Let’s be honest: Neither of us is actually going to sit through the recently-released Star Trek: The Next Generation DVDs, no matter how much we want to. We don’t have time and, despite appearances, we still have some dignity.

Fortunately, AICN has done it for us. And they’ve helpfully pulled all the good nuggets from the interviews with TNG writers (including the great Ron Moore, but not, so far as I can tell, the great Jane Espenson).

Of course, if you can name two or more writers from TNG, maybe the dignity hang-up is a stretch.

Just in case you think I’m kidding, snack on this little morsel:

* Patrick Stewart, perhaps envious of William Shatner, apparently told every TNG writer he met that Picard wasn’t “shooting and screwing” enough.

* Berman kept a (posthumous?) bust of Gene Roddenberry in his office that he would blindfold so Roddenberry couldn’t see what Berman and his staff were doing to Roddenberry’s universe.

* Moore’s nickname during season three was “Young Peter Guillam,” the character played by “Into Darkness” star Benedict Cumberbatch in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”

* A model of the Enterprise Moore built as a youth was used as a prop in Kirk’s quarters for the movie “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.”

Yeah, I’m pretty hot and bothered, too. Enjoy.

“If Koch Brothers Buy LA Times, Half of Staff May Quit”

Because, you know, the want ads are chock-effing-full of media jobs. Heck, I hear that the Atlantic Monthly–one of the most august publications in America–is desperate for content. Just so long as the writers don’t need to get paid.

But the best part of this headline is the total obliviousness to the fact that if you believe that the Kochs are philanthropic equivalent of Bush-McChimp-Hitler–as the LAT staff seems to–then having half the staff quit–rather than have to be fired or bought out–would be a feature and not a bug, no?

And journalists wonder why people hate them.

Over at The New Atlantis with a deeply-engaged review of Evgeny Morozov’s The Save Everything Click Here. Her essay is, as you’d expect, a pretty good discussion-starter on Morozov and the world of techno-utopianism. Sample awesome:

In Buddhist philosophy, people are encouraged to embrace discomfort and inconvenience as important aspects of a fully lived life. But most people aren’t Buddhists; they want convenience, and insofar as we are living in a convenience culture, we are actively discouraged from living with limits and instead taught to treat them as simply technical problems to overcome — bumps on the road to glorious efficiency and greater happiness. The technologies we buy to make our lives more convenient inherently discourage conscious reflection about our use of them. As a 2012 advertisement for the iPadput it, “When a screen becomes this good, it’s simply you and the things you care about.”

And:

For his part Morozov embraces “a dynamic view of selfhood as something that emerges only slowly and gradually — both in the context of individual self-development and across generations in the broader historical context,” and he correctly notes that our technologies “actively shape our notion of the self; they even define how and what we think about it.” But apart from politics, he says little about other social and cultural institutions that contribute to the construction of the self, and that also offer havens from the relentless self-exposure that our use of technology demands — havens that will become more important in the future.

This strikes me as (possibly) the heart of most of our discussions about modernity. Both the state and technology are expanding and laying claim to authorities which have historically been the province of the institutions of civil society. Part of that is ideological; part of it is practical. And some institutions of civil society have shriveled on their own while others have been actively crowded out by, for instance, the pervasive, all-devouring “morality” of the free-market.

Rosen is pro-Morozov (albeit with some reservations) but her sense is that Morozov’s critique of techno-utopianism is incomplete in some fundamental ways. But that doesn’t make it any less welcome.

Holy crap–now this Jason Collins essay in Sports Illustrated is news:

“I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay.”

I had no idea Jason Collins was black. Who knew?

So let’s say the Miami Heat win the next couple of NBA titles–not a lock or anything, but not-small possibility.

Head coach Erik Spoelstra will then have won three titles in row and championships in half of his first six seasons as a head coach in the NBA. By the numbers, you’d have to regard him as one of the all-time greats, no?

He’ll be up there with Phil and Lenny, Pop and Slick Rick.

It’ll be kind of insane, of course. But hey, what are you going to do–just be a h8r? Championships.

Exit Question: How long is it until ESPN the Magazine or SI or someone else starts pushing the “Is Coach Spo going to Springfield?” line?

I’ve got a What to Expect-related piece over at Slate, in case you’re interested. The comments section could be fun.

The great Walter Russell Mead has a short, kind, and very blurbable review of What to Expect in Foreign Affairs.

Ace of Spades sounds like he’s being drawn against his will into the Marvel Phase 2 project. He pokes fun at the new Thor: Into Darkness trailer and makes a crack about the villains being Dark Elves. Here, I’ll let him do the funny in his own words:

So here’s Thor 2, in which Thor teams up with Loki to stop… I don’t know, they’re called Dark Elves or something. I notice they don’t say “Dark Elves” in the trailer. Prudent of them. We have to preserve some sense of dignity. Going to a movie where we’re told right up front is about Dark Elves would deny us that figleaf of dignity.

