I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think of the Paris Commune as one of the pivotal events in human history. It was not only one of the first, but still is one of the most audacious experiments in equality, freedom, and liberation from oppression that has ever …
High-concept sit-coms are hard to pull off. Setting a half-hour, joke-heavy TV show in anything but an ordinary setting requires an awful lot of heavy lifting: not only do you have to spend a lot of time and effort on stuff like sets and costumes, but you also need to …
Respectability politics had what may be its grandest moment yesterday when an office being rented by the Republican Party of North Carolina suffered fire damage after someone threw a Molotov cocktail through a window. Barely had the embers cooled than a group of Democrats — yes, Democrats — started an online …
Polls are frivolous, untrustworthy, and based on inherently flawed methods. They have only heightened the horse-race nature of elections, further sportified our political process, and cause enormous amounts of anxiety in a race that is already painfully stressful. That said, if almost every recent poll is any indication and we …
Last night’s debate between centrist plutocrat Hillary Clinton and (in comedian John Mulaney’s nice phrase) amateur-night pimp Donald Trump wasn’t particularly instructive, but it certainly seems to have thrown a significant portion of the populace into a tizzy. The ‘town hall’ format, allowing as it did for hooting orangutans and …
Two of the most frequently encountered modalities in the modern world of television comedy share a common weakness: the way the negative personalities of the main characters tend to get in the way of the laughs. Comedies centered around protagonists with mental illness can succeed, and the genre has produced …
A lot of people I know seem to think that you can’t possibly object to Hillary Clinton’s campaign based strictly on ideological differences, so I’m often called upon to make penance by saying that Donald Trump is bad. I feel like I’ve said that enough; I had a piece published …
Well, look at this! It’s the night of the very first and very exciting presidential debate, in which Hillary Clinton, a woman who embodies the American ideal that if you want something really bad people should give it to you and not ask a lot of annoying questions, and Donald …
When Donald Glover was making the rounds to publicize the first season of Atlanta, the new FX series he created, produced, wrote, and stars in, he made a comment that has come to be the log line for the series: he claimed he wanted to make a show about what it’s like …
The release last week of Census data concerning recent trends in employment in the economy has been widely circulated, not only as evidence that things are getting better, but that we have our nation’s Democratic leadership to thank for that. In a particular partisan view, the country is doing fine, …
So another handful of ‘polls’ have been released, which seem to indicated that presidential heir apparent Hillary Clinton has failed to charm the electorate and that Chee-To-dusted stray stem cell Donald Trump is closing the ‘gap’ which allegedly exists between them. Many explanations have been offered for this development: It’s all …
Guilt has always been a major theme in noir fiction. Everyone is guilty to some degree or another, and even if they aren’t, what does being innocent get you? Fate will always find a way to trip you up, so you might as well be guilty. The flip side of …
Every election year, we are asked to make a momentous decision: to choose between the two official party-approved multimillionaires who are allowed to become President of the United States. This year, the choice seems especially important, because one of the candidates is a wealthy, unlikable real estate speculator who feels …
I woke up this morning to have my vacation spoiled by lots of social media chatter about what a terrible job the American media, and in particular Matt Lauer (who is, I suppose, technically a journalist), did of handling Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump last night. Lauer was selected, by …
It is a curious thing what people remember and what they forget, either by choice or by the mysterious alchemy by which culture, media, and personal and social factors determine the rank of our memories. At the time when two men — an embittered, hostile and paranoid 42-year-old veteran named …
