Second in my “Wokepedia” series of case studies of consciousness-raising Wikipedia edits. Mozart in the Jungle This Netflix show about a hard-living group of classical musicians is a current favorite of mine, and stars Latino[…]
Category: Television
My Dream Episode of SNL
I’ve been watching SNL for over 25 years now, and with all due respect to the common wisdom that your favorite SNL cast is your first cast, it’s as funny now as it’s ever been.[…]
Morality is Back: Goodness (and Diversity) in Popular Culture
Scientific studies have shown that when times are good, people act bad. Morality becomes an afterthought in times of peace and plenitude, perhaps because bad behavior often pays off when the world is otherwise stable.[…]
A Philosopher Talks About The Good Place
I’ve been remiss in my role as a pop-culture philosopher in being a late-comer to the the show “The Good Place,” one of the most high-profile, pop-culture oriented pieces of media to ever make a[…]
Context is Everything: This is Us
In honor of Season Two’s recent premiere, please enjoy this repost: One of the least understood impacts of technology on modernity is the way it alters context, and the way that, in turn, shapes how[…]
Quietly Subversive: Malcolm in the Middle
Bryan Cranston became a superstar playing a kindly suburban teacher turned deadly drug kingpin on the hit AMC show Breaking Bad, but before that he was best known as Hal, the emotional center to Fox[…]
Some of my best friends are Blackish
In the course of any cross-cultural relationship, there comes an inevitable crisis point, where actual cultural differences and differences in experience become significant. This crisis point can be particularly acute when there are underlying sociopolitical[…]
Fresh Off the Boat
The so-called new golden age of television has mainly passed me by. While I can respect the quality of the storytelling of dramas from Breaking Bad to Game of Thrones, watching even a few minutes[…]