The 40-year cycle of pop cultural nostalgiaApr 16 2012

In the new issue of the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik talks about pop culture's 40-year cycle of nostalgia.

So it seems time to pronounce a rule about American popular culture: the Golden Forty-Year Rule. The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past. (And the particular force of nostalgia, one should bear in mind, is not simply that it is a good setting for a story but that it is a good setting for you.)

If you combine this with Kurt Andersen's recent piece about the slowing rate of change of pop culture, perhaps there's another lesson here other than Gopnik's assertion that we'll be nostalgic for the Obama age 40 years from now. Maybe we've reached Peak Nostalgia and in an effort to find more and more nostalgia for an ever-increasing audience, culturemakers are mining more from those eras outside of the appointed 40-year era and as a result, pop culture is feeling more timeless, echoing all eras, until it becomes a culture that can't draw upon anything but itself.

And if not, I'm looking forward to the return of 70s-style moviemaking in the coming decade.

Searching for JesusJun 04 2010

From a recent issue of the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik surveys a recent selection of books about who Jesus was.

The American scholar Bart Ehrman has been explaining the scholars' truths for more than a decade now, in a series of sincere, quiet, and successful books. Ehrman is one of those best-selling authors like Richard Dawkins and Robert Ludlum and Peter Mayle, who write the same book over and over -- but the basic template is so good that the new version is always worth reading. In his latest installment, "Jesus, Interrupted", Ehrman once again shares with his readers the not entirely good news he found a quarter century ago when, after a fundamentalist youth, he went to graduate school: that all the Gospels were written decades after Jesus' death; that all were written in Greek, which Jesus and the apostles didn't speak and couldn't write (if they could read and write at all); and that they were written as testaments of faith, not chronicles of biography, shaped to fit a prophecy rather than report a profile.