Frank Kogan

Seth Schiesel in the New York Times (All Together Now: Play the Game, Mom):

Previous titles in the Rock Band and Guitar Hero series have already done more in recent years to introduce young people to classic rock than all the radio stations in the country.*

Um, are there any statistics to back up this claim? I mean, maybe it's true, but how do you know?

h/t Tom Ewing (as usual)

Of course, this blank assertion doesn't come close to the audacity of a claim I remember from one of the prominent photojournalist magazines (Look or Life or the Saturday Evening Post) in 1967, where they quoted some dude - made it a pull quote! - saying that a couple of stanzas in the Doors' "When The Music's Over" would do more to protect the environment than the entirety of Lady Bird Johnson's Keep America Beautiful campaign. (The stanzas in question: "What have they done to the Earth?/What have they done to our fair sister?/Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her/Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn/And tied her with fences/And dragged her down/I hear a very gentle sound/With your ear down to the ground/We want the world and we want it.../Now/Now?/NOW!")

( But more important than Rock Band to today's New York Times readers is the fact that someone told someone else that she was quitting Facebook! )

*Note how Ann Powers, whose Beatles piece I was criticizing a couple of days ago, nonetheless was actually trying to, you know, think, ask herself what story the game was telling, and what impact that story might have; while for this guy the story is a given, so that he can tell another one, about how the Beatles will bring us together as they never have before.

William Rhoden in the New York Times argues that each generation is getting softer than the last. He says that Eli Manning's inconsistent and apparently unimpassioned play at quarterback, compared to his father Archie Manning's consistent greatness, is due to Eli's not growing up with the hardships that his father experienced.

Rhoden actually makes this argument. In a major newspaper. In the major newspaper. There is no hint of parody, or irony.