Jefferson Pooley

Oct 31, 2024 | newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org | Louis Anslow |Jefferson Pooley |Michael J. Socolow

Remembered as history’s most infamous radio broadcast, a 1938 dramatization of H.G. Wells “TheWar of the Worlds” reportedly caused widespread panic when listeners thought a fictional news broadcast of an alien invasion was real… The day after broadcast sensationalist headlines ran from coast to coast: The New York Times placed “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact” front and center, with the report beginning: “A wave of mass hysteria seized thousands of radio listeners...

Apr 22, 2024 | chronicle.com | Jefferson Pooley

The campus novel, as a postwar genre, was established by Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe. Bilious and blade-witted, the 1952 novel mocks the low, claustrophobic stakes of faculty politics at a Pennsylvania liberal-arts college (“where the handsome President and his wife entertained with sherry or sat, Bennington-style, on the floor, listening to Bach and boogie-woogie”).