Washington, DC as a corrupt inferno of reality distortion (WARNING: Reading this may make you profoundly ill): “The resulting offspring of this confluence of industry, politics, and pop-culture has produced a wide range of hybrid permutations of all three partners: the celebrity operative (Carville-Matalin, Stephanopoulos), the cable news partisanship industry (Fox, MSNBC), the Hollywood revisionist/fictional political thriller (West Wing, Game Change, House of Cards), and the reality challenged political self-promotions industry (any consultant living in DC) — all of which has in the ensuing decades created a political atmosphere in DC having very little to do with the real business of governing, and more about massaging reality to fit whatever narrative serves your brand best.”
Wall Street as dystopian nightmare: “Imagine you’re a scientist in some sci-fi alternate universe, and you’ve been charged with creating a boot camp that will reliably turn normal but ambitious people into broken sociopaths more or less willing to do anything.”
How Goldman Sachs (and others) blew up the economy and profited from our misery: “The cumulative impact of this fusion of technology, greed, and moral blindness, duplicated from one end of Wall Street to the other, was global economic meltdown.”
The secret spiritual history of calculus: “Integral calculus originated in a 17th-century debate that was as religious as it was scientific. . . . For the Jesuits, the purpose of mathematics was to construct the world as a fixed and eternally unchanging place, in which order and hierarchy could never be challenged. . . . For Cavalieri and his fellow indivisiblists, it was the exact reverse.”
The (not so) secret magical history of science: “In reality, science owes its origins to beliefs that the high priests of modern science such as Richard Dawkins would regard as even more irrational than Christianity.”
The historical birth and continued vitality of the Illuminati conspiracy theory: “In popular culture and old-time religion, satire and nationalist politics, the Illuminati conspiracy still resonates with its warning that the light of reason has its shadows, and even the most enlightened democracy can be manipulated by hidden hands.”
It turns out George Romero was more prophetic than even he knew when he set Dawn of the Dead in a shopping mall. As reported by the BBC, it’s the end of an era as the entire phenomenon of American shopping malls is dying: “Born in the 1950s, these temples of commerce were symbols of the US consumer culture — but many are now dying out. . . . Soon enough, and just as no one knows how to make use of Ancient Egyptian temples today, shopping malls will become the stuff of archaeology and folklore.”
So what might replace indoor shopping malls? Well, isn’t it obvious? Say hello to outdoor mega-shopping villages based on the Disney model, where shoppers are called “guests” and the whole experience is carefully controlled, right down to the faux quaint architecture and village-like layout. Says one leading developer, “We’re in the entertainment business. You step on the property in the morning, it’s got to be perfect.”
Lessons from Stephen King and Valley of the Dolls: A college student named Matthew Kahn is reading 94 bestselling books from the past century (1913-2013) and blogging about what he’s learning re: the evolving nature and status of popular fiction and its audience.
A brief history of “Choose Your Own Adventure” (and oh, did I love those books when I was in junior high): “Nearly 35 years after its debut, ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ remains a publishing landmark.”