Author: mikhailhanafi

More and more I feel like the internet has just regressed into the shitty social spaces of the past. For a while it felt a bit like it was different, like it was potentially better. The only people who really spent any real amount of time on the internet were people who were just a little…

\The other day I watched The Taste of Things, a film by Vietnamese-French director Trần Anh Hùng that is, in very simple terms, about food, love and passion. It’s a film about Dodin, a gourmand (which I’ve learnt is literally just an old French terms for “foodie”) and Eugénie, his cook of 20 years. In…

The Holdovers (2023) dir. by Alexander Payne The Holdovers is a film about people who have gone through a great deal of trauma, and who decide to isolate themselves from the people around them to deal with it. It follows Mr Hunham, a cynical, bitter teacher at Barton, a New England boarding school for rich…

I have a lot of playlists. Some of them are organised by genre, some by vibe, and more relevant for this post, some by time. In the past, I had monthly playlists, then I found that I wasn’t listening to enough new music to fill up new monthly playlists, then I swapped to yearly ones,…

I’ve been in the UK for 13 days now on my 14-day holiday. It’s been four years since I last saw my university friends in person, and 4 years since I left behind the life I’d started to build for myself. The few months after I graduated were tough—the mitochondria may be the powerhouse of…

You remember the ice bucket challenge? That one period of time when you would open up your social media feeds and invariably end up scrolling for 15 minutes straight though posts from friends and friends of friends and friends of friends of friends dumping buckets of ice cold water over their heads. It was part…

One thing you might not know about me is that I use every goddamned tracking app known to mankind. Some day in the near future someone can do a study on why some people (me) feel the need to keep data on media consumption habits, but for now: here are my Top everythings of 2022.…

TikTok concerts and the commodification of music 🎶 There’s been a growing trend of people posting concert videos where the crowd, I hate to risk sounding like a fucking boomer, just plain sucks. People say that they had other audience members actively shush them while they’re singing along, some saying that entire crowds barely knew…