Pop culture is making us dumber, crasser, more immoral, and, especially, less adult. Such, at least, has been the claim of many a cultural critic. At 2023-11-07 13:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Discussions of global war and violence often come with pleas for nuance, for context, and for historical literacy. That’s reasonable and even commendable. You can’t understand the present without understanding the past; it’s wise to try to learn as much as possible about the contours of con...
2023-11-06 13:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
A year ago Gusgus wasn’t even a thing. Now look at him!
This week was the anniversary of my first year on substack! Pretty cool. Thanks again to all of you who have signed up to rea...
2023-11-04 12:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
House Republicans this week passed a $14.3 billion Israel aid package which included $14.3 billion in cuts to the IRS.
I don’t think US should be providing unconditional aid to Israel given indiscriminate killing of civilians in Gaza. But the cuts to offset the aid are also bad. The money...
2023-11-03 14:12:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey, it was Halloween yesterday! I celebrated by watching a horror film, and reviewing it. A bit late, but you know, for horror fans, Halloween is all year.
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I liked When Evil Lurks, but I didn’t love it. That’s somewhat out of sync with the critical consensus,which ha...
2023-11-01 12:00:17 +0000 UTC View Post
Image: Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” and was instrumental in establishing the UN genocide convention.
Experts consulted by the UN have 2023-10-31 12:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello all! Another week come and gone; thanks for sticking with me. And here’s what I published!
“Don’t Say,” a collage of made of LGBT writers’ words about silence. (2023-10-28 12:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Tom Emmer, the latest doofus being chewed up in the House Speaker debacle.
“Why did Donald act friendly to Emmer and then throw him under the bus?” Allison Gill, aka Mueller, She Wrote, 2023-10-24 20:43:47 +0000 UTC View Post
Most superheroes are in the business of foiling criminals and then putting them in jail. With the occasional arguable exception of a Suicide Squad film here or there, superheroes are usually on the side of the cops and the prison guards. They don’t question whether prison, or mas...
2023-10-24 12:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Jack Kirby is best known as the creator of beloved Marvel characters like Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, and the Fantastic Four in the 1960s. Twenty years later, though, at the end of his career, he was making promotional comics for DC’s new line of toys.
The 1984-85 Super Powers 2023-10-22 14:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
The blog is coming to the magnificent end of its first year (much like the magnificent tail of the kitty.) I’ve almost got 5000 subscribers; hoping to hit that before the 30th, which will be the official anniversary (more or less.) Consider sharing if you’d like to help me reach this arbitrar...
2023-10-21 12:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, 1980.
The Hamas attacks and the subsequent Israeli response have led commenters to a couple of historical comparisons. The first is 9/11. The second is the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
The parallels here are clear; the Hamas attacks, 9/11, and the 19...
2023-10-20 12:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Image: Langston Hughes by Carl Van Vechten, 1936
I just read M.L. Rosenthal’s 1967 New Modern Poetry anthology, which focused on postwar poetry. It’s a fun time-capsule. Way back in the mid-60s, important poetry looked substantially different than it does now. Robert L...
2023-10-17 14:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
The violence in the Middle East has led numerous Jewish people to explain what it means to be Jewish in this moment. This is entirely understandable. It’s also, for me, been somewhat alienating.
One person on social media said that Jewish identity is built around the Holocaust, and that J...
2023-10-15 12:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello again! Comforting pic for what’s been a pretty horrible week.
Not as much writing as sometimes, but still a bunch published this week. If you’re not a paid subscriber, consider becoming one so I can keep scribbling? Also you’ll get to see my music track of the week, which can be...
2023-10-14 12:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Image: Jacob Lawrence, The Legend of John Brown (1941/1977), no. 6: “John Brown formed an organization among the colored people of the Adirondack woods to resist the capture of any fugitive slave” [ 2023-10-11 12:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Death in Paradise is a completely unremarkable British detective series set in the Caribbean. Its first episode is a typically breezy nothing—except that, almost by the way, it directly confronts the series’ mostly ignored colonial dynamics. That confrontation isn’t particularly ho...
2023-10-10 12:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Here’s what I wrote this week.
Find editors who like you. (Litmag News 2023-10-07 12:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
When a completed, beloved television series spins off a film, the result is going to be, one way or another, an exercise in nostalgia. At worst, you get Star Trek: The Motion Picture, where the bulk of the movie is characters staring mournfully into the distance to remind you that you to...
2023-10-02 12:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Here’s what I published last week:
Why I’m okay with being called a content creator. (EIH)
...
2023-10-01 12:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
California Senator Dianne Feinstein died yesterday. She was 90 and in ill health, and there had been increasing calls for her to step down. Her death also raises major questions for the 2024 California Senate contest. Whoever California Governor Gavin Newsome appoints to the seat is going to have...
2023-09-30 12:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
After the rise of former President Donald Trump, there was a deluge of what might be termed "Real America Reporting," whereby journalists seek out supposedly typical middle-American voters—generally white, generally rural, often eating in diners—in order to conduct sympathetic interviews and ...
2023-09-28 12:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
“To hear people talk about ‘content’ makes me feel like the stuffing inside a sofa cushion,” Emma Thompson told an audience of drama students last week. “You don...
2023-09-26 12:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Eustacia and Ecgwynn, reminding us they are litter mates. Awww.
Here’s what I published this week while not staring at kitties.
Empathy doesn’t make you less racist. (2023-09-23 12:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
How do you solve racism and bigotry? One common answer is empathy. If oppressors could put themselves in the place of the oppressed, the argument goes, they could recognize the humanity of the marginalized, and they would reject oppression.
Scholar Saidiya Hartman isn’t so sure that empat...
2023-09-20 12:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Over the weekend, Kristen Welker of Meet the Press interviewed Trump and treated him like a regular politician rather than an authoritarian fascist insurrectionist who collects indictments like candy and who, oh yes, was 2023-09-19 12:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Note: If you've got Apple Music, you can listen to a playlist of songs/artists mentioned in this post here.
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This weekend I 2023-09-18 12:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Eustacia reclines as another week passes. Next week! I’ve got a piece about the Matrix and empathy, a piece on Stop Making Sense, one on the no true Christian fallacy—and lots more.
But! Here’s what I wrote last week. Thanks to all of you who support me and keep me scribbling!
Jann Wenner, legendary founder of Rolling Stone magazine, has always been a racist, sexist ass. He decided recently that he wanted to make sure everyone still knew it.
As his venue for self-humiliation, he chose a 2023-09-16 12:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Readers of Lord of the Rings aren’t really supposed to root for Gollum. But if, like me, you’re Jewish, you might be tempted to cheer him on when he gets his teeth into the hand that feeds him, and bites down hard.
What does Gollum have to do with being Jewish, you ask? Well, h...
2023-09-13 12:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post