Mad Men: A fair assessment

I've long been a fan of Mad Men, for many reasons and on many levels. I'm not going to go into all that here, but I will note a recent New York magazine review that I think captures beautifully what this show is all about.

The review was written right before Season 5 began, and it bats back some critics' complaints that the show doesn't serve history as it should by perfectly encapsulating the era. The review argues -- so correctly -- that this was never the intention of Mad Men.

This show is what all great writing should be: a window into the human condition. Mad Men is a perfect (silent) canvas on which life, hope, and good and evil play.

(And a side note on any suggestions that Mad Men has a soap opera flair: Well, how many times in your life have you had a tangled day and thought to yourself, "My life is like a soap opera"? I find the show completely realistic, the characters very well developed, and each episode self-resolving. Not much of a soap opera from where I'm sitting.)

The review uses the word "intimate," a great observation, and also notes Mad Men's resistance to a "master narrative" that has to be resolved or kept wound around its characters.

A great show (although, as always, beware before jumping in), and a great review.

Awesome archives

One of the best things newspapers have to offer these days is their incredible wealth of knowledge, information, and ability to capture and explain history.

The reason we still have journalism is because you can't just report the news -- you also have to give it context. Two of the best ways to do this are through exceptional photography and superior analysis, which is why I've always been a fan of the New York Times.

Now, paywall-free, the Times is offering a look at a bunch of its archive photos. Not only are the photos incredible, but the captions offer enough of a context that you can tell there's a whole different world out there.

The Boston Globe has jumped on board with its own archive series.

How Mad Men is a metaphor for the Masters

I couldn't write it better than Brian Phillips on Grantland, so I shall link to him.

This is a great piece about how some of the themes of Mad Men can be seen in the modern day Masters.

A couple of killer quotes: "Why does Jim Nantz narrate the Masters as if he's already nostalgic for the things he's describing, even while they're taking place?"

"No one wants to go back to the America of Mad Men, but a lot of people want to go to the costume party."

A God outside of Time

I spent parts of today and yesterday reading Time magazine, one of my favorites. Time was started by two overachieving Yale graduates who wanted to take all the news in the world and condense it into something manageable and visually appealing. They wanted to save their readers time by telling them everything they needed to know about the nation and the world during the week in just one place. That mission continues today, and I think Time is a great place to go to keep up with major events in politics, the world, and culture. It has great storytelling, analysis, and photos especially. And it’s a heck of a lot easier and fun than reading the newspaper every day.

One of Time’s signature approaches is that it focuses on people. This, too, goes back to when the magazine first started. The founders latched on to what would become the hidden ethos of the 20th century, that people are always interested in other people – that people are the center of the world, of the events that intrigue us. To an extent, their approach even supported the burgeoning acceptance of secular humanism, where people are not only the center of the world but are also the aim for all that is good. The advancement of people is the advancement of the world, and as such, the human race should be rooting for the success of people, and believing that all people are basically good and that the human spirit will win out in the end.

This brand of human optimism is now commonplace in modern culture. Whether we state it overtly or not, I think plenty of us in modern America agree with it. Even if we don’t buy into secular humanism or think that people are intrinsically good, we do make people the center of our world. And we often root for people to be triumphant. We find great hope and encouragement in human accomplishment.

I certainly grew up with some of these beliefs nestled into my subconscious, and that may be why I was always so attracted to Time. I loved the profiles and the interviews, the power shots of the people who were changing the world. Issues of the magazine dedicated to the 100 people of the year, or the one person of the year, made sense to me. Lauding a world leader or a musician for making this world feel like a better place didn’t seem odd.

But now that I’m a bit of an adult, and now that I’ve spent years studying the world and human behavior via my profession (journalism), I’ve found I’ve taken a different view of Time magazine.

I still read it every week, and I love it, but the issues focused on people and people alone are no longer my favorite.

This week’s issue was the 100 people of the year for 2012. As I sat and read the entries, which are written by some other "noteworthy" person who comments on the person who made the list, I became fatigued. The same thing happened last year, although I remember being annoyed then by something else: that the authors writing about the Time 100 were more prone to talk about why they themselves were important.

This year, as I passed through paragraph after paragraph of why these people were incredible and how they were making the world so wonderful, I felt myself shrugging more than feeling enthralled. For all the human good, this world is still such a messy place. I want a little more awesome than that.

If this is the pinnacle of human life, I thought, we are a bit doomed, because this doesn’t do much for me. Is this the highest I can hope? What does it mean to be on this list?

For some people, landing on a list like that will be the height of their achievement. Whether it’s the Time 100, an Oscar, a Pulitzer prize, or another great award, that’s how human success is measured.

But even the greatest human success doesn’t make much of a dent in this world.

At that point, something a friend once said crossed my mind. When talking about God and philosophy, she once said that God is outside of time – that He isn’t related to time the same way we are. We see life as a series of events, a this leading to that, a timeline. But the very idea of God is that He is a Being Who defies those parameters, Who just sees us as us, unfettered by time. Time doesn’t exist to Him except as a tool, an object to be used for different purposes.

Now, that’s a pretty deep topic, and one I don’t have a lot of formed thoughts on. But at its root is the idea that God – in the true sense of the word – is much bigger than this world in so many ways. The way we think this world works is very small compared to how He can use it.

When we see injustice, He can bring grace, and not just the kind of grace where a good person does a good deed but gets trampled in the end. His grace wins; His love wins; His redemption wins. He is outside the hurt and decay in this world, with the power to make all things new.

When we see achievement, we can only go so far. We can only reach a certain degree of success, and many people who get a rough start or hit unfair points in life can never get that. But God is sovereign and outside it all. When He wants something to happen, it happens.

A lot of times, we don’t give God the credit of being God. We deify Him into being partially powerful, or somewhat capable. But if He’s truly God in the real sense of the word God, He has control over everything and can do what He wants in all things. He is outside of it, in control of it all, and not able to be swayed.

God is outside of time, but that doesn’t tell us much, especially if we don’t really understand what it means. But God is also outside of Time, and that means a lot.

God is bigger than the Time 100 and all that it represents. That means that when our list of 100 people who are changing the world still leaves us with an ugly, hateful, spite-filled world, good remains. That means that when the Time 100 don’t enthrall us but rather leave us wondering what the point of it all is, hope still lives. That means that after a century of picking out people and trying to elevate them enough that it could save the world, we don’t have to rely on them to carry us through. Humans don’t have to be the center, and they don’t have to be the best reservoir for our dreams.

God is outside of Time. He raises and lowers world leaders. He gives inspiration and dreams, and He takes them away. He is the care for the broken, the answer to the dark questions of this world. He is the One changing it and making it worth reading about. These people are just who He is using right now. Some of them know Him and glory in His living through them. Others pursue traits that reflect Him so much, whether they know it or not. They live His truth, His goodness, His perseverance, His triumph. Still others are there for a moment, thinking that for some reason human something has gotten them there. They, too, will fade as the grass, with only what God has done through them remaining.

It’s sort of amazing how little of this world actually involves anything we do, and how all of it involves our huge God. If anything, that’s made me more excited about the Time 100.

A kid can dream of making that list, or seeing it organized in beautiful colors enough that she gets psyched about where this world is going.

A semi-adult can realize that, even with all the treachery in this world – and all of her own personal faults – God could still use her enough that she’d make that kind of list. Or, better yet, that God could redeem the world despite all of us. It could all become good, and the top 100 wouldn’t even know how it happened.