[1] The Franchise Curse [2] The Varieties of Social Media Experience [3] Growing Up Metal [4] When "Prestige" TV Jumped the Shark: The Problem(s) with Pluribus [5] Genre and Illusion [6] 20 Questions About Social Media [7] Themes from Philip K. Dick [8] Why I Love...
Now that social media has become a full-fledged ecosystem, with its own distinctive fauna, it seems useful to offer a taxonomy of its more common denizens. The catalogue has an American inflection, but can easily be adapted so as to apply wherever you find yourself,...
Many silly ideas are born of frustration, desperation, wishful thinking or some combination of the three. One of the most enduring of these is the widespread belief that there is some authority “out there,” poised to right wrongs. The grandest -- and silliest --...
Pluribus, the latest “prestige” offering on Apple TV, is a bad show. I know that I am in the minority on this, but that’s alright. A show can be bad while also being popular with audiences and critics, as can books, movies, and any other bit of entertainment, and I am...
It’s a cliché of course, but we are living in strange times. In one sense, we are awash with The New. In just a short period, significant aspects of our daily lives have been completely transformed: going to stores and buying things has been replaced with online...
Over seventy-six years Feeling, growing, and learning The poetry of life And the cruelty of deception I still now wonder As often as I regret How we might have taken another path Together with souls who cared To become more human By lifting those who were...
The conventional wisdom is that the first seasons of great TV shows tend to be weak; that the writers and cast need time to break things in; get things going; develop relationships, plotlines, and character arcs that are enduring and resonate with audiences. And while...
I was born in 1968, so my childhood was spent in the 1970s. My parents had recently moved from Queens to Long Island, where I would be raised in a leafy suburb, and as they’d only emigrated to the United States ten years earlier, they were almost as new to the place...
It is as if the notion “criminal” were to remain when criminal law and criminal courts had been abolished and forgotten... This word “ought,” having become a word of mere mesmeric force, could not, in the character of having that force, be inferred from anything...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZhQD2hwed8
This piece was written back in 2015, in reaction to the discourse surrounding Steven Pinker’s, The Better Angels of our Nature (2012). It is interesting to revisit his theme of an unyielding historical arc towards niceness, in light of our current times -- in which,...
Public behavior today is not known for its civility, so it’s unsurprising that online etiquette is especially terrible. Lacking even the most rudimentary incentives for decorum and restraint, social media platforms make it possible to act like a jerk to millions of...
When your president quotes Napoleon approvingly on social media, it's easy to be pessimistic about a lot of things: human nature; democracy; our ability to live together and self-govern. Can procedural democracy, with all of its potential limitations, properly...
The pilot for Babylon 5 first aired in 1993 and began a five-year journey that would result in one of the most respected and admired science fiction tv series ever produced, the winner of multiple Hugo and Emmy awards. Created by writer and producer J. Michael...
"The tragedy of your time, my young friends, is that you may get exactly what you want." [1] ___ Monkees, the Signifier "The Monkees”: this sign signifies a number of phenomena, related yet not identical. For instance: [1] A television show, broadcast in the...
When I was 17, I fell in love with three older men. Indeed, they were so much older that two of them were dead at the time. They were everything I wasn't. They were short and thin, and though not athletes, they moved swiftly and with agility. One couldn't say that...
We will first consider the Scooby Doo phenomenon in terms of its original appearance in the series Scooby Doo! Where Are You? (1969). The artwork is crude, the animation sloppy, and the music and laugh-track are downright annoying. The show won its audience with its...
During the pandemic of 2020-21, I was glad for our large, three-story house in a woodsy neighborhood in southwest Missouri, which bordered on a park with a lake. School and work were online, groceries were delivered, public entertainment had been suspended, and my...
We know now that beyond successfully turning out his base, Donald Trump’s 2024 victory depended on cutting into what normally would have been parts of the Democratic coalition. Women, whose reproductive rights Trump was instrumental in dismantling and for whom he has...
[1] What is the difference between posting on an open social media account and running through every airport, shopping mall, and train station on the earth shouting things? [2] Re: [1], is the only reason that people don’t do the latter – aside from the stray ...
Anyone who knows me knows that I am a tennis player and enthusiast of long standing. (I have been playing the game since 1973.) They will also know that I think the game has been in decline, despite the efforts of institutional tennis and tennis media (and...
Daniel Kaufman and Milton Lawson discuss the franchising of popular genre entertainment. The catalyst for this discussion was Dan's piece, "The Franchise Curse." This is the launch of a new CRZ podcast for entertainment and culture, "At the Movies & on TV"....
I’m not sure when entertainment franchises became a thing. There always have been series, of course – I grew up watching The Honeymooners, MASH, and the original Star Trek, to mention a few – but when did the term that previously had been reserved for fast-food chains...
I first became political in the early 1980’s, when I was a teenager. Reagan’s Contra and “Star Wars” initiatives had inspired me to become a Democrat and to attend Washington Workshops in the Capitol, where at the age of fifteen, I participated in mock congresses and...
Though not really Metal, my first love for hard rock music came when I was in the third grade, in the form of the band KISS. It was 1976, and KISS could be counted on to be hated by parents, and while their style was not entirely new – the New York Dolls and...
The Cult of the Self has shifted into high gear. It was rough going out of the gate, back in the 1970s, what with hirsute gurus and hippies talking about their astral projections, and simultaneously terrifying and lampoonable movements like EST (Erhard Seminars...
In The Naked Sun (1957), Isaac Asimov imagines Solaria, a low-population world in which residents live on estates so large that one never encounters one’s neighbors in person. As robots are employed in virtually every manner of labor, these estates are also almost...
It was a big deal that time of the year, when our high school yearbook came out. In truth, it was a big deal all year: when the staff was being determined (you had to be elected to work on the yearbook); while photos for it were being taken; and as the year’s theme...
It’s been several months now, since my father – “Aba” – died, and the memory of these last, difficult years has receded just enough for some of the earlier, happier ones to begin to re-emerge. Aba loved childhood and was very good with children, and my...
Wetson’s was a Long Island hamburger chain that was established in 1959 to be a McDonald’s clone, in a market that McDonald’s and Burger King had yet to enter. Once they did, in the early 1970’s, it wouldn’t be long before Wetson’s would go out of business, but at its...
Hearing how “exhausted” people are. “I bet no one remembers X!” where X is something that easily 80 to 100 million people are well-acquainted with. “Imagine X-ing, Y-ing, and Z-ing,” where X, Y, and Z are things most people (other than the writer) are fine with....
The spectacle of presidents of Ivy League universities unable to answer questions about the harassment and intimidation of Jewish students on their campuses by student “activists” without bobbing, weaving, and dissembling has given us an opportunity to think about...
A delightful film that’s not without its dark side, Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose follows a paranormal investigator looking into the case of a talking mongoose on the Isle of Man in the 1930’s. Simon Pegg in perhaps his best role to date gives Fodor a...