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 [...]
The worst argument I ever had with an old and dear friend was about Darwin. It only occurred to me later that – like almost any argument we have today where someone expresses even a scintilla of doubt about Darwin, “Darwinism” and the theory of evolution – we were really arguing about God, and whether even a suggestion of the divine was [...]
Amusements Rick McGinnis We have a curious relationship with the past. It’s often presumed that things were better then, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. And while no one but a tiny minority advocates a return to any pre-industrial point in human history, there has been a palpable longing for one recent period in history that’s lingered since before that [...]
Amusements Ten years ago, when I started writing this column, nobody was really frightened of the internet. My first column for The Interim was about the fear of communications technology, opting out and cutting the cable – but the villain was television. “Every year it seems like a new study is published linking TV viewing with obesity, poor marks, diminishing attention spans [...]
It’s been almost a year since General Motors announced that it would be closing its Oshawa, Ontario automobile assembly plant, ending over a century of car manufacturing in the city and putting nearly 3,000 employees and management out of work. This spring, however, the company announced that it would reinvest $170 million dollars in the plant, converting it to stamping and sub-assembly [...]
HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl arrived for streaming at a crucial moment for the company, just as the hangover from the end of Game of Throneswas starting to ebb. They needed a hit, and they got it with a five-hour story about the 1986 explosion at a nuclear power plant in the Soviet Ukraine. “Chernobyl is a thorough historical analysis,” wrote Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic, [...]
After eight seasons, 73 episodes, 47 primetime Emmy awards, and a massive audience that guarantees it a place in pop culture history, Game of Thronesended last month with a half dozen episodes that left fans distraught, angry, or both. Before the final episode aired, an online petition from fans demanding that the eighth and last season be rebooted and rewritten gained a [...]
I want to tell you a story about a church catching fire. Over 20 years ago, a parish church in the Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale caught fire and burned down. Holy Family had stood for over ninety years, but by the time the fire was put out nothing was left but the walls. This might have been the end of the story [...]
Media attacked Covington teens at March for Life, bishops and schools piled on There’s an old saying that life is like high school. I have no idea who originally said it, though American musician Frank Zappa is reputed to have elaborated on the idea by saying that “Life is like high school with money.” There was a time, very recently, when real [...]
Anthony Bourdain I’m not normally emotionally affected by the deaths of celebrities, but the sudden death of celebrity chef and TV host Anthony Bourdain last June resonated with me unaccountably. I don’t want to sound cold, but I think it’s difficult to feel real grief for anyone we don’t know personally. Very simply, there’s more than enough grief and heartbreak [...]
I have been a lifelong fan of the Beach Boys, but I’ve never been able to understand their 1963 hit single, “Be True To Your School.” That probably says more about me than the Beach Boys, but I think it has a lot to do with my high school, which has been in the news quite a bit lately as I write [...]
Joan Didion I was reading The White Album, Joan Didion’s 1979 collection of essays when I came across a passage describing student unrest at San Francisco State University in 1968. Didion admits that she had missed the really big student protests earlier at Berkeley and Columbia, and that while she was expecting much of the same at SFSU, she was [...]
It’s easy to believe that society is falling apart, especially if you spend any time on social media. My liberal friends are certain that the earth is on the verge of an imminent ecological disaster – probably climate change, but they’ll take resource depletion or overpopulation in a pinch. My conservative friends fill their Facebook feeds with stories and memes about the [...]