Man did I dislike this book. Based on the jacket and the title I was expecting a treatise on the nature of content as driven by the state of each method of delivery – TV in the era of even faster communication. I wanted an actual exploration of the one and only thing most of us know about Marshall McLuhan – the medium is the message now that media has changed so much – but instead I got a bunch of inside baseball from someone […]
Midterm election are Tuesday, November 6th
You’ve probably forgotten about Michael Wolff’s Trump expose Fire and Fury as well as the explosive media surge its release caused in January because 10 months in the Trump White House is the equivalent to 10 years in anyone else’s. Personally I was reminded of Fire and Fury by a friend who was reading it on the beach this past August so when I was looking for my next read (besides the dozen or so books currently unread on my bookshelf) I sought out this already outdated publication. How […]
Boss Baby
For a long while I’ve thought Donald Trump was the stupidest person ever to be elected President of the United States, but Michael Wolff’s book opened my eyes: now I think he’s one of the stupidest people alive. And not just stupid! Willful, petty, cruel, belligerent, incurious, capricious, infantile, and dogmatic, for starters, a thesaurusful of poisonous adjectives: basically every quality you wouldn’t want in the lowest-level employee, let alone the most powerful person on Earth. “Fire and Fury” isn’t straight reportage: it often has […]
Not the president we want, but possibly the president we deserve
In all the madness of 2016, I forgot that so much of the talk in the first month was about how deeply Trump didn’t want to be in the White House. That the campaign was all a ruse to create a new media organization run by Roger Ailes and Steve Bannon, with Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and Satan (citation needed) at the helm. That view is reaffirmed, here, and gives me flashbacks to how terrible a prospect that would’ve been. Look, Donald Trump looked like […]