Frankenstein.

The green-faced Halloween monster with a bolt through his forehead is one of the most enduring imaginary characters this side of Santa Claus. Everyone knows Frankenstein’s creation, though his creator—Dr. Victor Frankenstein—gets less attention.

The story of Frankenstein, then, is easily read as a warning about the potential of new and fears…

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At this point, dear reader, you could probably guess The Cure’s relationship with autumn.

You’d fairly expect some kind of stupidly heady take that goes something like: fall is one long blast of glory where the life-fire that burned green through spring and summer manifests itself anew through the blazing foliage, backyard firepits, …

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Weird question.

What’s the appeal of a laughing skull?

We only ask ‘cause it’s been Halloween in the seasonal pharmacy aisle for a while, but now all those smiling skeletons and candy-colored grim reapers, friendly ghosts and happy ghouls are lurking on stoops worldwide.

So why is it that the frown of deat…

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One Battle After Another is pretty much an unprecedented masterpiece. All the rave headlines about it being Paul Thomas Anderson’s finest film were right, and our skepticism was wrong. It’s a loving, laughing, flaming skull of a cinematic experience that punctures pieties with humor and oppression with heart. The actors deliver command performances, ren…

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“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” -George Orwell

You may’ve noticed we’ve shifted away from straight political commentary at The Cure in recent years.

Truth is, there are already more political takes online than anyone could read without going numb. We decided our platform might do better …

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Last week was a hideous, hideous one.

It goes without saying something is extraordinarily broken in the United States of America. Multiple school shootings, the murder of Charlie Kirk, the talk of civil war, and palpable fear of more violence in a nation already awash in it.

It’s just fucking horrible.

…

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Pop Quiz:

You see some young homie on the street rocking a RealTree camouflage hat, denim jacket, plain white tee, Carhart dungarees and leather work boots.

Are they:

1. In the heart of Rural America, going about their business?

Or..

2. In the heart of Brooklyn, doing the same?

It’s a real stumper these days, huh?

The presently on-trend ubiquity of …

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It’s hard to say exactly when the dog days of summer tilt into the season’s golden-lit finale. Shadows stretch, the light turns honey-dry, and a kind of Sunday calm falls over everything as autumn’s return-to-reality looms near. The eternally recurring question arrives for another year: where did summer go?

Sure, it’s not over yet…

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All of us wake up to a daily choice between meaning and cynicism. Between creation and dissolution. Between joy and fear.

This is the forking path we walk every day. We often can’’t choose the terrain of circumstance this path traverses, but we can choose the way we cross it.

But taking the road of joy isn’t always easy. Few people would know that better …

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Read history books, or news for that matter, and the entire human experience can start to look like one dark sky full of violence, with a rare few stars of progress thrown in.

To be sure, humanity’s past and present are full of inhumanity. Our shared story is full of conflict and literally unimaginable suffering. And tragically, the hinge points of globa…

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Apologies, good people of The Cure, for the delayed publication here.

Your humble Curemeister was on a brief summer vacation and did, indeed, fail to deliver the usual human grown, 100% organic piece of written opinion to your inboxes.

Sincerest apol…

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“Metamodernism is characterized by the oscillation between aspects of modernism and postmodernism. It is an attempt to negotiate between enthusiasm and irony, hope and melancholy, naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.” – Vermeulen & van der Akker, weighty philosophers

“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.” – Abraham Lincoln, America’s GOAT

Independence Day, huh?

The 4th of July is the American summer’s unofficial zenith. And since none of us have ever fully shaken that schoolday sense that summertime equals break time, it feels right that the season’s apex comes in the form of a long weekend.

Grilling, hanging out, fireworks, playing outside, drinking cold beverages, and sunburn are the soup du jour nationwide.

And these are all excellent things.

But, you know.

With July 4th creeping in this week, there will also be heavier conversations swirling about both sides of the commemorative coin labeled “America’s Soul.”

PTO and partying aside, Independence Day carries some complicated themes that are only getting more complex in 2025. America has angels and demons like no other nation. And both are very much on the move right now.

