"The Passing of an Era"

"And yet he also came across as a man of genuinely good will, in a way that didn’t feel like an act—just as it didn't feel like an act when he told New Times editor Yevgenia Albats in 2016 that his creed was, 'No blood,' or that he was ultimately 'a man of freedom': 'Freedom of choice, freedom of religion, freedom of speech; freedom, freedom—let them shoot me but I’m not going to renounce that.' Or when he wrote a warm letter to Bonner on her 85th birthday, expressing the hope that their shared ideals—'a democratic Russia, the rule of law, a more just world'—would someday be realized."

Cathy Young at The Bulwark marks the death of Mikhail Gorbachev.

And in a 2019 Foreign Policy article, Paul Musgrave tells the story of Gorbachev's Pizza Hut commercial.

"Every City Is Either Vibrant These Days or Is Working on a Plan to Attain Vibrancy Soon"

"History is more than a conflict between bogue millionaires and cool millionaires, however, and once you grasp this, you realize that it doesn't take a whole lot of 'creativity' to come up with real answers to the big problems. You just need to change the questions slightly. How about, instead of serving some targeted fraction of the master class, we chose to give an entirely different group of Americans what they wanted? Even if those Americans weren't cool? What would that look like?"

In a 2012 Baffler article, Thomas Frank takes on efforts by cities to promote their "vibrancy."

"Nelson Mandela Once Told Me, 'Coming to America Is So Important to Black People in Africa. It Is Like the Fairy Tale. It's Like Cinderella'"

"As the film's sequel, Coming 2 America, comes to Amazon Prime on Friday, the writers, singers, and actors behind the fake commercial—plus the NBA star who inspired it, musicians who cover it, celebrities who love it, and more—reveal the story behind a 35-second pop-culture masterpiece and its lasting impact on the world."

Jason Newman at Rolling Stone presents "The Definitive Oral History of 'Soul Glo.'"

"Not Simply a Cuisine, but a Lifestyle"

"I think it's maybe less in dude food itself than in the way marketers use the idea of the dude to combat gender contamination. You see how these brands are trying to construct ideas about masculinity, and that shows you so much about how they actually think about femininity and women. It's that idea of 'Diet Coke' versus 'Coke Zero,' women's weight loss and women's consumption versus men's. And it's so binary and so hierarchical in a way that is bad for both men and women." 

Rachel Sugar at Vox interviews Emily Contois, author of Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture.

"A Much More Ambitious Vision of a Thriving Creative Sphere"

"Artists in the middle of the twentieth century flourished not because the economy was inherently favorable to them, but as a result of powerful economic winds and the groups that joined in an attempt to harness them. Together, creative class groups wielded the crowbar of politics in an attempt to pry some autonomy out of consumer capitalism."

Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein at The New Republic reviews Shannan Clark's The Making of the American Creative Class: New York’s Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism.

"Fabricated the World as He Wanted to See It, in Ways Unprecedented at the Time but Which Have Become All Too Familiar in Years Since"

"But Reagan was also a brilliant politician. He had a performer's grasp of character and humor as well as an instinctive sense of when to micromanage. Several times in the book, Perlstein reproduces Reagan's own painstaking revisions to the work of his speechwriters, rewrites that often had little to do with content and everything to do with rhythm, cadence, rhetorical inflection. Even more than 40 years later, the folksy charm drips from the page. Reagan's acting career is often referenced through middlebrow fare like Knute Rockne, All American and kitsch like Bedtime for Bonzo, but his longest-running role was as the host of General Electric Theater. He was a pitchman, and it was this skill that he most effectively put to use in his post-acting life."

Jack Hamilton at Slate reviews Rick Perlstein's Reaganland: America's Right Turn, 1976-1980.

The Hidden Persuader

"Packard's prose is rarely moving and sometimes clunky, but he was able to intuit and even predict the anxieties of postwar America better than almost anyone else. Much of what we talk about now, and many of our current anxieties, hearken back to Packard's popular books. When environmentalist and social critic James Howard Kunstler describes America as 'physically arranged on-the-ground to produce maximum loneliness, arranged economically to produce maximum anxiety, and disposed socially to produce maximum alienation'; when activist Annie Leonard denounces the cult of consumption; when sociologist Robert Putnam surveys an America in which we are increasingly 'bowling alone'; all are echoing Packard, who saw the downsides and discontents of our new way of living at a time when most people were still discovering its benefits."

Addison Del Mastro in a 2017 American Conservative article writes an appreciation of Vance Packard.

Forward to the Past

"To understand the future of post-advertising media, let's briefly consider its past. During a period of the early 19th century known as the 'party press' era, newspapers relied on patrons. Those patrons were political parties (hence 'party press') that handed out printing contracts to their favorite editors or directly paid writers to publish vicious attacks against rivals.
"That era's journalism was hyper-political and deeply biased. But some historians believe that it was also more engaging. 

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic argues that future journalism will return to nineteenth-century practices.

"It's Time to Loosen the King Family's Grip on MLK's Legacy"

"That still leaves the question of the commercial exploitation of King's words and voice, and who decides. "One can sympathize with, even endorse, the idea that the material should be monetized 'to aid the causes with which [King] is identified.' But Intellectual Properties Management hasn't shown especially good judgment about granting permission. If King's words were all in the public domain, they might be more widely exploited for advertising, but the responsibility would be the advertisers'—and any that abused his words would face public backlash, as Dodge has.
"But at least the advertisers wouldn't be acting with the explicit approval of members of the King family. That does more to undermine Martin Luther King's legacy than any transparently dishonest ad campaign."

Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times criticizes "the commercial exploitation of King's words and voice."

