Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Is Blogging Dead? Not Exactly, But . . .

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Typing the keywords "Is blogging dead?" into the principal search of engine of the day invariably leads one to a long list of link...

Balzac's Theatre of Literature, the Theater of Cinema, and Oscar-Time (A Note on the Andrea Riseborough Affair)

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In an earlier comment on Balzac's classic Lost Illusions I mentioned the hard lessons that his protagonist, Lucien du Rubempre, learns...
Sunday, February 5, 2023

On the Crime Beat

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Matt Taibbi, discussing crime reporting in his book Hate, Inc., remarked that part of the media's strategy for keeping people coming bac...
Friday, February 3, 2023

What Was '90s Irony Really About?

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Not too long ago I remarked that in the '90s there still seemed a certain amount of alertness on the part of society's thinkers abou...
Wednesday, February 1, 2023

The Florida Man Phenomenon: A Note

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In the past decade "Florida Man" became a popular Internet meme, derived from just how often news stories detailing comically biza...
Sunday, January 29, 2023

The Myth of a Country Ever More Awash in Holders of "Useless" Degrees

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The accusation that the fault for many a national problem lies in the country's young people eschewing STEM in favor of "soft"...

Higher Education in the America of Berzelius Windrip

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Back before literature went over to the Counter-Enlightenment mind, body and soul, devoting itself to epistemological nihilism, Medieval mis...

Should Economics Be Classified as a STEM Subject?

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In recent years there has been a big push to have economics classified as a STEM field --and while this issue is not exactly high on the pub...

Why Aren't More Young People Attracted to Study of and Careers in STEM Subjects? A Thought

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Before proceeding any further I think it necessary to say that there is a considerable body of literature debunking the myth of a (to use th...
Friday, December 16, 2022

Some Thoughts on Reading a List of the Top 500 Keyword Searches

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The Search Engine Optimization company PageTraffic posted a list of the 500 most popular keywords on Google during 2022 (so far, anyway) on ...

Does a Book Release Now Have to be an Event for People to Take an Interest?

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I have previously written about how the tougher and tougher market for theatrically released films since the advent of TV has meant that fil...

Black Panther 2, Avatar and the End of 2022

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Black Panther 2 has taken in $11 million in its fifth weekend, lifting its total to $409 million (up from $394 million last weekend), a rate...
Friday, December 9, 2022

The Need for Movies to be "Events" and the Fate of the Marvel Cinematic Universe

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The decline of movie theater-going is a story that has been told many a time--not least by the writer of this blog post. Short version: in...

Martin Eden, Radical Rightist

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In Jack London's Martin Eden the eponymous protagonist, discovering the world of books and the ideas in them, early on happens on the w...

History as Superhero Tale

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A.J.P. Taylor quipped in one of the essays collected in Europe From Napoleon to the Second International that in biography the biographer ...