We’re Watching The Death Of The Paper Book

“The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone. It’s being chewed by the e-book. It’s being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all.”

How Peter Falk’s Lt. Columbo Changed TV Cops

For television’s first couple of generations, detectives tended to be “a smug and self-assured bunch, comfortable in their mental, moral, and physical attributes and their obvious superiority over not only the bad guys, but everybody else, too. … Columbo was immediately relatable to us, to people the world over, in a way that no TV cop had ever been before … We’d all met guys like him. Many of us were guys like him.”