Monthly Archives: March 2016

Pictures from our trip and thoughts about Dar’s vacation next week. Thanks for checking in.

This is conference week for me, at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies’ annual conference in Atlanta. Here’s a lightly abridged version of the paper I’m giving. I think it’s fair to say this covers the “media” and “populism” parts of the blog for this week. “Body-worn cameras and the new defensive panopticism” by Daniel Smith-Rowsey In the wake of the widely publicized deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Samuel Dubose, and Sandra Bland, […]

I think we can all agree with President Barack Obama and half of New York that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” is the sensation of the season. As I watched the curtain come down at the Richard Rodgers Theater last month, one of my thoughts was: “Noooo, I don’t want it to be over.” And then I thought…isn’t hip-hop all about the appropriation and remixing? I would like to dedicate this rhyme to everything I learned from Phife Dawg of A Tribe […]

If you would like to hear my take on an article that fascinated me, read John Robison’s “An Experimental Autism Treatment Cost Me My Marriage” and then come on back. If Dar can ever write words that approach anything like John Robison’s coherence, it will be a full-blown water-into-wine miracle. As a parent of a severely autistic child, I hear from people at John’s approximate position on the spectrum and I sometimes think – and I’m not proud of this […]

I love FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. I love how each episode has its own theme, but the larger narrative keeps bearing down on the characters. I love their dramatic reactions to being caught in the largest drama of their lives. I love every minute of it. I hated the actual The People v. O.J. Simpson. I ignored almost every minute of it. I never heard the word “Kardashian” until 2007. The trial and surrounding mishegoss […]

I also published this here at medium. What’s the main thing Donald Trump supporters and the media’s most vocal Donald Trump haters have in common? Rage over proven obsolescence. One side is overtly angry about their economical and cultural obsolescence: no one wants to hire them, and “white man” has become an insult. The other side is more covertly angry, partly at their repeated and repeated and repeated failures to predict and diagnose the Trump phenomenon. One side is outwardly […]

It’s a shamrock-bedecked week, so it feels appropriate to use this space to give a shout out to Irishman Rob Laffan, who last year created Tippy Talk. And boy, does Laffan ever look like my relatives and ancestors. It’s such a specific look, it makes me beam with Irish pride to see m’boy do so well. Rob Laffan was living in the city of Limerick, where my mother’s mother was born and raised, when he came up with the idea […]

[Article] – The 32 Best Irish-American Characters From Film & TV This week’s media blog post is a special for FilmDebate.co.uk. Erin go bragh!

Dear media, Thanks for finally paying attention to populism! Here at this blog we’ve been writing weekly 1000-word articles about non-partisan populism for more than two years. But it’s good to have you notice this little tendency in American society. Welcome aboard! Now, might I ask that you clarify what you mean, exactly, when you throw around that word “populist”? It would really help your readers and the country in general as they and you try to make sense of […]

For more than a year, friends have encouraged me to try something for Dar called Rapid Prompting Method. It’s a technique for communication that involves intense coupling while Dar tries to talk – if he gets it wrong, you just keep at him. You might say, yeah, why not just try it? Well, I’m considerably oversimplifying it. To use it effectively, you have to study a book/manual and take classes and learn the RPM board and a few other things. […]