Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Saturday Night Live celebrated its 50th season with an iconic ‘SNL 50’ logo, a movie about its past and a struggle to get 1 million viewers under 50 to tune in. Saturday Night, a highly fictionalized movie about the show’s opening night back in 1975, couldn’t even crack $10 million at the box office against a reported budget of $30 million. For its 50th anniversary, the movie celebrating its origins lost $50 million.* 1 million viewers in the theater and 1 million viewers under 50 is all that SNL has anymore. With less than a fifth of the weekly show’s audience being in the 18-49 range, 50 would be on the young side for a Saturday Night Live viewer. No matter how the show chases young trendy stars and musical guests, its usual viewer is closer to Joe Biden’s age than the kids onscreen. Adding the big ‘50’ to the SNL logo just confirms that the show, which likes to pretend that it’s the work of the chaotic subversive young people featured in Saturday Night, is a tired institution. 50 ye...

Standing in line at a Target, I glanced at the books for sale. Every work of fiction, with the exception of those two elderly stalwarts, James Patterson and Stephen King, came from a female author. While older male writers still have a large presence on bestseller lists and in the book world, newly published male fiction authors have become rarer than blue moons. This phenomenon reported on in stories like NPR’s “Women Now Dominate the Book Business” and “Women Are Now Publishing More Books Than Men” (which describe it as a sign of progress) helps shed light on another phenomenon that the media has been rubbing its head over in articles like The Atlantic’s “How Gen Z Came to See Books as a Waste of Time” and Psychology Today’s “Why Aren’t College Students Reading?” There is a generational decline in reading across Gen Z, but it’s also a gender divide. While there’s always been a gender reading gap, by 2018, 44% of girls loved to read, while only 24% of boys did. One study found that a...

When the Barrow Gang was conducting its brutal robberies and murders, socialists found in their exploits an echo of their anti-capitalist cause. So it was small surprise that the release of Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 marked the New Hollywood wave in which anti-heroes exposing the facade of American life through acts of dysfunction were to become the new focus of movies. “Our best movies have always made entertainment out of the anti-heroism of American life,” Pauline Kael, the infamous film critic, gushed in her essay on the gangster film. The anti-heroes were meant to be the heroes because American life was not heroic, it was anti-heroic, and the mission of the culture was to indoctrinate Americans with that message. American heroes were not police officers, but the anti-heroes who killed them. 90 years after Bonnie and Clyde went down in a hail of bullets on the watch of Frank Hamer, one of the toughest Texas Rangers ever bred, and a half-century after the counterculture was launched w...

Myths were once rare and exclusive things. The stories told around fires made up the soul of a culture. From the printing press to the internet, technology helped change all that. The oral became written and the written became all too easy to duplicate. Stories ceased to be communal and became personal. A written scroll was a painstaking effort, too precious to be hoarded, while a book could be one of a million copies. Everyone could have their own stories. When communal stories became personal stories: some things were gained and others were lost. Religious stories (there is a reason that the Bible remains the quintessential bestseller), national myths and cultural lore gave way to stories of personal empowerment. The story of the group became that of the individual and ‘individualism’, absent after the fall of Greece and Rome, was reborn, first in tales and then the power shift from the collective to the individual. Western individualism would not have existed without the underpinnin...

On Thanksgiving, 1965, Arlo Guthrie, an 18-year-old leftist singer songwriter, went to a local Massachusetts landfill only to find it closed and instead dumped some trash on a hillside. The event inspired ‘Alice’s Restaurant’, Guthrie’s anti-war song which gets played every Thanksgiving. The recent death of Alice Brock, the inspiration for the titular Alice, ahead of Thanksgiving inspired a rash of new stories about the song and ensures its relentless airplay over the holiday weekend. But the real relevance of the song doesn’t come from the Thanksgiving weekend or Alice’s death, but Trump’s resounding victory earlier in November. And the aging liberal boomers and a younger cohort with no clue about the song understand all too little what it really says about the modern Left. The same lefties smirking at Officer Obie busting a young Arlo for dumping garbage at the bottom of a cliff (actually a hillside) would applaud as EPA stormtroopers rampaged through the home of anyone daring to not...

“Social media isn’t real life.” It’s a phrase we hear a lot. But is that really true? When Congress threatened to block China from controlling TikTok, the company riled up a mob of tweens to threaten Congress. If the Senate gives in, the outcome will be real enough. TikTok certainly is real life. If you doubt it, look at the rate of teenage girls who have themselves mutilated because of trans trends on the app, even younger girls who killed themselves over material in the app’s algorithm or the spread of verbal or motor ‘tics’ to teens over the platform. Social media isn’t real in the same way as the wind and the rain, or the laws of physics or economics, it’s an alternate reality spread through the internal realities of our minds. Before social media, there was just media, the concentration of mass media, radio, film and newspapers that wrecked much of the twentieth century and killed millions of people. It is no coincidence that some of the most destructive social and political movem...