America’s dubious relationship with criminal defense, onscreen and off, has hit an interesting cultural speed bump with AMC’s new hit Better Call Saul, Vince Gilligan’s innovative prequel to—and, really, moral inversion of—his legendary crime saga Breaking Bad. The new show seems poised to explore the deep, uncomfortable relationship between our society and its attorneys in a new […]
Writing
As I mentioned in my Slate article about Leonard Nimoy, “The stacks of Star Trek paperbacks we all bought…had glorious oil paintings on their covers that depicted the Trek universe with baroque realism that far surpassed the cheap effects of the show.” Probably the best example from the early-to-mid-’Seventies (Star Trek’s “decade in the wilderness,” […]
“Peanuts” ran from October 1950 to January 2000—nearly 50 years (“The longest continuous story ever told by a single author”). In all that time, there is not a single strip to which anyone but Charles M. Schulz applied pencil or ink—the only cartoonist ever to earn a million dollars a month was also the only […]