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Author’s Note: a slightly different version of this post first ran on my old blog, Bahktin’s Cigarettes. It’s hard to believe, but the 40th Anniversary of the Watergate break-in is fast approaching, on June 17. The day will be commemorated by Chapman University and many others. It will not be the most uplifting of anniversaries, surely. I
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When I was a high school kid in the 1980s, a legend sprang up about a West coast rock band that got busted while playing one of the house parties on UF’s fraternity row. The band had gotten naked on-stage and been arrested for public indecency. And—oh, yeah—they were apparently a really kick-ass band. They
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I went into my favorite used bookstore recently, and I was shocked to find only a handful of Michael Crichton’s old books on hand. When I was a kid, he was ubiquitous. He was guaranteed to have not just an entire shelf dedicated to his work, but often an entire case. I mean, dozens of
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It’s a terrible thing when someone loses their job through no fault of their own. But when I read that 4,000 people have already been fired due to AI technology, my first thought is: “Man, they must have had really, really crappy jobs.” I mean, honestly. ChatGTP is just another kind of robot. It’s about
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Even though I live in Florida, I am guardedly optimistic about our chances of surviving (I almost typed weathering–HA!) the global warming crisis. New green technologies are being created everyday, and the ones we’ve already got have to the potential to completely transform the world. Here is a recent, positive article from one my favorite
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I have a confession to make: I love concrete architecture. I know, I know. Concrete Architecture (CA, for short) is not fashionable. It’s not renewable (not yet, anyway). It’s not touchy-feely. It’s not cool. Part of the bad-rap CA has is due to its association with brutalism, the quasi-Soviet style that was popular in the
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Ah, New Wave music. I remember you well. Post-disco. Post-punk. Post-modern. Post-everything. Synthesizers. Spandex. Dry ice fog in the videos. Bizarro special effects. What a lot of people fail to remember is how flat-out danceable a lot of New Wave music was, even in its most cerebral and soaring example, Gary Numan’s Cars. Yes, that’s
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I recently got a BritBox subscription, and I’ve been nerding-out. Mainly, I’m rewatching the original Inspector Morse series that aired on Mystery! back in the 80s and 90s. I’ve loved the show since I first saw it back in college. Morse is a genuinely interesting and conflicted character, and John Thaw played him brilliantly. Morse
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Of all the novels I have read in my life, only two ever disturbed me on a deep, lasting level. One was The Constant Gardener by John le Carré. The other was Money by Martin Amis. Money is, by any reasonable definition, a brilliant novel. Full of symbolism and thematic complexity, Money is a phantasmagoric
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The only time I ever got in trouble with my parents over a book was when I was thirteen. The book was Nova by Samuel R. Delany, and was reading while nested in the back of the family car on a long trip. My stepmom read the back-jacket copy, which made the book sound a
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Ash Clifton, Writer 