I recently went to the annual book sale to support Shelter House. It took place in a big warehouse full of long table stacked with old, donated books. These kinds of events are dangerous for me. I already have too many books at home, and there’s some risk of my classroom library becoming mere overflow of what I can’t shelve at my house. At this particular book sale I was relatively conservative; only a few titles for me, including Isaac Asimov’s book on Shakespeare, a collection of Vonnegut nonfiction from the 1980s-90s that I’d never heard of, and a slipcover, two-book set of Lewis Thomas’s essays.
Leafing through Thomas’s The Lives of a Cell, published in 1974, I found “An Earnest Proposal,” which begins this way:
There was a quarter-page advertisement in the London Observer for a computer service that will enmesh your name in an electronic network of fifty thousand other names, sort out your tastes, preferences, habits, and deepest desires and match them up with opposite numbers, and retrieve for you, within a matter of seconds, and for a very small fee, friends. “Already,” it says, “it [the computer] has given very real happiness and lasting relationships to thousands of people, and it can do the same for you!”
Without paying a fee, or filling out a questionnaire, all of us are being linked in similar circuits, for other reasons, by credit bureaus, the census, the tax people, the local police station, or the Army. Sooner or later, if it keeps on, the various networks will begin to touch, fuse, and then, in their coalescence, they will start sorting and retrieving each other, and we will all become bits of information on an enormous grid.
Again, this was the early 1970s.
The essay goes on to be a kind of plea against nuclear war — too long to explain how he gets from one place to the other, better to just go read the essay — but I never tire of writers from much earlier years speculating on futures that amount to our own present, if not recent past.
It’s reasonable to be burned out on your blog by the time we get to April. And yet, these two things are probably still true:
You are still interested in your topic. (If this is not true, talk to me about changing your topic.)
You still have blog posts to write.
So what gives? Why is it so difficult? And when you’re stuck, how do you get yourself unstuck?
One thing that’s challenging in this situation is that you’ve already been writing about the topic for months, so you’ve almost certainly used up all the easy subtopics. If finding new things to talk about is the obstacle, then here are some suggestions:
How have your attitudes or opinions related to your topic changed, and why?
What do people misunderstand about your topic?
What do people who are experts on your topic disagree about?
What conflicting claims people make within your topic, are you not sure which claim you agree with?
What is one key definition that newcomers to your topic would find helpful to understand?
What bothers you about your topic?
What contradictions or paradoxes do you find within your topic?
What is one thing about the history of your topic that outsiders would never know about but is really interesting?
Failing all that, the best go-to strategy is to find another source saying something very interesting about your topic, and either agree or disagree with it. Remember: the goal is always to remain engaged in the public conversation about your topic with other people who also care about it. If you find interesting voices about this topic you (hopefully) still love, it may remind you why you chose it as your blog topic at the beginning of the year.
Sources I always go back to on this stuff:
Bruce Ballenger, The Curious Researcher
Wayne Booth, et al., The Craft of Research (4th ed.)
Now that this blog is available again to students—six months too late, yes, but still—I’ve been asked my opinion about the casting of Robert Downey Jr. as Dr. Doom. Implied in this, I think, is the whole constellation of recent developments in the MCU. That opinion has not changed since I wrote about it almost two and a half years ago, unfortunately. At this point, the failures have been so numerous and just so bad that my adult children who grew up on it no longer care at all. There have been very few bright moments since then: I would count Agatha All Along and Daredevil: Born Again (still ongoing at the time of this post) as successful, entertaining shows. Deadpool and Wolverine was very satisfying. We can even put Spider-Man: No Way Home in that category if we’re being generous (though as I said in that late-2022 post, plotwise it’s a bit of a mess). In theory, those four titles would show that even if we can’t quite say the MCU has still got it, we could feel somewhat confident they can get it back. In practice, I fear that the seed of its final demise is planted within each of them.
Each of the shows/films I mentioned depends on nostalgia for earlier shows/films. Agatha is built on the audience’s fond recollection for Wandavision, which remains the most critically acclaimed of the MCU shows. Daredevil: Born Again counts on the viewer’s appetite for picking back up with a show they loved when Netflix was in charge of it, and says, “What if we did that again? Would you watch that?” (Which, for me, yes.) No Way Home and Deadpool and Wolverine are entirely dependent on the viewer’s knowledge and love of non-MCU Marvel films (made by Sony Pictures and 20th Century Fox in the years before Disney’s Marvel hegemony), and the assumption that audiences were dying to see Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, and a long list of heroes and villains from, let’s face it, a lot of mediocre or now very old movies drawn into the current universe. It feels like that is a recipe for diminishing returns. If you’re only making content that capitalizes on nostalgia, rather than telling stories for which future, younger viewers will eventually be nostalgic, you are by definition in late-stage MCU, to say nothing of capitalism.
