Image by Lynn Gilbert, via Wikimedia Commons

“The times we live in are indeed alarming. It is a time of the most appalling escalation of violence — violence to the environment, both ‘nature’ and ‘culture’; violence to all living beings.” But “it is also a time of a vertiginous drop in cultural standards, of virulent anti-intellectualism, and of triumphant mediocrity.” You may, at this point, already find yourself in agreement with these words. But they’re the words of Susan Sontag, now seventeen years dead, and as such can’t actually be describing our present moment. In fact she spoke them in, and about, 1983, during her first commencement address at Wellesley College.

Characteristically unsparing, Sontag extended her charge of mediocrity even to “the educational system that you have just passed through, or has passed you through.” In her view, “trivializing standards, using as their justification the ideal of democracy, have made the very idea of a serious humanist education virtually unintelligible to most people.” If it is to happen at all, resistance […]

Are you one of the hundreds of thousands who’ve gotten themselves hooked on Wordle, the free online game that gives players six chances to guess a five-letter word of the day?

Its popularity has spawned a host of imitators, including Quordle, Crosswordle, Absurdle and Lewdle, which has carved itself a niche in the vulgar and profane.

Even the National Gallery of Art is getting in on the action with Artle, wherein players get four attempts to correctly identify an artist du jour by examining four of their pieces, drawn from its vast collection of paintings, photographs, sculptures and other works.

The Gallery provides a bit of an assist a few letters into every guess, especially helpful to those taking wild shots in the dark.

Before you commit to Georgia O’Keefe, you may want to consider some 80 other George and Georges variants who pop up as you type, including  Georges Braque, George Grosz, Georgine E. […]

If you follow music news, or just scan entertainment headlines, you might have noticed that a few weeks after his death, beloved Foo Fighters’ drummer Taylor Hawkins’ final days became a controversial subject. According to a Rolling Stone article quoting Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, Hawkins was exhausted by the Foo Fighters’ touring schedule. He needed a break, and he didn’t get one. Both drummers have issued statements disavowing the article. Meanwhile, as GQ noted, a Rolling Stone “Instagram post highlighting the article is being slammed by critical fans in the comments.”

Arguing over hearsay about a musician’s state of mind before his death seems like a poor way to remember him soon after he’s gone. If you’d rather steer clear of this scene, the original Rolling Stone piece is still worth checking out for its introduction: a feelgood story from three days before Hawkins, 50, was found in his Bogotá hotel room.

After Foo Fighters canceled a headlining concert in Asunción, the capital city of Paraguay, […]

In light of the recent release of Matt Reeves’ film The Batman, we consider the strange alternation of darkness and camp that is Batman. Is he even a super hero? What’s with his rogues’ gallery? What’s with DC’s anti-world-building?

Your Pretty Much Pop host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by philosophy prof/NY Times entertainment writer Lawrence Ware, improv comedian/educator Anthony LeBlanc, and Marketing Over Coffee host John J. Wall, all of whom are deeply immersed in the comics, and we touch on other recent shows in the Batman universe.

Some relevant articles include:

• “Batman Actors Ranked from Worst to Best” from Den of Geek
• “All the Batman Movies, Ranked” by Eliana Docterman
• “The Best Order to Watch All the Batman Movies” in by Austen Goslin
• “The Top 27 Best Batman Comics and Graphic Novels” from IGN
• “5 Things ‘The […]

By most measures, Japan boasts the highest life expectancy in the world. But that ranking, of course, doesn’t mean that every Japanese person sees old age. Though the country’s rate of violent crime is low enough to be the envy of most of the world, its suicide rate isn’t, and it says even more that the Japanese language has a word that refers specifically to death by overwork. I first encountered it nearly thirty years ago in a Dilbert comic strip. “In Japan, employees occasionally work themselves to death. It’s called karōshi,” says Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss. “I don’t want that to happen to anybody in my department. The trick is to take a break as soon as you see a bright light and hear dead relatives beckon.”

You can see the phenomenon of karōshi examined more seriously in the short Nowness video at the top of the post. In it, a series of Japanese salarymen (a Japanese English term now well-known around the world) speak to the exhausting and unceasing rigors of their everyday work schedules — and, in some […]