Catherine Baab-Muguira
World's foremost expert on Dawson's Creek.
PROJECTS
The Millions
Take a Writer Like Him: My Complicated Love Affair with Kingsley Amis
If people know Kingsley Amis’s work, they tend to know his name-making first novel, 1954’s Lucky Jim, or perhaps The Old Devils, which won the Booker Prize in 1986. It’s a shame, because Take a Girl Like You is among his best—a great work of art, deeply moral and wonderfully realized. A lost classic.
NBC
Failure to launch: Why so many American millennials feel adulthood is a lie
“My mom had five kids by the time she was my age. My dad was starting his second career. And I’m still punching in my parents’ landline at CVS to get the discount.”
Slate
Confessions of a TV Tourist
Pam Beesly broke my heart. It wasn’t so much that she married someone else—namely Dunder Mifflin paper salesman Jim Halpert. It was that she first dropped out of art school in New York, schlepped back home to Scranton, and then got married.
CNBC
How Gaby Dunn found that being 'Bad with Money' can be good for your career
Gaby Dunn can't listen to her own podcast — at least not the early episodes. "I'm really embarrassed about things that I said," she admits, particularly the details she revealed about her bank balance and conversations she'd had with her student-loan servicer. But that's exactly what makes "Bad With Money With Gaby Dunn" so fresh.
Slate
How a $500 Monthly Allowance Saved Our Marriage
When I spend $65 on a vintage Jaws T-shirt in a closely watched eBay auction—closely watched by me, anyway—my marriage of 11 years hangs in the balance.
Quartz
The absurd dark comedies helping us survive 2017
When I asked the comedian Chris Gethard if 2017 has been weirder than other years in recent memory, he replied: “Of course it’s been weirder. I’d sum up this year thus far by asking a simple, “What the fuck is going on?’”
The Millions
Edgar Allan Poe Was a Broke-Ass Freelancer
For his entire oeuvre—all his fiction, poetry, criticism, lectures—Poe earned only about $6,200 in his lifetime, or approximately $191,087 adjusted for inflation.
Playboy
How Tim Heidecker Beat Nate Silver to Predict Donald Trump
On November 9, millions of people woke up to a nightmare. But Tim Heidecker, who writes and stars in Adult Swim’s Decker, found himself in an eerily, uncannily prescient position.
New York Magazine
I Spent $11,537 Becoming a Blonde
When I realized my hair was turning orange under the white dye goo, I finally hit send on the text I was hoping to avoid: “EMERGENCY. I’m getting something really stupid done to my hair.”
Quartz
Millennials are obsessed with side hustles because they're all we've ...
What happens when a generation raised with a “you can be whatever you want to be” ethos meets the worst job market in years?
Quartz
The good news about failing at absolutely everything in your 20s
A couple nights ago, I stumbled across a cache of rejection letters – possibly one of the largest deposits of rejection letters recorded in human history. They were all addressed to me.
FLAVORWIRE
Forget SNL: ‘Decker’ is the Best Satire of the Trump Era
This low-budget stoner-y Adult Swim show is a masterpiece, a great work of art.
Quartz
Do you have to move to New York City to make it as a writer? I asked my literary idols to find out
A few weeks ago, I was visiting New York City, standing in the top floor of The Whitney, staring at the museum’s giant burning candle of Julian Schnabel, when God spoke to me.
New York Magazine
How I Tried to Buy a Better Life With $400 in Subscription Boxes
Some people can do self-improvement without self-loathing or recrimination, without descending into the kind of zealous frenzy that prompts strangers to ask, “Is there someone I can call?” I am not one of them.