"Creating People On Whom Nothing is Lost" - An educator and writer in Colorado offers insight and perspective on education, parenting, politics, pop culture, and contemporary American life.
Disclaimer - The views expressed on this site are my own and do not represent the views of my employer.
Years ago, when my children were still young, but old enough to watch and appreciate movies and television from my youth -- say films like Ferris Bueller's Day Off -- my wife and I introduced them to one of TV's longest-running and most endearing sitcoms, M*A*S*H.
And they loved it, just as we did and knew they would.
Truly one of the most significant and impactful television sitcoms in history, it streams on Hulu, and my wife and I still tune in and watch a couple episodes a week. The show is every bit as good as it ever was. For a show centered on a group of army doctors and nurses during the Korean War, the entertainment value is actually quite an interesting study. M*A*S*H is hilarious and poignant, heartwarming and heartbreaking, deeply thoughtful and wildly wacky, honestly insightful on the human condition and hilariously honest about everyday life.
This week, esteemed linguist and social commentator John McWhorter published a piece in the New York Times about 10 Old Television Series Every Kid Needs to Watch. Surprisingly, he didn't include MASH, though he conceded his actual list is much longer than ten, and his commentary led me to pondering just how it is that MASH still "Holds Up Fifty Years Later":
Few, if any, sitcoms that began more than half a century ago can claim to be as great as M*A*S*H was. Despite airing throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s, and centering on a war that began and ended approximately 70 years ago, in many ways, it feels like a timeless show. It was a TV version of the 1970 Robert Altman movie of the same name, which itself was an adaptation of a 1968 novel called MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors. That novel was based on the real-life experience of former military surgeon turned author Hiester Richard Hornberger Jr. during his time spent serving in the Korean War, and so both the movie and the TV show center on a group of doctors and other medical staff in South Korea, with M*A*S*H's cast shown to work at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in South Korea. As striking and effective as the movie can be, the TV show takes what works about the film and makes it even better. It's a little less abrasive and crude, given it was broadcast on television, and features new takes on the characters that make them more sympathetic and endearing. Beyond the character development, the TV version of M*A*S*H also shines for its expert balance of comedy and drama, its bold anti-war themes, and its willingness to experiment with the TV format. Not every aspect has aged perfectly, but the vast majority of the time, M*A*S*H.
"I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix, angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night ..."
It was 70 years ago on October 7, that Allen Ginsberg "Howl-ed" for the first time. The poetry reading at 6 Gallery is a monumental moment in American lit, and it was recreated fictionally in Kerouac's Dharma Bums. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Rexroth, Snyder and others met for a reading that in many ways kicked off the Beat Generation.
Beat scholar David Wills recently published a book about that historic evening, and to promote the book and the evening, he recounted the history in a cool piece for Quillette: "A Subterranean Celebration: How the 6 Gallery reading in San Francisco on 7 October 1955 changed the counterculture."
On 7 October 1955, Allen Ginsberg gave the first public reading of “Howl” at the 6 Gallery in San Francisco. It was only his second poetry reading and he had little reason to feel it would be successful, yet a year later he was a minor celebrity and two years after that he and his Beat Generation friends were a national obsession—loved, loathed, imitated, and parodied. That reading started the San Francisco Renaissance, too, and helped to turn the Bay Area into a literary centre. It would not be long before the Beats spawned the beatniks, who arguably became the hippies.
It can be tempting to look back at events of great historical importance and feel that they were somehow inevitable, and yet that is not true of the 6 Gallery reading. In fact, its success was wildly improbable. The poets on stage that night were mostly unknown and untested. They read difficult work that should have had very limited appeal. Nor was the gallery itself a venue one would associate with era-defining moments. And while the city held some appeal as a place for the visual arts, it did not have a great literary history.
