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Joined February 2021
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Just a note here that I continue to write essays on all manner of topics on my own website. Link in bio.
I'm pretty sure this was the impression moviegoers had of Rob Roy and Braveheart (two historical epics set in Scotland, wherein the protagonists' wives are assaulted by dastardly Englishmen), even though they aren't ultimately all that similar.
I saw a lot of this in the 1990s and 2000s with what are called "twin films" - which are two studios competing to release very similar movies to capture audiences they feared their competitors would win by being either first to market or alone in the market.
1993/94 - TOMBSTONE versus WYATT EARP.
1997 - DANTE'S PEAK versus VOLCANO
1998 - ANTZ versus A BUG'S LIFE.
2000 - MISSION TO MARS versus RED PLANET
2003 - FINDING NEMO versus SHARK TALE.
2005/06 - CAPOTE versus INFAMOUS.
2006 - THE ILLUSIONIST versus THE PRESTIGE.
2009 - PAUL BLART: MALL COP versus OBSERVE AND REPORT.
We also see it today in Warner Brothers trying to copy the success of the interconnected MCU by building - so far unfruitfully - a similar DC film universe.
Ideally it should probably happen kind of like the last scene in The Sopranos — let them think they're just sitting down for a meal in a diner or something before everything cuts to black.
The rise of Mean Girls politics is one of the weirder recent developments, and I suspect its actual significance is still underappreciated
real talk @BradMBradford, you ran a hell of a race. it’s prob hard to not have really dark thoughts but please know you are alone and you should give into them
This is like finding out that Robert Smith is happily married to his high-school sweetheart
hearing for the first time that novelist Patrick O'Brian (of _Master & Commander_ fame) invented much of his own biography,
didn't know how to sail & had no practical experience doing it, wasn't Anglo-Irish gentry but rather English working class, barely educated, concealed his early marriage...
Everything he learned about sailing & the 19th c was from obsessive research & reading books.
O'Brian comes out to be a far more puzzling, eccentric, twisted, anachronistic figure who lived in isolation on a small hobby farm in France, deeply secretive, insecure, brooding, exiled, aloof, yet TOTALLY COMMITTED TO THE BIT.
I like him even more now (am currently reading Master & Commander)
Wouldn't it have been more important during the Cold War, when "international solidarity" could be leveraged by a global superpower with both ideological and material interests at stake?
Following BC's epochal (really) snap election, Toronto's own election closes this evening. One thing I've tried to argue is that the burden of proof in these events should generally be on the incumbent, and Mayor Chow's campaign hasn't remotely met it.
thehub.ca/2026/10/06/mayor-o…
Thread.
One thing I'd add is that while these kinds of identities are not new, the rise of (democratic) popular sovereignty endowed them with new significance—viz. the idea that these "national" cultures should be congruent with their political structures.
i promised a tweet-thread on my thoughts on ethnostate to @GreeneMan6 yesterday but i got busy with other things (eg writing up a piece on human evolutionary origins that i'm behind on submitting and dinner with friends from out of town). so here it goes....
This is nothing — once my parents turn 80, I'm gonna get my dad to publicly renounce Springsteen
Benjamin Moser, author of Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, told Rashid Khalidi that his 80-year-old mother, who had all but called him a Hamas member, apologized after reading his book: “I’m ashamed I ever said I was a Zionist.”
His book traces Jewish opposition to Zionism over the past century and challenges their exclusion in discussions over Palestine. “No, you don’t get to set the rules anymore. We’re setting the rules now,” Moser said.
Khalidi added that he had never seen so many people change their views so rapidly, noting that major publishers are now embracing books on Palestine that would have been virtually unpublishable just three or four years ago.
You guys need to stop pulling out the Salieri Overcome With Emotion clip for every half-clever turn of phrase on here
This is admittedly one of my pet themes, but I would refine this point: the origin of virtually all societies tends to be a bloody business. It's not unique to modern states, but it creates particular political tensions because of the rights-based claims of most nation-states.
Yep, the birth of many or even most modern nation-states was bloody and traumatic, based on *narrowing* the answer to the question, "Who belongs?"
As a Catholic, I don't fetishize the nation-state form. But neither can one be so naive to imagine that nation-states will dismantle themselves anytime soon. Or blind to the fact that many democratic nation-states today are both ethnic-majoritarian and non-racist.
With Toronto's municipal elections coming to a head tomorrow, I wrote about what I take to the central question: why can't Olivia Chow's supporters make a positive case for her mayoralty?
thestar.com/opinion/contribu…