The life and career of Neil Postman

I once wrote that I could "never work out whether Christopher Lasch was a left-wing thinker who sounded right wing, or a right-wing thinker who sounded left wing". (Sadly, the video I was writing about has since disappeared from YouTube.)

Another such figure was Neil Postman, who is interviewed here.

Do we regard his strictures on television and speculations on the effect of the home video recorder as amusingly dated, or do we regard the title of his book Amusing Ourselves to Death as an uncanny anticipation of the net and social media?

His son, Andrew Postman, takes the latter view.