“Are you not entertained?” Not that much lately, no. But yes, I’ll go see this. (Image: Hollywood Reporter)
And that brings us to Avengers: Doomsday, a title suggesting light work for headline writers if the movie turns out badly. First Disney brought back the Russo Brothers, directors of half (!) of the top-tier MCU films in the franchise’s first decade, most notably Infinity War and Endgame. Then the Russo Brothers revealed that Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars would be made as back-to-back films, like Infinity War / Endgame. And then the Russo Brothers revealed that they would be bringing back Robert Downey Jr., the actor widely accepted as the linchpin of phases 1-3, whose death in Endgame, in retrospect, seems to have marked the beginning of the end. But RDJ is back not as Tony Stark/Iron Man, but as Doctor Doom! The pitch Disney and the Russos seem to be making to multiverse-weary viewers is, “Of course it doesn’t make sense! But don’t you at least want to see what the heck we’re doing? Don’t you want to see Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen and RDJ and Chris Evans one last last last time?”
Being a comic book reader from way back, and a ground-level fanboy of the MCU, I in fact do want to find out what the heck they’re doing. Like many longtime Marvel readers, I suspect I already know, to an extent: Secret Wars is very likely the opportunity to get all the old bands back together one more time for a great big Multiversapalooza, hear all your old faves even if you suspect they are lip-synching at this point, and then—to mix my metaphors—unplug the MCU and wait two minutes before plugging it back in. Then they will rebuild the MCU starting out with the rights to almost all the intellectual property. (Hey, maybe in the meantime they’ll just buy Sony for the sake of putting Peter Parker on the mantle with the rest.) And though my adult kids might think I’m a sucker, I have hope that it will be entertaining and even satisfying. Doomsday will release next year, and I will hold out a fistful of cash and demand that they take it.
Oh, and Fantastic Four: First Steps is another reason for hope. That has to wait for another post.
Went down a rabbit hole yesterday, and thankfully caught myself before I got too far down. (This happens every couple of days.)
This particular rabbit hole opened up because of a line in Winston Churchill’s The Gathering Storm, which I started reading as part of my inquiry into tyranny and democracy (all of this relating to my BRE book On Tyranny). After a few chapters of the events between WWI and the rise of Hitler, Churchill has this to say:
It is difficult to find a parallel to the unwisdom of the British and weakness of the French Governments, who none the less reflected the opinion of their Parliaments in this disastrous period. Nor can the United States escape the censure of history. Absorbed in their own affairs and all the abounding interests, activities, and accidents of a free community, they simply gaped at the vast changes which were taking place in Europe, and imagined they were no concern of theirs. The considerable corps of highly competent, widely trained professional American officers formed their own opinions, but these produced no noticeable effect upon the improvident aloofness of American foreign policy. If the influence of the United States had been exerted, it might have galvanised the French and British politicians into action. The League of Nations, battered though it had been, was still an august instrument which would have invested any challenge to the new Hitler war-menace with the sanctions of international law. Under the strain the Americans merely shrugged their shoulders, so that in a few years they had to pour out the blood and treasures of the New World to save themselves from mortal danger. (77-8)
A few things jumped out at me here: First, the reference to the Parliaments in the UK and France doing things that were unwise, but that reflected the wishes of their citizens; and second, the class of American professionals who perhaps recognized that early intervention would have been smart, but whose opinions were shrugged off. Both seem recognizable today. I’m not historian enough to know whether populist leanings were in the air in all three countries Churchill cites the way there are in the US today, but certainly the professional class has been sidelined by the more energetic political movements on left and right today (more obviously on the right, I would say).
The other thing was the momentary counterhistorical “what if”: What if the US had become more involved, earlier? Could the tragedies to come have been avoided? Obviously, no historical event has been as open to counterfactuals as World War Two, and Churchill, being intimately involved in politics and government while it was all going down was as well-positioned as anybody to recognize both what difference it would’ve made and why it didn’t happen. But this reminded me of a much darker what if that went in the other direction.
