Roger Ailes made his public debut in the early pages of Joe McGinniss’ landmark book The Selling of the President 1968, a brilliant first-hand study of how filmmaking and advertising techniques permanently altered the political landscape during Nixon’s landslide election that year. McGinniss argues that the postwar, television-era thinking of Marshall McLuhan and other pioneers […]
Writing
Sometimes I end up watching two movies back-to-back that are not just different, but are polar opposites—that balance each other in such a perfectly bizarre yin/yang juxtaposition that the randomized double-feature shocks me with its illumination and depth, as if some broad truth that runs across the spectrum of art and life has been unexpectedly […]
What’s absolutely infuriating me right now, more than the daily psychic blows of the Trump era, is the way that my own (and others’) expectation that Hillary would win the election is being turned into a blunt-force rhetorical weapon against us—against myself personally and others who think like I do, as recounted everywhere, daily—not just […]