So now you had a nationwide craze over a genre of music that barely existed (having just broken off from Motown and R&B), based on a piece of long-form journalism that was entirely fictional and a movie made by people with no real connections to the original disco scene.
While people sometimes make bad decisions because they feel bad about themselves, the truth is that people make bad decisions for all sorts of reasons, including because they feel excessively good about themselves.
If anyone could engage in brainwashing, it’s the God of the universe, and he doesn’t. Which probably tells you . . . something.
Stories that pretend horrifying, disturbing, and immoral things simply don’t exist tend to ring hollow.
Nobody really had the answers to these questions about the internet, but it was clear there was a lot of venture capital to be raised by pretending you did.
The reality is that the whims of the internet mob are, at best, only occasionally guided by moral clarity and a sense of true justice.
Kilroy graffiti was something of a liturgy: a ritual that reshaped hearts and minds into parallel forces striving toward the same goal.
By the late eighties, though, the American right had discovered political correctness, and—well—that crowd has never met a phrase it couldn’t turn into an insult.
Giant, poofy white hair—something those of us alive today all associate with grandmas—somehow, for nearly a dozen generations, became a symbol of male power and virility. How did this happen?
If quicksand is really so dull, though, how did it become such a popular trope in cinema? And how did it disappear just as quickly?
Wait! Conspiracies happen all the time! Why are people so down on conspiracy theories these days?
Of course, as overblown as much of the Y2K panic was, the it-was-all-a-big-hoax assessment wasn’t really accurate either.
The backlash against O’Reilly’s 2004 fabrication of “The War on Christmas” was as swift as his declaration of it to exist.
When you factor in the higher costs, the uncomfortable glasses, and the headaches, it was probably only a matter of time before the novelty wore off.
For anyone who didn’t live through the nineties, it’s difficult to explain how big a deal Beanie Babies were.
We’re not, it turns out, a civilization of rock gods and their devotees; we’re all connected, and we all depend on each other.
