"We are indeed amusing ourselves to death. This started when Marshall McLuhan stated that the medium was the message. I said right away that the message was the medium. But, alas, my voice was maybe not loud enough, and/or the medium without a serious message is much more amusing to people. So the entertainers became the gods of the people, who screamed: “Keep entertaining us! We want to die being entertained!” The kings of the world wished the same, and they let their countries fall while they were entertained. This is the only book in this list that was published way back in the 1960s. I hope you can get it."

"I remember it as a strong anticolonialist film, with parallels with the American civil rights movement. In fact, a scene you won’t see in Medium Cool, of black militants going into a theater where The Battle of Algiers was playing, was deleted as a concession to Paramount’s concerns that it would provoke violence against Paramount executives. Paramount argued that if audience members came out of Medium Cool and committed a violent act, Paramount would be liable."

"Just read this instead of reading about it. Almost nobody gets how simple it is. It's not about TV or radio. McLuhan's saying that everything is a medium. We keep looking at subjects, but we miss the field or medium in which the subject is operating. We see the "figure" but not the "ground." He's trying to teach pattern recognition, lateral thinking, and to bring people into a peer-to-peer, Medieval, Burning Man sensibility. It's nothing like Wired magazine in there."

"Okay, maybe one more costume drama, but what a one it is. Bertolucci is a favorite of mine, and this is one of those majestic films that remind you how powerful the medium can be."