People have a tendency to romanticize — to weave narratives that sound nice, fit snugly in the brain, but do not necessarily reflect reality. Take, for example, the faux-medieval vision at work in this notoriously sword-and-sorcery-nerdy rock video from Chris Dane Owens, pointed out to me by fellow ex-Film Bulletin writer Liz Braswell (and [...]
A black man co-wrote and co-created the Underworld movies (specifically, that huge guy who plays one of the werewolves). I find this interesting because all three of the movies are, in some way, about forbidden interracial love — albeit between vampires and werewolves. I’m not saying everything a black writer does must be [...]
I notice that, somewhat amusingly, there are two movies called Push out at the same time — one a grim film about a teenage girl impregnated by her father, the other an action film featuring formerly scandalous teen-actress-who-played-a-rape-victim Dakota Fanning as a psychic. To avoid confused customers asking for their ticket money back, I [...]
An old DC Comics page e-mailed to me by Michael Malice depicts as glorious the inevitable day when we will all have robot butlers, advising us to “Get Ready for the Robots!” — but a compromise may be possible between the seemingly opposing dreams of having a monkey butler or robot butler: Ron Bailey writes [...]
•I expect both Obama and Jindal will give good speeches tonight — but if grunts and whistles preceded the rise of language, you ask, might music have existed, even been used to create a feeling of community, before humanity ever gave speeches? I think my friend Joann Kahn’s brother is directing a movie based [...]
•No matter how grim our economic situation — and the prospect of bank nationalization as a remedy for continual subsidies — is, it’s sort of fun to have people saying, “We may need a Swedish model to prevent the survival of zombies.” I think I saw that movie on USA Network on a Friday night [...]
One curse of being substantially smarter than the average person but not wanting to flaunt it — due to being genuinely kind, of course — is frequently realizing you’ve been overly generous, by too hastily assuming other people know what the hell’s going on. Contact with said other people, then, can sometimes be very [...]
•I don’t know who the winners at the Oscars will be, but I do know that two of my favorite acting moments at the movies last year were sort of gay:
(1) Heath Ledger (formerly best known for playing a gay cowboy) as the Joker, called crazy by one of the other gangsters in The Dark [...]
Gerry Ohrstrom, who I mentioned in Thursday’s entry, forwarded a link to an article by libertarian and evolutionary psychology popularizer Matt Ridley, who argues that biology, economic development, and technology can all be seen as (in some sense) evolving over time (when left free to do so). Ridley is a widely respected and popular science [...]
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of (1) the collapse of European Communism, (2) the unscientific scare over the chemical Alar (which will be commemorated today on ACSH’s website if all goes as planned), and (3) the pro-skepticism rap anthem “The Truth Is Out of Style” by MC 900 Ft. Jesus (better known as Dallas [...]
So, tonight’s Debate at Lolita Bar (between Ken Silber and Ryan Sager) is about the fate and state of conservatism — and I can’t help thinking that if conservatism were a bit more like anarchism, as it should be, it could surely reformulate itself and endure.
The theme at this year’s iteration of the near-anarchist annual [...]
Though it’s not clearly stated in this article about that chimp attack in Connecticut, the woman who was attacked presumably had her face eaten off, since that’s what primates do. They’re monsters, in short — yet about the best the wretched non-human animal kingdom has to offer, so keep that in mind the next time [...]
Wikipedia has no entry exclusively devoted to “Kosmokrator,” the (very cool) name for the Gnostics’ demiurge, the amoral spirit believed by them to have created Earth, rather than Yahweh, thus explaining (for people as yet unacquainted with the idea of evolution) this complex but noticeably imperfect world.
But if you try doing a search for “Kosmokrator” [...]
With the government, intended by the Framers to be small and humble, now funneling a trillion dollars through itself and into the hands of its allies and supplicants…with pop culture iconography fusing with state-worship to create an ostensible messiah-president…with self-interested elites from academia to Nobel committees now oblivious to the difference between compassion and centralized [...]
Amid all the current talk of infrastructure and road-building, you don’t hear many people making a case for promoting flying cars instead. As my friend Michael Mendelsohn (who also happens to be the husband of playwright Lynn Rosen, mentioned in yesterday’s entry) likes to point out, though, you have to wonder whether the creation [...]