Jackson McCarthy

Who’s Afraid of Ethical Non-Monogamy? The Invite is one of this year’s best (and funniest) films Mild spoilers ahead. Nobody in this damned country remembers Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, one of the last century’s nastiest and most nastily brilliant playscripts. An eviscerating document of a marriage falling apart at one epic dinner party in which nobody is allowed to leave (much less consume food), it's the closest literary antecedent to the latest Olivia Wilde film The...

Madonna’s dance music has always been social. This might sound obvious; isn’t all dance music social?; aren’t dance floors literally composed of a mass of people? But if you’ve been to a techno or trance gig recently you might be able to hear the difference. (And see the difference, too; as in, a disconcertingly large number of promising young lads slumped over in a K-hole.) Some dance floors are focussed on a self-pleasure kind of hedonism, where the dissolution of oneself into the larger...

I Got My Driver’s License Five Years Ago Olivia Rodrigo’s you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love First impressions matter. Olivia Rodrigo introduced herself to the world with the late-pandemic smash “drivers license", a beautifully accomplished ballad replete with an eat-your-heart-out bridge where the bottled up emotions of the verse and chorus are spilled out in a gory half-time. If the song up until that point seems a little one-note, that’s largely Rodrigo’s point: she even sets most...