Excellent! Alias is back, with a reasonably strong start. The way they spun the “my name isn’t Michael Vaughn” thing from last semester wasn’t great, but the Prophet Five expansion of the Alias conspiracy universe seems like a better choice than what we saw in the third season, as it gets at backstory and helps [...]

MIT Media Lab: $100 Laptop

Nifty.

Chris, one of my favorite people, and an excellent interlocutor, recently emailed me asking about the present-centeredness of pragmatic theories of truth and the general problem of pinning down a solid definition of anything in the field of pragmatism. What follows is most of my response.

Pragmatism does not necessarily get along well with time. Especially, [...]

Saw the premiere of Commander in Chief; it wasn’t bad, and it covered an acceptable range of content for a first episode—basically just introducing the premise and establishing some relationships. But the show is not marked by strong ensemble acting—or by any especially powerful individual performances. Now, this may just be a function of the [...]

It just occurred to me tonight that Prison Break not only hasn’t taken a turn for the suck, it’s been steadily improving. They’ve made excellent use of the closed space, especially with the latest episode, in which walls are broken down and the usually contained violence of the prisoner populations is spreading. It’s also done [...]

I don’t think I’ve posted this previously, but I wouldn’t put it past me to forget such a thing at 6:00 AM at night (yes, that’s what I mean), so here’s a little user’s guide to some dirty sanskrit:

First off, let us clarify the threefold division of dirty sanskrit. First, there are terms that are [...]

I’m rather fond of this, and I figured I might as well bring it over where the posts are searchable.

Television and the past

Television is the most important artistic medium available to Americans today. I suggest this because I believe television is the only viable current successor to theater, and theater is—or, rather, was—something special. [...]