Raritania

One finds that those general knowledge-type things everyone is supposed to know, like those historical facts we all had in school--it was th...

A certain sort of stupid person gets mad when anyone refers to a thing as "overrated" or "underrated." They instantly ju...

The latest put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics offered some interesting statistics regarding time use American Time Use Survey . It co...

Recent writing about Disney's recent travails in China the principal topic has, of course, been Mulan , but I did run across a piece in...

Recently looking at the coverage of the box office again I have found myself considering the case of China again. While in the U.S. Mulan ha...

Ever since the advent of TV the Hollywood movie studios have struggled to keep people buying movie tickets. Measured in per capita terms, Am...

I recently suggested that an optimistic calculation of the earnings of the country's novelists producing for adult readers from actual r...

Not long ago I wrote about the possibility that we are entering a post-scarcity age when it comes to fiction . My analysis there focused on ...

I recall being, if not pleasantly surprised, then at least intrigued by Josh Trank's Fantastic Four when I first saw it. There were asp...

In writing my history of the military techno-thriller I was concerned principally with the main line of the genre--its early flickerings dat...

Watching The Pretender it seemed that pretty much nothing about the show made sense--not that I expected much from a network TV show at tha...

According to the data set over at Box Office Mojo in 1996 Independence Day opened with a then-record $96 million July 4 extended weekend (f...

Watching TV these days one gets the impression that all Americans are adroit users of chopsticks. Suspecting this to be, to put it mildly, a...

I remember being introduced to the concept of NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training) when watching Welcome to the NHK . Later I ...

Remember when basic cable's scripted TV offerings seemed a fairly major part of pop culture? The Disney Channel had shows like  That...