A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

As essayist Lewis Hyde points out, self-mocking irony is always “Sincerity, with a motive.”

Miller’s 1986 “Deride and Conquer,” far and away the best essay ever published about network advertising, details vividly an example of how TV’s contemporary kind of appeal to the lone viewer works.

The lecture’s audience consists of bald solid thick-wristed men over 50 who all look like the kind of guy who rises to CEO a company out of that company’s engineering dept. instead of some fancy MBA program.

Movies are an authoritarian medium. They vulnerabilize you and then dominate you.

The very best way to describe Scott Peterson’s demeanor is that it looks like he’s constantly posing for a photograph nobody is taking.

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose.

There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir—especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased—I felt despair. The word’s overused and banal

I swear I am not exaggerating: this occasion is a real two-handed head-clutcher, awesome in its ickiness.

Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.