Two characters from Mike Judge's hit HBO comedy visit a Buddhist monastery on a trip that's less about enlightenment, more about entitlement. What happens next? Rod Meade Sperry needs to know. Spoilers and cuss-words ahead. I had the DVR on pause, queued up, as my partner came into the room. “Watch this,” I told her, and pressed play on the closing scene of last night’s [...]
Dear White People’s Justin Simien on Buddhist meaning in 2001, “My favorite movie ever”
Last month, in my interview with Justin Simien, the creator of Netflix's hit series Dear White People discussed how classic cinema, like Buddhist practice, challenges the ego. In this "outtake," he says why Stanley Kubrick's masterwork 2001: A Space Odyssey exemplifies that challenge. —Sam Littlefair Challenging the ego is what we're doing when we're practicing Buddhism. [...]
“Dear White People” creator Justin Simien talks Buddhism, empathizing with haters
One element of Simien’s identity isn’t obvious in his Netflix hit: Buddhism. But it’s there. Talking to Justin Simien, it’s clear that the characters in his show, Dear White People, come from within. Each episode of the Netflix comedy, which debuted last month, follows a different character at a fictional Ivy League college in the aftermath of a blackface party on campus. [...]
The Mushy, Pseudo-Mystical World of Marvel’s Iron Fist
Sam Moore on the Buddhist superhero's trope-packed new Netflix series. (Warning: spoilers ahead!) Now a much-discussed (and derided) Netflix series, Iron Fist began as a Marvel comic created in 1973 by Gil Kane and Roy Thomas. Its lead (and man behind the superhero’s mask) is Danny Rand who, after a family tragedy — in the comics a climbing accident; the show a plane crash [...]
If you watch TV, you should be watching The Good Place
NBC's hit comedy series, "The Good Place," which returns tonight, offers a refreshingly sharp and real approach to the great matter of life and death. Manny Jacinto and Kristen Bell are fakin' it 'til they make it in The Good Place. NBC's hit comedy series, The Good Place, has quite the pedigree. It stars Kristen Bell and Ted Danson (and a whole host of perhaps lesser [...]
Luke Wilson tells Jimmy Fallon he looks like Chögyam Trungpa
Last night on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, Luke Wilson pulled out The Pocket Chögyam Trungpa, which, he says, he purchased in a new age bookstore in Canada. "I've been carrying this around for a year now," Wilson tells Fallon. "The guy reminded me of you." "He's not bad," responds Fallon, laughing. "He's a good-looking guy." Wilson jokes that he reads the book when [...]
How “Orange Is the New Black” taught actor Jessica Pimentel the danger of attachment
Jessica Pimentel on what she’s learned from seeing life through the eyes of her character, Maria, on Orange Is the New Black. In Orange Is the New Black, you play a woman who gave birth in prison and was immediately separated from her baby. What is that like? It’s extremely painful. I must have cried every day for the first two years. Your reality changes when [...]
What does The Walking Dead’s Morgan know about “The Art of Peace”?
If you watch AMC's TV juggernaut The Walking Dead, you probably noticed that a book called The Art of Peace featured heavily on last night's episode. But what is the book about? As John Stevens writes in his translation of The Art of Peace, about its author: Morihei Ueshiba (1883-1969) was history's greatest martial artist. Even as an old man of eighty, Morihei could disarm [...]
Contest invites you to “leave reality behind” with 100-day TV binge at Buddhist monastery
Lots of Buddhist monasteries have terrifying illustrations of suffering beings trapped in cyclical existence. Now, Samsung's Swedish branch is offering you the chance to enter a monastery as a living example of one! (That is, if you agree that spending 76 hours figuring out how Ted Mosby met his kids' mom is the epitome of samsaric suffering.) This month, Samsung is awarding a [...]
15 classic Buddhism-and-advertising collisions
"I'd like to buy the world a Dharma-Burger"? Don Draper's meditation-based epiphany, as seen on Mad Men's finale, is all but immortal now. Though we'll never truly know what came next, one thing's for sure: the relationship between meditation and commerce wouldn't, for better or worse, be just fiction. Advertisers and marketers have been trading on it for decades, and [...]