Author: Matthew Westphal

Aaron Sorkin Called The Internet A ‘Bronchial Infection On The First Amendment’. He May Have Been Right

“Sorkin’s critiques of digital life looked especially off base in the 2000s and early 2010s, when the internet was a less broken place than it now is. The platforms looked like tools instead of weapons, and Sorkin looked like a boring crank. Now, though, instead of an old man yelling at the sky, Sorkin looks more like a middle-aged man yelling at a mountain of trash emitting toxic fumes. He’s still not offering any productive solutions, but he’s not incorrect.”

Serial Box, Publishing Books For The Age Of Peak TV

“Let’s go back to the Dickens model,” says Serial Box co-founder Molly Barton. “Let’s be Shonda Rhimes for books, and harness the power of telling a little bit of the story each week.” That’s what the company does, publishing books on the limited-TV-series model: the books come out in chapters meant to take 40 minutes to read (so you can do it on your commute); the various titles have seasons, writers’ rooms, and even showrunners; customers can purchase by the episode chapter, season, or entire span of a series.

Why John Milton’s Lucifer Is So Compelling — To Eve, And To Us

Edwin Yoder: “Despite the warnings of C. S. Lewis and others, I am left echoing Eve’s question: if the beasts [can eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil], why not man? Why, having armed his new creatures with intellectual curiosity, should their thirst for intellectual adventure become the paramount sin and its exercise a cosmic catastrophe? This prohibition seems especially odd because it contradicts what we know of Milton the lifelong scholar and polymath.”

‘I Just Wanted To Put It In The Blender’ – Choreographer Takes Six Modern Dance Classics, Chops Them Up, And Messes The Pieces All Around

Journalist Gia Kourlas talks to Netta Yerushalmy about her Paramodernities, in which she puts in the blender deconstructs Vaslav Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring, Martha Graham’s Night Journey, Alvin Ailey’s Revelations, George Balanchine’s Agon, Bob Fosse’s dances for the musical Sweet Charity, and three Merce Cunningham pieces (Merce probably wouldn’t have much minded which ones).

How Bad TV Creeps Up To Infect Great TV

“Bad TV,” in this case, doesn’t mean reality television, which has a kind of integrity in its shamelessness, but old-style idiot-box TV like The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Gilligan’s Island, and Dynasty. And as the much-ballyhooed age of Peak TV runs on, argues Paula Marantz Cohen, some of the most insidious traits of Bad TV are creeping into what ought to be high-quality material.

The Backlash Against Too Many Damn Tourists

International tourism has more than quadrupled since 1980, with growth in the last decade in particular being fueled by China’s mushrooming middle class. Now destination cities from Venice to Barcelona to Amsterdam to Auckland are seeing resistance from residents who feel their hometowns are being overrun. Richard Florida looks at the problems heavy tourism brings and possible ways to address them.

Preserving An Intricate, Crowded Artwork That Hadn’t Been Meant To Last

Built over 27 years (and counting) by mosaicist Isaiah Zagar and open to the public for a decade, the Magic Gardens installation in Philadelphia is now wildly popular – and the visitor traffic means repairing wear and tear that Zagar and his colleagues had never anticipated. Ashley Hahn reports on the program that’s now been set up to inspect and protect the countless tiny pieces of material in the mosaics that cover the site.