Last Sunday evening, while I was watching the final minutes of the now famous Indianapolis Colts - New England Patriots football game, I experienced a moment of middle-aged serenity. I realized that I didn’t actually need to have an opinion on perhaps the leading topic of office water cooler debate in this decade: Which quarterback is better—the Colt’s Peyton Manning or … [Read More]

One easily forgets how innocent those pretty young things really are… They are so good at having us believe they are experienced. Most men manage to resist the temptation of going after a ingénue, of course, but others, like the decadent and indecent Humbert Humbert and Roman Polanski, simply can’t. An Education,  Lynn Barber’s memoir about growing up in 1960s London, … [Read More]

Alright, you win. Reading all these blogs, I can’t avoid the subject of fist-pumping Heavy Metal any longer. A metaller since the tender age of 13 (coincidence?), I’ve been worshipping the gods of rock’n’roll even longer. But, don’t worry, that doesn’t stop me from being a proud Orthodox Christian. I’ll use my seasoned veteran status in an attempt to explain why … [Read More]

Can I milk another column out of Mad Men? Why not? Matthew Weiner’s show about Madison Avenue in the early 1960s is so meticulously detailed that it’s worth using it as a spur to consider what has and hasn’t changed in the Zeitgeist over the last half century. • The overall impression Mad Men gives of 1960 is that of a … [Read More]

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]