The 6 Gallery opened in October 1954 and was named for the fact that it had six founders: five young painter friends from near Los Angeles who had teamed up with one of their teachers at the California School of Fine Arts: a poet called Jack Spicer. In their final year of studies, they decided they wanted a place to display their work and Spicer encouraged them, suggesting that they expand the gallery’s function to include not just visual art but poetry. This was not as revolutionary as it perhaps sounds. Prior to the 6 Gallery, the building at 3119 Fillmore had been home to King Ubu, which was also an art gallery that one artist recalled was “primarily devoted to poetry reading.”
David Wills is a fascinating individual and a true scholar of the Beat Generation. His book about the night will undoubtedly enlighten and entertain even the most knowledgeable and passionate of Beat fans.
I've been hearing that since at least the early 90s when I was living the twenty-something expat life, teaching English in Southeast Asia. The late '80s had definitely put the spotlight on the economies of the East, with Japan bursting ahead technologically and buying up huge amounts of American real estate. Granted, that run became stagnant just as the Sleeping Giant began to wake.
Washington Post writer Fareed Zakaria has always had his finger on the pulse of emerging political and economic issues, and he made a statement with his book The Post-American World, which wasn't as much about the waning of the United States as it was "the rise of the rest."
Xi is building the future while Trump pushes tariffs and fights the woke wars.
For about a decade, the United States has been comforted by the notion that China had lost its way. After 35 years of astonishing growth, Beijing stumbled internally and abroad. Its leaders cracked down on some of the country’s most innovative sectors, from technology to education, driving entrepreneurs into exile or silence. Its “wolf warrior” diplomacy alienated its neighbors from India to Australia to Vietnam.
That era is over. China’s leaders have corrected their course.
Last month, while President Donald Trump accused nations at the U.N. General Assembly of being hopeless failures and harangued the United Nations for not hiring him to renovate its headquarters decades ago, President Xi Jinping put forward a Global Governance Initiative, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the U.N.’s founding. He proposed strengthening the multilateral system along a series of dimensions, positioning Beijing as the constructive, agenda-setting superpower.
There's really no other way to explain what Bari Weiss has accomplished in the past four years since very publicly resigning her (relatively new) position as an editor for the New York Times. The DIY ethic and fiercely independent spirit with which she launched The Free Pressand rode it to a practical coup in the corporate news world is about the most punk-ass thing we've seen in media in a long time.
With the recent announcement from Paramount that Weiss has been named the editor-in-chief of CBS News, the frenzied rumblings of the journalism world have been trying to figure out just how the forty-one-year-old writer stormed the gates of the Fourth Estate and won.
Since its founding in 2021, The Free Press has amassed more than 1.5 million readers and $15 million in annual subscription revenue, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s finances. In an interview, Hamish McKenzie, a co-founder of Substack, called CBS’s acquisition of The Free Press a “strong recognition that we’re in a new generation of media now.”
“What is undeniable is The Free Press built a new media business in a time when everybody thinks the news is dying as a business — and got it to a place of flourishing in a space of three years,” he said.
It's rare that disruptors are so effective so quickly in challenging institutions like the media. When The Free Press first came on my radar, I immediately thought of Arianna Huffington and the Huff Post. However, Huffington had quite a different starting point, obviously, with significant advantages over Weiss in terms of establishing a name and a news site. And, to be honest, I was never a fan of Huffington and her site which I believe took advantage of writers and certainly exploited many of them, making an obscene amount of money while paying virtually no one for the content.
Weiss deserves props for taking what amounts to a newsletter on the emerging platform Substack and turning it into a thriving news site which clearly filled a niche and a gap in the world of online freelance journalism. And with a prolific publishing schedule and podcast, she definitely put in the time and the effort to quickly build and grow her own unique platform. This was nothing short of pure DIY hustle, and Weiss carved out a market where none had existed.
Granted, as impressive as Bari Weiss' success with The Free Press is, the new leadership gig with CBS News is drawing serious scrutiny and criticism, and it undoubtedly should. Weiss is definitely a skilled writer, editor, journalist, and entrepreneur, but nothing in her career yet truly qualifies her to head one of the major news and media organizations in the world. And, while her greeting letter to her new team was certainly appropriate with many valid positions, her continued connection to The Free Press and its incorporation into the Paramount/CBS orbit is rather suspect.
