Mad Men, the upscale drama about an early 1960s Madison Avenue advertising agency, is a sort of Brideshead Revisited for heterosexual American grown-ups. For Baby Boomers, it’s hard to watch Mad Men without enviously exclaiming: Our parents had it better! Like the eleven-hour 1981 British adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel about the elegance and indolence of post-Great War Oxford undergrads, Mad … [Read More]

The cable period drama Mad Men attempts to answer the question: What would have Cary Grant’s stylish advertising executive in Hitchcock’s 1959 barnburner North by Northwest gotten up to if—instead of getting chased by spies all the way to Abraham Lincoln’s nose on Mt. Rushmore—he and his superb suits had simply stayed on Madison Avenue during the advertising industry’s storied golden … [Read More]

Everybody complains about how dumbed-down movies have gotten. Here, for example, are representative quotes from A.O. Scott of the New York Times in “Spoon-Fed Cinema” bemoaning the state of movies c. 2009: “infantile,” “male immaturity,” and “a program of mass infantilization.” Yet, nobody ever seems to mention one obvious change in audience composition over the decades that has contributed to the … [Read More]

I was once asked to imagine what the world would look like today had North American settlers snubbed the African slave traders in the 18th and 19th centuries. We can let our imaginations run wild with speculation, but one thing is certain: had the slave markets in Africa been starved of custom, our Pop music charts would look nothing like … [Read More]

A Genealogy of Morals One of my fundamental beliefs about culture and humanity is that morals and folkways are subject to natural selection. You need not believe in sociobiological bilge to share this belief; you merely need to agree that some ideas confer advantages over others. The classic example is the Levantine disdain for pork chops; not a bad idea to … [Read More]

Having the moniker “Southern Avenger” is like being named “Malcolm X.” Both have racial connotations and people assume the best or worst depending on their perspective. That advocates of Southern heritage might try to emphasize positive aspects of their philosophy—regional pride, states’ rights—is unacceptable to critics who see nothing but a front for anti-black racism. That advocates of Black Nationalism might … [Read More]

Watching Steven Soderbergh’s comedy The Informant! (with Matt Damon as that guy back in the 1990s who squealed to the feds about how he fixed the price of lysine for Archer Daniels Midland) reminded me of Econ 101, where you learn about the glories of competitive markets. Traditionally, economists draw their examples of “perfect competition” from agricultural commodities like corn, which … [Read More]

Having listened to country music on and (mostly) off since Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” four decades ago, I checked in on Billboard’s Top 30 Country chart to see if anything was new. A possible advantage about not knowing much about what I’m talking about when it comes to music is a certain ability to see the forest through the … [Read More]

Extract is the third live-action film written and directed by Mike Judge, creator of the hit animated TV series Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill (which will broadcast its final episode this coming Sunday after 13 seasons). Judge’s first was 1999’s Office Space and the second was the dysgenic sci-fi satire Idiocracy, which 20th Century Fox hostilely dumped into … [Read More]

Many of you will still be alive in 50 years. It’s interesting to think about what life will be like in 50 years technologically and otherwise. Predictions are risky, especially when they’re about the future, but I believe we can make some pretty good guesses. To predict a predictable future, you need to look at the past. What was technological life … [Read More]