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The Agony In The Garden, Andrea Mantegna c1455 When I first moved to Sydney eleven years ago, one of the hardest things for me to get used to was all the shops being closed by the evening. Growing up in NYC, I took for granted the whole "city that never sleeps" vibe. I always thought it was mostly just marketing and local bragging before I started living in a city that did actually go to bed at a reasonable hour. My parents didn't exactly live in a bustling or vibrant part of town, and yet if I got hungry at 1am, I was still within walking distance of a Taco Bell, Mickie D's, 7/11 ( buffalo chicken taquitos are sacred artifacts ), at least half a dozen Korean chicken and beer joints, and if I was truly feeling deplorable, a White Castle.  These burgers are the bomb, and I will die on this hill defending the (White) Castle That first year that I lived in Sydney, there were so many nights when I felt so alone and isolated. Not because I didn't have a lot of friends,...

G'day everyone, my name's Daniel. My dear wife Joanne has recently opened an Instagram account on my behalf to try to get this humble little webspace some more exposure. I thought I could do a little bit of an intro post so that you can get to know me better.   I'm an American, born and raised in NYC. I've been living in Sydney for the last eleven years, and I have a lovely wife and two beautiful kids.  I grew up during a distinct and particularly tumultuous period of American society, a period that saw rapid change in the way that you're supposed to wear baseball caps. I remember that it was cool for a while to keep the brim flat, and then later I heard that pre-bending the brim has made a comeback. For a while, you were supposed to keep the "New Era" sticker on the hat, and then the other day someone made fun of me because I still had the pricetag sticker on the underside of my Mets cap. Long story short, I don't know what I'm supposed to do anym...

“I look around at us, and you know what I see? Losers.”  Over a little more than a decade and across 23 feature films, the Marvel Cinematic franchise has reinvented the action genre, drawn universal appeal, and made almost 24 billion dollars along the way.  This unprecedented level of success makes us ask the question, what’s the secret sauce? How did they do what they do? How did Marvel turn comic book characters, which for decades was a niche subculture only of interest to nerds, into the cornerstone of 21st-century pop culture? Of course, you can’t really attribute their success to any one reason. They definitely benefited from favorable cultural winds that weren’t totally under their control such as the rise of nerd culture . But one powerful reason has to do with the kind of stories that Marvel movies tell.  Is there a narrative theme that threads through all the Marvel films? It’s hard to imagine that movies about a genius billionaire tech industrialist  could...