When Disney bought Star Wars it was clear that they meant to make Star Wars another Marvel-like mega-franchise, producing rather than a new hit every two or three years, two or three billion-dollar hits a year. All of this fell apart pretty quickly — by the third movie, in fact…

Black Panther 2 took in some $18 million in its fourth weekend, bringing its gross during the first twenty-four days of its North American run to $394 million. But how much higher will it go? Once more the original Black Panther can seem a good first point of comparison. That…

Hollywood’s release schedule continues to normalize. The summer release schedule was thinner than usual (a mere four top-grade would-be action-adventure blockbusters), with the last released in July and the next three months, again, on the light side by the standards of 2019 and before. But from late October forward the…

Not long ago I wrote about how film critics have become much more prone to give good reviews of films this past decade or so — in spite of the fact that no one (well, not anyone sane) seems to think film has actually got better (and many regarding the…

Between the late 1990s and the mid-2010s there would seem to have been an extraordinary boom in Young Adult (YA) fiction. Hence phenomena like Harry Potter, hence Twilight, hence The Hunger Games. At its climax in the early-to-mid ’10s, when College Humor brought us its famous Young Adult Plan for…

In considering the prospect of a post-work society one important question is “Given rising productivity, can we imagine a world in which a critical mass of human beings will feel they have enough things, sufficiently so that striving after the gain of more things will cease to be central to…

Recently considering the “rearmament” of Germany and Japan I argued that the two countries’ governments’ intentions of elevating their military spending might end up coming to little because of, apart from the limited nature of the announced plans (topping out at 2 percent of GDP, versus, for example, the 4…

I suppose that, certainly within the lifetimes of those living on this planet today, there has not been a period when people did not feel that modern life was precarious. Still, while modern war; viral epidemic; economic calamity; ecological catastrophe; are not novel concerns it has been rare that any…

When we talk about a post-work society we usually have in mind the problem of adults — how they will get money to live, and what they will do with their time. We never “think of the children.” By this I mean that we rarely give much consideration to the…