Posts Tagged ‘television’
“It’s about nothing”*…
Seinfeld, which originally aired on NBC from July 5, 1989, to May 14, 1998 (for a total of 180 episodes over nine seasons) ruled the airwaves during the 90s. Its reign continued, first in syndication, then streaming, and hold sway to this day. The series won all of the major awards for which it was eligible (a few, several times over) and is universally regarded as one of the greatest and most influential American shows of all time. Quotes from several of its episodes have become catchphrases in popular culture.
Most of us know Seinfeld, but not all of us… and even those if us who do, have more to learn. Andy Kirk is here to help…
I was intrigued by the possibilities of mixing work with pleasure: visually exploring a sitcom through its data.
Intrigued became compelled. I wanted to explore how Seinfeld and David, with the support of their evolving pool of talented writers, managed to achieve such sustained sitcom brilliance. Much like a sports coach seeks to assemble the right players in the right combinations, to win a game, how did the Seinfeld ‘coaching team’ use their resources to assemble the right characters in the right scenes, in order to score the laughs and create TV gold?
And so began a self-motivated, long-running, entirely unnecessary, data-driven exploration of every episode of Seinfeld.
The first product of this work was my 2020 publishing of The Seinfeld Chronicles, a limited-edition printed book presenting all my extensive analysis. With 176 copies released, matching the number of written episodes, this reached a small but exclusive, passionate, and generous audience.
A few years later, I decided it was time to revisit this work and develop a new format that could reach a wider audience…
A trove of insight into a epoch-defining sit-com and a glorious example of data visualization: “The Seinfeld Chronicles: Digital Edition,” from @visualisingdata.com.
* George explaining the premise of the show he and Jerry are trying to pitch to NBC
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As we codify comedy, we might recall (on this, National Junk Food Day) that it was on this date in 1988 that The New York Yankees traded Jay Buhner (along with minor leaguers Rich Balabon and Troy Evers) to the Seattle Mariners in exchange for 33-year-old first basemen and designated hitter Ken Phelps– widely considered one of the most lopsided deals in MLB history. While Phelps had a brief, productive stint in New York before being traded again, Buhner became a fan favorite and a legend in Seattle. Over his 14 seasons with the Mariners, he hit 310 home runs and was a key piece of the team that reached the ALCS in 1995, 1997, and 2000. He was inducted into the Seattle Mariners Hall of Fame in 2004.
In Seinfeld‘s seventh season episode “The Caddy,” Yankee’s owner George Steinbrenner (voiced by Larry David) visits George’s parents to (mistakenly) inform them that their son is dead. While George’s mother tears up, George’s father Frank (Jerry Stiller) responds…
“Paper is to write things down that we need to remember. Our brains are used to think.”*…
Henrik Karlsson argues that it can be more symbiotic than that…
Every few months I will read a tweet, or have a conversation, that makes me feel this is important, I must remember this. Often, these epiphanies are accompanied by a sense that I actually know this already, it had just somehow slipped my mind.
And for a few days, I do remember: my life shimmers with a new intensity, and I live the truth of what I grasped. But then, inevitably, the conveyor belt of things to pay attention to keeps churning, and my mind gets filled with small problems I need to solve, or new epiphanies or random noise, like news, and the shining fades from my eyes—I regress to being the same person as ever.
The Latin word for the tendency to lose track of what matters in the cacophony of things that attract our attention is stultitia. “Stultitia,” writes Michel Foucault in “Self-writing,”
is defined by mental agitation, distraction, change of opinions and wishes, and consequently weakness in the face of all the events that may occur; it is also characterized by the fact that it turns the mind toward the future, makes it interested in novel ideas, and prevents it from providing a fixed point for itself in the possession of acquired truth.
You can’t just read a blog post about high agency, get filled with a sense of possibility, and become, from then on, an agentic person. As John Gray puts it in his monograph on J.S. Mill, our character is “a cluster of habitual willings.” For changes to our behavior to become permanent, we must become different people.
In the same way that it is not enough to make a resolution that you will learn the piano, it is not enough to realize that when the kids act out, you shouldn’t lose your temper but slow down, listen, and regulate their nervous systems with the help of yours. Imagine how good a person I would be if having insights were enough! But reacting to the frustrations of your children with calm and curiosity is a skill as much as playing the piano is—and as with the piano, the act of learning it requires rewiring your nervous system through sustained attention and practice. Realizing the value of acting in a certain way might give you a temporary motivation to do it. But in order to actually live in accordance with what you believe in long-term, you must make it a habit.
