Browsing the archives for the Modern Myths category
A Time magazine article this week notes that traditional ink-and-paper paper books are seeing a surprising spike in sales this year, as they did last year, despite the meteoric rise in popularity of ebook readers. The article flails for causes: “The holiday spike may reflect this year’s partial lifting of economic gloominess.” If that’s true, why was there one [...]
While the earthquakes of Harold Camping’s apocalypse failed to roll around the globe at precisely 6PM (God has apparently modernized enough to observe human time zones), I spent the day reading The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology. I suppose I find modern mythology more appealing when presented as such. Of course, [...]
An old logic joke goes like this: I. Nothing is better than eternal happiness. II. A ham sandwich is better than nothing. III. Therefore, a ham sandwich is better than eternal happiness! It turns out that there are a lot of ham sandwich myths trying to reassure us that our life is tasty just as [...]
Professor Peter Winn Kirby of Oxford has a thoughtful and painfully spot-on essay about how the original Godzilla movies, far from being mere campy horror flicks, in fact were fictional dramatizations giving a voice to Japan’s visceral fears of radioactive contamination. Once again, mythology and stories put a face on things which are almost unthinkable. [...]