James Matthew Wilson

Something snapped in 2014 and then every Midwest city planner decided roundabouts were the answer to this nations problems

I’ll leave it to you to determine whether or not this 17th-century devotional poem is stranger in its original typeface:

And yet, sometimes, it's just hard to account for oneself.

Andy Weir wrote a novel nobody wanted, posted it on his blog for free, then sold it on Kindle for 99 cents. It sold 35,000 copies in a month. This weekend, the movie based on his third book opened at $141 million worldwide. Weir was a software engineer who started posting The Martian chapter by chapter on his website in 2009. Readers asked him to put it on Kindle. Within days of it hitting the bestseller list, he had a literary agent, a publishing deal, and Fox bought the film rights. The Martian cost $108 million to make and grossed $630 million. Drew Goddard wrote that screenplay. He wrote this one too. Project Hail Mary cost nearly double at $200 million. And the studio behind it isn’t Fox. It’s Amazon MGM, which exists because Amazon wrote an $8.45 billion check to buy MGM in 2021. Four years and several expensive flops later, this is the first time that bet has looked smart. Amazon MGM’s 2026 started ugly. A Melania documentary earned $16 million on a $40 million budget. Crime 101 managed $65 million worldwide against $90 million in production costs. Then Hail Mary opened to $80.5 million domestic, the second-largest non-franchise debut in a decade, behind only Oppenheimer’s $82.4 million. Here’s what makes Amazon’s math viable: 200 million people pay for Amazon Prime, mostly for shipping. Prime Video is included. Every movie they put in theaters is a marketing campaign for a streaming service their customers already have. Their distribution chief said it in 2024: if they cover marketing costs theatrically, the movie pays for itself again on streaming. Traditional studios need a film to gross 2.5x its budget. Amazon just needs to cover the ad spend. The film earned a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes and an “A” CinemaScore (an audience exit poll that predicts how long a movie keeps selling tickets). If it tracks anything like The Martian, which had a similar audience profile and word of mouth, it could push past $600 million globally. Same screenwriter adapting both books, for a studio that didn’t exist when the first one came out.

My boring take is that Shakespeare is a Christian Humanist.

The number of people I encounter who can’t explain their (generally “good”) jobs and/or what their spouses do is staggering. I’d love to see people try to describe what they actually do for a living in a single 280 character tweet in a way that the average person can understand.