While The Free Press is in many ways a fresh and valued voice in the media landscape, it is by no means an unbiased, non-partisan, "fair & balanced" news site. The same goes for Weiss herself. And it's entirely fair for anyone to have and promote their ideas, perspectives, angles, preferences, and attitudes. In fact, that is the job of commentary writers, the side of journalism from which Weiss comes.
So, it will certainly be interesting to see what comes next for Weiss and The Free Press. It's definitely been a raucous and impressive ride so far.
According to Outside Magazine, the legendary rock climber and free soloist Alex Honnold is going to free solo climb Taipei 101, the tallest building in Taiwan, and once the tallest in the world.
Alex Honnold—yes, Mr. Free Solo himself—will star in a two-hour live TV show on Netflix in 2026, during which he will scale the tallest skyscraper in Taiwan (gulp) without any safety ropes. Yep, Honnold will go buildering on a very tall building on live TV, and he will do it while adhering to the risky climbing style that made him famous. According to a news release published by Netflix, the ordeal will be titled Skyscraper Live, and it will be staged on a building called Taipei 101, which stands 1,667 feet fall and has 101 floors. In the release, Brandon Riegg, the vice president of nonfiction series and sports at Netflix, called the whole thing an “adrenaline inducing spectacle that you can’t look away from.”
For those of you who don't know, Alex Honnold is an incredibly famous rock climber who climbed the infamous El Capitan in Yosemite without any ropes. It was one of the most incredible feats of athletic skill and human endurance that anyone ever imagined. The feat was captured on film in the documentary Free Solo, which went on to win the Academy Award.
In the recent passing of "the Sundance Kid," accolades for a legendary career have offered a wide array of choices for some of Redford's greatest roles. From The Sting to The Way We Were to The Candidate to The Natural, I have many favorites. But in the early '90s a seemingly obscure little spy film - a light thriller - came out that featured a pretty stellar cast, and it's one of my most favorite Redford pics. The film, of course, is Sneakers, and it not often mentioned, but also not unappreciated in the Redford pantheon.
Redford’s ability to mix Hollywood charisma with human vulnerability drives Sneakers. After its place setting opening, Sneakers follows Martin’s team as they’re coerced by what appear to be NSA agents into stealing a secret codebreaking device from a brilliant mathematician (Donal Logue, back when he could be cast against type). Along with help from Martin’s sometime girlfriend Liz (Mary McDonnell), the team attempts their goal by duping a gullible scientist (Stephen Tobolowsky), getting pulled further into post-Cold War intrigue and coming face-to-face with a surprising mastermind (Ben Kingsley).
At the time, some viewers complained that Sneakers failed to challenge Redford, that it just asked him to repeat beats from his ’70s paranoid movies. However, with two decades of age on him, Redford was even more equipped to balance his charisma with humanity. As thrillers of the era grew more slick, with big stakes and fancy technology—Enemy of the State, Mission: Impossible, The Long Kiss Goodnight—Redford’s ability to ground Bishop and his wacky pals made Sneakers stand out all the more.
Sneakers never stops insisting that Martin has remarkable hacking skills, that he’s fundamentally a good man against powerful forces. And Redford can embody those admirable traits. But throughout the film, Redford finds ways to keep Martin human: the way his shoulders slightly drop when Liz reminds Martin that he messed up her relationship, the tightening in his jaw as Martin waits to learn if his friends will take on a risky job that would clear his record, the slight lean back when Martin realizes the mastermind’s identity.
As Sneakers repeatedly shows, Robert Redford was a movie star, remarkably handsome and blessed with endless charisma. But by pairing him with oddball character actors and having him play a real person in a heightened story, Sneakers also proves that Redford was a proper actor, able to remain a human being, even when idolized on screen.
