Marcel Proust, over a century ago: If only I had been able to start writing! But, however I set about it (all too similarly, alas, to the resolve to give up alcohol, to go to bed early, to get enough sleep, and to keep fit), whether it was
Every few months (or years) I show back up here on the candler blog, tap the mic a couple times, and promise to revive a regular posting practice. I’m old enough to know that’s a promise I can’t keep, so I won’t make it this time. And yet,
I’ve been reading François Truffaut’s The Films in My Life, a collection of the filmmaker’s criticism and other writings over the course of his life. Tucked away in his 1957 review of Anthony Mann’s Men in War is this parenthetical: I rate
Twitter is over. After declining for months (at least) the sudden, undignified way in which the rug was pulled out from under developers of popular, revolutionary apps seals it. If you haven’t found your new home online yet, the time has co…
A little over a year ago I stopped being able to update the candler blog. The reasons are boring, a combination of my web host shutting down, my CMS not being actively developed and Ruby growing increasingly difficult to work with on macOS.…
The candler blog is an ongoing conversation about cinema, technology and other stuff. It is the personal weblog of Jonathan Poritsky. A candler is able to determine the health of an egg by holding it up to a light. This site derives its emi…
Pauline Kael, reflecting on her career in The New Yorker, 1994: My pieces belong to the breakneck era before people could rent videos of old movies and before distributors began to supply reviewers with videos of new movies. (Reviewers can
The candler blog is now twelve years old. I sat down recently to write a little about it, only to realize I was saying the same stuff I had said on the site’s fifth and tenth anniversaries. So I just started reading my old work. In my trip
Annalee Newitz, parsing a variety of issues at Substack, this week: Substack’s business is a scam. They claim to offer writers a level playing field for making a living, and instead they pay an elite, secret group of writers to be on the pl…
I’m going to write soon about how and why I decided to move back to the Mac for most of my work (the M1 is a big part of the story, of course, but not the whole story), but for now I want to go over how I’ve organized the tools I use for wr…
A nice thing about having written a blog for awhile is I can go back and see if my younger self has an answer to a current dilemma. Here’s me, 9 years ago: Life is short and the considerable time I spend wondering which app has the best Mar…
Vesper wasn’t an app for everyone. A lot of people thought it was under-featured and overpriced from the get-go. Maybe it was too simple. Another word is elegant. Now it’s shutting down. Vesper was a notes app for iPhone (and later iPad) by…