Chris Hayes on Showtime's Years of Living Dangerously Tonight

No one needs another show to watch on Sunday night these days.  In addition to Mad Men and Game of Thrones, which I watch and regularly review, there's also The Good Wife and Turn, which I watch and sometimes review, and Mr. Selfridge, which I watch and enjoy and usually don't review, because enough is enough.   On the other hand, to paraphrase the Victorian poet Robert Browning, one's reach on TV should exceed one's grasp, or what's a DVR for?   And Years of Living Dangerously, whose third episode is on tonight, is also On Demand.

I'm looking forward to Chris Hayes' contribution to this high-tech broadside on the need to wake up to the dangers of global warming.  Just to be clear, though I think Hayes is one of the brightest and most cogent voices on television, I don't agree with everything he says.  For example, I'm not too worried about the apocalypse to democracy thought to be engendered by Citizens United, seeing as how Obama - whom I voted for twice, and strongly support - handily won reelection in 2012, or two years after that much derided Supreme Court decision.   This confirms to me, once again, that Milton and Jefferson were right that people are inherently rational and vote their best interests - now in the 21st century, regardless of the mega-bucks spent on political advertising.

But Hayes and James Cameron and the all-star cast both in front of and behind the camera in Years of Living Dangerously are completely right that we need to do something about what is going on in the climate around us.   Look, even if all the evidence that the world is slowly heating up is wrong, wouldn't we be better off having some control over our climate and the temperature of the world?  To say, as do some Republicans, that the climate is in God's hands, misses the point that God or natural selection or whatever brought us here left us with minds and the capacity not to just accept the natural world around us but improve it, for us,  and most living denizens of this planet.   Surely, we're better off now than in ancient Rome, with its average lifespan of 20-30 years (45-47 for those who made it to the age of 10) - a result of science and medicine and its invention and application via human mentality.

The Scientific Revolution in the Renaissance was borne on the wings of the printing press (as I detail in The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution).  Television in America, though it's had its moments with Nova and the original Carl Sagan Cosmos series and the reboot now on Fox, has by and large not risen to the task.   It's good to see Years of Living Dangerously and some of the best minds on the planet join the ranks.

Good for Gingrich Talking about the Moon

Newt Gingrich has received considerable ridicule and flack for his statement that we would have a permanent base on the Moon by the end of his second term as President, and when the Moon attained 13,000 permanent settlers, it could become another U.S. state.

I say, good for Gingrich for thinking so big.  We need more of that.  One of the reasons our efforts in space have stagnated is because no one after JFK had the requisite vision to see us get off this planet in a sustained way.

The fact is that we are citizens of the cosmos, not just this Earth.  We'll never truly understand who we are, what we're doing here, from a vantage point stuck down here on this planet.   Carl Sagan got this.  Isaac Asimov understood this.  Unfortunately, not enough politicians and Presidents.

Although I expect to vote for Barack Obama in this election, as I did in 2008, I was never happy with his weak position on space.  Obama has been no better on space than his predecessors after JFK, and in some ways worse.

Conversely, I'm not likely to vote for Gingrich (though, if I were a Republican, I would over Romney).  I get that he's presumtuous about the second term. I get that he's grandiose.   But sometimes, as in the grandeur of space, that could be a good thing.

The Closer 6.1: The New Building

The Closer was back for its 6th season tonight, sporting a new building, a surprise promotion at the end, but the same delightful mix of suspense and humor that has characterized the five seasons of The Closer preceding.

My favorite line, as it often does, came from Provenza. He says thank you, Dr. Sagan, as Tao displays his erudition about the stars in the sky. Some good guest stars in this episode as well, especially Currie Graham, whom we last saw as DA Balco in the short-lived but excellent Raising the Bar.

But the brightest star, as always, was Kyra Sedgwick, in fine form and Southern accent as Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson, this time applying her customarily razor sharp logic against the backdrop of a new building she and the team would rather not have been moved into.

And the surprise? Well, let's just say someone with the name of Pope deserves a lot more power...

And, on the subject of power, here's an article in The Christian Science Monitor today about the impact of The Closer on television - in which I'm quoted.


5-min podcast review of The Closer

See also The Roots of Testimony on The Closer and Finding Killers vs. Hearts on The Closer and Brenda Leigh's Niece and Libby from Lost on The Closer and Tom Skerritt on The Closer and Det. Richard Tracy on The Closer and Pres. Laura Roslin vs. Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson  and The Closer Closes on a Fine Note for the Season

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The Plot to Save Socrates


"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

Carl Sagan and the Stuff of the Cosmos

Carl Sagan died 10 years ago last week - at the age of 62. He was best known as the voice that humanized science, talking about "billions and billions" of stars in the universe to Johnny Carson and the millions of people who watched the Tonight Show. Fortunately, this was at the dawn of videotaping, and you can see some of Sagan's work on YouTube, where he is as mesmerizing about the human place in the universe as ever.

In 1977, when Sagan was young and in his prime and I was even younger, I was appointed Book Editor of an obscure journal named et cetera. As a way of kicking off my tenure - which turned out to be brief (I've always found editing essentially boring) - I wrote to the people I considered the five greatest thinkers of the day. Sagan was one of them. (Should I tell you my other four choices? OK - Marshall McLuhan, Karl Popper, Arthur Koestler, and Noam Chomsky - for his theories of language, not his politics).

I wrote to each of the authors, told them they had made my Top 5 list and why, and asked them to say a few words about their work. To Sagan, I wrote that it was his work as a philosopher and a popularizer, not his work as a hard scientist, that made me admire him - in particular, his view that, because we come from the cosmos, when we look back out at the cosmos with our telescopes, we are but the stuff of the cosmos looking back at itself. I still find that view thrilling, today.

Happily for me, all five cutting edge thinkers responded with a few paragraphs, mainly thanking me for the honor, etc. But Sagan said something more: he said I shouldn't discount his work as a hard scientist, because that's what he was, and his philosophy and his appearances on television were all a part of that.

And that's stuck with me too. Because, whatever else Sagan may have intended by it, to me it said that, hey, going on the Tonight Show and talking with Johnny may be as much a part of a great cosmologist's work as analyzing the light received from the stars. There's no contradiction, in other words, between the pursuit of fame and the pursuit of knowledge.

And it does make sense, doesn't it? Carl Sagan was a star here on Earth, because of what he saw when he looked at the stars above. The stuff of the cosmos looking back at itself.

A few of Sagan's books:

Billions and Billions

The Dragons of Eden

Pale Blue Dot

And my podcast about Carl Sagan: