Category: Culture

  • “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…

  • All the news that’s fit to ignore

    I missed the mid-terms last week. It was great. Don’t get me wrong: I voted early by mail, so I did my civic duty. It’s what happened after I dropped my ballot that’s interesting. Due to travel in the wilderness and no access to the internet or other media, on Tuesday, November 6, I didn’t…

  • Since when does Anthony Lane review NETFLIX “movies”?

    In the November 12 issue of The New Yorker, film critic Anthony Lane reviews both The Front Runner, a Gary Hart biopic starring Hugh Jackman, and Outlaw King, a Scottish period piece starring Chris Pine. (Link here, subscription required.) Lane is impressed with neither film. What surprised me about Lane’s Outlaw King review is that the film…

  • Why the NRA should worry about “ghost guns”

    Whatever your politics and however you feel about private gun ownership, the “ghost gun” debate that has emerged over the last few weeks has implications for every kind of business in the digital age. What is a ghost gun? In brief, activist Cody Wilson won a round in his long-running legal action against the Federal…

  • New Media Math & the President’s NYT Obsession

    Earlier this month, I argued that the president has a fundamentally different way of measuring media. Instead of balancing positive against negative coverage in order to suss out average sentiment, the president views all media coverage as a tool to advance his agenda. The media is both incapable of understanding this different sort of math and…

  • 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 challenge of OOOIO: opting out of information overload

    I keep a list of nagging questions like, “why can’t Google organize all my different video services (HBO, Starz, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, etc.) so I can browse through all of my viewing options at the same time?” The obvious answer is that Google wants users to watch movies on YouTube and subscribe to its…

  • Marvel’s new “Avengers: Infinity War” movie and the structure of special experiences

    Although at first this column will seem like a movie review, what I’m really after is a sense of what makes experiences special because we often mistake one part of an experience for the whole: we over-focus on the new thing, the concrete feature, and in doing so we miss the total shape of an…

  • The not-caring economy

    Inside every positive statement is a negative counterpart. In the second sentence of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” The sentence doesn’t mention women. In his sweeping, seemingly universal statement, Jefferson only includes half the population. A similar gap lurks…

  • It’s not information overload: it’s information hoarding

    Hi, I’m Brad, and I’m an information hoarder. Here’s an example. During this year’s Winter Olympics in South Korea, I was drinking my morning coffee from a mug that I’ve owned since the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. Back then, my high school sport was fencing, which was as obscure as sports got in the…