What Should Boys Watch?
by Mark BauerleinThe old virtues of manhood are missing from youth culture. Here is a list of films and TV shows for 10-to-13-year-old boys to rediscover them. Continue Reading »
The old virtues of manhood are missing from youth culture. Here is a list of films and TV shows for 10-to-13-year-old boys to rediscover them. Continue Reading »
The First Things Podcast, Episode 26. Featuring: FX’s The Americans, and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
Search Party has received praise for its performances and cutting wit. But the series succeeds because it goes beyond generational caricature and hipster-bashing and lays bare an aching human need for narrative and connection Continue Reading »
The First Things Podcast, Episode 15. Featuring: Hardboiled detective novels and HBO’s Westworld.
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Our engagement with the arts is no longer guided by emotion and imagination, but by reason. It’s why we walk away from a show like Westworld concerned with and moved by logos—“theories”—rather than ethos and pathos. Continue Reading »
Amazon serializes The Man in the High Castle, the Philip K. Dick novel that asked: What would we be like if we had lost World War II? Continue Reading »
Viewers of Downton Abbey may have noticed in the recently aired first episode of Season Six that Carson the Butler articulated, in a delicate but firm and unmistakable way, the truth that marriage is a conjugal union. Mrs. Patmore, the cook, is sent as an emissary of Carson's fiancée, Mrs. Hughes, . . . . Continue Reading »
Now drifting into its sixth and final season, NBC’s Parenthood has spent its run alternately pegged for cancellation and heralded as the saving grace of the network’s Thursday-night lineup. Rejecting both courses, it has remained just good enough to get by, just bad enough to remain tolerable. Sometimes better, sometimes worsebut always along the gradient of mediocrity. Continue Reading »
The cognoscenti tell me that Stephen Colbert, who is a self-identified faithful member of a Church that teaches that homosexual inclinations are intrinsically disordered and that sodomy is a mortal sin, is a smart guya really smart guy. Evidently, his shtick is to adopt the persona of a certain type of individual whom he regards as intellectually and morally inferior to himself so that he can ridicule people of that sort. This, I’m told, is the kind of humor that people who watch Stephen Colbert, who is a self-identified faithful member of a Church that teaches that homosexual inclinations are intrinsically disordered and that sodomy is a mortal sin, relish. Continue Reading »
Okay, so a little more Breaking Bad blogging. Spoilers ahead. Over at the Atlantic, Chris Heller writes that Ozymandias was the fitting conclusion for Breaking Bad because: Nobody is saved and everybody suffers. That’s the ending Breaking Bad needed. Bleak, merciless, and tragic. I think . . . . Continue Reading »