Matthew Gasda

Author Archive

  • May 8, 2025
    Akari was on the couch, scrolling Instagram. Her body was small, but she was very toned and lean from yoga and pilates classes, so she appeared longer than she was. And though her...
  • May 1, 2025
    Arranged marriages long ago disappeared from the secular West. Yet marriage and dating are becoming functions of caste once more. This time, it’s dating apps that determine...
  • April 14, 2025
    A few weeks ago, after the first preview of my play about artificial intelligence in San Francisco, I found myself talking to Edward (not his real name), an agreeable programmer with...
  • March 25, 2025
    My first real directing gig, the first time I directed a play other than my own, was Bloody Poetry, a work from the 1980s by Howard Brenton, an English playwright. It’s...
  • March 6, 2025
    I'll start with a simple premise. If we now have direct evidence that the federal government was funneling millions of dollars into supposedly free market press organs (such as...
  • February 24, 2025
    Millennials are having their post-Soviet moment: the truths, the lifestyles, the ideologies, and the religions that girded us through adulthood: all vapor. Our mode of social...
  • February 10, 2025
    It's harder to communicate now that people don’t read. One way to look at books is as shorthand—summarizing vast swaths of human experience. Reading a great book is like...
  • January 27, 2025
    I wrote my play Doomers partly because, the night Sam Altman was fired, I was performing in a play called Zoomers.
  • January 24, 2025
    “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.” — Jean Baudrillard American films don’t feel like films....
  • January 13, 2025
    I moved to New York in 2011 and started hanging out in the Village, not realizing that it was, at that point, largely a fake neighborhood—NYU kids and the wealthy....