“I didn’t so much experiment as flounder around. But experiment is a nice word for it!”

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George Orwell would not have liked the Super Bowl. In his 1945 essay “The Sporting Spirit” he writes, “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.” Orwell may have a point. But, the Super Bowl is about more than hubris, violence and sadism! It’s also about Bruce Springsteen, expensive advertising, insane snacks and John Madden’s bumbling intellectualism. According to this guy, the Super Bowl might also be …more

X Minus 1 is the perfect  companion to insomnia. It sounds like a psychotropic drug developed by the C.I.A., but if you’re like me, this series of radio plays might be just the kind of vintage sci-fi escapism needed to get you through a  night plagued by financial anxiety.  Produced in the 1950s for NBC, X Minus 1 features stories by Rad Bradbury, Philip K Dick, and Issac Asimov, along with plenty of theremin-related sleep-inducing sound effects. All the broadcasts are available to stream for free at the Internet Archive, and come complete with vintage commercial interruptions.

The online magazine Triple Canopy has a fantastic, extensively illustrated, essay about Star Wars and minimalism. …more