Truman Burbank, the unwitting star of the world’s most popular TV show, is supposed to be an everyman. The Truman Show is set in an island town, Seahaven, that evokes the prefab conformities of American suburbia. Truman is a brand in a setting that is stridently generic. Since his birth, he has navigated a world manufactured—by Christof, the creator of his show—for lucrative inoffensiveness. Everything around him exists to fulfill the primary mandate of a mass-market TV show: appealing to the widest possible audience.
In September 2021, the criminologist Betsy Stanko went into the Metropolitan police force to work out why they weren’t catching rapists. The previous year, less than 3% of rapes reported to the Met had resulted in charges being brought; in 2021, that percentage almost halved.
Try to remember the last time your phone was not the first thing you reached for in the morning. I can’t recall a time when it wasn’t.
Every morning my alarm goes off at 6:30 am. Before I lug my sluggish body from under the security of my warm sheets, I reach for my phone, pull it up inches away from my face, and start scrolling through whatever I missed overnight.
[handlettering by kelly cummings] twitter | facebook | tumblr | instagram | pinterest...
