Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

Unless they die before the age of thirty-three, nobody’s entire career matters, and we all unconsciously understand this. If you’re trapped in a Beatles-Stones debate,

Here’s what I mean by that: I once read a movie review by Roger Ebert for the film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Early in the review, Ebert makes a tangential point about whether or not film characters are theoretically “aware” of other films and other movie characters. Ebert only touches on this issue casually, but it’s probably the most interes

I tend to consider myself an amateur Real World scholar. I say “amateur” because I’ve done no actual university study on this subject, but I still say “scholar” because I’ve stopped watching the show as entertainment. At this point, I only watch it in hopes of unlocking the questions that have haunted man since the dawn of civilization. I’ve seen e

approach will become so central to American life that I’ll need a singular persona just to make conversation with whatever media-saturated robot I end up marrying. Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable.

Billy Joel is also not cool in the kitschy, campy, “he’s so uncool he’s cool” sense, which also happens to be the most tired designation in popular culture. He has no intrinsic coolness, and he has no extrinsic coolness. If cool was a color, it would be black—and Billy Joel would be sort of burnt orange.

when people tell you that you should be on a reality program, they’re basically saying you’re crazy enough to amuse total strangers. I was always flattered by this suggestion, and I used to fantasize about being cast on The Real World, imagining that it would make me famous.

could never love anyone else, and I was wrong every time. Those old love letters remind me of my emotional failure and my accidental lies, just as “Just the Way You Are” undoubtedly reminds Joel of his.

Meat Loaf might have been sincere, but he was just a fat goofball who was cool in spite of himself. But Bruce was trying to save you. He appealed to the kind of desperate intellectual who halfway believed that—when not recording or touring—Springsteen actually went back to New Jersey to work at a car wash. Before he even utters his lyrics, people a

What seemed so new about Seinfeld was that it didn’t need a story to have a plot: Nothing was still something. The Sims forces that aesthetic even further: Nothing is everything.