Is there anything more redolent of the 20th century monoculture than a fascination with the inner life of Johnny Carson?

The hold Carson had on the nation’s attention in the late-night hours, most weeknights for 30 years, is difficult now to imagine. Tonight’s late-night hosts only pull a fraction of his numbers, even while following a formula he set in stone. The band, the announcer, the monologue, the desk, the couch, the skits. The formula still works, but the world has changed. No one will ever again be the default, as Carson was.

“Default” is not a very exciting way to describe a show-business professional, but the marvel of Carson was that he never wore out his welcome. The host had a sure sense of his skills and his limitations, including knowing exactly when to bow out. He said the May 22, 1992 episode would be his last, and it was. He went out on top, living out his 13 remaining years enjoying private pursuits like yachting and learning Swahili.

Carson became such a legend that it took a legend to write his biography.

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Do we hate children?

I don’t need to detail what a person I know was talking about the other day when they declared about this country, “We actually hate children.”

Take your pick of reasons why a person might reasonably come to that conclusion. There’s the fact that child mortality is ticking up for the first time in decades. There’s the youth mental health crisis, and the growing bipartisan consensus that — whether you’re pro-natalist, anti-natalist, or natal-neutral — it’s increasingly difficult and expensive to raise a child in this country.

But is this all really happening because we hate children? The question is of particular interest to me not just because I happen to have a child, but because I spent years studying the sociology of childhood: tracking the changing ways societies have understood and interacted with their newest members. Have our attitudes towards children really, fundamentally changed?

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Where Max Boot particularly excels, as a biographer, is in connecting his subject’s accomplishments and failures to his essential character. If Ronald Reagan’s triumph as President was to act the part superbly, Boot argues, the ways in which he let Americans down are related to his shortcomings as an actor.

Reagan felt and appeared sympathetic, but he lacked true empathy: the ability to see the world through another’s eyes.

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Honda Civic Ad - 1980

Imagine being able to advertise a consumer vehicle with the pitch, “This slick little machine will disappear into the entrancing city,” rather than, “This rolling fortress will cross dry riverbeds and defend your family from the crazies.’

He-Man and Wind Raider - Masters of the Universe (Mattel)

I like the tenderness of this box copy: “STRONGEST MAN IN THE UNIVERSE AND HIS ASSAULT LANDER…together.”

Has “The Phantom Menace” been redeemed?

Let’s take a look at the three main dings against The Phantom Menace when it was first released.

Each short episode of Star Wars: Tales of the Empire ends with one name, before all others. “Created by Dave Filoni.” Sure, George Lucas’s name comes next, but there’s no question that Tales of the Empire is a journey into the Filoni-verse.

Lucasfilm’s chief creative officer has proven adept at steering the storylines for hours of streamable entertainment, while maintaining an internally consistent canon, by branching out from the franchise’s signature characters in quasi-fractal profusion: revisiting themes and tropes while leaving room for variation, always keeping a clear path back to faces familiar from ’80s bedsheets.

Tales of the Empire, being released as a dash of Disney+ spice on Star Wars Day, is a series of six animated episodes totaling 81 minutes — the second in an anthology series that began with Tales of the Jedi (2022). In two three-episode arcs, the Empire episodes show the beginning of one character’s journey (Morgan Elsbeth, seen in middle age in The Mandalorian and Ahsoka) and picks up with another (Barriss Offee) we last saw taking a dark turn way back in The Clone Wars circa 2013.

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The cultural imprint of Dungeons & Dragons is so vast, it’s hard to believe there was a time when D&D seemed like a has-been. Circa the turn of the 21st century, it was far from clear that the game would ever regain anything like its pop culture footprint from the 1980s, when — as David M. Ewalt chronicles in Of Dice and Men — D&D co-creator Gary Gygax left Wisconsin and went Hollywood, pursuing ill-fated but not entirely implausible dreams of parlaying his tabletop celebrity into a multimedia empire.

Though Gygax died in 2008, the tide had already turned for D&D by the time the original edition of Ewalt’s book was published in 2013. The company Wizards of the Coast, which bought D&D in 1997, successfully steadied the rollercoaster trajectory the game had followed under Gygax’s company TSR; when Of Dice and Men was first published, Wizards was preparing to launch a new edition that would facilitate rulebook modularity so players could choose their own depth of complexity.

The book has now been reissued for the 1974 game’s 50th anniversary, expanded to track D&D’s remarkable ascent over the past decade. The growth of online networking and the crisis of the coronavirus pandemic, neither of which might have been obvious candidates to spur the growth of a traditional tabletop game, facilitated the rise of an avid multigenerational participant group — including young players attuned to the game’s appeal by media like the Netflix hit Stranger Things and streaming play sessions.

Given the game’s current ubiquity, if Ewalt was starting from scratch he might not feel the need to give quite so basic an orientation to the game’s central concept. Much of Dice and Men involves walking the reader (or listener) through sessions of D&D and other games, with narrative texts interpolated to convey the game characters’ perspectives.

While Ewalt covers the bases of the game’s invention and spread from its Upper Midwest cradle, Of Dice and Men is a work of gonzo journalism told from the perspective of a player who’s been embedded in D&D culture for decades.

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