But isn’t this, in some way, the case for all of us?

A macrocosm of the microcosm of our own human hearts?

Of course, our individual footprints are not America-sized. Our capacity for help and harm is much smaller than the hulking nation we all share. But the truth of the matter is, we all exist in a state of tension between good and bad, selfishness and other-directedness, order and chaos.

Of course, our individual footprints aren’t America-sized. Our capacity for help and harm is a fraction of this hulking nation’s. But if we’re being honest with ourselves—and willing to sit in the psychospiritual discomfort that comes with examining the ways we all fall short of our ideals—the yin-yang of good and bad within each of us becomes obvious.

None of us are all saint. None of us are all sinner.

Sometimes we love America for its ideals, its potential, its dynamism. Other times—especially when unconscionable shit happens in the nation’s name—not so much.

And in that tension, we see our own reflection.

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Human brains are still the world’s most advanced and unique computer. They’re lightning fast, preposterously complex…and prone to techn…

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“And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
"When you comin' home, son?"
"I don't know when, but we'll get together then, Dad
You know we'll have a good time then"
-Harry Chapin, “Cat’s Cradle”

In the aftermath of Father’s Day, consider, if you would:

dad bods, dad jokes, dad hats.

Each of those phrases carries a …

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Image from CONVICTS

It’d be a damn shame if some people weren’t just born weird.  

Taking the logical and easy way is normal. Following one’s gut down the harder road is weird. 

Trying something, succeeding and repeating your success is normal. Trying something, failing and continuing to try because your mind’s on fire with secret visions is weird.  

And the musician, writer, director, journalist and cracklingly-brilliant intellectual Roland Ellis is one of these very virtuous weirdos. The Aussie came into this world tuned to a slightly different frequency than the rest of us. He’s the rare type whose vibe-eantenna seems to catch every current of the human condition…and the even rare type who can express his insights across artistic mediums. 

First known for bending chords and cracking hearts as the musician Ernest Ellis, Ellis came up through the Australian music scene: touring and writing hard, while slowly shifting his creative center of gravity. Over a decade ago, his fascination with the visual language of music videos moved him from on the stage to behind the camera. Next came screenwriting, journalism for Rolling Stone, forays into academia and a move around the world as Ellis braided his various yarns of talent into a single thread: storytelling. 

These days, Ellis is a writer-director based in Brooklyn. He recently wrapped his first feature film The Reunion, which is set to hit Amazon this summer. He’s deep into development on sophomore feature, titled Dream Baby Dream.

The film is a gritty, character-driven slice of New York noir that doubles as a cinematic indictment of late-capitalism’s soul-stealing grind.  It’s in the final stages of crowdfunding, by the way. And is a project more than worth lending your support towards. Check the teaser here.

Aside from his growing success as a writer-director, Roland is a dad, a scholarly thinker and a critic of the transcendent promises of AI culture. 

We caught up with this artist-slash-academic while he was jetlagged in the French Alps, fresh from investor meetings in Geneva and right on the cusp of getting Dream Baby Dream over the line. What followed was a wide-ranging conversation about the addictive nature of flow states, the crushing weight of systems and how stories might just be the last sacred thing left. 

Read the condensed and edited version of our conversation below. 

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“The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal—because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”

—Achilles in Troy (sampled by $uicideboy$)

We’ve been hearing this idea of a New Romanticism popping up here and there more frequently. In e…

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Another year in the 2020s, another cooking-hot summer settling over the Northern Hemisphere. There’s something elemental about it—the comfort of the seasons’ return, especially in times as upside-down as our own. Spring arrives with its feverish greening and flowering, and along with it comes a sudden surge of joy. It’s a reminder that we’re more attune…

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So, we’ve got good news and bad news about The Cure.

Let’s start with the bad… as is wise and customary.

Bad news is that—after the Curemeister spent years fighting this move with weaponized incompetence, aggressive foot-dragging, and legitimate lack of media-savvy or practical intelligence in general—The Cure is about to go paid on Substack starting next…

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