A bunch of alums were whooping it up in a highway-side saloon, toasting Stanford’s football victory over Cal, when a young old grad called for the Stanford hymn. “How does it go?” someone asked. “From the … something . . . something …” a voice began. “Foothills? Mountains?” someone suggested. Others dimly recalled “in the sunset fire” and “raise our voices singing,” until at length a young wife bravely quavered: Read More...
There’s something uniquely satisfying about prime-time network comedies. Maybe it’s their self-contained nature, with most story lines introduced and resolved within a single episode. Maybe it’s their brevity, each half-hour studded with commercial breaks long enough to visit the kitchen or bathroom. Maybe it’s the comfort of entertainment conceived to elicit laughter from the broadest possible range of viewers. More likely, it’s all of the above.
Which is why, although they’ve dwindled in number and declined in quality since cable and streaming started to erode Big 5 broadcasters’ dominance over the market for original scripted programming, network sitcoms’ absence has been felt amid a fall TV season delayed by strikes. Read More...
Before LSD escaped the lab and was evangelized by hippies, the U.S. government was secretly testing the effects of the drug on hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel. In a must-read feature on newly unclassified material on the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert operation, the MK-ULTRA program, which ran from 1953 to 1964, SF Weekly fully exposes the bizarre world of the CIA’s unethical drug tests. The utterly-unbelievable-but-true story involved using hookers to lure in unwitting johns for undisclosed testing, narcotics agents who slipped drugs into drinks, and a U. Read More...