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This perception turned television into a pure commodity. The people writing and producing the shows were still smart and creative, but they were far less concerned with aesthetics or mechanics.
they just tried to entertain people (and to occasionally “confront them” with social issues). From a linguistic standpoint, this allowed for a colossal leap in realism.
It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t reasonable, and—sometimes—it wasn’t even clever. But Roseanne was the most accidentally realistic TV show there ever was.
If The Cosby Show was an attempt to show that black families weren’t necessarily poor and underprivileged, Roseanne was an attempt to show how white families weren’t necessarily rich and functional.
Roseanne was the first American TV show comfortable with the statistical reality that most Americans are fat.
It’s among the few remnants of the pre-Internet monoculture; it could be convincingly argued that football is more popular in America than every other sport combined.
This is the Gladwellian outlook, and it generally goes something like this: The number of on-field concussions continues to increase, as does the medical evidence of how dangerous football truly is.
The less incendiary take on football’s future suggests that it will continue, but in a different shape.
Its fanbase resembles that of contemporary boxing—rich people watching poor people play a game they would never play themselves.
Though they empty into dissimilar cul-de-sacs, these two roads share one central quality: a faith in reason.
Both perspectives place trust in the motives and intelligence of the populace. But I am less willing to do that.
Something becomes truly popular when it becomes interesting to those who don’t particularly care. You don’t create a phenomenon like E.T. by appealing to people who love movies. You create a phenomenon like E.T. by appealing to people who see one movie a year.
You can’t perpetuate a $7 billion industry without aggressively motivating the vaguely unmotivated. Yet this level of social saturation is precisely what places football on the precipice.
It attracts people who haven’t necessarily considered the ramifications of what they’re witnessing—people who think they’re relaxing at home on a Sunday afternoon, nonchalantly watching the same low-stakes distraction as everyone else.
Those who self-identify as enlightened believe it means something tragic. And in ten years, that sentiment might reflect most of the US population. But it won’t represent all of the population.
This is why I can imagine a world where football continues to thrive—not in spite of its violence, but because of it. And not in some latent, unspoken context—openly, and without apology.
The contemporary stance on football’s risk feels unilateral, because nobody goes around saying, “Modern life is not violent enough.” Yet this sentiment quietly exists.
Football could become a dead game to the casual sports fan without losing a fraction of its cultural influence. It could become the only way for a certain kind of person to safely access the kind of controlled violence he sees as a critical part of life.
Socially, this is absolutely the way we have been conditioned to think. The idea that greatness is generated through pain and adversity and fear is not just an unpopular position—when applied to the lives of young people, it’s practically a criminal act.
I’m simply wondering if the overall state of society is—very slowly, and almost imperceptibly—moving toward a collective condition where team sports don’t have a place.
It turns out youth participation is down for all major sports—football, basketball, baseball, and even soccer (the so-called sport of the future).
The producers mildly scoffed at the coaches’ answers, all of which were eerily similar: video games.
It’s wholly possible that the nature of electronic gaming has instilled an expectation of success in young people that makes physical sports less desirable.
Compared to traditional athletics, video game culture is much closer to the (allegedly) enlightened world we (supposedly) want to inhabit.
We inject sports with meaning because they are supposed to mean something. So what happens when the things they signify are no longer desirable traits?
Ohio is a wonderful place to ponder the state of American democracy, because you’re constantly being reminded that America is where you are.
More than any other state, Ohio decides who sleeps in the White House. The variance of its social construction makes it the only major population center that always feels completely up for grabs.
he places himself inside the life of long-dead people he’s never met and tries to imagine how the world must have appeared to them, at that time and in that place. Which, he concedes, is antithetical to how serious history is now conducted.
Storytelling’s relationship to history is a little like interviewing’s relationship to journalism: a flawed process without a better alternative.
You need to personally remember that the 1980s felt prosperous, even when they weren’t. Every extension of mainstream popular culture expressed this. The 1980s felt prosperous even if you were poor.
When I was in college, everyone told me the worst president of all time was Ulysses S. Grant. But we now consider Grant to be merely subpar. The preferred answer to that question has become James Buchanan.
What makes the United States so interesting and (arguably) “exceptional” is that it’s a superpower that did not happen accidentally. It did not evolve out of a preexisting system that had been the only system its founders could ever remember; it was planned and strategized from scratch, and it was built to last.
If it can be reasonably argued that it’s impossible to create a document that can withstand the evolution of any society for five hundred or a thousand or five thousand years, doesn’t that mean present-day America’s pathological adherence to the document we happened to inherit will eventually wreck everything?
think it’s more likely that if we look back with regret at our dedication to the Constitution, it will be with respect to the structural provisions, rather than the liberty and equality ones.
the United States is a safe place for those who want to criticize the government but a dangerous place for those who want to advance unpopular thoughts about any other subject that could be deemed insulting or discomfiting.
I sometimes wonder if the pillars of American political culture are really just a collection of shared illusions that will either (a) eventually be disbelieved or (b) collapse beneath the weight of their own unreality.
in the ancient world, they often had bad examples of democracy. Some of those guys looked at democracies the way we look at failed dictatorships.
The Western world (and the US in particular) has invested so much of its identity into the conception of democracy that we’re expected to unconditionally support anything that comes with it.
It’s not merely that Obama was the first black president. It’s that he broke this barrier with such deftness and sagacity that it instantaneously seemed insane no black person had ever been elected president before.
The ultimate failure of the United States will probably not derive from the problems we see or the conflicts we wage. It will more likely derive from our uncompromising belief in the things we consider unimpeachable and idealized and beautiful. Because every strength is a weakness, if given enough time.
It’s now been twenty years since the release of The End of Science.
The central premise of his book—that the big questions about the natural world have been mostly solved, and that the really big questions that remain are probably impossible to answer—is still marginalized as either cynical or pragmatic, depending on the reader’s point of reference. But nothing has happened since 1996 to prove Horgan wrong,
society is faced with a strange new scenario: the possibility that our current view of reality is the final view of reality, and that what we believe today is what we will believe forever.
The more we discover, the less there is to discover later. Now, to a lot of people, that sounds like a naïve way to think about science. There was a time when it once seemed naïve to me. But it’s really just a consequence of the success of science itself. Our era is in no way comparable to Aristotle’s era.”
“Science will follow the path already trodden by literature, art, music, philosophy,” Horgan writes. “It will become more introspective, subjective, diffuse, and obsessed with its own methods.”
Fukuyama believed that once mankind eliminated all its problems, it would start waging wars against itself for no reason, almost out of boredom.
The moment machines become self-aware, they will try to destroy people. What’s latently disturbing about this plot device is the cynicism of the logic. Our assumption is that computers will only act rationally.
The Singularity is a hypothetical super-jump in the field of artificial intelligence, rendering our reliance on “biological intelligence” obsolete, pushing us into a shared technological realm so advanced that it will be unrecognizable from the world of today.
The theory’s most startling detail involves the option of mapping and downloading the complete content of a human brain onto a collective server, thus achieving universal immortality—we
In his autobiography Chronicles, Bob Dylan (kind of) explains his motivation for performing extremely long songs like “Tom Joad,” a track with sixteen verses. His reasoning was that it’s simply enriching to memorize complicated things.
