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For Whom the Phone Rings
September 29, 2015
A version of this essay was published at Salon.com in 2014.  It’s genius season again. From NPR to the New York Times, they’re talking about where people were when they found out they had won the MacArthur Fellowship, our society’s most prestigious honor. Twenty-one of ...

Voices of the Village
September 24, 2015
Ronald Blythe is now more than ninety years old, beloved and revered in England as a newspaper columnist, literary critic, and memoirist. But he remains best known for his summer labors of 1967, when he sat down with the residents of a single town in his home county of Suffolk ...

The Novel in Analog: Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers
July 22, 2015
Reviewers are having a hard time with Book of Numbers, the latest novel from the incorrigibly ambitious and graphomaniacal Joshua Cohen. Responses have ranged from dismissive to enraptured, with most both at once. The book is “a mess,” writes the New York ...

Metrics All the Way Down
July 08, 2015
According to Spotify, the value of one play of a Willie Nelson song in an Ole Miss dorm room at 4 a.m. is around 0.68 cents, but why stop there? When everything is data and data can be called down through the air, “song” and “book” and “movie” ...

The Joys of Consumption
July 03, 2015
In the 1970s, when the New Deal consensus began to erode, something unexpected started to play a role in popular culture. It was the decade after the industry-approved release of The Pawnbroker (1964), the first Hollywood film to show women’s bare breasts, and all the old ...

Show Those Pearly Whites
June 30, 2015
Officially, things have rebounded since Wall Street collapsed and the world’s wealthiest and most rugged individualists turned to Washington for a bailout. Corporate America is now raking in more money than ever before, and unemployment rates continue to fall, inching back ...

The Branded, the Sponsored, and the Native
June 26, 2015
The name of Samsung’s new advertising campaign for its Galaxy 6 and 6 Edge devices coos with the consumer-soothing cadences of a practiced therapist, or masseuse: “The 30-Minute Recharge: Connectivity Without Concern.” In reality, though, the campaign has all ...

Smile Like You Mean It
June 16, 2015
Such is the exuberant optimism of the staff at Pret A Manger that you’d assume they were treated well. But Pret A Manger’s employees aren’t overjoyed because of good workplace conditions, generous wages, or regular hours; instead it’s because management ...

Spoof Vs. Spy
June 12, 2015
Summer 2015’s first big blockbuster comedy, Spy, may traffic in elaborate onscreen subterfuge, but it’s little more than the latest variation on a baby-simple, well-worn Hollywood formula.The movie’s admittedly energetic and amusing aim is to lampoon and critique the ...

Shutting Up
June 09, 2015
This weekend, I used up one of my ten free monthly views of The New York Times to find film critic A.O. Scott declaring a national “humor crisis.” No, he wasn’t referring to any of his colleague Maureen Dowd’s perennial struggles with political humor; rather, he ...

The Fantastic Four Under Fire
May 29, 2015
Only in America can the skin color of someone who spends much of his waking life on fire supply the basis for a spirited pop-culture controversy. That’s the grim lesson of the media run-up to the latest in the long line of lumbering comics franchises’ superhero cash-cows ...

Freedom of Choice Degree Zero
May 26, 2015
Soon there will only be two kinds of ads on broadcast TV: commercials for things that make you sick and commercials for things that cure the illnesses caused by the things that make you sick. That’s why fast-food ads are stocked with images of youth living it up, while Big ...