The website of John C. Snider
If you haven’t been watching Apple TV+’s new drama series Severance, you’re really missing out on an unsettling, thoughtful, and rewarding sci-fi mystery. Severance centers around Mark S (Adam Scott), an employee of Lumon, an enigmatic technology corporation. Lumon offers select employees the option to “sever” their work selves from their off-duty selves via a computer chip implanted …
About a year ago I noticed this new, two-sided historical marker had been installed in Roswell, Georgia’s Riverside Park. It’s part of a larger program by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) to install such markers around the country. This particular sign is a sobering reminder of the lynching of Mack Henry Brown in 1936. Not …
I first discovered Mark Rylance in the summer of 2001, when I bought a groundling ticket at the Shakespeare’s Globe in London to see a performance of the Bard’s Cymbeline. Rylance was artistic director of the Globe at the time, appearing in Cymbeline in a supporting role as Cloten, but he stood out to me, with his confident, …
Francis Fukuyama was an optimist. In his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, he put forth the proposition (if you’ll forgive my oversimplification) that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, Western liberal democracy had finally gained a permanent foothold and there would, ultimately, be no returning to …
This is one of my favorite photos. It shows yours truly and the late social commentator, raconteur, and defender of atheism Christopher Hitchens at Emory University on February 26, 2010. I wish I could remember what I said that made him laugh—it must have been good. Allison and I had actually had brief encounters with …
This review contains spoilers. French writer/director Julia Ducournau made a splash with her first feature film, 2016’s meaty psychological horror-thriller Raw. (Full disclosure: I have not yet seen this film.) Her sophomore effort—Titane—has also made a splash, winning the coveted Palme d’Or at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Titane falls undeniably and unapologetically into the category of “body …
The end of the world is big business nowadays. Between streaming and broadcasting and movie theaters (which are themselves dying), hardly a month goes by that we aren’t introduced to some apocalypse or Armageddon or what-have-you. If it’s not zombies, it’s a vicious pandemic; if it’s not a giant meteor, it’s an alien invasion. Americans, …
The Atlantic posted a headline today proposing to explain “Why the West’s Diplomacy with Russia Keeps Failing.” This is just one example of recent fatalistic declarations that all is lost with respect to Ukraine and the possibility of a Russian invasion. I confess I don’t understand headlines like this concerning the situation with Ukraine. Diplomacy …
Thoughts on the new book Smashing Statues by Erin L. Thompson On the night of January 20, 2022, workers in New York City removed an 82-year-old statue of Teddy Roosevelt from its location outside the American Museum of Natural History. The statue depicts the late president mounted heroically on a horse, with a pair of men (one …
When Joe Biden won the presidential election in November 2020, liberals across the nation started daydreaming about what Uncle Joe might do to erase the toxic legacy of his predecessor, to make things right (or at least, make them less terrible). There was a lot of (in hindsight, laughably naïve) optimism that Biden’s victory would …