Pop Culture
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How Far We’ve Come since 1940
In greed and meanness, that is. This speech might be full of cliches, but it envisions a cliche world I wouldn't mind to live in. Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator
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We’re All Pottervilleans; We Always Were
I'm up early this Christmas morning waiting for my sleep-deprived family to wake up and came across this article by Rich Cohen in Salon. He has a somewhat different but I think intriguing angle on Capra's famous Christmas film. The idea that It's a Wonderful Life is sentimental swill is nonsense according to Cohen–the real
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Dems vs. the GOP
I assume you know which is which
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Stewart v. Maddow
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we
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Stewart’s Attempt to Restore Sanity
I think Stewart's rally is an admirable effort, and I appreciate what he's trying to do. I think his closing speech in the video above is well-wrought piece of demonstrative oratory designed to define the Aristotelian mean–that sane midpoint between the crazy extremes that we all recognize as the place where human decency and sanity
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Quote of the Day: Frank Rich
We can’t afford to forget now that the single biggest legacy of the Iraq war at home was to codify the illusion that Americans can have it all at no cost. We willed ourselves to believe Paul Wolfowitz when he made the absurd prediction that Iraq’s oil wealth would foot America’s post-invasion bills. We were
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Superpowers: Invisibility vs. Flight
In this week's This American Life the theme is superpowers, and in Act One The Daily Show's John Hodgeman asks which superpower, if only one were possible, would we choose–Invisibility or Flight. The answers given by people he interviewed were, I thought, rather depressing. One person talked about how she would choose Invisibility so that
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At the Movies with Spencer Tracy
I love TCM. In the past week they’ve had some Spencer Tracy movies, and the two I watched were Judgment at Nurmeberg and Pat & Mike. There’s something about Tracy, a kind of magnetism that he has that has hardly anything to do with his lumpy looks. He’s a mensch. He’s the Walter Cronkite of
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The “Lost” Sensibility
Heather Havrileski at Salon doesn't have it: Damn you, "Lost"! We went and jumped on your bandwagon way back in the first season, got sucked into your endless jungley maze and suspenseful chords, and waited breathlessly for the next shoe to drop, over and over again. Remember when that was still fun? Remember? Henry Gale's
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More on ‘Lost’ and Dante’s Island Down Under
About a month ago, I wrote a too long post about how Cuse's and Lindelof's Lost was an creative exercise in postmodern religious syncretism and mythopoesis, but leaning perhaps a little more heavily on retrieval themes from Dante and by extension Catholic iconography. I think after watching the finale last night, that assessment holds up