All subscriber-only this week.
This Week’s Posts
Monday, March 7th - Drug Review: Trazodone (subscriber only)
A review of the popular sleeping pill. First in a series.
Short Story Club: William Gibson's "New Rose Hotel" (subscriber only)
Discussing one of my favorite short stories with commenters.
Tuesday, March 8th - Culture War is Fractal (subscriber only)
Every new social divide looks like the big social divide.
Friday, March 11th - I Want a New Show Like Star Trek: The Next Generation or Law & Order (subscriber only)
Give me good people trying their best to solve thorny ethical dilemmas!
We also had the first Book Club post for our next book, A Confederacy of Dunces. Still plenty of time to get the book and get started with us on Wednesday.
From the Archives
Song of the Week
Book Recommendation
Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word, Matthew Battles, 2013
A fun meditation on the written word and what it does, set down in prose that’s engaging so long as you give writers a lot of leash to stylize as they see fit. The Goodreads reviews are savage, but this is to be expected - Goodreads reviewers hate flowery prose, and the subtitle does indeed overpromise. But if you look past the subtitle (which is always, always marketing and not to be trusted) and enjoy a less minimalistic prose style, which you should, there’s a lot of gold to be mined here, a cogent summary of the consequences of print and an interesting consideration of how writing has always been linked to control.
Comment of the Week
I have the same feeling, and thank for articulating this so well. Two thoughts to add:
- Another show that at first seems drenched in the whole "people are evil and dark and goodness is doomed" but is actually optimistic at heart is Deadwood. I realize that it is the antithesis of L&O and TNG in term of mood, but in the sense that it portrays people with real flaws, desires, vices, and motivations trying to come together to create something workable and lasting, it shares some of the same DNA.
- I wonder if there is any correlation between how modern entertainment has abandoned the L&O and TNG ethos and the (apparent, supposed) decline in faith in democracy. Democracy as a political project presumes that even when we disagree, there are basic institutional structures that we can trust to mediate disputes, that we believe in the peaceful transfer of power, that there is a moral claim to be made by the will of the majority (even if it is not absolute), and that losing one political battle is not the end of everything and that there will be a chance to engage again, so that political defeat does not mean existential defeat. All of that assumes that most people in the governing system share those beliefs and are mostly good (not not evil) people trying to do their best. If all of entertainment tells us to be cynical and untrusting, that there are no good people trying to do good work, that must have an effect at some level. - Joshua
That comment made me go back and read the associated post. Initially I skipped it because I've seen neither Star Order or Law & Trek. But... damn, that post hits hard.
Is debaathification complete?