Margaret Howie

Writer. Critic. Vulcan.

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How to Make a Podcast Website That Doesn’t Suck – Bello Collective

Eight tips for designing your show’s digital home

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Work Louder, Not Harder: Ten Podcasts About Working

Listen to them before robots take all the jobs

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How Much Are My Childhood Dream Jobs Really Worth? – The Billfold

Becoming the person I wanted to be when I was eight, all expenses included.

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Goldman was kind enough to talk to us about how Reply All started, the new seers of the digital age, and how Star Wars fanvids can heal the soul.

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Take This Spreadsheet & Save the World: A Tool for Unsure Activists

In times of fear and crisis, we all turn to our own sources of consolation — some have faith, some have hard liquor. I have spreadsheets…

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Book reviews, interviews, columns, and musings.

Everyone, Alison Kinney says, wears hoods. It's the uniform of Zuckerberg and girls who visit their grandmothers in the woods, of basement bloggers and bad hair days, as familiar and cozy as a fairy tale -- but hoods are also central of the stories of Trayvon Martin, Abu Ghraib, and the Ku Klux Klan.

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Back in the early 90s a crate load of crime story clichés must have washed up on the Danish coast. The battering of the North Sea only enhanced the patina of the weather-beaten trench coats, bottles of whisky, and worn-out detective badges good only for throwing down on your superior’s desk. Twenty years later it’s all getting coughed up in the post-Dragon Tattoo Scandinavian crime aftermath. A carbon copy of Peter Falk’s Columbo but with higher chance of butter biscuits, The Keeper of Lost Causes earnestly works through a storyline checklist that veers on parody.

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Ten Great Prison Flicks : Starred Up, Shawshank, Chopper, and more

A gigantic amount of movie running time is spent avoiding prison, but some great jail films show that being banged up makes for fascinating watching. Starred Up screenwriter Jonathan Asser notes that the subculture of an ostracised group becomes fascinating to those of us excluded from it, and that may explain why they make such great backdrops to drama, and sometimes even comedy. To celebrate the release of Starred Up on Digital HD, DVD and Blu-ray here’s some of the greatest movies set in the slammer:

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Review : Downhill

In the movies, men in crisis go on the move: call it the Easy Rider effect. No longer concerned with rebels, since the likes of Adam Sandler’s Grown Ups movies and the Tim Allen/John Travolta abomination Wild Hogs, road trip stories have become the province of middle-aged men. Several British filmmakers have recently taken on this theme, and along with The Trip andLocke, Downhill is a particularly Anglo-Saxon product. Instead of horsepower and leather jackets, here it’s all fry-ups and flapping cagoules. With the tagline ‘A road movie on foot’, our four protagonists aren’t trying to conquer the highway. Instead they’re hiking the ‘Coast to Coast’ walk from the east to west of the England.

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In Pioneer, the forces of geology and economics both push forward and occasionally flatten the fragile humans in their way. It’s set in the hilariously-outfitted 1970s when the Norwegian government was angling to get a deep sea pipeline to the vast and lucrative oil fields of the North Sea. But standing between them and what was effectively a gushing tunnel of cash were the deep sea trenches of the coastline and the Americans eyeing up the same resource.

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Interview: Vikings Creator Michael Hirst & Star George Blagden on Pillaging History for Drama

The British Museum was the perfect venue for the launch of Vikings: The First Season on DVD/Blu-Ray. An epic exhibition on the Scandinavian warriors is just about to open there, and as writer and creator Michael Hirst pointed out, they’re reaching to something in the zeitgeist that’s fascinated by the era. Hirst’s drama is action-packed and entertaining, not a documentary but a reflection of the notorious fighters that was committed to avoiding the biggest clichés. Sorry cosplayers, there were no horned helmets – but you can replicate George Blagden’s monk style with a tonsure, as the actor pointed out that his character’s look was authentic: “There is something to be said about having a hole shaved into the top of your head that you can’t quite get for your character from reading a book”

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Exclusive clips from Affleck’s Runner Runner DVD

Having a glum February? Check out these exclusive clips from Runner Runner to add some sunshine and international criminal activities to your weekend.

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Lizzie Prain's got it nicely sorted for a woman in her fifties, with the small rural cottage, the cake-making business, and her marriage to Jacob, a sculptor she met at art school. This is the stuff that Domestic Goddess daydreams are made of: giving up social media and long commutes for being more present in the moment. Cooking, walking the dog, gardening; ideally while wearing homemade woven clothing and upcycling jam jars into whimsical light fixtures. Lizzie is deliberate and practical, an expert cook, thrifty, good with her hands. The landscape she inhabits is right out of a Pinterest lifestyle board fantasy.

But Lizzie isn't gazing over her flower garden awash in a torrent of gratitude-based endorphins. She is standing over the body of her freshly killed husband (spade, skull) and the weight of her entire lifetime is piled up on top of her.

Natalie Young's novel Season to Taste, or How to Eat Your Husband picks away at the household idyll that forms the happy-ever-after backdrop in the last scene of the makeover show, or the TV cook's penultimate feast. A contemporary horror story assembled from the secular comforts of recipes, therapy-speak, and listicles, it draws out its terror not from mystery but from exposure.

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American Horror Story Season 2 on DVD release

Like the Sugababes line-up, each series of AHS rejigs itself with a new scenario. The second series takes place in two claustrophobic environments, a mental asylum and the early sixties, and brings back some cast members to class the joint up.

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This story could be made into very serious subject matter -- immigration, coming out, family secrets -- but instead it's a comic novel. Did you ever worry that you were sacrificing gravity for comedy -- or did you struggle to kill off jokes that didn't sit right in the final work?  

Comedy is something I draw on very heavily in my writing. The point is, however, that my comedy always has bite -- it's not humor for its own sake. The novel isn't "lightweight." Its intent is very serious. I consider it a comi-tragic novel. The tragedy is that Carmel has been married to a gay man for fifty years and suffered as a consequence, and that Barry has lived a lie all his adult life. Comedy is very hard to pull off and I think it's often more powerful than fiction that is devoid of humor.

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Essay: The Butler, the Billions, and 'Bernard and Doris's Broken Hearts

Money changes everything, as noted by deep thinkers from Karl Marx to Cyndi Lauper. The very rich are so interesting because they seem to occupy a different world from us, one where you don’t have to worry about picking up after yourself -- you have to worry about the people you've hired to pick up after you. Bernard and Doris’ director, Bob Balaban, encountered the dramatic potential of wealth and domesticity when he appeared in 2001’s manor house drama Gosford Park. Balaban’s movie, produced by HBO in 2006, is based on the real life relationship between tobacco heiress Doris Duke (Susan Sarandon) and her gay Irish butler Bernard Lafferty (Ralph Fiennes). Balaban and screenwriter Hugh Costello used this scenario to examine two vulnerable people who crossed class and professional boundaries to make a messy, painful, and touching drama. 

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When you were a child, were you drawn to spooky stories or scary movies? Did you have reading rituals to draw out the tension?

I've always adored spooky books and movies. And, though they scare me, it's always in a way that I love and enjoy. So I'm terrified, but I don't mind being terrified. Though I have to say, writing The Orphan Choir really scared me and upset me -- it was a bit much for me at times. I don't know if I'm supposed to admit this, but initially the book had a much jollier ending -- but some early readers said, "If it's going to be this scary, you need to escalate the fear and horror at the end, not diminish it." So I gritted my teeth and went full-on horrific.