And this is much harder than making a habit out of playing the piano. When you’re trying to make something like piano practice a habit, the standard advice is to chain it onto some already existing habit—to practice immediately after you brush your teeth in the morning, for example, or after you change out of your work clothes in the afternoon. Chaining the new habit to an already existing one provides a predictable trigger that helps remind you to practice. But the habits that make up our characters often do not follow a predictable schedule like this. I never know, for instance, when our children will act out (except that it will usually be when I’m least capable of handling it with grace—whenever both they and I are unusually hungry and tired). The conflicts seem to come out of nowhere, so I have to, somehow, always be ready to act in the proper way. I need to have the right reaction “ready at hand” (procheiron), as the Greek-philosopher-Roman-slave Epictetus put it. If Johanna and I talked about how we want to deal with the kids’ conflicts the night before, I will nearly always handle the situation well. The problem is to keep it top of mind.
During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation, in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that—unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them. If they needed courage, for instance, they could meditate on an anecdote that made it real for them what it meant to act bravely. The idea was that over time, the insights they gathered by reading would be transformed into character, something deeply ingrained in their way of thinking and seeing and acting.
This was, as I understand it, an exercise designed to combat the problem I outlined above. Meditating on what matters is a simple habit, which you can chain onto your morning routine, but it reinforces the habits you can’t plan, the habits that make up your character. It was, in the words of the French classicist Pierre Hadot, a spiritual exercise—an exercise because it required work and discipline, spiritual because it engaged the whole person, not just their intellect, but their emotions and their moral character. It was an attempt to treat the formation of character as a skilled practice, as something you can deliberately train and improve through targeted exercises…
…
… I have often noticed that my experience of reality improves if I write and think about something.
But it strikes me now that the practice Foucault wrote about was probably more transformative than what I’ve ended up doing. Essay writing is incredibly time-consuming, and a lot of that time is spent on things that aren’t self-transforming: I spend less time reshaping my mind than I spend solving literary-technical problems that help me write more functional and beautiful essays, for the joy of the craft and for the benefit of readers. Another limitation of my practice is that when an essay is done, I move on. The ideas—though they have been much deepened and more firmly lodged in my mind—fall out of attention and start to fade.
There is an element of self-deception involved here. I like to write essays, so it is comforting to think of it as a powerful practice, something that helps me live more fully and grow as a person. But if I look at it soberly, it is clear to me that essay writing is not a practice that is ideal for the purpose of ethopoiesis.6 It is common to think that what we do achieves what we want it to achieve, even if there is no evidence for it. There are many practices that promise to transform and improve us—therapy, meditation, psychedelics—, but that branding doesn’t mean that they actually do much for us: it is common to see people use these techniques for years without any obvious progress on their problems. If you want to achieve a particular outcome, it is important to start from that goal and evaluate which practices actually help you.
The most important ideas we need to return to weekly, even daily. Essay-writing, then, is not a functional substitute for having a practice that keeps the important truths top of mind, day after day. But it did help me reach that conclusion…
On a particular kind of commonplace book and staying centered: “How not to forget what matters,” from @henrikkarlsson.bsky.social.
* Abert Einstein
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As we contemplate contemplation, we might that it was on this date in 1949 that the first science fiction series debuted on American television, the DuMont Network’s Captain Video and His Video Rangers. Written by such luminaries as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, James Blish, and Jack Vance, it was– even in its time, when early television productions often were thrown-together affairs– considered crude, owing much to the fact that the daily show was done live on a meager budget. Indeed, the actors were paid so little they actually made more money from appearing in character at supermarket openings, county fairs, and the like than they did from their salaries.
Still, it ran for a total of 1,537 episodes, and quickly spawned competitive sci-fi offerings like Tom Corbet, Space Cadet and Space Patrol.
For episodes on YouTube, see here.
“Privacy is rarely lost in one fell swoop. It is usually eroded over time, little bits dissolving almost imperceptibly until we finally begin to notice how much is gone.”*…
… And now, indeed, we’re beginning to notice. Hana Lee Goldin surveys the state of play– who’s buying our personal information, what they’re using it for, and how the system works behind the screen– and considers our options…
Sometime in the mid-2000s, most of us started handing over pieces of ourselves to the internet without giving the exchange a second thought. We created email accounts, signed up for social media, bought things online, downloaded apps, swiped loyalty cards, connected fitness trackers, stored photos in the cloud, and agreed to terms of service that almost none of us have ever read in full. We did this thousands of times over two decades and counting, and each interaction felt small enough to be inconsequential.
