Category: Aesthetics

  • Book Review: Go read “Joey Somebody” by Joey Dumont immediately

    The short version of this review is simple: drop everything, and order a copy of the new memoir, Joey Somebody: The Life and Times of a Recovering Douchebag. Then read it as soon as you can. You won’t regret doing so. Here’s the longer version: Usually when I’m reviewing a book I try to be objective, or at…

  • Short Post: Poetry & the Anxiety of AI

    Earlier this week, Fast Company published a delightful short article by Katharine Schwab: “3 reasons why AI will never match human creativity.” It’s a quick read, so I won’t recapitulate it here beyond that neural networks “fail miserably to anticipate when a pattern will change, let alone connect one pattern to an unrelated pattern, a…

  • No algorithm for serendipity

    What do Mister Rogers and artificial intelligence have to do with each other?  This is a column about the nature of human expertise. That sounds like airy philosophy, but it’s actually an urgent practical question facing us as a species today because of the pressure that algorithms (artificial intelligences and machine learning) put on what we…

  • Analog Pleasures in a Digital World

    At first, it was hard to appreciate the elderly woman seven rows in front of us who had a sudden coughing fit during the opening minutes of Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” at a recent trip to the symphony. But as I winced through the coughing and throat clearing that sat between us and the orchestra, I…

  • “Bohemian Rhapsody” is fantastic: what the critics missed

    The Bottom Line: Drop everything, turn off your phones and go see “Bohemian Rhapsody” immediately. The critics are wrong. It’s fantastic.  More details: I have a pet theory that critics—subject matter experts of all sorts, really—get so into the weeds of the production of the material they critique that they lose track of why ordinary…

  • What is a movie and why does it matter?

    Is the definition of a movie only a video presentation of a certain length, or is there more to it than that? The June 30th issue of The Economist featured an excellent cover story and short lead article about how Netflix is changing the entertainment industry with one disturbing sentence: “This year its entertainment output will far…

  • The Girl in the Spider’s Web isn’t terrible, isn’t great

    Over the weekend I zoomed through the new David Lagercrantz novel, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, which is the not-written-by-Stieg-Larsson sequel to the Millenium Trilogy that started with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I’ll start with some thoughts about the book itself — so you have your spoiler alert — but I’ll wind…

  • High Fidelity, Pillow Talk, The Music Man: on technology and on ideas that rhyme, but then don’t

    Hey, this looks like a piece about old movies, and it starts out that way, but it’s also about how to think about technology. I even throw in a little Douglas Adams at the end. Ideas can rhyme like words do. When words rhyme, the rhyme helps us position ourselves inside a poem: we know…

  • Stewart, Cosby, Williams: Tough Times for U.S. Comedy

    Take heed, sirrah, the whip.    —King Lear to his Fool Jon Stewart’s farewell episode of The Daily Show last night proved joyful rather than sad as dozens of people whose careers took root and bloomed under Stewart’s watch turned up to celebrate and — despite his resistance — to thank him. For the under-30 crowd,…

  • Looking Back on “The Fall Guy” — an Aria of 80s Sexism

    The Lee Majors-crooned theme song from his old TV show “The Fall Guy” snuck into my head this morning.  It’s a stumper as to why or how this happened, and it proves only that I watched way too much TV in my youth. The series (about a stunt man who is also a bounty hunter…