When the slick operators on “Mad Men” were polishing off the last of their after-work martinis and rushing to catch the LIRR, I was still collecting baseball cards off Post Toasties boxes and bouncing down a farm town’s back roads in a rickety school bus. So I could be all wet, but I wonder sometimes if the golden age of advertising, when giants like Leo Burnett, David Ogilvy and Bill Bernbach walked the earth, might be a myth of a self-absorbed industry’s own creation: And not just a myth but one that, in today’s economic climate, has outlived whatever usefulness it may once have had. (more…)

When I first went to work in corporate America in the 1970s, the rule—understood if unwritten—was that professional and personal lives remained separate. You didn’t talk to friends or relatives on the phone while at work. Even balancing your checkbook at your desk was taboo, not done.

What a difference three decades make. In today’s work environment, it’s difficult to tell whether employees spend quite as much time on work as they do on personal matters. (more…)

In 1985’s “The Breakfast Club,” principal Dick Vernon’s great fear is a grown-up, in-charge Gen X. “Someday these kids are going to be running the country,” he says of those high-school students confined in Saturday-morning detention. “This is the thought that wakes me up in the middle of the night.”

Are you sitting down, Dick?

Anthony Michael Hall, who played the ineptly suicidal geek Brian Johnson, is now 41 years old and a “thespian.” Molly Ringwald, who played angsty rich girl Claire Standish, is also 41 and is eulogizing writer/director John Hughes, so recently deceased, in The New York Times. (more…)

Why did no one ever use Willy DeVille’s “Mazurka” in an ad?  

I know, I know. We are supposed to absolutely hate it when a song we love by some rock singer we admire ends up being used to push products, but DeVille certainly could have used the money. Much better known in Europe than he was in this country, DeVille was only 58 when, on August 6, he died in New York of pancreatic cancer. His life, like that of countless other accomplished rockers, had been hard. He deserved better (more…)

“Julie & Julia,” Nora Ephron’s thoroughly enjoyable movie with Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, represents an interesting moment in the history of American popular culture. Interesting but problematic: It will not reassure troubled loyalists of the printed word—with which it seems much concerned—or thrill enthusiasts for new media.

In any case, it’s fun. Streep’s Julia Child is played with chipper good humor, and Amy Adams, as Julie Powell, is fetching as usual in the role of Child’s young fan.

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A truly remarkable event took place in Boston last week, but that city’s newspaper of record seems not to have considered it remarkable enough. Around 5:30 on the evening of August 11, a dense and, to the uninformed, quite mysterious fog settled over the town, shrouding tall buildings in a wet and wispy cloud. As creepy as this was, the Boston Globe wanted to make it creepier still or found the meteorological phenomenon, called “advection fog,” not really very interesting at all. This is worrisome for what it says about a society neurotically accustomed to viewing its own experiences through a, well, fog of its own fictions. (more…)

The news that Japanese engineers have created robotic baseball players that can pitch and hit with 90 percent accuracy has prompted an astute—if incomplete—retort from Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report.” “That’s not baseball,” Stephen Colbert says. “The whole point of baseball is to stand in one place long enough for the people in the bleachers to become so bored they’ll pay $10 for a beer.”

As usual, he’s onto something. That people today find baseball so tedious signals a significant shift in Western consciousness, which is one effect, for better or worse, of media.

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It might have been Edward Bellamy, in Looking Backward (1888), who first predicted that labor-saving devices would present Americans of the future with a problem they’d never faced before: What to do with all that leisure they would have?

Feeling busier than ever, we of course scoff at such optimistic naiveté. But Bellamy, who also envisioned debit cards and TV, was probably closer to the mark than might first appear. Americans could very well have more time on their hands than they realize. Considering how many hours most office workers fritter away at their computers, they might, if they applied themselves to the task at hand, be able to get their real work done in 45 minutes, tops.
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All social media is not created equal—but somehow it has all gotten lumped together under one title. And that is confusing everyone.

Though Facebook and Twitter are usually mentioned in the same breath by self-proclaimed “social media gurus” and network TV anchors, the two mediums don’t have that much in common. Facebook, originally created as a way for college students to ogle each other, is a vintage AOL chat room dressed up with pictures and the ability to choose who else can see those pictures. Twitter, on the other hand, is just a message board adorned with icons. Additionally, and most importantly, Facebook has a significantly larger audience than Twitter. The only quality the two really share is that they both reside on the Internet. (more…)

Lindsay Lohan’s “Labor Pains” is available today on DVD, just a few weeks after its world premier on ABC Family. The film isn’t funny or entertaining, but is worth watching—and perhaps owning—because it marks the end of the first and best phase of Lohan’s career. (more…)