But the accumulation is enormous. More than 6 billion people now use the internet, and each one makes an estimated 5,000 digital interactions per day. Most of those interactions happen without our conscious awareness: a GPS ping, a page load, an app opening, a browser cookie refreshing, a device checking in with a cell tower. The average person in 2010 made an estimated 298 digital interactions per day. In fifteen years, that number multiplied more than sixteenfold. Those digital interactions produce records that can persist indefinitely, stored, copied, indexed, bought, sold, and combined with other records to build profiles of extraordinary detail.
If we’ve been online since the late 1990s or early 2000s, our data footprint can include social media accounts we’ve created, online purchases we’ve made, forums we’ve posted in, loyalty cards we’ve used, and apps we’ve installed going back decades. Some of that information lives on platforms we’ve long forgotten. Some of it was collected by companies that have since been acquired or dissolved, with our data potentially passing to successor entities we’ve never heard of. The digital life most of us have been living for 15 to 25 years has produced a layered, evolving archive that only grows more valuable to the people who buy and sell it as time goes on.
Most of us sense that something is off about all of this. In a 2023 survey, Pew Research found that roughly eight in ten Americans feel they have little to no control over the data companies collect about them, 71% are concerned about government data use, and 67% say they understand little to nothing about what companies are doing with their personal information. The concern is real and widespread. And so is the feeling of helplessness: 60% of Americans believe it’s impossible to go through daily life without having their data tracked. The unease is there. What’s missing is a clear picture of what’s happening on the other side of the transaction…
[Goldin explains what data is being collected and shared, and by whom; how the data is managed and trafficked; how its being used (by insurance and financial companies, employers and landlords, retailers, AI companies, governments, and criminals); and how “inferred” data is used to augment the “hard” data. It’s chilling. She then puts the issue into context, and discusses we we can– and cannot– do about it…]
… The philosopher Helen Nissenbaum has a framework for what’s happening here: contextual integrity. The idea is that privacy isn’t about secrecy. We share information willingly all the time, when the context fits. We tell our doctor about a health condition because we expect that information to stay within the medical relationship. We search for symptoms on a health website because we assume that search won’t follow us into an insurance application. In the current data economy, that’s exactly the kind of boundary that dissolves, because the company collecting the data and the company buying it are operating in completely different contexts.
This is an information literacy problem as much as a privacy problem. Information literacy is usually framed around consumption: evaluating sources, questioning claims, recognizing bias in what we read and watch. But every time we interact with a digital service, we’re also producing information: generating a record that will be read, interpreted, scored, and acted on by organizations we may never interact with directly. Many of us have gotten better at questioning the information that comes at us: checking sources, noticing bias, and recognizing when something is trying to sell us a conclusion. But we haven’t developed equivalent habits around the information that flows from us: where it goes after we hand it over, who reads the record, what incentives they have, and what conclusions they draw. The gap between what we think we’re consenting to and what we’ve agreed to in practice is where the real exposure lives, and the system is designed to keep that gap invisible.
One of the reasons the “so what” question is hard to answer with action is that opting out of data collection often means opting out of participation. Declining a social media platform’s terms of service means not using the platform. Refusing location permissions can mean losing access to navigation, ride-sharing, weather, and delivery apps. Choosing not to create an account can mean paying more, seeing less, or being locked out of services that have become essential infrastructure for work, communication, healthcare, banking, and education.
The architecture of digital consent treats data sharing as a binary: agree to the terms or don’t use the product. There’s rarely a middle option that allows us to use a service while limiting what data gets collected and where it goes. The result is that the “choice” to share data often functions as a condition of entry into daily life rather than an informed negotiation. We’re not handing over data because we’ve weighed the tradeoff and decided it’s fair. We’re handing it over because the alternative is exclusion from services we rely on.
This is the structural context behind the Pew Research Center finding that more than half of Americans believe it’s impossible to go through daily life without being tracked. For many of us, it isn’t possible, at least not without significant inconvenience or sacrifice. The question isn’t whether we can avoid data collection entirely, because for the vast majority of people who participate in modern life, the answer is no. The question is whether we can make more informed decisions within the constraints we’re operating in, and whether the system can be pushed – through regulation, through market pressure, through better tools – toward something more transparent.
California’s Delete Act, which took effect in January 2026, is the strongest example of what’s emerging. It created a platform called DROP (Delete Request and Opt-Out Platform) that lets California residents submit a single deletion request to every registered data broker in the state. Brokers are required to process those requests, maintain suppression lists to prevent re-collection, and check the platform regularly for new requests. The European Union’s GDPR provides similar individual rights, and a handful of other U.S. states have enacted their own privacy laws with varying levels of protection. But the coverage is uneven: what’s available to a California or EU resident may not extend to someone in a state without comparable legislation.
