u/Snoo-93317

Relevance: Ezra often discusses how impordent houssing is. This article is about a particular form of high density houssing that may also help ameliorate Americans' social atomization.

She seems only to host one or two out of every ten episodes for the past few years. If she's retired or semi-retired, they should just announce that and take her name off the show. It's silly to call it Fresh Air with Terry Gross if she's gone the vast majority of the time.

Relevance: Bill just discussed the decline of reading with Klosterman.

TL;DR: Contrary to the recent Atlantic piece and many others, it turns out that Americans (esp. young Americans) aren't reading that much less. In fact, the young may be reading slightly more. The vast majority of the decline in reading is happening among seniors, who now scroll and watch TV rather than read. The most voracious readers seem to be reading more. Book sales are at record highs and Americans report reading slightly more books per year in 2026 than in 2001. The amount of screentime today isn't that much higher than in the past: in 1968 children under 6 watched 54 hrs of TV per week. Perhaps most important of all, the data show that most Americans never read much at all to begin with, even decades ago.

Look at movies based on sketch comedy. 9 out of 10 are bad. For every The Blues Brothers or Wayne's World, there's a Coneheads, It's Pat, Stuart Saves His Family, The Ladies Man, Good Burger, etc.

What's funny in a 10 min sketch is exhausting when stretched to 2 hrs. Sketch characters are built around an exaggerated trait so they can make an immediate impression in short bursts. You don't want to be stuck with them for an entire movie. Why spend two hours with a character whose whole personality is being angry?

AVGN is even harder to adapt than most sketch comedy because it's fundamentally a review show. There's no obvious way to turn that format into a feature film. On top of that, James has no range as an actor. He's a ham who yells and makes goofy faces. His acting could never get people emotionally invested in an actual story.

The whole thing was a bad idea. He would've been better off using the money to direct a horror movie using low-cost locations around his area instead of chasing this bloated white-elephant project that ended up breaking the channel.

Rockets with 31 at the half. It's ugly out there.