In the past, personal information existed in dusty file cabinets, spread across multiple Midwestern states. People were ashamed to be file clerks, or if they weren’t ashamed, they at least had the decency to be drunk whenever possible. The notion of privacy—something which we eagerly gave up about a decade ago, but are only now starting to miss—was sacrosanct. You could actually talk about how something was ‘an invasion of privacy’ and people would not think you were aiming to shack up in the woods and pen a manifesto.

In addition to being a fascinating preview of the emotional and spiritual complexity David Chase would later achieve with The Sopranos, the 1990’s television series Northern Exposure also offers a glimpse into what it would feel like to turn 30. As Northern Exposure’s principal character Joel turns 30, he realizes that the things that once distinguished him as a medical prodigy are now simply ‘expected’ of him. He also lugs a canoe around a pristine forest, and bitches to a shaman-in-training who dines with Peter Bogdanovich. Ripped from the headlines, I know.

It’s been a while since I’ve lost my mind in Venice Beach, but even longer since I had ridden along the entirety of the bike-path. Six years, to be exact. Back in those days, I was crashing at my brother’s boardwalk pad — a glaringly pink building in the dirty heart of it all. We were writing a screenplay about getting lost in Italy that never came to fruition – like so many other hopes and dreams before and since.

After the success of the 2008 HBO Emmy award-winning documentary, “The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not for Sale”, (which documented his slow and shaky rise back to the top of the art world) Connelly is being honored with a retrospective of his work.

In 1890, William Jennings Bryan pontificated his way into historical relevance by proposing a monetary standard based on silver. Experts roundly condemned Bryan’s choice in precious metal as ridiculous, and further derided his selection of pocket-watches. “Brings out his stomach roll,” said one oft-quoted but rarely cited Yale scholar.