A lot of people coming to the professional literature of the Great War from popular histories like G.J. Meyer’s A World Undone are often surprised to discover that the narrative of “lions led by donkeys,” in which incompetent traditionalist generals led valiant men to pointless deaths against German machine guns…
The Rising of the Shield Hero was one of the big hits of last couple of years, and it’s not hard to see why. It has well-drawn sympathetic characters and a story that is a marked departure from the cliches of its genre. …
By the end of Saturday, February 13, 2021, Donald Trump had once again made history: he had become the first President of the United States to be impeached twice, and the first to be tried for impeachment after leaving office and found not guilty. Many commentators in the media treated…
It’s no secret that Doctor Who has gone downhill quite a lot in the last couple of seasons. So, as a thought experiment, I decided to figure out how, in the extremely unlikely hypothetical event (particularly since I don’t work in television) that I was appointed as the new showrunner…
The problem with the Timeless Child overarching plot of season 12 of Doctor Who was far simpler than many believed. It wasn’t too complex, nor did it fail because it tried to be too progressive — it all just came down to bad, and even terrible, storytelling.
In its conception…
(Warning: Contains spoilers.)
At the end of the first episode, it really looked like HBO’s Watchmen had tried to tackle the problem of modern racism and whiffed it.
In fact they hadn’t whiffed anything — by the end of the season, HBO’s Watchmen had become a compelling and nuanced examination…
WARNING: Contains spoilers for Watchmen
Does Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan have free will?
It’s a question that both the graphic novel and HBO’s sequel series — which just finished a run as one of the most compelling shows on television — lend themselves. Jon Osterman, aka Doctor Manhattan, is a blue-skinned…
One of the most notable thing about the new Ghostbusters: Afterlife trailer is what isn’t there: a backlash.
The trailer sets itself up as a sequel to the original Ghostbusters, with most of the action revolving around a little girl (the granddaughter of Harold Ramis’ character Egon Spengler) becoming a…
In last night’s stunning segment about HBO’s legal victory over coal magnate Bob Murray that included a musical number with line dancers, Last Week Tonight host John Oliver made a strong case for implementing anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) legislation in every corner of the United States.
Unfortunately, he…
The Nazi Titanic is kind of amazing.
For the course I teach this term, I delivered a lecture on the sinking of the RMS Titanic, using a modern disaster analysis framework to demonstrate how the pieces of a catastrophic accident fit together. As a happy side-effect, my wife and I…
