to have brought home in my carry-on.

Since getting back, I have been reading both the aforementioned Harp and Hitt nonfiction books, along with Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry2 and Olivia Nuzzi’s American Canto3.

Movies

I saw one movie this week, and it was The Secret Agent for the second time. Paul Schrader sat behind me. I cried at the end and the woman seated next to me — who was hating it — kept glaring at me. What a picture!

Lost rewatch corner

It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on my ongoing rewatch of the 2004-2010 television show Lost. Netflix has started hitting us with the “LOST WILL BE LEAVING NETFLIX ON DECEMBER 31” which means we really have to pick up the pace, but we are a third of the way into the fifth season so I think we’ll be fine. Having watched this show mostly in high school, I recall my loose ranking of seasons something like:

Season One
Season Three
Season Four
Season Five
Season Two
Season Six

Now it’s more like this:

Season One
Season Two
Season Four
Season Three
Season Five
Season Six

I’d forgotten most of the fifth season — mostly remembering one of the many time periods the island people jump around to and not that they are playing shuffle on history — and as insane and somewhat bad as it is, I quite like how plot-driven and urgent it all feels. That this whole season breaks down in a matter of days is quite exciting, even if the writing feels objectively dumber.

I’m struck in rewatch by how done dirty just about every female character on the show is. Maybe Penny gets out of this okay? And Rose, kind of? Everyone else suffers under a very specific type of womanhood — fridged wife, fridged girlfriend, mother who wants to be dead, mother who wants to kill, Juliet’s relentless suffering — in a way that grows tedious. I guess everyone on the show suffers, but in more original, creative ways. I’ve found myself going back through and reading Reddit — something I didn’t know about when the show came out — and seeing everyone say stuff like “Lost is a show about parents and children.” Wrong: Lost is a show about being on an island that’s crazy.

Regardless, I think Lost is a great prerequisite to The Leftovers, one of the most moving and ijbol programs in existence. I’m gonna miss rewatching Lost, which Heated Rivalry can never be.

Video games

I am finally getting good at Hades 2, having beat both Chronos and the surface since last writing about the game. I’ve actually beat Chronos four times now, and I’ve mostly figured out how to go about that fight and do okay without getting got by any of his bullshit. I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how to win on the surface again, mostly because I tend to lose all (or most of ) my lives to Prometheus, and then I just get my ass beat on the mountaintop. Thank you to this man for this guide.

One of my core complaints about Hades 2, which I think I have mentioned before on here, is that in the original Hades, it felt like you could have a truly randomized run and make the most of what you were doing no matter what. Here, I feel like you really have to know what you’re doing to maximize damage, and I’m doing far more internalized math than I am giving in the thrill of play. It’s possible that I got so good at the first game that I didn’t have to think about gamifying runs so much, but mostly playing this second game is much closer to playing Elden Ring than it is to playing a regular roguelike. I’m having fun now that I can feel my skill exponentially improving, but I’m still not having the best go at it.

UK Celebrity Traitors

I’m in love with him!!!!!!!!!!!!! I think what’s compelling about UK Celeb Traitors vis a vis UK panel show scene is that the comedians are all pretty good at this game for the most part4. Anyway, three eps to go – we’ll check in on this next week.

Do you guys think I will ever see Is This Thing On? What have you been reading, watching, listening to, or enjoying? Not to do “Avatar has no cultural relevance” discourse but I have to see the new one tomorrow and I have no idea what happened in the last one outside of whatever went on with the whale.

Leave a comment

There’s an adaptation starring Alain Delon — anyone seen this?

Can’t really recommend but it is more engaging than the show.

Also can’t really recommend — it is mostly dull and presupposes the larger public cares a lot about “the role of a journalist in society.” We can’t all be Janet Malcolm, and I include myself in this.

Minus whatever is happening in Lucy Beaumont’s brain — SAID WITH LOVE.