What Orwell got right, and wrong, about power in the Age of Trump The prescience of George Orwell’s 1984 is near-universally acknowledged across America. In this 1948 dystopian sci-fi novel that exhaustively details the workings and philosophies of a terrifyingly successful totalitarian government of the future, we find an analogue…

For the past four years, liberals have struggled to understand Donald J. Trump’s consistently strong appeal to (if polls are accurate) about a third of Americans. The actions President Trump takes that seem most despicable and dangerous to many on the “cultured Left” — the lies, the insults, the violations…

The answer may have to do, not with atoms, but with stories It may seem surprising that the Trumpian “war on science” has gained so much traction, and that empirical, rational thought continues to lose ground to charismatic snake oil salesmen all over the world. Even during a global pandemic…

Thoughts on the season finale of Star Trek: Picard (spoilers galore, read onward at your peril) Loved the Picard season finale. This series has truly been the most well-written and engaging thing I’ve watched since Season 1 of Stranger Things, or Season 1 of Westworld…the ethos, of course, is different…

(Number One, go to Yellow Alert — there are spoilers throughout this review) Well, it only took 20 years since the conclusion of Deep Space Nine, but finally, FINALLY, we’ve got a worthy successor to the Star Trek line. Ok, maybe you could count Voyager (which ran until 2001), which…

(aka Star Wars: Rise of the Jump Cuts) (I sense great SPOILERS in this review…spoilers lead to anger, anger leads to hate, etc…) I’m not sure what I was expecting in a movie that aimed to finish off a story I’d been waiting some 40 years to see conclude, but…

Boris Johnson’s sweeping victory in England made me think, hardly for the first time, that the only purpose in being a liberal/globalist these days is to keep the companies that manufacture antidepressants in business. It’s depressing because I think I have come to understand the appeal of Johnson, of Trump…

In this modern age of curated media, one of the few surviving realms of monoculture is Disney. Specifically in this case, any parent raising a daughter during this decade has found FROZEN occupying a central place in the pantheon of their child’s media life. We’ve raised our two children in…

“Stranger Things” in a Strange Land : Review of Season 3 (beware demodogs and spoilers) Like the corrupting tentacles of the Mind Flayer, Season 3 took a little while to grow on me, but it eventually happened. Here’s how and why. Context: Season One of Stranger Things was some of…