140: July 2026

I've been approaching burnout again this summer. It's my own damn fault; I bite off more than I can chew, and by God I'll chew it, but this month, I needed a break. My husband and I went to Pittsburgh for a week with no work and no writing and no real plans, other than a desire to go to a bunch of museums and maybe a baseball game. The baseball game got rained out, but the museums were great. I had a hand-to-God religious experience in one of them, when I expected it least and needed it most, and it's been carrying me through the rest of the month.

It was at Mattress Factory, a contemporary art museum scattered across three buildings on the same block in a residential neighborhood on the north side of Pittsburgh. We'd been walking across town in the heat; it was threatening to rain, and the building was still and warm. One of the floors in the main building was intentionally dark, the kind of low-level lighting that makes you want to tiptoe and speak in a hushed voice. This floor was home to three artworks, all by James Turrell, whom I'd never encountered before. His medium is light, which is the kind of thing you say about an artist who paints showy vistas, except it's actually true in this case. There were three rooms on the floor, each one separated from the other by dark corridors, and each one featured an artwork made from projected light.

The one that got me is a work called Pleiades. To access it, you have to walk around a corner and down a hallway so dark, you can't see your hand in front of your face. At the end of the corridor, there's a door, and on either side of the door, there's a chair facing what I'm pretty sure is a twenty-foot-long room, though I couldn't actually see the room itself; it was too dark. To experience the work, you have to sit in the chair for fifteen minutes and look out into the dark. When I sat down and looked out, I thought I could see gray clouds, which gradually took on blue and purple tones, subtle projected light that looked a little like the texture of a crashing wave viewed from below the surface of the water. The longer we sat in the room, the more our eyes adjusted. The colors remained subtle but grew richer in tone; eventually I thought I could make out shades of red. Seven minutes in, and I started to cry.

It's been two weeks, and I still can't think too long about the experience without tearing up. I can't explain it; I didn't feel a sudden rush of emotion, and the artwork remained subtle for the entire fifteen minutes that I sat there. Nothing loomed out of the dark, nothing became suddenly clear. I'd felt a little nervous entering the room, but that anxiety settled down in the back of my head, like my dog curling up for a nap. It didn't go away, but it wasn't active any more, either, and for once in my life I was able to look out into the dark and empty my head of thoughts and be still. That soft light held me as I looked out at it. There were no grand revelations, just a gentle feeling of being, and of being accepted.

After our fifteen minutes were up, we went to the museum cafe. I was emotional for a little while afterward. I learned later that Turrell is a Quaker, which made the startling quiet acceptance of Pleiades suddenly make sense. If you're ever in Pittsburgh and have fifteen minutes to spare, you should seek it out.

What I wrote:

To mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, I wrote a column for Bright Wall/Dark Room about two Michael Mann movies that capture the history of the country from his perspective. A sort of history of the United States, according to Mann.

I also reviewed Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey for Seeing & Believing.

And I turned in a book chapter! More to come on this front, though it might take a while. I'm writing on an academic publishing timeline for this project.

What I talked about:

Like the summer cicada, I have emerged once again to yell about the Alien movies, partly because Aliens is celebrating its 40th anniversary this month, and partly to promote the second edition of Becoming Alien.

I sat down with Marshall Shaffer at Marshall and the Movies to talk about James Cameron's Aliens for its 40th anniversary.

I joined Jason Bailey and Mike Hull over at Guide for the Film Fanatic podcast to talk about the original Alien.

And I joined Ryan Does for his podcast/YouTube channel Everyday Dread: Horror Analysis for the Real World to talk about Aliens.