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3 weeks ago | 
johnpaulbrammer.substack.com | John Paul Brammer
Your paid support makes writing like this possible. Thank you so much. May 2025: It will be June in a week. I’m sitting on a fully booked Amtrak from Manhattan to D.C. for an old friend’s wedding. My recently purchased suit is in a bag over my head. I’m surrounded by people dealing the sort of damage to one another typical on mass transit. (“I apologize,” a woman’s raspy voice says behind me to the passenger next to her, “for the way I asked you to move over earlier. I’m headed to a funeral.
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1 month ago | 
johnpaulbrammer.substack.com | John Paul Brammer
Your paid support makes writing like this possible. Thank you so much. Two months ago, I was pulled aside for “additional screening” in the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. I was making a connecting flight on my way back to New York after some fifty days in Mexico. I’d successfully cleared passport check and retrieved my luggage when I felt the tractor beam of authority pulling me from the herd. I kept my eyes down and quickened my pace, but this was in vain.
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1 month ago | 
johnpaulbrammer.substack.com | John Paul Brammer
Your paid support makes creative endeavors like this possible. Netflix doesn’t allow screenshots, so I took some pictures with my phone. I think it adds a little something. Thank you for reading!The bulk of Shakespeare’s works can be filed under two categories. There are comedies, which end in weddings, and there are tragedies, which end in funerals.
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2 months ago | 
johnpaulbrammer.substack.com | John Paul Brammer
Your paid support makes creative projects like these possible. Thank you. It happens on occasion that even a recluse such as myself ends up in the predicament of having to do an “icebreaker.” In fact, it comes up more often than I’d like. This is because, as a globetrotting homosexual with body dysmorphia, I regularly find myself in boutique fitness classes in cities where I don’t live.
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Mar 26, 2025 | 
johnpaulbrammer.substack.com | John Paul Brammer
¡Hola Papi! is the preeminent deranged advice column from writer and author John Paul Brammer. Support this column by sharing it and subscribing below, or by upgrading to a paid subscription for access to more columns. Send Papi a letter at [email protected]¡Hola Papi!This isn’t going to be a unique question. I imagine it’s one millions of people wake up with every morning these days.
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Mar 20, 2025 | 
johnpaulbrammer.substack.com | John Paul Brammer
Your paid support makes creative projects like these possible. Thank you. Ranking Catholic hymns is no easy task. First of all, the Catholic Church has some absolute bangers. You don’t get a title like “the universal church” without producing an earworm or two, and the Church understood centuries ago what South Korea (K-Pop) and Kosovo (Dua Lipa & her lesser Albanian clones) understand in the present: to dominate hearts and minds, it helps to dominate the charts.
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Feb 5, 2025 | 
johnpaulbrammer.substack.com | John Paul Brammer
Your paid support makes creative endeavors like these possible. Thank you. I’m sitting now at John F. Kennedy International Airport waiting to board my flight to Mexico City, where I will be for several weeks. In the interest of being let into the country, I will be holding off on publishing this piece about Emilia Pérez until I’ve made it to my domicile.
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Jan 31, 2025 | 
johnpaulbrammer.substack.com | John Paul Brammer
Your paid support makes creative endeavors like these possible. Thank you. I’m thinking of the morning after the 2016 presidential election. What I remember most clearly is the mechanical whoosh of the M Train outside my window. I used to live under a bridge, not unlike a troll. It was a sound I was accustomed to. But it struck me as quite scandalous that morning, what with its bureaucratic nonchalance, the way it continued to run like nothing was out of the ordinary.
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Jan 31, 2025 | 
johnpaulbrammer.substack.com | John Paul Brammer |Hunter Harris
Your paid support makes creative endeavors like these possible. Thank you. Greetings, naughty readers. It’s that time of year. Time for every last writer and publication on the internet to publish their Christmas-themed articles. Did you expect anything different from me? Aw, you shouldn’t have! Indeed, “you shouldn’t have” is what your wretched foe will be saying after you bequeath them something from this deeply unpleasant gift guide I’ve created for sworn enemies.
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Jan 31, 2025 | 
johnpaulbrammer.substack.com | John Paul Brammer
Welcome, cherished subscribers, to the Monthly Magpie, a new series in which I find something shiny out in the world and bring it back here to the nest. Last month, it was this essay on the rise of “AI sparkles.” Sometimes, I will do two a month. That’s just something you’ll have to live with. I chose this title because, as you’re doubtlessly aware, I’m obsessed with birds, and because I wanted to acknowledge the broad variety of topics I want to write about.