Some services now automate parts of the opt-out process, submitting removal requests to dozens of brokers on our behalf. These can’t erase the data trail entirely, but they can narrow what’s actively available for sale.
Beyond deletion, there are smaller choices that reduce how much new data we generate. We can audit which apps have permission to track our location or access our contacts, since a surprising amount of behavioral data comes from apps that don’t need those permissions to function. We can treat “sign in with Google” and “sign in with Facebook” buttons as what they are: data-sharing agreements that can link a new service to an existing profile. And we can glance at the first few lines of a privacy policy before agreeing, looking for some version of “we may share your information with our partners,” where “partners” just means anyone willing to pay.
Most of us don’t read privacy policies, and the policies aren’t built to be read. They average thousands of words of dense legal language filled with terms like “legitimate interest,” “data processor,” and “de-identified data.” Studies consistently put them at a late high school to early college reading level (grade 12 to 14), but the difficulty goes beyond reading level: the concepts are abstract, the volume of agreements we encounter is enormous, and the design of the consent process itself pushes us through as fast as possible. Pre-checked boxes, auto-scrolling agreement windows, “accept all” buttons positioned prominently while “customize settings” options sit behind additional clicks. These are dark patterns, design choices that make the path of least resistance the path of maximum data sharing.
The result is a gap between the moment we share a piece of information and the moment that information shapes a decision about our lives. We don’t connect the app to the insurance premium or the loyalty card to the rental application because the chain of custody between them is long, complex, and designed to stay out of view.
The same critical thinking we’ve learned to apply to the information flowing toward us (checking sources, questioning claims, looking for bias) applies to the information flowing from us: who’s collecting this, what will they do with it, who else will see it, and what did we agree to? The difference is that in the data economy, we’re the product being evaluated, and the questions are being asked about us rather than by us.
So can we get it back? Not entirely. Data that’s already been collected, copied, sold, and processed across multiple systems can’t be fully recalled. What we can do is reduce what’s actively available for sale, slow the flow of new data going forward, and take advantage of legal tools that didn’t exist a few years ago. The archive of our past digital lives is too distributed to undo, but the file is still being written, and we have more say over the next page than we did over the last twenty years of them.
So what if they have our data? The tradeoff extends well beyond better ads. It reaches into the prices we’re charged, the credit we’re offered, the jobs we’re considered for, the insurance premiums we pay, the AI systems trained on our behavior, the accuracy of the profiles used to make decisions about our lives, and the degree to which government agencies can monitor our movements without a warrant. Every new service we sign up for, every permission we grant, and every terms-of-service agreement we accept adds another layer to that file. We can’t close the file entirely, but we can make more informed decisions about what goes into it next…
Eminently worth reading in full: “So What if They Have My Data?“
See also: “Why Do We Care So Much About Privacy?” (source of the image above) in which Louis Menand suggests that our concern should be with the “weaponization” of data…
* Daniel J. Solove, Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security
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As we reinforce our rights, we might recall that it was on this date in 1996 that the internet-as-we’ve-come-to-know-it broke big into the mainstream: Yahoo! launched the national campaign that asked “Do You Yahoo?” advertising its web-based search service on national television. The campaign was created by ad agency Black Rocket and Yahoo Marketing Head Karen Edwards (whose many awards for the work include a seat in the Advertising Hall of Achievement).
An early spot from the campaign…
“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.”*…
… Still, there are bills to be paid. Mathilde Montpetit (and here) on how the young Claude Monet made bank…
At the age of fifteen, Claude Monet was, by his own account, one of the most successful artists in Le Havre. Crowds would gather in the Norman port city to gawk at the pictures he sold through a framing shop: not paintings of haystacks or of the sea or water lilies, but slightly cruel caricatures of local bigwigs and minor celebrities. He had already learned to commercialize, charging his customers 20 francs (around 200€ in today’s money). “If I had continued”, he claimed to an interviewer in Le Temps almost fifty years later, “I would have been a millionaire.”
Spurred by profits, the young Monet was productive, creating up to seven or eight of these caricatures a day; a small collection of them is now held at the Art Institute of Chicago, most donated by the former mayor Carter Harrison IV (1860–1953). The French art historian Rodolphe Walter has claimed that his caricatures constituted a “clandestine apprenticeship”, the first attempts by a son of Le Havre’s bourgeois shipbuilders to make his way in the art world.
