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Month: April 2018

“The Alienist”– Something Wicked This Way Comes

“The Alienist”, a TNT psychological thriller set in 1896, is based on the novel by Caleb Carr. People with mental illness were once considered “alienated from society,” unfathomable to doctors and laymen alike. Those who thought they could treat them were referred to as alienists, pre-dating the Freudian psychiatric movement by more than a decade. The Alienist foreshadows the Freudian theory of the unconscious, and the incipient emergence of forensics (including the first attempts at fingerprinting). If that is not enough, the series also foreshadows the suffragist...

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Seven Seconds–Black Lives Matter?

  The Netflix Original  series Seven Seconds (premiered February 23) is about race, corrupt police and unequal justice. In the opening scene a hit-and-run of an African-American teenager by a white Jersey City rookie cop (Beau Knapp) is covered up by three other members of the police force. The story is harrowing and complicated, with several subplots that are not resolved. But the seminal theme is clear: does a hit-and-run crime against a young black fifteen-year-old go unpunished, no matter what the evidence or the commitment of the prosecutor? In ten episodes, Seven Seconds gives us...

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“The Internet’s Own Boy”: The Story of Aaron Swartz

  Chronicling the life and tragic death of computer wunderkind Aaron Swartz (1986-2013), “The Internet’s Own Boy” is a documentary that pulls the viewer into a life too brief and incredibly brilliant as we witness a young boy’s intellectual development as well as his emotionally opaque inner life. The testimony of those who deeply loved him and grieved over his untimely death at the age of 25 is sensitively and truthfully conveyed. A master in software development (some would argue the computer programmer equivalent of the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking), Aaron...

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“Roseanne” (2018): Neither Here Nor There

Having the highest ratings for any network sitcom in almost four years, the revival of the ABC television show “Roseanne” had 18.2 million viewers last week, and features most of the original cast. And then this high-concept sitcom begins to evoke memories of the good old days of “Roseanne” and “All in the Family”, with the same old-fashioned couch, the living room that made “Roseanne” a bona fide pioneer (1988-1997) with its focus on blue-collar Americans in Lanford, Illinois. Still set in this fictional town in the Midwest, now Roseanne is back, and Trump...

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