Whether he's playing a beach bum in the Elmore Leonard-inspired The Big Bounce from 2004 or playing along with buddy Vince Vaughn in the huge hit Wedding Crashers, Wilson seems to always being playing his stock "awh shucks character," and yet the charm never fails to make me smile.
With his most recent role playing a washed-out professional golfer, he entertains with a limited comedy series The Guardian is calling "the Ted Lasso of golf."
I’ve never met a golfer in real life. I’ve always assumed I’m the wrong demographic – perhaps in terms of age, or class or at least tax bracket – or perhaps my lack of athleticism is so aggressive that it has prevented me from becoming friends with anyone with even the mildest sporting proclivity for all my life. Instead, I have essentially taken Mark Twain’s word for it that golf is a good walk spoiled, and gone about my days.
Now, however, I think golf may be the spoiler of a good new comedy drama. Stick, it’s called – a deadening name – and it stars Owen Wilson as washed-up golf pro Pryce Cahill. He had a televised meltdown during a tournament at the peak of his career (“He triple-bogeyed his entire life”) and is now reduced to selling golf kit, giving lessons to rich old ladies and hustling for cash in bars. He is also going through a divorce, and still living in the former marital home that his wife Amber-Linn (Judy Greer) – with whom he is still on good terms, bound as they are by a shared sorrow – now wants them to sell.
A golf course can make "fore" some great comedy going back to such classics as Caddyshack and Tin Cup, and while the mentor-prodigy can be a tired and cliched formula, Stick manages to stay fresh and clever and ultimately entertaining, especially with a great turn from Marc Maron as the wise, loyal, and sardonically jaded sidekick.
The master of the truly inexplicable yet compelling novel of postmodern weirdness, Thomas Pynchon has just released upon the literary and pop culture world his ninth novel. Still blowing our minds at the age of eighty-eight, Pynchon's latest novel Shadow Ticket is a detective novel featuring "criminal cheesemongers, Jazz Age adventuresses, Hungarian magicians," and according to Washington Postbooks writer Jacob Brogan it is "bonkers and brilliant fun."
I was first introduced to Pynchon during my undergrad years in a contemporary novel class where we read the reasonably accessible Pynchon novella The Crying of Lot 49. I wish I knew enough then to really appreciate what the teacher was offering. For, it was nearly a decade later in grad school that my cohort read and literally devoured V.. Some of the discussions are still rattling around my head. And I appreciated the class because, like most, I would never have truly understood what Pynchon was doing without multiple viewpoints.
Which leads me to this excellent Pynchon Primer put together by New York Times critic-at-large A.O. Scott.
Since the 1960s and ’70s, when he made his name with “V.,” “The Crying of Lot 49” and the 900-page, National Book Award-winning “Gravity’s Rainbow,” Thomas Pynchon has been tagged with various highfalutin epithets: experimental writer, postmodernist, systems novelist. Gore Vidal, writing in The New York Review of Books in 1976, assigned Pynchon to the “R and D (Research and Development)” wing of contemporary literature. For Vidal, the opposite of R&D was R&R — the kind of fiction people might read for pleasure.
Nearly 50 years and five novels later, we can say that Vidal was half right. While Pynchon is properly celebrated as a formidable literary innovator, he is less often recognized as a great entertainer, a master of R&R. His books are challenging, mind-blowing, precedent-shattering — all of that, yes. They’re also a lot of fun.
So, ... not to sound too conspiratorial or anything, but after I blogged about the two new films spotlighting Taiwan and its struggle with Chinese intimidation, the traffic to this blog plummeted by 90%.
So, perhaps I should have titled this: "Is the PRC blocking access to this blog?"
I mean, I have to be honest in that when I was writing the blog post about the film Invisible Nation and the new Netflix seriesZero Day Attack, I did pause for a moment wondering if posting about Taiwan and two films that the PRC definitely does not like could possibly affect my blog traffic.
While my traffic fluctuates a lot, and this is not a widely read blog by any stretch, the numbers had been quite good the past couple months. And it's not news to anyone that the PRC's digital surveillance program and bots are vast.
