Alex Laughlin

2 weeks ago | defector.com | Alex Laughlin

The third season of The White Lotus ends with guests speeding away from the resort on a boat while the staff wave at them, placid and obliging. In Season 1, Natasha Rothwell’s Belinda was among the staff charged with sublimating their identities to avoid being “too specific as a presence,” as Murray Bartlett’s Armond explains in the pilot.

2 weeks ago | defector.com | Alex Laughlin

My friend Sasha was banned for life from the Providence Place Mall when she was 20. She and her friends would sneak into movies at the mall’s theater through the maze of back hallways and tunnels. They climbed onto the mall’s roof. I imagine them like the subterranean ants in an ant farm: constantly scurrying, unseen and underfoot. The only thing deterring people from entering these halls was social convention. We live in a society.

4 weeks ago | defector.com | Alex Laughlin

William Kim’s TikTok videos should not be popular. They are long, sparsely edited, and lack music or text that might hold viewers’ attention. Most of his videos start with a defiant and absurd statement: “This is my food. My food is me.” His first video, posted on January 30, 2025, has almost six million views.

1 month ago | defector.com | Alex Laughlin

11:59 a.m. The tiny clock at the bottom of the screen counts down to the top of the hour, and like a bizarre bell chime from a digital clocktower, large pink text overtakes the Whitney Museum’s website. "A quick bus ride and transfer to the F gets us into the city nice and swiftly at noon, where I’m greeted by this food truck."Then, the comments tick in.

1 month ago | defector.com | Alex Laughlin

David Roth: I will start by saying something nice about Parable Of The Sower, which is that it really is as prescient as advertised. So much so, in fact, that I found it pretty punishing to read. I wasn’t expecting escapism, obviously, but I found it difficult at times to appreciate how well Octavia E. Butler anticipated what America would be like after three decades of social and political atrophy from my vantage point here in the future that she anticipated.