Dir. Wolfgang Becker. Starring Daniel Bruhl, Katrin Saß, Maria Simon After her husband escapes to the west, a single mother of two, Christiane Kerner (Saß), becomes deeply involved in East German politics. The government is grateful. Such people are common enough in any nation: they devote themselves at a local level and become symbols at… Read More Good Bye, Lenin! (2003)
Dir. Lone Scherfig. Starring Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina Movies about young adults very frequently – that is, always – feel a need to tell the audience that their characters change. One’s teenage years [he sighed while cleaning his eyeglasses] are the beginning of a life’s summer, after a springlike childhood and before the autumn… Read More An Education (2009)
In this episode – our tenth! – Matt and I talk about a pair of our favorite books. Matt talks about how Anil’s Ghost literally changed the trajectory of his life, making some stops along the way for discussions of epistemology; I make it my life’s podcast’s work to bend the allusions in A Prayer… Read More Baumann and Burch, Episode 10: Isn’t It Pretty to Think So?
It’s uploaded! Another podcast here, in which Matt and I imagine backyard football versions of seven-a-side, two-way NFL players. In this brave new world, who’s running the triple option? Who’s actually going to have a pro-style offense with a quarterback who can play linebacker too? Are we still upset about actual NFL drafts from five… Read More Baumann and Burch, Episode 9: Phil Loadholt Throwing Marcus Mariota
If you have just one white liberal friend on Facebook, you’ve already seen the image that says while Hillary Rodham was campaigning for Barry Goldwater, Bernie Sanders was a significant activist in the Civil Rights movement, marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. For these same white liberals, it is inconceivable that Bernie Sanders should be… Read More Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders
In August 2001, my family and I visited the Statue of Liberty. It was a deeply influential day in my life, mostly because I was very interested in Americana at that point in my life. History interested me, and the symbols of America (such as they were in the eyes of a white boy) were… Read More Arthur S7E10, “April 9th”
Dir. Ron Howard. Starring Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Matthew Macfadyen Howard Zinn is probably the most important historian that the United States has ever produced. (Sorry, Charles Beard. I love you too.) Regardless of how you feel about him – in other words, regardless of whether or not you think “historical revisionism” is an honest… Read More Frost/Nixon (2008)
Matt and I, in this newest podcast, take on a topic which we are intimately familiar with and which we have spent virtually no time on in these podcasts: books. In what we hope will become a recurring subject, we talk about some books that we’ve read recently and talk about what interested us in… Read More Baumann and Burch, Episode 8: Author Cheese Wheel
While Glee was premiering on Fox in the fall of 2009, NBC was airing a new comedy of its own. Unlike Glee, an hour-long program which pretended to be comedy but which ended up plowing for drama and reaping awkward silences, Community was a half-hour program which knew it was funny and aspired to become… Read More Community S1E21, “Contemporary American Poultry”
Matt and I return to the wide world of sports in our latest podcast. We share the highlights of an NBA fantasy draft. Find out why, in this universe, there is hope for the Charlotte Hornets, no hope for the Sacramento Kings, and why neither one of us drafted Kobe Bryant. If you want to… Read More Baumann and Burch, Episode 7: Why the Sacramento Kings Will Be Terrible Forever, and Other Results of an NBA Fantasy Draft
Seeing Things Secondhand 