Insider deputy editor Walt Hickey received the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting and Commentary. His wide-ranging, fascinating You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything makes it simple to see why.
The common American spends three-plus hours a day consuming media. “Across a lifetime,” Hickey writes, “that’s 22 percent of our time on Earth!” No marvel we’re interested in how media impacts us. Hickey asserts that, opposite to those that take into account our favourite media “a “bogeyman, a brain melter, a violence inciter, a waste,” it really is “complicated, fascinating, and sometimes moderately good.
Hickey fascinates as he demystifies popular culture, sharing the outcomes of his experiments and research. Hickey is an information journalist, and cheeky and informative visuals—charts, graphs, maps and little images of well-known folks’s heads—bolster Hickey’s pro-pop-culture assertions and illuminate private tales, corresponding to when he subjected his nervous system to a “Jaws” rewatch to discern which scenes most affected him. Colorful charts like “Movies Make People Exhale the Same Chemicals at the Same Times” convey his analysis into focus. He notes that when “The Hunger Games” movie debuted in 2012, USA Archery’s merchandise gross sales quintupled. Similarly, the premieres of 1943’s “Lassie Come Home” and 1992’s “Beethoven” had been each adopted by spikes within the reputation of collies and Saint Bernards.
His eager eye for element and talent to see connections throughout genres enliven the narrative past concept and speaking factors. From the WWE, the Tax Reform Act of 1976, Scooby-Doo, geopolitics and past, Hickey presents a bounty of enthusiasm for our favourite tales.
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