The Comstock Law, passed in the United States in 1873, was part of an ongoing – to this day! – campaign to legislate public morality in the United States. The Comstock Law was initially meant to stop the trade in “obscene literature” and “immoral articles,” particularly through the mail. It was named after Anthony Comstock, […]
King Henry VIII was the first Monarch to take legal action to control the press in pre-Enlightenment England. His methods were simple enough: he required all printers to pay licensing fees in order to be allowed to print anything. This concept became known as ‘prior restraint’: preventing the distribution of controversial materials before they are even […]
Mad Men is a perfect example of a serialized historical melodrama that permits viewers to re-evaluate the past. The show was created by Matthew Weiner, a co-writer and producer of The Sopranos, in 1999. Mad Men arguably tells us less about the 1960s than it does about the current desire for collective nostalgia for the […]
Effective celebrity activists use their fame and fortune to bring attention to important issues and to give credibility to legitimate representatives of social movements. Internationally-known celebrities can help expose and highlight problems which would normally get little or no news coverage without their involvement. But does celebrity involvement really make any difference in what people […]
(Caution: italics ahead!): From the school playground to the presidential election, the art of a truly fine insult is a universally accepted cultural tradition with a long, inglorious history. The most effective insults use irony, metaphor and personification tropes – along with humor – as a way to attack their opponents’ character, and to frame […]
Recent studies confirm that a growing number of college students are losing empathy for their fellow human beings. In a world that clearly needs more compassion, this is a shocking trend. Studies conducted between 1979 and 2009 found that college students have less empathy toward their peers than previous generations. The findings come from the study, Changes […]
My first encounter with social media was probably listening to the car radio as a child while my parents drove around Los Angeles in the mid-1960s. These are some of my earliest memories. A few of the songs I can recall hearing during this time include A Hard Day’s Night by The Beatles, Stop In the […]
The second event which influenced my sense of identity was more technology-driven, and it came much later in my life. The transition from vinyl albums to compact discs was a difficult one for me, and it was at this time when I first realized that for better or worse, change was inevitable; there was no […]
The final innovation which profoundly affected my personal sense of identity was the advent of the Internet. By the time my wife and I broke down and bought our first PC in the early 90s, the World Wide Web was already a full-blown global phenomenon. The Internet opened up entirely new vistas of research and […]
“Congratulations, America! We spent 40 million dollars surveying Bud Light® drinkers all over the country and the results from two years of consumer focus groups have shown that for some reason the words ‘mix’ and ‘tail’ scored highly with our target audience: people with an IQ below 80 and the tastes and desires of the average 10-year old child. Adding […]