The earliest are anonymous: the identities of The Man in the Small Hat or The Man with the Big Cigar are now lost, although the framing shop devotees may well have been able to name them. Some of the works are imitations, like the 1859 drawing of the French journalist August Vacquerie (1819–1895) that Monet seems to have copied from Nadar (1820–1910), probably the period’s most famous caricaturist.
Monet’s own 1858 caricature of Léon Manchon, the treasurer of Le Havre’s Société des amis des arts, captures his subject’s appearance but also, in the background, both his love of the arts and his work as a notary. Most fantastical is the 1858 caricature of Jules Didier (1831–1914), which shows the 1857 winner of the Prix de Rome as a “Butterfly Man” being led on a leash by a dog. Monet scholars remain divided as to the symbolic meaning of the iconography, though more obviously derisive is the drawing of a dejected fellow applicant to an 1858 Le Havre art subsidy, Henri Cassinelli. Monet has captioned it “Rufus Croutinelli”: a slightly forced pun on “croute”, meaning a daub of paint. Monet didn’t receive the subsidy either.
Sixty-year-old Monet’s claims about how he could have made his young fortune probably had more to do with his later difficulties in selling Impressionism than the actual fortunes to be made in portraits-charge, but it was the roughly 2,000 francs (20,000€) from selling these caricatures that allowed him to, against his father’s wishes, move to Paris and begin training as an artist. (He also received a pension from his wealthy aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, with whom he had been living since his mother’s death in 1857.)
Perhaps it helped him in other ways as well. In the Le Temps interview, Monet claimed that it was while admiring his admirers at the framing shop window that he first encountered the work of his mentor Eugène Boudin (1824–1898), whose paintings were also hung there. Boudin would later take him en plein air for the first time. Perhaps, too, there’s something in the quickness of the caricature that speaks to what Impressionism would become — a desire to capture not just the literal appearance of a thing, but its true essence…
“Doing Impressions: Monet’s Early Caricatures (ca. late 1850s)” from @mathildegm.bsky.social in @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.
Re: the other end of Monet’s career, readers in (or visiting) the Bay Area might appreciate “Monet and Venice,” over a hundred works– mostly the fruits of Monet’s only visit to the City of Canals, but spiced with Venetian views from artists including Renoir, Sargent, and Canaletto– on display at the de Young Museum in San Francisco through July 26.
* Kurt Vonnegut
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As we cherish cartoons, we might might send pointedly-insightful birthday greetings to Peter Fluck; he was born on this date in 1941. An artist, caricaturist, and puppeteer, he was half of the partnership known as Luck and Flaw (with Roger Law), creators of the epochal British satirical TV puppet show Spitting Image.
The show ran from 1984 through 1996. (It was revived, with a different crew, in 2020.) Here’s a BBC appreciation of the original…
“Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”*…
Happy Charles Dodgson’s (Lewis Carroll’s) Birthday!
Just when we thought that there was nothing else about which to worry, a different kind of “alien” concern: Helen McCaw, and economist and former senior analyst at the Bank of England, has written to her former employer with a warning…
The UK must plan for a financial crisis that would be triggered if the US government announces that aliens exist, a former Bank of England expert has said.
Helen McCaw, who served as a senior analyst in financial security at the UK’s central bank, has written to Andrew Bailey, the Bank of England’s governor, urging him to set out contingencies in case the White House ever confirms the existence of alien life, according to The Times.
Ms McCaw, who worked for the Bank of England for 10 years until 2012, said politicians and bankers can no longer afford to dismiss talk of alien life, and warned a declaration of this nature could trigger bank collapses…
Read on: “Bank of England must plan for a financial crisis triggered by aliens, says former policy expert,” from @the-independent.com.
* often attributed to Arthur C. Clarke (but likely from Stanley Kubrick, quoting Carl Sagan [who was riffing on a Walt Kelly Pogo quote])
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As we acclimate to chaos, we might recall that it was on this date in 2021 that Resident Alien debuted (on Syfy).
Resident Alien is based on a comic book of the same name [by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse]. Created by Chris Sheridan, Alan Tudyk plays an alien who crash-lands in Patience, Colorado and immediately goes on a killing spree including the town’s doctor, Harry Vanderspeigle.
Taking on the form of Harry, the alien continued killing thinking that by doing so, it would be good for planet Earth. But then, he was overcome with human emotions and started questioning the morality of it all…
– source
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
– Lewis Carroll
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