In 2004, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Philip Roth published The Plot Against America. This novel supposed that Charles Lindbergh had run against FDR in the 1940 presidential election. Lindbergh was the face of aviation in the when that technology was the symbol of American innovation and bravery. Arguably, he was a big part of the reason that aviation captured the imagination the way it did. He flew from New York to Paris in his airplane, The Spirit of St. Louis. He was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1927. He was handsome, rich from his exploits, the son of a former Congressman. He was also a sympathetic figure, after his infant son was kidnapped from their home. He was also an anti-Semite who was vocal about thinking some races were superior to others. He had opinions about Jewish people that might lead you to believe he was sympathetic with Hitler. Like many of the Americans Churchill was referencing, he was against the United States intervening in any more foreign wars. He never ran for office, but, Roth imagines, if he had, he might very well have beaten FDR.
Roth was born in 1933, so he was a seven-year-old Jewish kid growing up in New Jersey at the time of the 1940 election. His parents were second-generation immigrants—Wikipedia says his mom’s family was from the Kyiv area of Ukraine, if you’re looking for connections to 2025 (though I’d need to check that with a more reliable source if I use it in the essay). In a move that I found fascinating when I first read the novel, Roth wrote The Plot Against America as a memoir of his own childhood in this slightly different timeline. Lindbergh beats Roosevelt, and promptly makes deals with Hitler and Hirohito. A much worse outcome than merely staying on the sidelines as Churchill remembers, and without the prospect of needing to “pour out the blood and treasures” a few years later.
There’s a temptation, with stories like Roth’s, to use them as a proxy for the time you’re living in. Since we all know that history doesn’t repeat but often rhymes, we go looking for parallels. This is the entire point of On Tyranny—that we need to learn the lessons that the 20th Century destroyed so many lives trying to teach us.
This thought is not finished, but I’m going to post anyway. Can’t decide yet whether this belongs in the essay anywhere, even much more briefly than this.
Today is apparently International Happiness Day, so there was really only one choice for the Second Floor Hallway Playlist this morning (although now that I say this, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” would also have been acceptable). This coincides with a new report that shows, among many other things, that the United States is no longer in the global top 20 when it comes to self-reported happiness, owing in large part to the decline among young people. If you considered only Americans over 60, we would be in the top ten; if you considered only people under 30, we would rank 62nd, between the Dominican Republic and Peru.
Why young people are so unhappy is open to a great deal of interpretation, so everybody can use it as evidence to support their preferred hobbyhorse. If you think that young people as a group are spoiled, overprivileged brats who don’t know how good they have it, this all but proves it (this is not my explanation, by the way). If you believe that the U.S. is on the precipice of becoming a dystopian wasteland, then you may wonder how older people could be so blind. For me, I wonder about the effects of cell phones.
Research from Computers in Human Behavior; graphic by Daily Mail UK
When comparing the top 12 happiest countries among those under age 30, and the top 12 with the most smartphone addiction, there’s no overlap. This is cherry-picking the data to some degree; Israel is 2nd in youth happiness and 13th in smartphone addiction, and if we went up to 20 on each list we’d have to add at least Switzerland and Australia.
I’m not really arguing that cell phones are the cause of young Americans’ unhappiness. But we continue to learn more about the relationship between frequent cell phone use and our sense of well-being. Just within the last two weeks, Pew Research published a study showing that teens feel happier and more peaceful when they don’t have their phones.
Maybe, as a way of celebrating International Happiness Day, we could consider the degree to which the supercomputer we carry around is making us happier; and if not, what we could do about it.
I should be working, not blogging, so I’m gonna make this really quick.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier — To me, this marks a turn in the entire franchise, because it’s a spy movie first, a superhero movie second. That opened the door wider, I would argue, for other directors to do interesting things (though they have not capitalized as much on that as I would have expected).
Infinity War & Endgame — It wouldn’t be a list of mine without cheating, so these go on the list together. There is no precedent for what the Russo Brothers pulled off with these two movies. Legendary.
Captain America: Civil War — Very underrated. This is probably in my top three, if I measured it only by the number of times I’ve put it on when looking for something fun.
Spider-Man: Homecoming — Best MCU Spidey, and I don’t think it’s close. Michael Keaton as Vulture is a top-five MCU villain. Balances the Peter Parker and Spider-Man stories very well. The twist is amazing. More Tony Stark. I don’t know what’s not to like here.
Thor: Ragnarok — Great, campy fun. Jeff Goldblum! Valkerie! Planet Hulk subplot! Peak Tom Hiddleston! Some pretty great Dr. Strange stuff early on! Hela is a drag though, and her scenes are boring, so I skip them.
Last week, prompted by a question in class, I reflected on my all-time favorite shows and then followed up with some additional lists of faves. When writing it, I had to make a conscious choice not to fill it with shows from the last several years. Andor, for example, which was just nominated for a couple of Critics’ Choice Awards, strikes me as an almost impossibly good show (here are a fewarticles thatarticulate why); The Crown, too, is doing a very difficult thing very well. Deutschland 83/86/89, a German show, should have made one of my lists; my bad. Some of this is definitely recency bias, which I’m extremely susceptible to regarding media, if I’m not remaining conscious of it. But that’s not all it is.