But, I figured, ... come on. A Teacher's View is a small teacher's blog, and news of the Taiwan films is already out there.
Released in 1986, Life's Rich Pageant, is a pivotal REM album, and it is in many ways the breakthrough work for the legendary Athens band who had ruled college radio for many years, starting with the release of Murmur in 1983 (or for the true believers Chronic Town, the EP released in 1982).
LRP was somewhat of a new direction for the band, as Mike Mills noted a desire to move out of its murkier sound, and with singles like "Fall on Me" and "I Believe," mainstream listeners got a first taste of Michael Stipe lyrics they could actually understand.
Now, with the 40th anniversary of the LP that many considered one of the most important releases of the 1980s, especially in the alternative rock world that was emerging, there is a tribute tour lining up to celebrate LRP with a concert performance of the album in its entirety. So, are the boys from Athens reuniting for a reunion tour?
Of course not.
One key reason REM is the iconic band it is, is because it ended its run as gracefully as any band has ever done and has remained true to its commitment to never tour again. For, as Peter Buck explained on 60 Minutes, "It would just never be as good."
However, fans can experience a great show celebrating the album with the tour from Michael Shannon & Jason Narducy, who have true musical chops, a great reputation as performers, and experience putting on shows of an REM album that are so inviting sometimes the band itself shows up and joins the party.
For several years in the early 2000s, Scrubs was one of the smartest, funniest, timeliest, and at the same time occasionally most poignant situation comedies on television. In fact, I find the first three seasons to nothing short of brilliant. And, like several other shows of that era, Scrubs was the vehicle for access to some incredible indie music. In fact, I'm sure the first time I heard "New Slang" by the Shins was in an episode. (And of course the song also featured in Zach Braff's wonderful indie film Garden State).
The series had clearly run its course by the time season eight rolled around. In fact, I am a firm believer that most series peak in season three. However, the show has lived on in streaming, and Turk and JD (Donald Faison and Zach Braff) have continued to live in the TV-sphere by regularly popping up as themselves in television ads for T-Mobile.
Given a straight-to-series order by ABC in July, the new series will follow JD Dorian (Braff) and Christopher Turk (Faison), who scrub in together for the first time in a long time- medicine has changed, interns have changed, but their bromance has stood the test of time. Characters new and old navigate the waters of Sacred Heart with laughter, heart and some surprises along the way.
While I am not generally a fan of remakes and reboots and rehashing the past and trying to recreate the magic, I am kind of excited about this news. I mean who wouldn't be when looking back at some great moments in a special sitcom like Scrubs.
In the summer of 1992, after graduating from the University of Illinois with a teaching degree, I hopped on a plane with my college girlfriend (Now wife), and flew 8000 miles across the world to Isle Formosa, the "Beautiful Island" of Taiwan. It was one of the best decisions of my life.
I lived for five years teaching English in a wonderful culture of vibrant, hard-working, fun-loving people who have lived all their lives in the shadow of invasion from China. Ironically, I moved to the nation of Taiwan without actually knowing that the United States and nearly the entire world does not recognize Taiwan as a country. I learned acronyms like the "ROC" and "PRC" and phrases like "renegade province," and I came to understand the official title of the island as "The Republic of China on Taiwan."
Since 1949 when the Chinese Civil War ended with Chiang-Kai Shek fleeing the mainland for Taiwan and Mao Ze Dong establishing the communist government of the People's Republic of China, the beautiful island nation and thriving democratic republic of roughly 25 million people has existed in a state of detente. And when the United States formalized a relationship with Mainland China in 1979, the island nation became an "Invisible Nation," so to speak.
That phrase is the subject and title of a new documentary on Taiwan and its unique precarious political situation. And that release coincides with a new Netflix drama titled Zero Day Attack, which portrays a riveting story of the Taiwanese president faced with an imminent invasion. While neither of these films is currently showing in the United States, they will hopefully be available soon, for it is important for American audiences to understand this complicated issue and to learn more about the wonderful place I consider a second home.
