Friday, June 7, 2024

"Show Business for Ugly People": A Few Thoughts on the Foolishness

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It is these days something of a cliché that politics is "show business for ugly people." Clichés do not always have much to do w...
Friday, May 31, 2024

What We Overlook When We Argue About C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures: Snow's "New International Economic Order"

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As I remarked previously , when we discuss C.P. Snow's writing on The Two Cultures we get fixated on the argument about whether there a...

What We Overlook When We Argue About C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures: Why Did the Split Happen in the First Place?

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Writing about C.P. Snow I have tended to emphasize what it seemed to me that he had got right, in large part because so many are so vehement...

Taylor Swift and the Era of "Peak Pop Star"

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Recently considering Taylor Swift's extraordinary present stature within pop culture even as celebrity as a whole seems to be in decline...

What Will Inside Out 2 Make at the Box Office?

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Ordinarily when I think about what a movie might make I look at comparable, prior, films. If the movie is part of a series I look at its pre...

Why Hollywood Needs Inside Out 2 to be a Hit

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Back in 2015 Inside Out hit theaters, and grossed over $850 million globally--which in today's terms works out to over $1.1 billion. ...

Upton Sinclair's "Dead Hand" Series, and the Sometime Necessity of Self-Publishing

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The student of sociology may recall having encountered the concept of "substructure-structure-superstructure." In this conceptio...

Book Review: The Brass Check: A Study of Journalism, by Upton Sinclair

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The imagery and word-play in the titles of most of the books in Upton Sinclair's "Dead Hand" series tend to be easy enough for...

What Would a Twenty-First Century Edition of Mammonart Include? Some Thoughts

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Upton Sinclair's Mammonart is almost a century old--the hundredth anniversary of the book's publication next year. It seems a nat...

Upton Sinclair's Los Angeles

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In City of Quartz Mike Davis characterized Los Angeles as a city born not of governmental convenience, utility as a transport hub or the gr...

The Limits of the Superman: Jack London's Wolf Larsen

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One of Jack London's principal themes was the falsity of the myth of ultra-individualism so dear to the conventionally-minded in America...

Have I Overlooked Dauriat's Virtues?

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I have here written in the past of Balzac's character Dauriat . I have even suggested the use of "Dauriat" as a term for the c...

Craig Thomas' Charles Buckholz: A Few Thoughts

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Craig Thomas' Kenneth Aubrey novels, like most comparable series', bring back not only the star but his supporting cast. ( Mitchell ...

The Legacy of Herman Wouk

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Recently thinking about writers who were both hugely popular with the public and greatly acclaimed by critics but then largely forgotten I f...

William Makepeace Thackeray's Counterfactual

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In my reading about historical counterfactuals I do not recall ever running across the name of William Makepeace Thackeray, but as it happen...