The Tangential

President Ronald Reagan was personally moved when recounting the story of a World War II bomber pilot who opted to go down with his plane — and his gunner — when the latter was trapped and couldn’t bail out. “We’ll ride it down together,” said the empathetic pilot. “Congressional Medal of Honor,” noted Reagan, “posthumously awarded.” In fact, the incident never happened. Most likely, Reagan adapted it from a 1944 Don Ameche movie.

Each short episode of Star Wars: Tales of the Empire ends with one name, before all others. “Created by Dave Filoni.” Sure, George Lucas’s name comes next, but there’s no question that Tales of the Empire is a journey into the Filoni-verse.

I’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons, also known as D&D. That’s not for lack of desire — there’s just never been a right place, right time. Still, listening to David M. Ewalt’s D&D history Of Dice and Men reminded me of just how thoroughly the brand has permeated the universe of speculative fiction. I grew up playing the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons video game on Intellivision, and watching the Dungeons & Dragons Saturday morning cartoon.

Remember the quarter-life crisis? Its prominence in the discourse harks back to a more innocent era, when stories about young urbanites couldn’t be faulted for omitting floods or wildfire smoke and when no U.S. presidential candidate actively fighting multiple felony charges had ever led polls in key battleground states.

How did Patrick Stewart possibly manage to make it into his 80s before publishing a memoir? His longevity is a gift to him, and the fact that he held off this long is a gift to us. The book itself, of course, makes clear why the actor hasn’t previously sat down to recount his life in writing.

Sociologists caution against reading too much into a society’s cultural products, be they books or banner ads, but it’s impossible not to see each year’s selection of British Arrows award-winning ads as a barometer of the masses’ mood. When the annual parade of video spots first gained Stateside popularity through holiday season screenings at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, British humor was a principal draw.

You may have seen this coming, but the whale is a metaphor. Whalefall has one of the season’s best elevator pitches. What would it be like to be literally swallowed alive by a sperm whale? Could you survive? How could you possibly get out? How could you even get into that situation in the first place?

Ahsoka Tano’s namesake series launches this week on Disney+. New live-action Star Wars series aren’t anything special in and of themselves these days, but there’s a particular energy surrounding this one. The company is well aware, and has been capitalizing on the excitement by sponsoring fan gatherings and preview screenings. Why are fans getting emotional about Ahsoka? I have a few theories. Princess Leia was iconic, but didn’t get to use the Force onscreen until she was nearly on her deathbed.

Hollywood Wives has been given new life with a 40th anniversary reissue, but it was long ago guaranteed immortality. A gilt-edged, leather-bound copy of Jackie Collins’s novel has pride of place on the schadenfreude bookshelf. Anyone seeking assurance that rich and famous people are absolutely miserable and obsessed with petty grievances can take Hollywood Wives into the bubble bath.

The pictures told the story. At one point in Strip Tees, Kate Flannery’s American Apparel memoir, she receives a series of photos for store display that depict a girl she’d recently hired as a high schooler, posing provocatively for the company’s 37-year-old male leader. The teenager was seemingly becoming a “Dov girl,” one of the employees who shared Dov Charney’s bed. For consumers who didn’t know the photo subjects personally, American Apparel’s problematic yet iconic ads told a different story.