Matthew Yglesias:

Trying to do a piece of extended drama that embodied the values of pragmatic progressive reformism would be impossible. The results, if serious and true to the spirit, would be deadly dull. Moderate optimism about human nature and the possibility for change is, if done in an entertaining way, the stuff of light romantic comedies, not big-time drama…

In political terms [The Wire is] a dark vision that, like Dostoevsky’s, veers wildly between radical and reactionary and that exists, fundamentally, outside the lines of “normal” arguments about policy. Simon believes that we are doomed, and political progress requires us to believe that we are not. But aesthetically it’s an extremely powerful conceit. And at the end of the day, it’s a television show not a treatise on urban policy.

Nathan Rabin:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: politics and good intentions have ruined more filmmakers than drugs and money combined. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. That goes double if the knowledge involved is political in nature.

Two unrelated quotes. Both are interesting.

One:

When a person is scared, a brain area called the amygdala becomes more active, laying down an extra set of memories that go along with those normally taken care of by other parts of the brain.

“In this way, frightening events are associated with richer and denser memories,” Eagleman explained. “And the more memory you have of an event, the longer you believe it took.”

Eagleman added this illusion “is related to the phenomenon that time seems to speed up as you grow older. When you’re a child, you lay down rich memories for all your experiences; when you’re older, you’ve seen it all before and lay down fewer memories. Therefore, when a child looks back at the end of a summer, it seems to have lasted forever; adults think it zoomed by.”

Two:

To a Democrat, if you get a blurb in the Washington Post, one day, that’s a public relations victory. To a Republican, once that blurb is repeated every day for 30 years then they declare victory.

While reading Distant space collision meant doom for dinosaurs I thought: what if, by chance, there had been no such collision? Would they have evolved into something more like “us”?

The dinosaurs had a good run: 62 million years. What would another 50 million have done for them?

Then again, you could say they never went away. Without them, we wouldn’t be who we are today: consider the role of fossil fuels in human evolution. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and all that.

It’s tempting to see a thread of continuity, of a very loosely phrased “evolution,” in which we follow them and are, in turn, followed by some other.

We have no certain explanation as to why mammals took off just as the dinosaurs went extinct but we do know that the history of our planet consists of alternating cycles of life and death: “a rise and fall of marine animal diversity [occurring] every 62 million years [followed by] a weaker cycle of rising and falling marine diversity, which repeats every 140 million years.”

The details of death – or, on a mass scale, doom – don’t really matter. Even if the dinosaurs had evolved enough to detect the coming asteroids and deflect them (oh, to see that movie! Jurassic Armageddon!), chances appear to be such that they would eventually “mistakenly” transport world-ending weapons from one base to another or succumb to some ingenious, fatal virus – all while competing with one another for resources.

I’ve seen enough movies to know that even “Dinosaurs in Space” would end badly. The obelisk in 2001 is a tombstone. It’s the living (and dying) planet of Solaris which holds closer to truth.

At least, this is how I talk myself back to sleep in the middle of the night.