Category: Media

• Long live the limited podcast series

  My recent experience with the Band of Brothers podcast made me realized I’m very much a fan of the modern trend of “official” companion podcasts released alongside limited series by the show’s creators—Watchmen and Station Eleven being two recent examples I enjoyed and appreciated. These are slightly different beasts from the popular post hoc recap […]

  March 24, 2022

  Media, Television

• Courage & Camaraderie in ‘Band of Brothers’

  Band of Brothers, the 2001 Tom Hanks-produced HBO miniseries that dramatized the history of Easy Company paratroopers throughout World War II, was a formative viewing experience for me, especially on the heels of Saving Private Ryan. That was as a youngster interested in history and World War II, and as the grandson of a veteran […]

  March 17, 2022

  Media, Review, Television

• Under the bookfluence

  Call me Influencer. (just kidding, please don’t) I don’t use TikTok but I’ve started making Instagram Reels for work and have grown to appreciate the format, however much of a time-suck it can be. There’s lots of creative, funny, and relatable ones out there if you can navigate the ever-changing algorithm. I figured the easiest […]

  February 10, 2022

  Media

• Siskel & Ebert, Mark Driscoll, and the Power of Popularity

  Among the podcasts in my regular rotation, there are two others I’m listening to that are both limited series, airing concurrently, and happen to share a surprising thematic overlap. One is Gene and Roger, an eight-part Spotify-exclusive series from The Ringer that serves as an oral history of Gene Siskel, Roger Ebert, and their movie […]

  August 10, 2021

  Film, Media, Religion

• Podcasts of the moment

  I won’t do this quite as often as Media of the Moment, but I think it’s interesting to check in every once in a while with my podcast lineup and habits, since they do change over time for various reasons. What hasn’t changed since my last dispatch: I listen to too many podcasts, and/but I’m […]

  August 7, 2021

  Media

• My favorite podcasts right now

  After examining my current newsletter situation, I thought it would be a good time to look at the podcasts I’m into right now. I say “right now” because since my September purging, I’m constantly looking for reasons not to follow a podcast. (For the record: I use Apple Podcasts, and I never increase the audio […]

  January 31, 2019

  Media

• My favorite newsletters (what are yours?)

  Newsletters seem to be A Thing these days. To me they are a strange hybrid of public and private discourse, like a corner booth at a restaurant. You can subscribe and interact with the writer privately, as if you’re in the booth together. Or you can just eavesdrop from the next booth, so to speak, […]

  January 30, 2019

  Media

• They podcast me back in

  “If your mind is forever filled with the voices of others, how do you know what you think about anything? Pulling attention apart is pulling a mind apart.” After watching this video by CGP Grey about attention (h/t C.J. Chilvers), I deleted over half of my podcast subscriptions. I’ve culled the list before, but like […]

  September 21, 2018

  Media

• Ursula Le Guin on the ‘media golem’

  A pox upon me for never having read Ursula Le Guin before she died last week. I’ll get right on that, as her reputation is high among many different kinds of readers. Before diving into her novels, though, I encountered her blog (an 88 year old blogging!) on which last year she posted “Constructing the Golem”, pretty […]

  January 31, 2018

  America, Media, Politics, Technology

• Cmd + Ctrl: towards smarter searching and dumber devices

  Let me echo Austin Kleon’s ode to the search box: Maybe it’s not so much the command prompt I’m nostalgic for, but the days when the computer wouldn’t do anything without me — I had to explicitly tell the computer what I wanted to do, and if I didn’t tell it, it would just sit […]

  December 30, 2017

  Design, Media, Technology