The Cassette-Tape Revolution by Jon Michaud

I am of the exact right age to be enthralled by a brief treatise on the bygone pleasures of the cassette tape, which is exactly what Jon Michaud provides in this piece. Using the new book High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape as a jumping off point, Michaud writes about the flaws and attributes of the format, emphasizing the easily forgotten truth that it provided a highly revolutionary empowerment of music fans at the time. As someone who toiled over countless mix tapes, I can confirm it was a thrill to reconfigure my music collection to my liking and to communicate through the art of the song sequencing. This article is published by The New Yorker.

The ‘80s in 40: ‘Porky’s’ (March 21, 1982) by Keith Phipps

This essay is part of an ongoing effort at The Reveal to characterize and analyze the shifts in American cinema across the nineteen-eighties, focusing on one title per three-month period. Focusing on movies that made a significant cultural impact regardless of their quality can lead a writer down some strange byways, and so Keith Phipps slings a whole bunch of words about the inane sex comedy Porky’s, which was a sizable hit in 1982. The film is junk, as Phipps readily acknowledges, but the piece is highly entertaining, effectively capturing a strange moment in Hollywood history when thinly plotted teen sex romps came tumbling off the studios’ conveyor belts.