By Rick McGinnis Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements The end of lockdown is in sight, or so they tell us. There is, of course, the little matter of vaccinating the majority of the population – easier in some countries than others, apparently. Then there are ongoing debates about just what privilege immunity confers – the speed with which we’ll be [...]
By Rick McGinnis In the first decades of the 19th century, upstate New York became known as the “Burned Over District,” a hotbed of spiritual revival that gave birth to an explosion of religious sects and utopian communities. Usually evangelical and often millenarian in nature, these included the Shakers, the Mormons, the Millerites – who would in turn produce Seventh-day Adventists and [...]
By Rick McGinnis Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements The “OK Boomer” meme – a condescending, dismissive internet catchphrase that’s supposed to be generational kryptonite when employed by millennials against anyone over 55 - is not new. OK Boomer began, as far as we know, on either reddit or 4chan – the very nerdy, largely boomer-proof online bulletin boards that are lumped [...]
BY RICK McGINNIS Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements You have to assume that Ronald Diebert was being provocative by calling his book about the internet in a time of social and political crisis Reset. Presented as a series of lectures this past year in the middle of the unfolding coronavirus pandemic, the title evokes the concept the “Great Reset” – [...]
By Rick McGinnis The first question you have to ask when holding all 600-plus pages of Barbara Amiel’s Friends and Enemies: A Memoir in your hand is: Who exactly is this book meant for? You might imagine that it’s an attempt to correct the story of her husband Conrad Black’s trial, conviction and imprisonment. But Black himself attempted to do that with [...]
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements By Rick McGinnis The recent Netflix adaptation of J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy begins with a flashback – a vignette of working-class life that resonated with me, perhaps more than with most viewers. We begin with a montage where the camera glances over scenes of life in ramshackle rural Kentucky, the “hill country” where [...]
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements By Rick McGinnis Artists don’t have a monopoly on bad ideas – there are plenty of those to go around, and in any case a bad idea from a politician is far more dangerous than one coming from a painter. But when artists have bad ideas, I can’t help but wonder if they know how [...]
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements By Rick McGinnis The term “social media” wasn’t in widespread use over 10 years ago, when I started writing this column. Back then we still worried about television and the general amount of “screen time” our children were spending on increasingly smaller and less expensive devices. Re-reading my old columns, like almost every exercise in [...]
By Rick McGinnis While our collective anxiety was being ramped up amidst stories of plague and rioting, 2020 reached deep into its awful cornucopia this summer with a reprise of cancel culture. That apparently ceaseless turkey shoot, insuring that anyone employed in politics, the arts, academia, journalism and science – so far agriculture, fisheries and forestry seem immune, but the year isn’t [...]
Amusements Rick McGinnis With the end of the coronavirus lockdown in sight as I write this, we’ll finally get to see how the greatest social experiment of the 21st century will finally play out. By the time you read this you may be able to visit your elderly relatives or sit in a restaurant or watch a movie in a [...]
Amusements Rick McGinnis It has been more than eight weeks now since we were told not to leave the house. At this point I’m not sure if I’m more dumbfounded that this even happened, or that the majority of the world, at least for the sake of appearances, agreed so placidly (at first) to put their lives on hold. If [...]
Amusements Rick McGinnis As I write this, it has been five weeks since life as we knew it ended. This sounds like the first line of a post-apocalyptic novel or the rough draft of a sci-fi movie script. If you’d e-mailed it back in time to me two months ago it might have triggered a panic attack, so I would [...]
Like anyone given to binge-watching shows on streaming television, I recently tore through three seasons of Babylon Berlin, a Netflix series set in the ominous, waning years of Weimar Germany, just as the roaring, manic 1920s tumbled into the dismal 1930s. It’s the most expensive non-English TV drama ever filmed, with the first two seasons costing €40 million, most of it spent [...]
Amusements Three years ago I was asked to write about HBO’s The Young Pope, which was expected to be a sucker punch attack on the Catholic Church and the papacy. It turned out to be a startling but surreal story that sympathized with a youthful and charismatic new pontiff who planned to reverse the Church back past the liberalizations of [...]
The film The Two Popes stars Anthony Hopkins as Pope Benedict XVI and Jonathan Pryce as Cardinal Jorge Marlo Bergoglio (later Pope Frances). You don’t expect to see religion being treated with respect or insight in popular media these days. For religious people that attitude might be paranoia, though it’s helpful to recall the old maxim that you might be [...]