Tag
Class
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Price-Tag TV and the Transformation of Television Prestige
Apple’s “Price-Tag TV,” to propose a new entrant to the TV name game, is expensive programming about folks who like expensive things, made for viewers who either can’t see or don’t care about the difference between good and expensive.
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Love, Factionally
Since 2003, Continuum Books and Bloomsbury have been publishing a series of short monographs on pop albums under the increasingly anachronistic title “33⅓.” At their best, the 33⅓ books, mostly written by professional music critics and cultural-studies academics, are models of passionate, cerebral fandom. (A rough analogue would be the British Film Institute’s long-running BFI…
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Forgotten Woman
When we think of the ’30s film musical, we tend to picture Fred and Ginger gliding through the polished worlds of Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), and Shall We Dance (1937). Earlier in the decade, however, Warner Brothers produced a spate of song and dance films that were less willing to deny Depression…
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“We” Includes Me
In my world, which is populated by people obsessed with race, statistics about black men and boys are ubiquitous. Study after study lays out how few graduate from high school, how many wind up in prison, how few are employed, how many are killed by the police. I can find a number for nearly any…
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Working Girls
“A friendship between college girls is grander and more dramatic than any romance,” writes Hannah Horvath (played by show creator Lena Dunham) in the final episode of the second season of the HBO series Girls. This literary gem is the first, and only, sentence of an ebook for which Hannah has already received and spent…
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Ordinary People
Edwidge Danticat has a way of making small lives tell big stories. Gently and quietly, she writes the outrageous and compels us, her readers, to become intimate with tragedies that are at once particular and global. From her very first novel, the 1994 best seller Breath, Eyes, Memory, which made her something of a literary…
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In Praise of MA (Middle-Aged) Fiction
Reading what we might call MA (Middle-Aged) fiction, it’s easy to see how YA (Young Adult) fiction has become so popular among not-so-young adults. In the face of characters burdened with troublesome children, aging parents, failures of love and marriage, professional frustration (or even more frustrating professional success), depression, cancer, and obesity, who wouldn’t want…
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Hari Kunzru on Networks, the Novel, and the Politics of the Author
Hari Kunzru is a British-born writer who lives and works in New York. He is the author of four novels as well as numerous articles in publications including Wired, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Times of India, and the New Statesman. His first novel, The Impressionist (2002), which won the Betty Trask Prize,…
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Class Diaries: Reflections on Michael Apted’s Up Series
The British documentary film Seven Up!, broadcast for the first time in 1964, was originally intended to be a single, stand-alone program. Made by Granada Television for the current affairs program World in Action, it focused on 14 seven-year-old children from a variety of backgrounds across England. According to Paul Almond, the director of the…
