This piece picks up where Part 1 of Peter Kaufman’s article left off yesterday… The epistemological nightmare we seem to be in, bombarded over our screens and speakers with so many moving-image messages per day, false and true, is at least in part due to the paralysis that we – scholars, journalists, and regulators, but […]

Charlie Chaplin came up in vaudeville, but it was silent film that made him the most famous man in the world. His mastery of that form primed him to feel a degree of skepticism about sound when it came along: in 1931, he called the silent picture “a universal means of expression,” whereas the talkies, […]

Image via Wikimedia Commons How did we get to the point where we’ve come to believe so many lies that 77 million Americans voted into the White House a criminal reality TV star from NBC, one groomed by a reality TV producer from CBS, who then appointed his Cabinet from Fox and X and World […]

Robots seem to have been much on the public mind back in the nineteen-thirties. Matt Novak at Paleofuture gives the example of a moment in 1932 when “the world was awash in newspaper stories about a robot that had done the unthinkable: a mechanical man had shot its inventor.” Despite being a typical example of […]