This has been a Golden Age of Television (either the second or the third, depending on who you listen to, the first being the 1950’s, I Love Lucy era). Sam Adams had a good piece at Slate a few years ago that detailed why TV has been so good (“prosperity and uncertainty”), even while arguing that the era was ending in 2019. There was a lot people didn’t know in 2019 about how the next few years would go, and the COVID pandemic extended the era by a few years, since so many of us were trapped inside watching Netflix and the like. But here at the end of 2022, the streaming business as a whole is starting to feel like a party where everybody has stayed too long, a party where some of the guests begin to regret decisions they made only a couple of hours earlier. In 2023, I suspect, people are going to start shutting off the lights.
Between 2016 and 2022, Netflix’s content spending went from a little under $7 billion to $18 billion. Disney spent a whopping $30 billion in the past year. Amazon spent almost half a billion dollars on The Rings of Power alone. Apple, relatively modest, spent around $6 billion. It’s a ridiculous arms race before you even get to contracts for streaming sports.
Investors in these companies have to wonder what end goal they’re chasing here. Yes, Netflix is profitable. But Disney’s board just fired their CEO, in part because he didn’t seem as alarmed as investors that they were spending so much. Amazon and Apple don’t even need streaming, given their other, actually profitable businesses. It was one thing to spend this much when everyone was at home streaming TV, and borrowing money was free. With a possible recession looming, interest rates higher and still rising, and media stocks tanking, that level of spending on content makes no sense.
All of which suggests there will be fewer new shows in the coming years, and fewer big-budget shows. What does this mean for the kind of shows we do see? Would Andor even have happened in a leaner economic environment? Would WandaVision? What would it mean for shows like Our Flag Means Death or Reservation Dogs or Euphoria? These questions will have to wait for another post…
I never got there on my previous post, which was already too long. The second solution to the problem of Top Five All-Time Shows list is to make a whole bunch of Top Five All-Time Shows Sub-Lists. So here I go:
Top Five Shows That Were Brilliant Until They Went Totally Off the Rails
1. Game of Thrones — Best sci-fi/fantasy show of all time, or incoherent nonsense? Viewers who stayed through the end got both! 2. The X-Files — Science fiction and fantasy shows seem especially susceptible to going off the rails. Maybe that’s because so many of them start off with a huge, mind-blowing concept, and start running before they’ve figured out where it’s going. 3. Arrested Development — Has any show gone from elite to unwatchable faster? 4. Downton Abbey — Jen insists that Downton Abbey does not belong on this list, but once Anna was done so wrong, 5. Lost — I guess I don’t know if this was brilliant before it went off the rails. Anybody who didn’t know by the middle of season two that the creators didn’t know where the show was going deserved what they got.
Top Five Shows I Hate That Everybody Else Seems to Love
1. The Office (American version) — I will die on this hill. There were moments, sure. But most of the comedy was just bland and obvious, and not half as subversive and deliberately cringey as the British version. 2. House of Cards — In an early episode of Netflix’s first real breakthrough show, slimy politician Kevin Spacey gets a brick thrown through his window. It is so bleedingly obvious that he is behind the attack himself, for political purposes, that it seems like that can’t possibly be the point of the episode. And yet, 45 minutes later, the shocking twist is dramatically revealed that he paid someone to do it himself, and isn’t he diabolically clever. Unintentionally hilarious, but not enough to hate-watch. 3. Peaky Blinders — A boring waste of Cillian Murphy’s talents. 4. Boardwalk Empire — If Mark Zuckerberg programmed an AI to write TV scripts by feeding it scripts of The Sopranos and Deadwood, it would end up with something more interesting than Boardwalk Empire. 5. Big Bang Theory. I can’t keep this up. Everybody’s entitled to like what they like. I don’t need to ruin it with snark.
Top Five Three Shows That Are Still Going
1. Andor — I cannot shut up about how good this show is. The only Star Wars film made in the past 35+ years that was genuinely good without any huge caveats was Rogue One, which treated the characters like human beings. Tony Gilroy returns to one of those characters here, in a show entirely different than everything else they’ve done with the franchise on Disney+. Here is a twelve-episode meditation on the on-the-ground effects of living under a fascist regime, and on the development of an effective Rebellion to fight the Empire in spite of hopelessness. The writing in this show is some of the best I’ve seen in any sci-fi/fantasy media of any kind, and definitely the best writing of the entire Star Wars franchise, original trilogy included. 2. The Crown — This show has a chance at my actual, all-time Top Five when it’s all done. I didn’t love the latest season, but the first four were good enough that a strong sixth might put it there. Considering the challenge of maintaining a consistent tone when changing all the actors every couple of years, it’s astounding they’ve been able to do it this well for this long. 3. Stranger Things — One critic I respect says this should not make the list, because it has fallen too far since season one. It’s a valid point. After the first or second season, it was bound for certain top-ten territory, but not any more. Still, it deserves a chance to come back with a solid concluding season.
