It's the Brian Laird show on W.N. Y.C.

Good morning again everyone.

Jake Caspian Kang is back with us.

Staff writer for the New Yorker, an Emmy nominated documentary film director

and author of the book The Loneliest Americans, his book

about Asian American politics identity and culture.

In his New Yorker column last week, Jay picked up on a classic book of media criticism from the 1980s called

amusing ourselves to death to say that now we're in an era of arguing ourselves to death as a point of media criticism.

We're going to play an old clip of the amusing ourselves to death author Neil Postman

to set this up. It's really interesting I think. But first let's say hello to Jay.

Thanks for coming on for this and welcome back to WNYC. Hi thank you. It's

always a pleasure to be here. So would you like to give people who don't know the late Neil Postman's work a little

prelude? What was the premise of amusing ourselves to death, his book that came out in the 80s that was on your mind here in 2024.

Right, so in 1984 to, I guess to celebrate or discuss the book by George Orwell.

Postman and a bunch of other academics

and thinkers were invited to kind of reflect

on what had happened and what totalitarianism or whatever would look like.

And what Postman argued was that Orwell, in fact,

had not been correct, right?

Orwell had envisioned this idea of Big Brother reaching out

and controlling everything in that censorship

would be the big problem.

...