Junk
I grew up when America was first discussing “junk food”: ready-to-eat foods that were filling, and tasty, but neither nutritious nor healthy. I feel like we’ve ...
Category: power
politics, history, force
latines
from the study of advertising: a consumer who is unsure of how to pronounce a brand name, a consumer who fears being embarrassed by mispronouncing a brand name,...
Monolingualism is an aberration
Julie Tetel Andresen in The Allusionist: Monolingualism is an aberration – most people have been multilingual… The human body and brain is quite well adap...
First families
I slept fitfully and repeatedly dreamed of the migrant family, as enshrined by Christianity. La familia sagrada. The holy family versus Herod, the king. The fam...
Catholic Celibacy and Cuban Communism
In the early 1960s, two very different regimes attempted to remake humanity: Still, the revolution was most astonishing not for its radical redistribution of we...
quasi-public spaces
From my Facebook account, July 23, 2015: [note: I saw a man, apparently homeless, using a Starbucks cup to justify his occupying space in an outdoor seating are...
War Games, Fail-Safe, Dr. Strangelove
In 1998, there were two movies about a natural catastrophe: Armageddon & Deep Impact. In 2006, there were two movies about magicians living outside the real...
Underground
Magicians show you things you don’t know you’re seeing. Prosecutors tell you things you don’t realize you’re hearing. Movies use a similar ploy: they make you f...
the normal
I just scanned the most recent issue of “14 y medio”, a banned / clandestine news digest from Cuba. You won’t be surprised that the stories are about struggle. ...
a big lie
most car commercials are really public road commercials
Actual Science Fiction
A hundred years from now half the cops will have psych degrees and we’ll look back on today like a horror show. (the movie “Bright” is not actually ...
Facebook is made out of…
very good critics point out that Facebook is engineered to be addictive. but they seldom recognize that the pleasure being meted out is OTHER PEOPLE. for exampl...
Invasions
One of the charms of Star Wars was the contrast of robots and serfs, space ships and lords. High technology and feudalism. If you follow US politics (don’t, it’...
Wheels of fortune
Smart people become irrational around technology. We want absolutes, purity and simple answers; whether it’s being anti-GMO or bullish on AI, the impulse ...
Pleasure and power
Casamigos, Doritos marketing collateral, 2018 A consistent theme in the marketing of Mexico’s grastronomic culture is the erasure of Mexicans. When Mexica...
Motherhood and the workplace
The movie Arrival (2016) and the movie Alien (1979) are contrasting takes on motherhood and women in the workplace. In Arrival, a successful professional woman ...
Legal or illegal, capital or labor
“You’ll get beautiful coverage, believe me, and the Mexicans will pay for it.” – Jeet Heer This tweet is comedy because “and the Mexicans will...
Facebook users deserve all their feels.
Facebook is software for managing your feelings. It promises to be a tool for strengthening relationships – primarily, as a replacement for email – but it is en...
Who are the architects?
A curious turn of phrase from Robert Gates as reported by David Ignatius: “We’ve never had a populist movement or political insurgency quite like this — that ac...
diagnosis
the diagnosis of “mentally ill” is often used to strip people of their liberty. by governments and by family members, alike. we Americans don’...