Parenting norms come inevitably shaped by generational trends. My Uncle Robert will tell you that as a boy in Casper, Wyoming circa the mid-1950s, any adult could and would physically assault you for misbehavior, whether actual or perceived. Still, such threats of regular corporeal interventions from their elders failed to…

As Middle Child Appreciation Day arrives on August 12, a middle child case study for you: It’s Christmas some year in the early 2010s, a bygone era when CD burning was still a thing, but an old enough thing to have crossed the bounds of adolescent/youth culture and become known…

Sitting in stupefied awe during an early morning showing of “Barbie”, a line from Dave Eggers’ forward to Infinite Jest came to mind. He wrote that with most novels, “It’s possible… to break it down into its parts, to take it apart as one would a car or Ikea shelving…

Early on in “Fishes,” the Christmas nightmare episode of ‘The Bear,’ Donna Berzatto (Jamie Lee Curtis) does something with butter I’ve never seen before. Using her bare right hand, she slathers it onto bread, scooping out tablespoons at a time with her pointy, red-nailed fingertips and slapping it on slice…

Its inaugural season earned “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” a mostly positive response with one blaring exception — its flippant and ludicrous portrayal of motherhood. There are children on this show, but there’s not much mothering, and what little we do see in the mom-and-child department usually stinks, ranging from the…

Ted Lasso — protagonist of the eponymous Apple TV sitcom, played by Jason Sudeikis — kicks off the show’s first season by leaving his 7-year-old son back in America for a job coaching professional soccer (football!) in London. …

In the year 2006, my friend Erin and I were standing on an apartment balcony beneath a night sky too light-polluted by Denver’s electrical buzz to show any real muscle on the star front. Venus was up there, probably, joined by a scattered handful of other celestial entities flexing the…

Be it resolved that everyone on ‘Succession’ lives a life of inner solitude. An occasional exception emerges with the three younger adult siblings — Kendall, Shiv, and Roman—who might experience fleeting moments of genuine fellowship. Whether the trio is reminiscing about their idiot teenage years, goofing off on the Roy…

A shopworn pop culture observation for you: mothers are mostly absent in Disney movies, in fairytales. You know this already, though. To the Disney dearth of maternal casting, Mr. Walt’s mother died from a furnace leak in a house he’d purchased for her. Many speculate that guilt sprung from this…