Pop culture

The column used popular culture as evidence rather than as a subject. The one piece filed here reads a television drama about a chemistry teacher who starts manufacturing drugs as a statement about medical costs and West Coast life, on the argument that a show reaches an audience only once its premise already feels plausible to them.

No section of the portal is given over to culture. The habit that produced this piece — treat a widely shared story as data about what people believe, then go and check the published numbers — is what Society does with incomes and thresholds and what markets and energy does with quoted prices. The essay below keeps the address, the date and the signature from the snapshot, and the heading it is filed under is the author’s own.

Reading a drama as evidence works only if somebody then checks the figures it implies, and the portal’s habit is to do the second half: name the series, open the published number, state what it counts and what it leaves out. That is why culture appears here as an archive heading and not as a desk of its own. The essay listed below is reproduced as the snapshot carried it, under the rubric its author chose, at the address that has pointed to it for years.