Pop Culture
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Boredom, Dionysos, and the Ethic of Authenticity
For people like Trump there is no good or bad; there is only boring and entertaining, and so anything is permitted so long as it is entertaining. The only sin is to be a bore, and it is better to be a boor than a bore. This is a truth someone like Matt Gaetz well
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The Failure of Democracy is the Failure of Elites
For all our talk of democracy, it's pretty obvious that the country is run by elites in business, media, and politics. The rest of us get to ratify the general leftish or rightish direction they seem to be going, but the actual power of the people is pretty crude and is in effect plebiscitary. Elite
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Dolly Parton and the Coincidentia Oppositorum
There’s a mesmerizing and ironic artifice to Dolly Parton—a sincere and relatable duality. She’s one of those icons in whom seemingly opposing forces naturally connect: poverty and folksiness against the power of enormous success, vulnerability and tenderness against effervescent self-assuredness, a story of honesty and heartache under an image so artfully plastic it seems to
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Albee’s “The Goat” or A Discourse on Ontological Dizziness
Last weekend I saw a very good student production of Edward Albee's The Goat or Who Is Silvia? It's the story of Martin Gray, a successful architect and gentle, loving husband and father, someone that typifies the kind of educated, cosmopolitan person who would go and see an Edward Albee play in Blue America. Martin, however,
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Realigning the Colors
What these figures suggest is that the 2016 election will represent a complete inversion of the New Deal order among white voters. From the 1930s into the 1980s and early 1990s, majorities of downscale whites voted Democratic and upscale whites voted Republican. Now, looking at combined male and female vote totals, the opposite is true.
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HBO’s ‘The Leftovers’: Channeling the Zeitgeist
One of the things that I’ve been thinking about and writing about over the last several years is that while the Age of Faith was supplanted by the Age of Reason, we live in a time now when most thoughtful people no longer believe in reason. Although there are still some dead-enders like Sam Harris, E.
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Whither King Laius?
It’s now boring to be a rebel — or, rather, rebels have become boring. When everyone from cashiers at Rite Aid to associate humanities professors to seemingly every single NBA star has a pierced nose or face, ironic clothing item, an elaborate tattoo and disproportionately strong opinions; when multinational corporations selling hamburgers, potato chips and
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‘Animal House’ and the American Right
The kind of liberation the rude gesture brings has turned out to be not that liberating after all, but along the way it has crowded out previous ideas of what liberation meant—ideas that had to with equality, with work, with ownership. And still our love of simple, unadorned defiance expands. It is everywhere today. Everyone
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Bratton’s Anti-TED TED Talk
His point is that TED is to cosmopoliticans what FOX is to conservatives:"TED of course stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and I'll talk a bit about all three. I Think TED actually stands for: middlebrow megachurch infotainment." Yes and No. The whole thing is worth reading, but a couple of grafs from the close to give you
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Breaking Down ‘Breaking Bad’
I don’t see “Breaking Bad” creator Vince Gilligan as any sort of moral prognosticator. He is a talented and occasionally traditional fantasist who understands that, at the end of the day, the most significant part of the word “antihero” is still “hero.” Gilligan coyly lets us know how shit’s going to go down in the