Lee Siegel

I love the idea of the amateur - that's what popular culture is all about. But what the Internet's doing is professionalizing everyone's amateuristic impulses.

Television has to reflect back to you your own sense of security. It also has to mirror your sense of your own decency and your own limitations.

Everyone seems to be fleeing from the responsibilities that come from being who you are. I think that is why the blogosphere is thriving. It allows people to develop a fantasy self.

Every 'Oprah Winfrey Show' has about it the aura of Oprah's own life, just as the rituals and sacraments of a religion are suffused with the life of the religion's founder. Above the testimony of Oprah's guests hovers what viewers know about Oprah's experience.

The terrorist threat is so cloudy, faceless, and vague, so manipulable by political purposes, so definitely present but indefinitely manifested, that it sometimes feels interchangeable with everyday dread itself.

It became inevitable that television would address life's mundane problems because television itself is so mundane, part of the ordinary flow of time the way those problems are.

I have a confession to make. For years, I earned a living - or a sort of living - writing negative book reviews.

A single week of Oprah takes you from bondage to all the violent terrors of life, to escape through vicarious encounters with celebrity, to visions of charity and hope, to hard resolve, to redemption and moral renovation.

The sitcom's traditional role has been to comfort the viewer who feels burdened by the unreality of American expectations.

Ever since the romantic comedy-drama 'She's Gotta Have It' antagonized black women and black men in 1986, Spike Lee's films have enjoyed the outrage of various groups.

In 1986, human nature in America started to change. That year, 'The Oprah Winfrey Show,' based in Chicago, became nationally syndicated, and the country entered the beginning stages of a quiet cultural revolution.

I love the Internet; I'm on it all the time.