“If the way to do good to my country were to render myself popular, I could easily do it. But extravagant popularity is not the road to public advantage.”
— John Adams
John Adams is the most underrated Founding Father.
He was also the realest.
Category: Art
Categories
Favorite vs. Best
What is the best film of all time?
Most film scholars (and wanna-be film scholars) proclaim that it’s Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’s 1941 masterpiece that inarguably changed filmmaking forever. Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather, and Gone with the Wind are often in the conversation as well.
Excluding The Godfather, how many times have you heard someone mention one of those films as their absolute favorite? How many are populating a casual filmgoer’s top five? How many Lawrence of Arabia conversations have you experienced in your life?
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Margaret Mead
For more than three years, the Snyder Cut was part-myth and part-fantasy.
There’s a YouTube channel called the The Art of Improvement that does those funky illustrated videos to add a visual to written text.
Back in 2019, they asked if they could do the same for my essay “Get the Most Out of Your Books – Be an Active Reader.” I, of course, enthusiastically said yes! It’s a piece of which I’m quite proud, so to have someone not only appreciate it, but build on it in this way is very cool.
“The relationship of the individual to the book is very much like a love affair.”
Anyone that has studied or researched the finer points of books, particularly rare books, knows that it is a more complicated and layered world than most would imagine.
How do you identify a first edition? What makes a book rare? What is an “antiquarian” book? What makes a book valuable? And who are these people that dedicate their lives to answering such questions?
We’re a nation of clutter. We’re a society of packrats. We love our stuff.
At some point, Wu-Tang Clan became known more as an entity – a thing – than simply music.
The Passion of Christopher Pierznik 