Ross asks if the iPhone is making us stupid.
[Walter] Mossberg delivered this assessment [at the Aspen Ideas Festival] with a strong note of techno-pessimism woven in: A lot of his talk had to do with the issues constant connectivity raises for deep knowledge (”people hate iPhone users,” he remarked, “because you can never have an [...]

Probably the most telling (if only the second or third saddest) aspect of the AP’s eulogy for bearded bawd George Carlin is this one:

The actor Ben Stiller called Carlin “a hugely influential force in stand-up comedy. He had an amazing mind, and his humor was brave, and always challenging us to look at ourselves [...]

Like Daniel, I happily pondered Reihan’s Spectator prophesy of a yupster Return to the Blue Lagoon of Hippiedom. And the result of that pondering centered around the following two sentences:
As the left-wing cultural critic Thomas Frank argued in The Conquest of Cool, Madison Avenue eventually cracked this countercultural code. The hippie quest for freedom was [...]

Apropos of, more or less, liberaltarianism, Reihan is anecdotally impressed with
the particular facts of the individual stories I kept coaxing out of people, and by how values informed life choices. That is, a taste for freedom and autonomy led to more risk-taking and thus to sharper fluctuations in economic outcomes. The quality that propelled some [...]

Let me take the opportunity to second Sonny´s contention that a true nobility of movie reviewers is impossible without a plurality of nobles. I´m of the mind that monopolies should be permitted to form — only to be busted up — so in the broader context of media centralization, I´m very hesitant to suggest we [...]

Like Alan, Sonny airs a complaint:
journalism has always been little more than a delivery method for advertising. But it’s still unclear just how to deliver those advertisements to the customer when the written word is your medium and those words are transmitted for free. It’s even harder to see how freelance writers are supposed to [...]

And I thought Paulville was the limit of the utopitarian imagination. Fool!

By way of Jonathan Last’s and Victorino Matus’ commentaries on Star Wars and Indiana Jones, Sonny raises a pop culture problem with profound implications for right-leaning political philosophy:
[Last] argued that viewers were cheering for the wrong side in the Star Wars flicks–that the empire was a force for stability in a universe ungovernable by [...]

Sonny’s right — dead right — that Kilmer’s Doc Holliday is one of ’90s cinema’s indelible figures. “They want revenge.” “Fer what?” “Bein’ born.” Brrr! That’s movie magic.
But what about Kilmer’s attempted comeback film, Salton Sea? And while we’re on it, if Val Kilmer can ruin his career by starring as The Saint, and Robert [...]

Over at The American Scene, Matt Frost is undoubtedly right to question and even ridicule supposed experts about ‘Millennials’ — that latest incarnation of the Pepsi generation who are supposed to be, individually and in the aggregate, both so much more enlightened than their ancestors and so much more trenchantly aware of the emotional and [...]

One of the big insults you can fire at a blogger is that blogging is one big group grope, the most self-referential and closed niche society around in a cultural milieu defined by them. What are all these fairly young, educated human beings doing, these people who all seem to know each other and speak [...]

Deep as it runs, my appreciation for Pabst does know limits. Those limits have been obliterated by this man:
SOUTH CHICAGO HEIGHTS, Ill. — Bill Bramanti will love Pabst Blue Ribbon eternally, and he’s got the custom-made beer-can casket to prove it. “I actually fit, because I got in here,” said Bramanti of South [...]

Ann Hornaday doesn’t really like Iron Man:
Toggling between Stark’s impish goatee and Iron Man’s full-metal body condom, and amid so many generic fireballs, kill shots and earsplitting thumps, bumps and crunches, the film finally collapses under its own weight. It’s possible to see a decent franchise in “Iron Man” with Downey at its troubled center; [...]

Stands for, y’know, We Await Radical-life Extension’s Zarathustra. I see Sonny’s on board, praying for the Great Noontide. Then there’s this guy:
As Kevin Warwick gently squeezed his hand into a fist one day in 2002, a robotic hand came to life 3,400 miles away and mimicked the gesture. The University of Reading cybernetics professor [...]