Pop Culture
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Why Is ‘Breaking Bad’ Hitting a Nerve?
There are two interesting articles in Salon about the show, the first by David Sirota suggests that Walter is everyman; he mirrors both the stress the middle class feels, but also the unrestrained greed of its masters of the universe on Wall Street: Ultimately, all of these themes converge to raise the most harrowing questions
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Some Thoughts on ‘Breaking Bad’
I came to this show late. I've only watched the first season, and a couple of episodes in the second. I realize that the show's finale is only two episodes off, but I wanted to say a few things about it as it relates to the 'missing middle" post I put up a few days
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The Limits of Authenticity
Simon Critchley in a recent NYT piece: Unlike the conversions that transfigure the born-again’s experience of the world in a lightning strike, this one occurred in stages: a postwar existentialist philosophy of personal liberation and “becoming who you are” fed into a 1960s counterculture that mutated into the most selfish conformism, disguising acquisitiveness under a
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Mud
I saw Jeff Nichols' film Mud last night, and it's one of those couple-of-times-a-year movies you wake up the next morning with on your mind. It's very, very rich. This movie asks important questions about love and truth, about the truth of youthful idealism, and its fierceness in a spirited, young soul, and also about its limits, its
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Being in the Grip of Compulsions We Don’t Understand
I have been getting this feeling lately about the big historical sweep of things and of our individual seemingly insignificant part to play in it. It’s a feeling of how mostly things don’t change, and yet how they do, how greed and powerlust seem to be in the driver’s seat, and yet that they are
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“The Last Samurai” and the Nostalgia for Premodernity
The Last Samurai, a 2003 Tom Cruise film, is a Lawrence of Arabia-style epic that is interesting on a number of levels and worth seeing if you haven't had the chance. (It was more popular in Japan than it was in the States, so you probably missed it.) I thought it was an thoughtful study of the
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Civilization and Culture
Civilization is the head and culture is the heart or the soul of a society, and the soul of a society is framed by how its culture prioritizes what is worth caring about. And so if the culture defines what's most important to care about, the society's head develops a civilization to provide for the
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“Inception”, “Solaris”, and the Unconscious
In the past week I've watched both Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and Christopher Nolan's Inception. Both in very different ways try to grapple with the question: What is the human unconscious? First, a little riff on that question, and then maybe I'll get around to the movies. We all heard when we were children that that the human brain