PicoBlog

In the vast and expanding forest of films whose echoes take up much of my cognitive array, "The Natural" stands out like a crowning oak. Its memory towers above nearly all others; its roots are sunk deep into the formation of my perception of cinema. It's one of the movies that made me fall in love with movies. I think about it often, though it's probably been close on to a decade since I last saw it in its entirety.

This qualifies as one of the 72 “Greatest” Moments in NBA History Carl Lewis is one of the great athletes in U.S. history. I’m no track and field expert, but winning nine gold medals plus a silver in the Olympics seems pretty good. Okay, that’s enough praise for Carl Lewis. What we’re here for are the lowlights. For that we can thank the New Jersey Nets and Chicago Bulls, but mostly the Nets.

This excerpt is taken from my recent conversation with journalist, author, and Bloggingheads co-founder Bob Wright. Here we spend a little time in Bob’s wheelhouse, and it’s a big wheelhouse. Bob’s books cover things like “the logic of human destiny” (the subtitle of his book Nonzero), the relationship between religion and tribalism, and Buddhism’s anticipation of the findings of modern psychology. We don’t cover all of that, of course. But Bob and I do discuss one important through-line in his writing and thinking: The role of non-zero-sum games in human social and political life.

My father died, unexpectedly, the fall I turned 48. In the months that followed, I created a bucket list. The places I wanted to visit. The books I wanted to read. The things I wanted to do. It was the first time I looked forward and considered the rest of my life. I wanted to know what it was I would regret not doing. Writing was at the top of the list.

[This profile contains discussion of sexual coercion.] Here we are! My second profile! Just like Taylor Swift, I can create two of the same thing in a year. After the intricacies of Jenny Humphrey’s costume design, I thought I’d need someone a little simpler, a little less varied in their style. And, while I mean this with all the affection in the world, the first character who came to mind was Nate Archibald, played by Chace Crawford.

“I love being professional. That’s always, like, huge for me.” — Dylan Gelula, Support the Girls Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls takes place in an alien world—a world where people get paid by the hour and have no benefits, a world where they have to make rent on shitty apartments with scuffed walls and worn beige carpets, a world that chips away at their dignity and self-respect. This is an alien world because we do not see it nearly as often on screen as worlds with aliens in them, which is a Hollywood problem that’s shared, to some degree, by American independent films that feel conspicuously disconnected from lived experience.

“What u’ve done will live here forever.” — billie227, Unfriended Here at The Reveal, we strongly endorse seeing as many films as possible on the big screen, where you can immerse yourself fully and without distraction in some grand (or evenwillfully mediocre) vision that home viewing could never quite replicate. And yet, a movie theater is not the right place to see the 2015 horror movie Unfriended, nor is that giant 4K television you might have mounted on the living room wall.

There was a specific moment when I realized Hello Kitty Island Adventure was more than some adorable Hello Kitty paint tossed onto a game that played like Nintendo’s Animal Crossing. A few minutes into the game, my character started climbing a mountain, and a stamina meter that looked suspiciously like the one in Breath of the Wild appeared out of nowhere. What’s a stamina meter doing in a Hello Kitty game?

“The truth is, everybody doesn’t have to like what you do for you to be successful with it,” Keke Palmer recently tweeted. “It really doesn’t matter who hates it lol, it matters who likes it. There is an audience for anything so please, keep doing your thing.”  I’d like to believe she was referring to the cultural phenomenon that was and continues to be Nicole Kidman’s AMC ad, a rare moment of branding-meets-zeitgeist with enough cultural resonance that when AMC began showing a shortened version before movies, a version that cut out the famous “heartbreak feels good in a place like this” line, crowds booed and a Change.