But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past

Three or four generations from now, the present-day entertainment medium most likely to be “studied” by cultural historians will be television, based on the belief that TV finally became a serious, meaningful art form around the turn of the twenty-first century.

Something becomes truly popular when it becomes interesting to those who don’t particularly care. You don’t create a phenomenon like E.T. by appealing to people who love movies. You create a phenomenon like E.T. by appealing to people who see one movie a year.

“I don’t think purest distillation is how giant fields get replaced by one single figure,” novelist Jonathan Lethem contends. “I think the one single figure isn’t the inventor or the purest distillation, but the most embracing and mercurial, and often incredibly prolific.”

If you are heavily involved with normal Internet culture, you are partially involved with branding (even if you’re trying to be weird and obtuse on purpose). Internet writing is, by definition, public writing. Which means our Contemporary Kafka must be doing something slightly different.

Round and round this goes, with both sides claiming to occupy the spiritual center of the same philosophy, never considering the possibility that the (potentially real) value of their viewpoint hinges on the prospect that patriotism is not absurd and democracy is not simply the system some wig-wearing eighteenth-century freedom junkies happened to

On the surface, it seemed like the reactionary complaint of a Luddite. But sometimes the reactionaries are right. It’s wholly possible that the nature of electronic gaming has instilled an expectation of success in young people that makes physical sports less desirable. There’s also the possibility that video games are more inclusive, that they giv

The ultimate failure of the United States will probably not derive from the problems we see or the conflicts we wage. It will more likely derive from our uncompromising belief in the things we consider unimpeachable and idealized and beautiful. Because every strength is a weakness, if given enough time.

It engenders a delusion of simplicity that benefits people with inflexible minds. It

The (seemingly regular) deaths of unarmed