Hbo

Harry Potter is for infantilized millennials

Nostalgia is often seen as a positive emotion, but the word actually derives from the Greek nostos, meaning “homecoming,” and algos, meaning “pain.” Nostalgia is really a type of homesickness, an ache for something lost. As audiences watch the new trailer for the HBO Harry Potter television series, the algos may hit pretty hard: those tantalizing two minutes are the reminder we need that you can’t catch lightning in a bottle twice.  The first thing you notice is simply how bad everything looks. Shows seem to have an obsession nowadays with making everything as dark as possible, so that you are constantly trying to adjust the light settings of your screen to see what’s actually happening. Even the colors of the recent Wicked films – an emerald-saturated dreamland that changed the possibilities of

harry potter

New York, I love you, but I need to get home

I reached New York for the premiere of the fourth series of Industry in a mild state of delirium. I was traveling from Lamu, and it had taken four flights and 20 hours in the air to reach the US. Lamu is so beautiful that it briefly makes you consider whether to bother with western civilization at all. On the rickety flight to the island from mainland Kenya, I had sat next to a German count I vaguely knew. ‘You looking to get a little fucked up?’ he asked. I mumbled something about ‘family time’. He nodded and wished me luck. On New Year’s Day I ran into him again,