Since my early years of high school, I’ve become more and more convinced that comics published in the local newspaper are little more than bland space fillers. Foremost in my mind among these problematically bad comics—which are also those I used to like most—are Garfield, The Family Circus, and Dilbert. Garfield always mixes the loser, […]

Love Actually is the kind of movie I tend to avoid. You know the kind: sweet “romantic comedies” that only the lobotomized can’t figure out the outcome of within 15 minutes of their beginning. Where you know that these people are going to get together after you sit though the long list of false obstacles […]

Outside my window, the rarely-trafficked street is still white, only the manhole cover that managed to melt through gives a hint that there’s anything not white under there. The gray sidewalks—which must be shoveled both as a courtesy to fellow pedestrians and out of fear for the law—form a coherent border between the white over […]

There has always been a great deal of idle speculation about what it is that people find so fascinating about Hitler’s Germany. My favorite theory—which hardly makes it correct—is that people want to understand what allows people to do such depraved things to each other. That people probe the Holocaust looking for ways that we […]

Helvetica is a documentary about a typeface with the same name. That typeface is also the one in which this post’s green headline is written. And to simplify the coming discussion, I want to make clear that Helvetica is a documentary and Helvetica is a typeface. The essential goal of Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica is to […]