This one was written by Jeremiah Lawson. Spoilers ahead! Brad Bird’s films may be some of the most misunderstood animated films released under the name of Disney/Pixar, thanks to film critics who, over against any of Bird’s own public statements, insist that he embraces and endorses an Ayn-Rand-style objectivism. There have been inevitable attempts to […]
Another Week Ends: Self-Citation, GoT Fatigue, Pros and Cons of Moral Lit, Wonder in Children's Books (and Movies), Millennial GENESI$, and Funeral Etiquette
1. In the academic world this week, a new study looks at self-citations among academics. One had 7,000 citations, which is pretty good–but more than 1400 of those came from his own (later) work. There’s some ‘bootstrapping’ for you. The study also found that men over the last couple hundred years have cited to themselves […]
Three Minutes of Pixar Easter Eggs
Because we could all use a mental health break this AM:
p.s. Remember when we released “The Gospel According to Pixar”? Me neither…
The Short-Term Memory of God: The Gospel According to Finding Dory
Finding Dory — Pixar’s latest box office smash — picks up where Finding Nemo left off, a year after that rebellious clownfish was found and rescued from the dentist’s tank in Sydney, Australia. Nemo’s friend, Dory, a natural blue who suffers from short-term memory loss, isn’t adjusting well to daily life in the Great Barrier […]
Another Week Ends: St. Paul’s Gift, Princeton’s Fifth Quintile, Biden’s Kierkegaard, Russia’s Soul, Pixar’s SadLab, and the Peak of Television
1) After the seriously powerful interview Colbert conducted with Vice President Joe Biden, Quartz did a closer look on the guiding philosophy that helped Biden endure the loss of his son Beau. If you’ve not watched the interview, well, go ahead and do that, but Biden describes a note that his wife left him on […]
Thou Shalt Never Feel Bad: Inside Out for the Ivy League
Sadness is having a cultural moment, and that makes me happy. Much of this is thanks to Pixar’s Inside Out, that rare film which deserves all the success and acclaim being heaped upon it. There are any number of reasons to laud the movie, as DP pointed out a couple weeks ago. Its artistic merits […]
Gospel According to Pixar: Inside Out
The reviews for Pixar’s latest, Inside Out, are not just hype. I went to see the movie on Tuesday night, and I’m still processing different parts of it, which to me is always the sign of a goodie. It’s exactly what we’ve come to expect from Pixar: appealing to all ages – wholesome, charming fun […]
Another Week Ends: Kafka's Facebook, Pre-cations, New Hugo, New Pixar, the Empathy Police, and Kid Worship
1) Facebook at the top of our list again this week, thanks in whole to Joshua Rothman’s New Yorker article, “In Facebook’s Courtroom.” The article depends on a deadly cocktail of TMZ’s Ray Rice video release and Kafka’s “The Trial.” What he gets at, in doing so, is the idea of Facebook as our junk-room […]
Another Week Ends: Religious Justice, Self-Esteem Pathologies, WWE SummerSlam, and Jealous Partners
1) Well, if you planned on taking your kids to see Planes, thinking it would be the aviary of the Cars legacy, think again. As it has happened before, Pixar has created something seemingly unrepeatable, except unto itself (and unto scripture), and the Atlantic tells us what it is. Luke Epplin says it is the […]
Another Week Ends: Blame Games, Law/Gospel Lunches, FOMO, Tom Wolfe, Lou Reed on Yeezus, Luther S3, and Middleton's Law
Let the pinning commence – not sure what we were waiting for but Mbird is now on Pinterest! Pretty gratifying to see six year’s worth of visual silliness in one place. Also, pre-registration for our Fall Conference near Houston, TX opens next week, on August 1st. Theme this time will be “Overextended, Under God: Christian […]
Pixar and the Beauty of Ugly Emotions
The reviews are in for Pixar’s latest project, Monsters University, and most of its criticisms direct readers to previous films in the franchise, implying Pixar has produced better (reinforcing the Law of High Quality Content). But the reviewers still say that the film is immensely entertaining. I can’t disagree. I loved its parallels with the […]
Another Week Ends: Snowden Psychology, Child Stars Grown Up, Sleep Perfomance, the Science of Risk-Management, and Ira Glass on Jesus Freaks
1) I guess the graduation speeches were of quite the well-suited ilk this year—fitted more for the heart and less the diploma. Jonathan Safran-Foer spoke at Middlebury’s graduation (the transcript was then printed for the Times), and talked a lot about today’s ease of communication and, thus, today’s relational retreat. Entitled “How Not To Be […]