1. Bill Lawrence officially writes everything that makes me feel good about life. Just as with Ted Lasso, it took me too long to get into Shrinking, but I’m surprised at myself about that: a show that mainly stars Jason Segel, Harrison Ford, and Jessica Williams is the kind of show that one could leave out under a cardboard b…

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Welcome to a new special edition of Zeitgeist Zephyrs, a “Throwback Thursday” occasional column in which I go back to an older, less recent film, show, etc. and assess it for its religious, classical, or theological value. Today is Agora (2009), a film set in 4th century Alexandria and following the life, drama, and death of the female philosopher Hypat…

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It’s been too long since a Zeitgeist Zephyr has come out, and I need a bit of breathing room before finishing my Hexaemeron series; plus, it’s the time of year when I need to lean as much as possible into things that give me good life and energy for sanity. So have some unsolicited pop-culture thoughts. Next week, Hexaemeron will pick back up, so it’s a…

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David

So, probably it’s a stretch to claim that this book is an event of pop cultural significance, but I’m proud of it, anyway, and of its many contributors.

A bit of backstory. Growing up, anime was a special medium that connected me to friends, often in contexts far from my normal space. It’s difficult for me to describe what “home” looked like as a ki…

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If anyone ought to have pulled a Tom Baker, and stayed on as the Doctor for seven years, Peter Capaldi was that person.

I came into Doctor Who in 2010, at the beginning of the show’s long popularity under Steven Moffat. I was fifteen at the time: a friend introduced me to it through his Advanced Language Arts and Research/Presentation (ALAR/P) thesis de…

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Caveat Lector: Spoilers follow for The Phoenician Scheme.

In college, a lifelong acolyte of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, there was a time where I really wanted to become a “great, American, Catholic novel” sort of person and dive into the literature and art that is supposedly very Christian in its spirit and that seems to animate a lot of online and I …

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Let me begin here: I believe Neil Gaiman’s victims, and I hope that they receive the justice they deserve. Gaiman’s fall from grace, while unfortunate for fans of his previous work, appears fully justified. I should probably say for legal reasons that Gaiman himself denies that any of this is true, and it has not yet been settled in court—so I …

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I was always going to love this movie.

Some personal context: when I was four or five years old, my grandfather dropped a box of old Superman, X-Men, and Spider-Man comics on bed for me to read. I’ve been a comic book nerd ever since, though admittedly, most of my comic book and adaptation-related interests have been in Marvel rather than DC. (Call it te…

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Caveat Lector: Spoilers follow for Étoile.

I wrote just this past December about my love of Amy-Sherman Palladino’s ouevre in connection with my favorite of her offerings, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The Palladinos—she and her husband Dan tend to collaborate—are really good at three things. First, and most obviously in any of their shows, they have a dial…

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Spoilers follow for both The White Lotus and The Righteous Gemstones.

Max is having a renaissance of streaming right now, even as it and its parent company, Warner Bros., continue to meaninglessly throw away good things that they have the rights to (like Looney Tunes). And it’s intriguing what Max can engross viewers with provided that they make it …

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I am a bit precious about media having to do either with Bible or classics. I don’t like most of it. In my defense, most of it is bad: I was more generous, for example, to Those About to Die than I should have been; I don’t need to watch an episode of Amazon’s new David show to know that it’s probably garbage. The problem in most media that has to do wi…

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Caveat Lector: Spoilers follow for Cobra Kai.

I was born in 1995, but I was raised on a hefty diet of 60’s music and 80’s films. Karate Kid never had the cult following that some of the other franchises I imbibed did, but I loved it: having spent my early life mostly with my mom and not my dad, psychologically traumatized by their divo…

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So, I’m late to writing a review for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: in my defense, APD was only recently back up and running at the time it concluded, and people keep asking me, given my day gig as a Latin teacher, if I’ve seen Gladiator II and if I like it, which aggravates me, so I’m talking about Maisel instead.

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Caveat Lector: Spoilers follow for Wicked.

I think that I read Wicked when I was in middle school; I can’t quite remember, but I do remember at least absorbing clippings of the novel around the time of its popularity in the early 2000s. I know I’ve never seen the Broadway show, though I’ve been treated to countless renditions of its soundtra…

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Caveat Lector: Spoilers follow for Conclave.

A good rule of thumb is that anything that makes Bishop Robert Barron of Word on Fire mad is probably good. I guess it’s possible that something Barron doesn’t like is actually bad, but in most cases, probably not.

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There are a lot of ways to talk about Kaos just the same way there are a lot of ways to talk about Greek mythology in general. The show has, first of all, something of an adult version of the schtick inherent to Percy Jackson, in that it attempts to modernize Greek myth with the aesthetics of the 21st century. But unlike Percy, which also transfers the gods to the American spiritual landscape, Kaos keeps the human action centered on an imagined modern Krete, where President Minos rules, Orpheus is a pop star, and Dionysus is the ultimate bisexual party boy. This way of portraying myth in film has something to commend it the same way as does the more Shakespearean, mythohistorical version: it allows the audience to make easier connections with what is otherwise an alien kosmos.

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Caveat Lector: Spoilers follow for Ted Lasso.

Look, I’m late to the game on Ted Lasso. It’s not my fault: Apple TV+ is this weird combination of really quality content and also a streaming subscription that hardly anyone I know uses or keeps up with. I got into it when my wife got us tickets to an STL CITY game for Father’s Day, and remembered that socce…

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Forgive the additional email this week; but the Zephyr blows! Caveat Lector for spoilers.

1. Scavengers Reign reminds us that nature being sacred is not the same as it being benign. Scavengers Reign has rightly been hailed as one of the most beautiful and original sci-fi tales of the last several years. I have only discovered it this year, when it in fa…

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1. Jon Stewart is back where he belongs. Without a doubt the most joyous pop-culture phenomenon of the season for me has been Jon Stewart’s temporary, part-time return to The Daily Show as the host on Monday nights. Stewart is my TV dad: he basically raised me, and he certainly gave me a good deal of my po…

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Systems come and systems go, but one that I’ve used to teach mythology in the various classes (English, Latin, World Religions, etc.) that I’ve taught to k-12 students in the last several years that has remained useful to me personally as an explanatory tool is what I sometimes like to call a critical or deconstructed hero’s journey.…

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