“Bringing back the joy”: Kamala Harris’ rally blows away JD Vance’s weird appearance across town by Amanda Marcotte

The news media that concentrates on politics is broken in about a dozen distinctly different ways, and I think one of the results is that most mainstream coverage I’ve seen is severely underestimating the positive effect of the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket emphasizing joy. The past ten years have been defined by the unfounded grievances of a lifelong criminal who has been given the helm of the Grand Old Party despite ample, inescapable evidence that he’s a compulsively immoral and monumentally stupid person. His takeover of the discourse has been so thorough that President Joe Biden can’t even have a simple press event about the return of hostages to their home U.S. soil without being badgered with inane, irrelevant questions about the tantrums of his misbegotten predecessor in the White House. I believe there exists as sizable portion of the population who takes the genuinely hopeful spirit of Harris’s campaign, which was kicked into overdrive by the addition of Walz, as an enormous relief they’ve been longing for. I think Amanda Marcotte does an exceptional job of capturing that sense in this piece, written for Salon.

The End of HBO Sunday Nights by Sam Adams

Writing for Slate, Sam Adams considers the erosion of HBO’s once sterling brand. He’s absolutely correct about the immediate import a series had when it got a Sunday night berth on the pay channel’s schedule, For years, our culturally committed household was sure to at least sample any new series that was given that privileged place. That’s done. If anything, Adams goes easy on David Zaslav’s disastrous leadership of the entertainment conglomerate that has reduced HBO to just another fungible thingummy in a their corporate junk drawer. Barring a major reinvention and probably the emancipation of the network from the indifferent overlords who see it as just another cell on the spreadsheet, its easy to imagine HBO disappearing into complete insignificance within the next ten years. At one point not so long ago, such a fate would have been unthinkable.