This brings up a really interesting question: In a contest between WoW nerds and comic book nerds, who’s the winner (loser?) dignity wise? Having been on both sides of this contest at various points in my life, it seems like a pretty close call.

Ace then closes out with this great little hand-grenade:

Exit question: Aren’t these movies the Star Wars of the twenty-aughts and twenty-teens? It’s a fictional universe in which Guardians with Special Powers maintain Peace and Order in the Galaxy. Isn’t Captain America just a Jedi with a high-tech shield instead of a high-tech sword?

Isn’t Iron Man just Chaotic Good Boba Fett?

Isn’t Jarvis just disembodied C3PO?

And isn’t the Hulk just Gamma-Wookie?

He had me at “Chaotic Good Boba Fett.” Well played.

Meanwhile, Allahpundit is not amused.

Truth be told, I’m basically ready to buy in to Marvel Phase 2. Looking back on Phase 1, it’s interesting how uneven the Marvel films were in quality. I think we could classify Iron Man and Avengers as top-shelf productions–well-crafted with a real sense of what they were doing. And quite winning. Captain America was the next tier down–a great first and second act, and loads of promise, diminished only by the paint-by-numbers third act. Thor was a little less impressive still. And Iron Man 2 is a complete disaster.

As far as batting averages go, that’s certainly respectable, but it’s not like Marvel is working on a Pixar-like streak of quality.

This means that (1) We’re likely to get some more crap in Phase 2–and if Guardians of the Galaxy is anything better than Green Lantern with plushies, I’ll be surprised; and (2) It’s not like Phase 2 is trying to live up to some unattainable ideal from Phase 1. There’s room–lots of it–for improvement.

What’s interesting to me is that Marvel doesn’t seem to have a systematic approach to assembling their film projects. There doesn’t seem to be a “Marvel Method” for the film universe. Look at the directors they’ve chosen: Whedon, Branagh, Johnston, Favreau. You can try to find some common theme with them, but it’s pretty hard. Now look at the Phase 2 directors: James Gunn.  Alan Taylor. The Russo Bros. You might remember them from such classics as You, Me, & Dupree and Super. And lots (and lots) of TV work. The only stud in the bunch is Shane Black–who is awesome. But again, it’s interesting to think about the kind of managerial process which hands pieces of big, expensive, interrelated movies to Kenneth Branagh, Alan Taylor, and Shane Black. Maybe there’s a coherent worldview to that, but I can’t intuit it.

In fact, looking at the writing-directing teams from Phase 1 and now from Phase 2, I only see two likely conclusions. Either (1) Marvel has decided that it doesn’t care about a writer-director’s pedigree, they’re just hiring talent that has figured out a great way to tell their particular story. Or (2) Marvel has decided that writing-directing talent is secondary to the power of the characters and pre-existing story pieces which they’ve already generated through the comics. Why else move down from (mostly) proven feature-film directors to marginal film and TV directors for Phase 2?

Two other notes: First, Marvel now has their hands on Daredevil, which is great. There’s at least one awesome Daredevil movie to be made, and I nominate Joe Quesada’s Daredevil: Father arc which very artfully tells the Daredevil origin story (which any rebooted DD will have to do) but does it in an extended series of flashbacks while DD is solving a crime–and it does so in a way that makes the origin the payoff. It’s great and honestly it would be a little crazy not to start DD this way and then bring in the Kingpin or Bullseye or Elektra or some other classic Daredevil foe in the sequel. Not that I’ve thought about this or anything.

Second, I wonder if Marvel is ever going to give one of their house comics writers a shot at writing one of the movies. Though I suppose you could count Whedon in this, since he only wrote the best X-Men run in the history of the book.

Does someone you love suffer from the “soap-opera effect”?

Do you?

If so, you don’t need to endure strange and off-putting image enhancement ever again. Nerds are here to help.

As the kids say, for this headline:

“David Sirota should be happy: You can’t get much more Caucasian than Chechens!”

With the new trailer I’m in on Man of Steel. All in. Here’s my $20 for the IMAX Digital-Oral 4D experience. Take it in advance.

A pretty deep essay about the cosmological nature of the fight:

Too many of them think that same-sex marriage is merely a question of sexual ethics. They fail to see that gay marriage, and the concomitant collapse of marriage among poor and working-class heterosexuals, makes perfect sense given the autonomous individualism sacralized by modernity and embraced by contemporary culture—indeed, by many who call themselves Christians. They don’t grasp that Christianity, properly understood, is not a moralistic therapeutic adjunct to bourgeois individualism—a common response among American Christians, one denounced by Rieff in 2005 as “simply pathetic”—but is radically opposed to the cultural order (or disorder) that reigns today.

They are fighting the culture war moralistically, not cosmologically. They have not only lost the culture, but unless they understand the nature of the fight and change their strategy to fight cosmologically, within a few generations they may also lose their religion.