Allow me to take a brief detour from my 30 for 30 project (which will be done by the end of this month, I am promising myself) to highlight some of the stuff I wrote in 2021. It was a lot more than I thought, and a lot more varied than I thought, too.
Here you’ll find movie reviews, explanatory journalism, crime write-ups and more. You’ll also find my last bylines for WFAA. I am now the senior audience growth and engagement producer at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. That mouthful of a title just means that I’m now focusing more on distributing the news than writing it. I’m excited to get back to working in newspapers, my first love, and I’m thrilled for all that entails.
But, for now, I’ll share some of my favorite pieces from the past year.
For WFAA:
I kicked off the year writing about how sometimes, you end up going to court on Zoom with a cat filter on your screen.
I’m still shocked that the deadly pileup on I-35 in Fort Worth happened just days before the deadly winter freeze in Texas, but I helped work on this piece chronicling that day.
Most of my work on the winter freeze was under a staff byline, but this story about how the Plano police wrongfully arrested a Black teen walking home in the snow is emblematic of everything wrong with local policing efforts.
This story about Google Trends turning 15 was a shameless stab at SEO relevance, but it worked, and it was fun to see what people were searching for on Google 15 years ago.
There was a Topo Chico shortage last August, but fear not, it was resolved.
Maybe my favorite thing I’ve ever written for WFAA, this article about when you can buy booze on Sundays in Texas started as a response to seeing “when can you buy beer in Texas on Sunday” trending on Google every Sunday while I was at work. I got real into the weeds with it.
Ahead of the new “Halloween” movie’s release, a lawyer in Galveston decided to dress up like Michael Myers and walk along the beach. It didn’t go too well.
A Dallas bar banned anyone playing Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” before Dec. 1. Mariah responded.
A big anniversary happened on Nov. 22 in Dallas. No, not the Kennedy assassination— Nov. 22, 2021 marked 20 years since Creed played the Cowboys halftime show.
Apparently, a study by the New York Times says that Euless, Texas is the best place to live in America. I don’t buy that, but then again, the reporter that wrote the NYT story isn’t from Texas.
I shamelessly made a Harry Potter pun in the headline for this story about Dallas Stars goalie Anton Khudobin.
Ahead of South Oak Cliff High School’s historic championship run, I took a look back at Dallas ISD’s last championship team — the infamous 1988 Dallas Carter team, first made famous in Buzz Bissinger’s “Friday Night Lights.”
I looked back at the history of the Hail Mary pass on the anniversary of the historic Roger Staubach-Drew Pearson catch
And, finally, in my last act as a WFAA digital producer, I analyzed why “Yellowstone” and “Spider-Man: No Way Home” both did so well. It’s the same reason: familiarity.
For Book & Film Globe:
Now that 2021 is over and we saw all that Marvel, Star Wars and the rest of the comic book world had to offer, I’m feeling pretty good about my predictions in this article about how every studio is trying to ape Marvel’s success at crafting a multiverse for their franchises, no matter how obscure.
I am eagerly awaiting the new Liam Neeson Action Movie this year.
“Young Rock” on Peacock was a charming delight that I didn’t see coming.
The short-form documentary series “Sasquatch” was so good, and I think my review does a good job of explaining why the show’s analysis of why we solve mysteries hits a nerve.
This piece about “Space Jam” and its corporate origins got a mention in the Morning Brew newsletter.
I was not a fan of the new documentary about Anthony Bourdain, and this piece gets at why I thought it was much more obsessed with ghoulishly “solving” his death than celebrating his life.
Scarlett Johansson sued Disney over her “Black Widow” points and profits and made history this summer. I wrote this article about it.
I had a lot of fun with the “Fear Street” series on Netflix, which I hope the streaming network uses as a template for how to create shows and movies in the future.
And I wrote an obituary for Gary Paulsen, an author who pulled no punches and treated his young adult audience like they were old enough to deal with mature subject matter.
That’s all I got for this year. Because this newsletter is nothing but an exercise in relaxed deadlines for myself, I’ll be sharing my Top 10 list of 2021 by the end of January as well. Be on the lookout for more from me in your inbox in the coming weeks.
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