Each Friday we compile a list of interesting links and articles our editors find from across the web. Here’s what’s catching our eye this week.
Andy Greenwald at Grantland remembers Lost the “most important network show of the past 10 years.”
Lost premiered 10 years ago this week. It ended four and a half years ago. And I still miss it like crazy. This doesn’t seem to be a popular opinion these days, as backlash to the underwhelming series finale seems to have overtaken the memory of everything that came before. But backlash has overtaken just about everything in 2014, and the effect on television has been profound. Networks today are more hidebound, creators more skittish, and broadcast TV as a whole more distressingly safe. Yes, the expansion of viewing options and the subsequent diminishing of audiences have played the leading roles in this retrenchment, but it’s impossible to discount the added impact of our rapid-response culture. The big four networks were never particularly good at taking chances, but there was a dedicated, if occasionally naive, desire to give people something they might adore. Now networks twist themselves into knots coming up with milquetoast servings of what they’re pretty sure people won’t hate. It’s how you end up with 66 annual hours about Naval crime investigation and a half-dozen sitcoms about love that, taken together, are barely worthy of being liked. Want to know what white bread dipped in milk tastes like? I’m pretty sure there’s a new network show just for you.
What does the NFL have to say about the sanctity of the human body?
It’s been two years since I parted ways with the NFL and opened up my Sundays to other things. At the time I thought of it as a “personal boycott.” In other words, you don’t stop watching pro football with the intent of igniting a movement, or of affecting one wit of change in the NFL. You do it so you can sleep at night, so that you can preserve your own morality. I left to keep my side of the street clean in the particular way that I like.
The Other Journal contributor Amy Lepine Peterson remembers Rich Mullins on the seventeenth anniversary of his death:
I stood in the kitchen, sixteen years old, absentmindedly wiping wet dishes with a damp towel as I listened to the radio station. The news that night was full of singer-songwriter Rich Mullins: the day before, he’d been in his Jeep with Mitch McVicker, traveling southbound on I-39 when they lost control of the car. Thrown onto the road, Rich had been killed almost immediately by another truck. McVicker was in critical condition in the hospital. Had Rich fallen asleep at the wheel? I wondered. Hadn’t he been wearing a seatbelt?
The Verge asks: “What happens to literacy when the internet turns into a giant TV station?”
Video is the future of the web. You can no longer launch a new smartphone, inaugurate a Kickstarter campaign, or even announce a business partnership without accompanying it with a slickly produced video teaser. Video is the destination point for a grand shift toward more visual communication online — one that makes the web accessible to more people than ever, but also risks losing one of its most fundamental benefits.
A review of Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction at First Things:
Good books on contemporary theologians are rare, good critical books rarer still. This is a very good, very critical analysis of a widely esteemed and powerful Christian teacher, economically written, tightly argued, and purposive. Its major proposals are that Stanley Hauerwas’s work is ecclesiocentric, that it does not speak sufficiently of God or of the works of God, and, consequently, that its rejection of the modern traditions of Christian moral theology is only selective.
Just when you think the fire hydrant couldn’t get any better, someone improves its design to meet the needs of the twenty-first century:
New York City, with its dense population and endless skyscrapers, is notoriously difficult to fight fires in. Firefighters depend on nearly 100,000 hydrants to do their work, but many of these hydrants are in disrepair. Vulnerable to misuse and exposed to extreme weather, the city’s hydrants are decayed, leaking, and corroding.
Richard Beck, another TOJ contributor, ponders “Love, Training and Social Psychology,” reflections on this month’s Abilene Christian University Summit that featured Barbara Brown Taylor and Stanley Hauerwas:
ACU’s Summit conference continues today. On Monday we had Barbara Brown Taylor on campus. Yesterday, Stanley Hauerwas was with us. And important to me, and the thrust of this post, on Monday my former graduate student Andrea was also visiting. Andrea and I got to go together to Barbara Brown Taylor’s sessions and afterward I reflected a bit about how Stanley Hauerwas, due up, would have responded to her presentations. I also sketched out with Andrea how I fuse and use these two very different Christian thinkers–Barbara and Stanley–in my own faith journey.
How one pranked his roommate with Facebook ads:
Recently I found myself in need of a roommate and, like many others, reached out to the Craigslist universe. Looking back at the post titled ‘Super Awesome Roommate Needed’, it included more details about the extroverted and energetic roommate (me) than it did about the actual place they would be renting. I had a few takers, but no one that I was interested to live with.
Matt Ogens directs a documentary entitled Meet the Hitlers, a last name that is actually more common than you think:
In his new documentary Meet the Hitlers, director Matt Ogens—the guy behind Confessions of a Superhero – explores just how much a name can influence an identity. Meeting a diverse group of people with the surname Hitler (or Hittler), which arguably comes with more baggage than literally any other name in existence, the film looks at how their lives have been affected, for better or worse.
Our obligatory baseball story for the week includes a video recapping Derek Jeter’s top-ten career plays…with Legos:
OYO Sports @ YouTube found via For the Win.
Honorable Mention
- Holy Relics: The Hymnal, Part 1 @ Christ & Pop Culture
- Why Wendy’s Wants To Conquer The Fast Food World With BBQ @ Fast Company
- Lecrae: Christian Rappers, Christian Rap, and the No. 1 Album in the Country @ Grantland
- 30 for 30 Shorts: ‘Fields of Fear’ @ Grantland