I’ve been more than a little taken with this basic idea ever since I saw The Game, but I think Aaron Swartz is onto something with this thought:

Billions of dollars are spent making and watching people explore mysterious tunnels, chase down alleys, and fly as if by magic, but there’s hardly a single opportunity to actually do any of these things.

I didn’t post this — which is frequently headlined as PBS running “commercials” — when I first saw it because it’s news (and not firm) and I don’t really think it’s worth my time to put news here. But this isn’t getting covered widely and it has the potential to be the worst thing to ever happen to American TV. I am concerned.

If you’re curious, the logic is thus: because PBS is the best thing on American TV — and there’s not room to debate that — even a modest debasement in the name of commerce is far worse than, say, the History Channel becoming an abomination before history and intelligence.

That said, this does explain the new structure of some Frontline episodes and NOVA scienceNOW. And if you’re an American and don’t know what I’m talking about, shame on you.

(via Atlantic Wire & Slatest)

A valid and undervalued point:

Force a writer to be brief and you force him to think clearly—if he can. No, I don’t think that “War and Peace” would have profited from being written in 140-character tweets. But I do think that our impatient age might just be getting the best out of a great many artists and thinkers who, left to their own devices, would never have learned how to cut to the chase.

(via @oliverburkeman)

There’s no single solid takeaway from this essay about the culture we feel obligated to consume, but I think it’s a good and valuable thing to think about and pay attention to.

Every year, I can tell Mad Men is back on the air by a small spike in traffic to this post. Daniel Mendelsohn’s take on the show is more thorough, and more mixed, but this paragraph nails why I stopped watching:

Worst of all—in a drama with aspirations to treating social and historical “issues”—the show is melodramatic rather than dramatic. By this I mean that it proceeds, for the most part, like a soap opera, serially (and often unbelievably) generating, and then resolving, successive personal crises (adulteries, abortions, premarital pregnancies, interracial affairs, alcoholism and drug addiction, etc.), rather than exploring, by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation, the contemporary social and cultural phenomena it regards with such fascination: sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture, and so forth.

Short synopses of films someone saw a while ago and doesn’t remember well. It’s a cute idea, executed well, and has essentially no value beyond diversion. But still, 5 minutes of fun.

(via zefrank)

I must restore my balance, view the world in a fair way, hope to inspire more appreciation than ridicule.

A sound goal for us all.

(via Fimoculous)

I swear this article appears at least semiannually in some paper somewhere. This one chose the “epicenter of artistic talent” angle.

(via Ideas)

John Parkers offers a welcome counterweight to the unavoidable, and often inane, argument that people are dumber than ever before. A snippet:

Millions more people are going to museums, literary festivals and operas; millions more watch demanding television programmes or download serious-minded podcasts. Not all these activities count as mind-stretching, of course. Some are downright fluffy. But, says Donna Renney, the chief executive of the Cheltenham Festivals, audiences increasingly want “the buzz you get from working that little bit harder”. This is a dramatic yet often unrecognised development. “When people talk and write about culture,” says Ira Glass, the creator of the riveting public-radio show “This American Life”, “it’s apocalyptic. We tell ourselves that everything is in bad shape. But the opposite is true. There’s an abundance of really interesting things going on all around us.”

(via Ideas)

This is certainly the coolest graph I’ve seen in a while. It might be the coolest ever.

(via kottke)

An under-understood truth:

Paul Krugman was observing that even though the political coverage is the part of the media that people like to talk about, it’s actually fairly marginal to the business. The New York Times is known for its hard news coverage, but he observes that from a business perspective it’s primarily a fashion and food publication that runs a small political news operation on the side. One issue of T Magazine, he says, pays for an entire NYT European bureau.

(via kottke)

Noticing the undeniable fandom of the critical class, Vulture has added AMC’s Mad Men to their list of television shows you should watch:

…by now you’re feeling that oppressive sense, delivered by critics and laysnobs alike, that if you aren’t watching Mad Men you’re out of touch with all that is good in our culture. That means Mad Men is officially a Show You Should Watch™ (or SYSW for short), following in the proud footsteps of The Wire, The Sopranos, and Arrested Development.

Ross Douthat tackles how and why modern Hollywood pictures look relatively similar to those of the Vietnam era.

This doesn’t mean that the current paranoid, doom-ridden mood in cinema and television was manufactured in Hollywood and foisted on an unwilling public. Up to a point, at least, Hollywood is meeting Americans where they are. Mistrust of government and disquiet about the country’s future have risen to Vietnam-era levels, and reviving ’70s-style paranoia and pessimism is a natural way for the culture industry to connect with a public coping, once again, with a military quagmire, rising oil prices, prophecies of ecological doom, and corruption in high places.

Some would say, and with good reason, that there’s no good reason to compare London and Paris. They’re different cities with different goals and different heritigates. Nonetheless, the comparison allows for a pretty interesting rundown of what problems and successes the two cities have had. For quick reference, the crux of the difference is roughly thus:

All the same, as Mr Sarkozy has lamented, Paris seems to lack London’s dynamism. Marc Levy, a French novelist who has chosen to make London his home, argues that the conservative attitude towards planning and architecture has a direct effect on creative life. “Paris doesn’t take risks, it lacks audacity,” he says. “How can you create a desire to innovate when the ambient culture is oriented towards preservation?”

I’m surprised by how good and readable Gregory Rodriguez’s column about Stuff White People Like is. A taste:

One irony-deficient reader complained that the blog was less about white people than it was about yuppies. And without knowing it, she was cutting to the heart of the joke. Lander is gently making fun of the many progressive, educated, upper-middle-class whites who think they are beyond ethnicity or collectively shared tastes, styles or outlook. He’s essentially reminding them that they too are part of a group.

(via Fimoculous)

Virginia Heffernan offers an interesting reason that Friday Night Lights — which is a critical darling — has failed to draw a large audience. I’m not sure she’s right, but the argument is interesting.

The fault of “Friday Night Lights” is extrinsic: the program has steadfastly refused to become a franchise. It is not and will never be “Heroes,” “Project Runway,” “The Hills” or Harry Potter. It generates no tabloid features, cartoons, trading cards, board games, action figures or vibrating brooms. There will be no “Friday Night Lights: Origins,” and no “FNL Touchdown” for PlayStation.