Nuclear Theater Rewind: The Year in Review
Hey, everybody's doing it! Here are my favorite posts from 2025.
A lot of readers out there may be ready to kick 2025 to the curb, but for it was a good year for NUCLEAR THEATER. We unpacked the Kennedy Assassination, went inside the NASA space program, viewed life from the other side of the Iron Curtain, and skirmished with suicidal death-machines and freakishly large ants.
As always, thank you for reading. More ahead! And if you haven’t, please sign up to recieve the regular newsletter version. It won’t cost a thing (although paid subscriptions are appreciated).
The Third Man: The unquiet American
Holly Martins is a stumbler. That’s the best way to describe him. The pulp novelist has arrived in postwar Vienna at the behest of his friend Harry Lime. But Harry is nowhere to be found. Holly soon finds out he’s dead, run over in the street by a car.
Asteroid City: Fetishizing the Fifties
One hallmark of American pop culture is the way it eternally turns back on itself, returning to past eras in efforts at nostalgia or reinterpretation. When I was a kid, George Lucas’ American Graffiti spurred a rush of attempts to recapture the “innocence” of the 1950s and early 60s, best typified by TV shows such as “Happy Days.”
The Lives of Others: Voices carry
When you grow up with the privilege of freedom, it’s easy to never fully grasp the scope of the gift you have been given. In the United States, the concept has been fundamental to the national identity, even though most of us here surrender our freedom a thousand different ways every day, by needing to respond to superiors at work, obeying legal and mor…
The Road Warrior: A last chance power drive
Before we go any further this week, we have to stop right now and appreciate this dude:
JFK: The end of the innocence
Obsessions die hard in America. But it’s entirely possible that the grip the Kennedys once held on the public consciousness has finally loosened after almost 70 years of glamorizing a political dynasty whose aura always outshone its achievements. To older Democrats, Robert F. Kennedy Jr’.s heel turn and embrace of Donald Trump may have been the final st…
Good Night, and Good Luck: Gatekeepers
One of the things about growing older is that you realize you straddle eras. I was a child of Vietnam and Watergate, when color TVs were cutting edge, microwave ovens didn’t exist, and we had four channels on the tube. (We even called it the “tube.”) Now, I inhabit a world of AI agents, “content” streamers, and pocket-sized phones that have more process…
Them! Ant-agonists
The year is 1954—so everything’s in black and white. State troopers come across a little girl wandering in the New Mexico desert. She stares ahead, not seeing, hearing or even blinking, catatonic. Her family’s trailer has been torn apart – from the inside. No clues, except strange tracks. Couldn’t be a mountain lion, could it, Ben? I don’t think so, Ed.…
A House of Dynamite: Death by Zoom
Are Kathryn Bigelow and Donald Trump secret readers of Nuclear Theater? Likely not, but a writer, ahem, a creator, can dream. The two of them, in different ways, have put the threat of nuclear conflagration back on the front burner.