[This is the next installment in my ongoing series of reviews of Black Mirror. These posts DO include spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know!] Ever since the first season of Black Mirror was released in 2011, I have been utterly confounded by my friends’ and colleagues’ affection for its second episode, “15 Million Merits.” Reasonable people disagree about…
Read More[This is the next installment in my ongoing series of reviews of Black Mirror. These posts DO include spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know!] [Note from Dr. J: What follows is a guest post from Shannon M. Mussett, a brilliant philosopher and dear friend with whom I frequently disagree about almost all things technological. When I posted my…
Read MoreIn my experience, of the people who have actually watched Black Mirror, there are two types: those who absolutely LOVE it, and those who never got past the pig episode. To be fair to the second group, “the pig episode” (aka, “The National Anthem”) is the very first episode of the very first season and it packs…
Read More[NOTE: This is the second in a series of reviews of Black Mirror. These posts DO include spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know!] The second episode of Season 3 (“Playtest”) is what I imagine many people who have heard about Black Mirror but never actually watched the series would expect the show to be like. “Playtest”…
Read More[NOTE: This is the first in a series of reviews of Black Mirror. These posts DO include spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know!] All of the episodes of Charlie Brooker‘s brilliant sci-fi series Black Mirror take place in a near-distant future, but in the first installment of the third season (“Nosedive”) that future is far…
Read MoreTwitter has changed a lot over the last few years, but until recently there was one inviolable rule to which all users were obliged: tweets must be limited to 140 characters or less. Because a computer “character” is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme– letter, number, punctuation mark, or whitespace– the…
Read MoreThere are so many things about Netflix’s original comedy series Grace and Frankie (now in its second season) to recommend it, not least of which is its pitch-perfect gallows humor. Orbiting around the decidedly 21st century lives of four septuagenarians– the eponymous Grace (Jane Fonda) and Frankie (Lily Tomlin) and their now ex-husbands, Saul (Sam Waterston)…
Read MoreI can’t quite remember exactly when email became such a nuisance in my life, but it must have been a long time ago now since I can barely remember it not being a nuisance anymore. I think I got my first (AOL) email address in 1994. Then, the familiar modem-screeching and you’ve got mail! alert were the…
Read MoreAs a general rule, I’m not a fan of the contemporary obsession with gerunding (#seewhatIdidthere), i.e., turning words that were perfectly fine being nouns, perfectly fine accepting the assistance of helping verbs to make sense of some phenomenon, into stand-alone verbs themselves. My allergy to this practice is, for the most part, a consequence of countless, maddening…
Read MoreIt’s Saturday, the hardest day of the week to find motivation to get things done. Luckily for me, I have almost unrestricted access to all the music ever written (thanks, Google Play!), a stereo with a volume dial that goes all the way up to 10 (thanks, technology!), and neighbors who don’t mind my loudness because…
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