Five Shows I’m Embarrassed Not to Have Seen, In No Particular Order
Sandman — I was absolutely in love with this comic when I was in high school, and yet I have only seen the first episode. Teenage me is furious, but I just haven’t made the time. Lovecraft Country — I can’t believe that I didn’t see this in time to be outraged when it was not renewed for a second season. Honestly, I feel partially responsible. Sons of Anarchy — I already have too many sympathizing-with-horrible-human-beings type of shows in my life, but I’m told this is good. The Americans / Homeland — Two different shows that I constantly get mixed up with one another. One of them is supposed to be amazing, but I’m not sure which one. Thus, I watch something else. Someday I’ll get it figured out. Hannibal — Mads Mikkelsen is always brilliant, and yet serial killer shows/movies are just not my thing anymore.
Today a few students asked me what my all-time top five favorite TV shows were, and I was unexpectedly stumped. Yes, a couple of them occurred to me, but instead a whole lot of inadequate possibilities swam before me. How could this be? I’m not constantly watching shows, but I’ve certainly see enough TV in the past decade that I should be able to come up with five shows that at least could be in my top five. But nothing. Blank. Even after leaving school at the end of the day, I was haunted by the question.
Lists of this kind are always hopeless. What would be the criteria? Is it about how much I loved it at whatever age I was at at the time I watched it? Or would it just be today, what do I think are the best five shows? Is it about the writing? How groundbreaking they are? Do I put dramas and comedies on the same list? How can I compare a show with a mind-blowing first season that fell off a cliff after that with a show that was steadily really good for five seasons? What if it was good at the time, but it doesn’t hold up to viewing in 2022? Or what if I haven’t ever re-watched it, or don’t even have any interest in re-watching it? Taking all these questions together, I came up with two solutions.
Solution 1: Don’t think about it too hard. And so I present to you:
My Top Five Shows Of All Time
5. Mad Men
This is one of the very few zeitgeist shows that Jen and I were actually in on from the beginning. I remember hearing an NPR story about it the day before it aired, watching the pilot, and, like many others, falling in love with it right away. Jon Hamm was made to play Don Draper (and maybe little else, based on what I’ve seen since), and the entire first season is so beautifully written and plotted. Historical dramas set in the mid-20th century have become popular during the content glut of the past ten years (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Queen’s Gambit, The Crown), but nothing I’ve seen has come close to Mad Men‘s combination of period, character, costuming, music, and design. Yes, the show faded toward the end as many do, but it recovered enough in the final season — unlike some other notable candidates for this list — that the show as a whole wasn’t tarnished.
(Note: This should not be construed as a recommendation to watch Mad Men, or any of the other shows on this list, until you’re adults.)
So obviously I’m trying to blog on here again, and Jen asked me about it the other day. “What do your students think?”
“Oh, they don’t know about it,” I said. “I haven’t told them.”
So here I am, blogging to no one, at least for another few days until I tell people about it. This is not that different, I think, from the student experience. On the one hand, your teacher assigned you this blog. On the other hand, you’re not sure if he’s reading it. Until it is commented upon, in some way or other, the blog post is both read and unread.
I can’t tell whether this is a benefit or a detriment to students. For some, the idea that actual people will read their blogs is cause for alarm; for others, the idea that nobody will read it is deeply demotivating. Some, I imagine, both hate the idea of readers for fear of what they might think, and also think of it as busy work if nobody reads it. I started this assignment for AP Language with the belief that the best imagined reader for most of us is (1) a like-minded someone who will understand us the way we want to be understood, and (2) probably not our English teacher. (I had a lot to say about it.)
And yet I am finding a lot of freedom here in the liminal space between having readers (you, reader, are imagined as my AP Language students) for whom I am writing, who give me purpose to start a new blog post, and knowing that no one is reading yet (which perhaps frees me from worrying about the judgment of others). There’s obviously no correct answer here, but I hope that you find some motivation in the idea that people may actually read what you have to say.
Oh, yeah, one more thing: All the blogs go live at the beginning of second trimester.
Now Read This 