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Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)
With a complete lack of both sentimentality and judgment, this touching, deeply moving drama pursues the hard-edged truths about the physical and emotional dispersion of the modern American family and...
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Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010)
At his core, in his soul, Scorsese is a genre filmmaker, and from that perspective, Shutter Island is the perfect Scorsese vehicle, as it allows him to take a well-worn genre (the psychological...
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The Crazies (Breck Eisner, 2010)
Eisner maintains the underlying themes—distrust of those around us, the thin line between sanity and insanity, the complementary terrors of organized versus hysterical violence—of Romero’s original...
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Lola Montès (Max Ophuls, 1955)
This lavish CinemaScope epic is a fitting testament to the enormity of Ophuls’ vision even though it was a commercial and critical disaster that was unceremoniously butchered by its producers to try to...
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Knowledge, Retrieval, and My Unshakeable Love of the Printed Page
Vannevar Buch’s 1945 essay “As We May Think” is amazing in its forward-thinking approach to the nature of content management–essentially how we store information, retrieve it, make use of it, and...
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You Gotta Respect the Man Who Invented the Mouse
I’ll be honest–I had no end of difficult in making my way through Douglas Engelbart‘s “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” This is not to say that the essay, which is actually a...
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Of Anti-Westerns and Fish Bowls
This isn’t related to probably anything we will discuss in class regarding Computer Lib / Dream Machines, but in my routine background research on Theodor H. Nelson I discovered that he is the son of...
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Understanding McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan broke into the world of communication theory in 1964 with his equally heralded and deplored third book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In a single brilliant, maddening...
View ArticleWhat We Talk About When We Talk About …
Near the beginning of Sherry Turkel’s chapter “Video Games and Computer Holding Power,” she makes a curious statement that resonates with many of my own experiences regarding the media. Writing about...
View ArticleUnschooling, Deschooling, Reschooling
Ivan Illich’s call to deschool society is certainly a challenging one, and even if I have a hard time imagining many of his propositions coming to fruition given the stacked deck against which such...
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