Sadly the right used to be the ones insisting that people should know Shakespeare.

Dear John Teti: please make it 2011 again through science or magic

Boys! AVENGE ME!

Thanks for saying Shakespeare plays are so dull that only snobby liberal elites go to them, assholes.

Reddit? Show your face here, Teti!

'I was under the impression that they posted the sex clip without permission from the parties involved'

100k? Dude are you hiring English teachers? I've published a book!

Well, he did say 'authoritative' when I'm pretty sure he meant 'authoritarian', so he's clearly an idiot and deserved to have his mic cut.

LOL LAZY TEACHERS GET SUMMERS OFF MAGA

'Interesting field but does seem hard to get historian work.'

Dude listens to prog; he probably 'expands his horizons' to Tarkus every night

I was thinking of using him as an example, yes. We certainly live in a fallen world.

I argue that it's the Poptimist milieu that encourages people to make arguments like 'Bolton's ok because he's self-aware' or 'Celine Dion's nice so we shouldn't make fun of her music' (both of which show up in some form in these comments). It's looking for rationales to 1) try to read something worthwhile into these…

I stand by my assessment! And I fail to see how self-awareness makes Michael Bolton's music any less shitty. Kids today don't remember what it was like when his cover of 'When A Man Loves a Woman' was everywhere <shudder>

Absolutely. I hate the conceit that for a show to be worthwhile it has to develop and maintain a plot arc from premiere to finale (see the ridiculous frustration with people who complain that the characters in Silicon Valley don't seem to be making any progress), and Veep seems to have become a casualty of that kind…

The exact same thing has happened to Michael Bolton and Enya. I blame Poptimism, or, perhaps more fairly, the recent cultural shift where saying anything critical about popular music is criticized as elitist.

How do you keep up with the news like that?

I grew up two miles from Centralia (one of the local historians who gets interviewed a lot for Centralia documentaries was a neighbor of mine). Sadly it's actually no worse than any of the other local towns.

Disclosure was one of their top-tier episodes, by far the best one this year.

I think its quality decline began when they ditched the initial premise of the show and had Selina become president, so Iannucci's not entirely off the hook (indeed his limited acquaintance with American politics is probably responsible for some of the ridiculous plot turns of the past few seasons.) However the…