"We Need a New Covenant—A New Deal Between Advertisers and Consumers, to Make Some Times and Places Off Limits"

"The descriptive thesis is that there is a strange business model called advertising-supported media that was once restricted to a small area of our life, like newspapers, but now it is taking over every area of our life. I wanted to understand the history of advertising, because it didn't simply always exist this way. You typically would just pay for stuff, like newspapers or movies. The idea of selling a captive audience had to be invented.

"And the normative question is: What are the costs of everything being free? Are we paying in other ways? There is a covenant that, in exchange for free stuff, we expose ourselves to advertising. But is that covenant broken?"

 

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic talks with Tim Wu about Wu's new book, The Attention Merchants.

"The Glittery Patron Saint of Hollywood"

"For all her wispy spirituality, Angelyne is still celebrated as a rebel: 'If you can be on a billboard just as yourself, not representing anything, I think that's pretty punk rock,' says leather-clad Scott Graham, a fan since 1982, when he joined the Angelyne Fan Club at the age of 12. At the exhibition, Graham remembers Angelyne's frequent visits to Retropolis, his Melrose Avenue boutique, in the 90s, where she purchased hundreds of dollars of clothing with a wave of her hand. To Graham, Angelyne has always been a spoof of Hollywood itself, subverting the established channels of fame in true DIY fashion. 'She’s shameless,' he says, flipping his neon pink mohawk out of his eyes as he peers at an Angelyne original on MODA’s main wall."

In the LA Weekly, Marnie Sehayek meets the peerless Angelyne.

"The Last Frontier"

"When Backer finally met with his colleague Billy Davis—a songwriter from Motown who had been in the Four Tops—and the rest of his team, he said he wanted 'a song that treated the whole world as if it were a person—a person the singer would like to help and get to know.' He read to them what he had written on the napkin: 'I'd like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.'"


Slate runs an excerpt from Jeff Chang's Who We Be: The Colorization of America.

"Pioneered the Techniques of Creating Trust in a Pure Religious Product"

"What Crowell did—and what makes him so important to my mind—is that he solved the problem that had plagued individualistic, evangelical religion since it first emerged during the First Great Awakening in the eighteenth century. (When things started to go a little nutty, respectable middle class Protestants swung back to an emphasis on church and tradition.)
"Crowell figured out a way to impose order on evangelicalism, but without having to resort to churchly guardrails. He used the techniques of consumer capitalism that he knew so well, packaging and trademark and massive promotional campaigns."


Daniel Silliman in Salon talks with Timothy Gloege, author of Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism.

The New Hillary

"As another New York Times' reporter noted, the future candidate 'has been exposed to the full view of the American electorate in one capacity or another for some 20 years now, but the politicians, no less than the voters, are still having trouble disengaging his intertwined assets and liabilities.' In fact, that was an observation from a February 1967 Times story about Richard Nixon, the then-former vice president who had lost the 1960 presidential campaign to John F. Kennedy and was plotting his political comeback.
"It's striking how much Nixon and Clinton have in common. They spent years in the shadows of more popular, charismatic politicians (Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton/Obama). They both lost their first presidential campaigns to younger, more charismatic challengers. Their images, as they began their second White House bids, were indelibly etched in the public's mind."


Robert Mann in Salon argues that Hillary Clinton should study Richard Nixon's '68 comeback.

"Don Draper Lived on Hard Drives for Half a Decade Before Anybody Paid Him Any Notice"

Lacey Rose and Michael O'Connell in The Hollywood Reporter present an oral history of Mad Men.

"Increasingly Desperate Advertisers Settle For More Attainable 35-To-44-Year-Old Demographic"

"Pfeiffer then reassured herself that she and her clients could do a lot worse, pointing to Tommy Bahama's 'sad' long-term relationship with 45-to-60-year-old single males with annual incomes of less than $50,000."


From The Onion.

Bop Inferno

The New York Times runs obituaries for writer Frank M. Robinson, former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, historian Anne Hollander, actor Dick Jones, modeling agent Eileen Ford, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummer Tommy Ramone.

Flowers for My Kevlar Superstar Kevlar

The New York Times reports the deaths of actress Ultra Violet, author Daniel Keyes, adman Julian Koenig, musician Horace Silver, songwriter Gerry Goffin, actress Carla Laemmle, cartoonist Charles Barsotti, and chemist Stephanie L. Kwolek.

"Last Living California Raisin Dies Of Prostate Cancer"

"The California Raisins’ bassist, Stretch, died of liver disease in 2004, while fellow bandmates Red and A.C. famously perished in a Los Angeles nightclub fire in 1998."


From The Onion.

"Because Some People Are Greedy"

"The tobacco industry was a pioneer at this. Its goal was to erode public acceptance of the scientifically proven links between smoking and disease: In the words of an internal 1969 memo legal opponents extracted from Brown & Williamson's files, 'Doubt is our product.' Big Tobacco's method should not be to debunk the evidence, the memo's author wrote, but to establish a 'controversy.'
"When this sort of manipulation of information is done for profit, or to confound the development of beneficial public policy, it becomes a threat to health and to democratic society. Big Tobacco's program has been carefully studied by the sugar industry, which has become a major target of public health advocates.
"It's also echoed by vaccination opponents, who continue to use a single dishonest and thoroughly discredited British paper to sow doubts about the safety of childhood immunizations, and by climate change deniers.
"And all those fabricated Obamacare horror stories wholesaled by Republican and conservative opponents of the Affordable Care Act and their aiders and abetters in the right-wing press? Their purpose is to sow doubt about the entire project of healthcare reform; if the aim were to identify specific shortcomings of the act, they'd have to accompany every story with a proposal about how to fix it."


Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times explores "agnotology, a neologism signifying the study of the cultural production of ignorance."