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The Emperor Doesn’t Need Clothes—You Do
The Emperor has no clothes because the Emperor has no shame. Only his subjects must cover themselves. The Emperor, like God, “giveth and taketh away.” What he giveth and taketh away is your importance. The Emperor promises and threatens. He promises to retract his threat and threatens to retract his promise. The Emperor pretends to…
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The Electromagnetically Odd Cashier: An Area Consumer Experience
It was New Year’s Eve. I had a 20%-off- wine coupon that was set to expire at midnight. I went to the grocery store that issued the coupon and pulled a case of wine—4 bottles each of Cab Franc, Saint-Émilion and Chianti—and headed for the checkout. The only available cashier was a guy I usually…
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Bored, Lonely and Safe
We’ve finally taken notice of how safe and boring things are. How our experience of the world has become predominantly digital and life strangely devoid of ground-breaking music, literature and art. How culture is cannibalizing itself, rehashing breakthroughs of the past. How the band-less rockers, broke poets, unwashed artists and geographic trustafarians are no longer…
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Art and Politics, Apples and Oranges
The other day I met up with an old friend in downtown LA and visited the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). The exhibition was called “Monuments” and featured a dozen or so statues that had once memorialized the Confederacy. Some had been toppled and defaced during the George Floyd protests. Others had been rearranged. One…
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Books Will Abide, Though Readers May Not
James Marriott’s essay on the “dawn of the post-literate society” supports what to me has been evident for over a decade: in the wake of the smartphone, book readership has diminished and so has the cognitive discipline of the human species. Marriott aptly begins his essay with the rise of the book in the eighteenth…
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The Bad News Is the Good News
I grab the remote and turn on the PBS Newshour. Because I need to catch up on the latest failures of civilization. The scandals, disasters, crimes, wars, abuses of power, class conflict and sundry forms of morbidity, mortality and stupidity afflicting people worldwide. I’m hardwired to overcome adversity, avoid pain, organize chaos and secure the tribe’s…