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Odenkirk, who appeared in many of the 11-minute Tom Goes to the Mayor episodes that aired on Adult Swim, puts Heidecker in the same category as his Mr. Showcollaborator David Cross, someone with “a certain kind of natural ease at being funny, that I do not think I have, and most people don’t have.” The even rarer thing that Odenkirk sees in Heideck... See more

Tim’s Time

I have a good friend who’s one of the seven or eight main editors of a major American newspaper, and he happens to be very much opposed to U.S. policies towards Central America, and towards the arms race, as well as several other things. He tries to craft editorials which will just barely sneak through under the ideological barrier, but will sort o

Peter Mitchell • Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky

She was tempted to flip them down and see if they could face-rec this Larry and if so find out who his editor was—or more likely what edit stream he subscribed to and what particular flavor of post-reality it was pumping into his mind.

Neal Stephenson • Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: A Novel

of outlandish facts and quotes—he is a tenacious reporter—and a style that barely suppresses his own amusement. It works particularly well on the buccaneers who continue to try the patience of the citizenry, as proved by his profile in The New Yorker of the developer Donald Trump. Noting that Trump “had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury,

William Zinsser • On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction

Miller’s 1986 “Deride and Conquer,” far and away the best essay ever published about network advertising, details vividly an example of how TV’s contemporary kind of appeal to the lone viewer works.

David Foster Wallace • A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

Cheap, blatant, and readily accessible, American pop culture was made for the world’s first leisured masses. It’s almost designed to offend snobs, which is why cultural anti-Americanism tends to take root in the traditional upper ranks of societies. No working-class Englishman ever despised Americans as much as Graham Greene and John le Carré, both

George Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

artistic elevation of television.

Chuck Klosterman • But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past

These incidents of “political correctness,” amplified by right-wing media, whipped up hatred of elites out in Real America. The culture wars raged on, as bloody-minded and durable as the Thirty Years’ War, a full-employment program for pundits of every type. Some worried about a generation of ultra-sensitive children coddled by ultra-indulgent adul

George Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

"Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations. The irony here is that this is wha