George Case's Blog, page 15

Silence Descends: The End of the Information Age, 2000-2500

Written in 1995-96 and published by the independent Vancouver house of Arsenal Pulp Press in early 1997, Silence Descends was my first book and one of which I’m still proud.  It’s a brief exercise in “imaginary non-fiction,” constructed as a global history of the next five hundred years from the perspective of what is, to […]

That’s Not Funny

Ever notice how serious comedy has become? The art of eliciting laughter, like just about every other form of leisure and entertainment, is today a political marker that aggravates the social polarization once driven solely by hard stories like war or taxation. A joke’s premise, its target, its audience, and certainly its teller are now […]

Don’t Let Me Downplay

It was recently announced that the federal government will pass a law (part of its larger budget bill) making it illegal to deny or downplay the Holocaust. Other countries, including Germany and France, have similar prohibitions on their books, but Canada’s legislation may not prove as beneficial as some imagine. Irwin Cotler, the Prime Minister’s […]

The Paranoid Stylist

The most confounding aspect of Mark Jacobson’s 2018 biography, Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy and the Fall of Trust in America, is also the most compelling. In tracing the elaborate obsessions and tormented life of his subject, the author often cites uncritically a collection of fringe claims and pseudohistory without stepping […]

Nichols’s Times

As much a portrait of a lost era as a biography of a major artist, Mark Harris’s 2021 book Mike Nichols: A Life will summon in Baby Boom and Gen X readers a distant nostalgia for a sophistication and glamour they may never have personally experienced but which, for many years, was held as the […]

Into the Mystic

In my 2016 book Here’s To My Sweet Satan: How the Occult Haunted Music, Movies, and Pop Culture 1966-1980, I devoted a chapter to the era’s craze for “unexplained phenomena,” like Bigfoot, ESP, and the Bermuda Triangle. Richly capitalized on by the film and publishing industries, the proto-New Age material attracted a wide audience of […]

The Reckoning: A Rebuttal

Among the small library of books, articles, and podcasts nowadays critiquing the excesses of progressivism, it is virtually a requisite that the fundamental facts of racism and other forms of discrimination are first acknowledged.  “This is not to deny the reality of race-based intolerance”; “Of course, we all know the terrible legacies of slavery and […]

Gimme Some Truth

Of all the social and political troubles we are contending with today, few may be broader or more consequential than the epistemic crisis, our polarizing shortage of neutral knowledge and agreed-on realities in the information age. The epistemic crisis took on a special urgency under the presidency of Donald Trump, who called professional journalists “enemies […]

Reckon With This

One thing professional and amateur historians have long understood is that the scholarship around given topics often evolves over time. What is fiercely debated by one generation can become the consensus opinion of the next, while a sudden upset of conventional wisdom may itself be thoroughly debunked by later research. We are witnessing this process […]

Babel On and On

Imagine, if you will, a world where knowledge and opinion can be shared almost instantly among millions of people.  Imagine a world where powerful men and women can be openly mocked, denounced, and accused by the weak with impunity.  Imagine a world where the humblest person can consult the same sprawling archives of information as […]