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Striking that strong teaching of basic information about American chattel slavery in the late 18th/19th centuries is considered revelatory (sometimes enraging) by a surprisingly large number of people. Because we failed at such things for so long, even if new generations get it, there's a backlog.

Yep - this kind of influence-tracing is one of the most fun things to do with all sorts of pop culture phenomena.

Reading a couple of issues of 50s-60s sci fi pulps for fun, and it’s really interesting how clear the DNA of Star Trek TOS is in these stories, like the “one planet = one culture/society/biome = one adventure” norm that Trek follows so often.

I really like and support the National Constitution Center in general, which makes it more annoying when they do something like invite Ilan Wurman for a book promotion talk that promises to be pretty positive and uncritical. It's tonight, so maybe they'll provide context and pushback, but...sigh.

Came upon an author-signed copy of "Herb Block's State of the Union" yesterday in a used bookstore, but didn't get it. I already have a copy of the book (it's so good! he's a priceless look into midcentury political life!) but am wrestling with whether $40 is worth it to have an inscribed copy.

also strikes me as a little nutso to conflate the social and demographic impacts of "introducing modern medical and food technologies" with those of "having a vicious dictatorship." There may, just may, be multiple factors at work in a situation like comparing 1950s demography to 2020s.

Teaching Neuromancer as a text in the history of popular culture next year for the first time and re-reading in preparation. I'd forgotten how jagged, vivid and off putting the book can be at times. Gibson's later works are better in many ways, but it's super apparent why this book had such impacts.

wait what someone finally made an adaptation of Neuromancer? I'm actually using the book as a teaching text (History of Popular Culture) for the first time next year and somehow I missed this!

yeah, the WW2 analogy breaks down in a scenario where we are trying to imagine contemporary economic mobilization because the weapon systems we're talking about are so complex. A tractor plant converting to early tracked personnel carriers is a far cry from a modern plant moving to, say, MANPADs.

it's legitimately hard for a civilized 21st century mind to really get its arms around the kind of brutality and cruelty and mass death which war planners and strategists calculated for, and which the civilians and soldiers on the ground experienced, in the 1940s.

I echo him - saw Hadestown in NYC with the original cast, then with a different touring cast when it came to my town, and again in this proshot movie theater release. The proshot version loses very little of the experience and captures the cast chemistry exceptionally well, totally worth it.

No one is lying about the Hadestown proshot, folks. It is incredible and, yes, quite possibly the best proshot I’ve seen. Do not miss it. It’s only out for a week, and I don’t know that we know yet if and where it will have a life after this.

Listened to the old album 'Deltron 3030' on a whim this evening and lord is it ever still a weird masterpiece. How many other albums have a track with lyrics as bonkers as "I'm like Gamera to amateurs" and "Rap your tear clap your ear with Soulsonic Mantronik phonics / Turn your brain to an omelets"

I guess I follow some of this argument? But elected policymakers by necessity make laws within a political system and a legal structure. So I hardly fault them for mostly existing within and referring to that legal system and political structure when discussing their ambitions.

Drop album(s) important to you when you were nineteen! By the time I was nineteen I was pretty deep into making a lot of mixed CDs and multi-artist playlists across genres, but these albums - all recent thought not current - found their way into my ears mostly as whole albums and shaped my tastes.

Once again I seriously wonder how much media consumption habits are upstream of political and social discourse patterns and it's a pretty grim thing to think about.

I'm not sure what you mean or who you're talking about. Would you mind clarifying what you're trying to say about ideological gaps and who does or doesn't recognize them (and why that matters) here?

I see what you mean, but I just have a really hard time with those ideas (dawg/instincts) as categories of analysis unless I know a politicians day to day decisions and accumulated tactical choices very well.

Those of us who follow politics closely tend to overestimate the importance of specific communications or rhetorical choices like the one you describe. My hypothetical about 2024 is more about time to integrate staff, funding, paid comms strategies etc without Biden legacy approaches as much.

Mostly too-short. Clearly counter factual speculation is a little bit of a fools errand, but if she’d had the runway of knowing she’d be the one on the ticket since January and developed staff, comms, money, and field on that basis…not too hard to imagine things turning out better in Nov 2024.