I remember hearing once that FBI agents who had wiretaps on various mafia operations noted a change in the speaking style of the gangsters they were monitoring after Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather was released in 1972.  The real gangsters began imitating the patois of their film counterparts, thoroughly identifying with their brutal ethos. 

Excerpt from one of Deborah Solomon's infamously condensed interviews in The New York Times Magazine. (I like them.) With Douglas Coupland, famous Canadian, infamous coiner of the term Gen X.

Recently, I was browsing the bookstore in United’s terminal, in San Francisco’s international airport, with the aim of picking up a book, any book, of literary criticism for the long flight to Germany.

Like many of you, I saw James Cameron’s Avatar over the winter break. The film offers a theory of representation based on a genetic (but technologically sealed) connection between a human interloper’s body and an “Avatar,” a modified, organic, native Na’vi body that can be moved by thought via a semi-organic, “plugged in” technological matrix.

In his reply to my recent blog post, Joel Burges raises an important question: does the new imaginative thinking about history I find in recent literature and cinema also mean a "return to liberalism"?