January 31, 2001

Imagine a pastor preaching on the rebuilding of the city. Her text is Jeremiah 32. The city of Jerusalem has fallen apart, she tells her congregation, and its citizens have been taken into exile. Yet in the midst of this chaos, the prophet Jeremiah claims that the Lord has told him to buy a piece of property. His investment is a declaration of hope. As the God of Israel says, “Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land,” and “I am going to bring it [the city] recovery and healing . . . I will restore fortunes . . . rebuild them.”

The enormous popularity of The Simpsons, now in its 12th television season, suggests that religious people have a sense of humor—contrary to the usual wisdom in Hollywood. The program takes more satirical jabs at spiritual matters than any other TV show, yet the erratic cartoon family has an appreciative audience among many people of faith and among many analysts of religion. The reason? Perhaps it’s because The Simpsons is an equal-opportunity satire: it shrewdly targets all sorts of foibles and hypocrisies, not just religious ones.

The rise of the Internet’s World Wide Web in the mid-1990s launched an unlikely hero into the media spotlight: Johann Gutenberg, the 15th-century inventor of movable printing type and technological forefather of the vernacular Bible. Reporters, Internet columnists and even some scholars began parading Gutenberg before the public as a kind of poster child for the digital revolution. The Net, we were told, would do for modern society what Gutenberg’s invention had done for the Renaissance: spread the fruits of mass education by democratizing communication.

Steven Soderbergh's Traffic places international drug trade in the broadest possible context, taking viewers into the lives of various people touched by cocaine trafficking. The film's tight script--an extraordinary balance by screenwriter Steven Gaghan of disparate storylines--and Soderbergh's terse, jumpy direction make it a riveting journey.