By Brett Yates Earlier this month, in anticipation of Mother’s Day, Facebook introduced a seventh reaction emoji: the controversial “purple flower,” signifying thankfulness. In fact, it was a reintroduction, this time suggesting an annual springtime rollout, like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg at Easter, following its first appearance in May of 2016. As you well…

By Brett Yates Do you listen to podcasts? If so, have you noticed that pretty much every advertisement-supported podcast is funded by the same set of sponsors? These, in no particular order, are Blue Apron, Squarespace, Audible, Casper Sleep, Stamps.com, and Dollar Shave Club. The podcast is that rare example of a new medium, although…

By Brett Yates “I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’ People…

By Brett Yates Out of all the political debates you’ve ever had over drinks at a bar, how many of them, in retrospect, do you think were worth your time? The new Heineken commercial (titled “Worlds Apart”) that’s been making the rounds on social media is about political differences and the possibility of overcoming them.…

By Brett Yates The title of this piece notwithstanding, “Cold Prey” is not technically a skiing movie; it’s a snowboarding movie, insofar as it concerns sports at all. More importantly, it’s a slasher movie: a group of frisky young adults, a masked killer on the loose—it all just happens to take place at an abandoned…

By Brett Yates To make things immediately clear, “Hot Dog… The Movie” is not good. Indeed, one could go so far as to call its post-ellipsis subtitle aspirational, or at least a reflection of a certain need for self-reassurance: “Hot Dog,” a low-budget comedy directed by Peter Markle, really is just barely a movie at…

By Brett Yates Editor’s note: The following is the first in a short series of reviews of mostly older films whose narratives prominently feature skiing and ski resorts. The opening shot of “Downhill Racer,” the 1969 Alpine drama starring Robert Redford, initially registers as an abstract composition: a dark, diagonal bolt against a white backdrop.…

By Brett Yates [Verse 1] In the time of bloated budgets, I got real wonky, Made PowerPoints in vain, became a fiscal junkie. With the widow’s peak, the airbrushed headshots, Wisconsinites voted for the beefcake hotshot. Kill the entitlements and put it in neutral; Stock market’s gaining with the White House under our control. Body…

By Brett Yates During the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Neil Gorsuch, the federal appellate judge from Colorado, Republicans strove to give Donald Trump’s nominee opportunity to present himself as a friendly, well-rounded human being—as opposed to the Constitutional pedant and heartless enforcer of unjust power structures that leftists might suppose him to be. During…

By Brett Yates Winter landscapes will never stop being kind of magical to me, no matter how joylessly and cynically grownup I become: the endless unstained carpet of a fresh snowfall, the sculptural perfection of an icicle, the fierce sting of the cold itself. The dreamlike beauty of the alpine environment is one of the…

Writers of internet content are in general unoriginal, pandering, and shamelessly given to formula, so when one particular article becomes a successful and widely shared piece of clickbait, you can bet that other articles in same vein will follow. Was that dress blue and black or white and gold? For the past couple months, I’ve…

My girlish interest in the Academy Awards is surely fairly obvious to frequent readers of this column, given the truly embarrassing number of times I’ve written here about the Oscars (including last week, in what was, upon reflection, possibly least coherent column in the history of my Mountain Times career—a serious achievement). Even so, I’ve…

Three months have passed since Bernie Sanders infamously remarked that, in order to win future elections, the Democratic Party would have to “move beyond identity politics.” In a response to a young woman who had asked for his advice regarding her goal to become the second Latina senator in U.S. history, Sanders began by emphasizing…

I’ve written here before about the uneasy relationship between my passion for skiing and my longstanding tendency toward early-morning sluggishness. Simply put, skiing is not the sport for lazy people (I think that title may belong to bowling, no offense intended to bowlers)—it is not the sport for those whose bodies, on days off from…

Following the death of the actress Mary Tyler Moore last month  at the age of 80, many journalists and critics reexamined the second-wave feminist legacy of her eponymous sitcom, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” which, in the 1970s, normalized the lifestyle of the single working woman in an American city, presenting it as a full…