There was a time not so long ago when the moviegoing experience was a big deal. It was an event. Viewers entered ornate, cavernous movie palaces and watched, along with an audience of thousands, the spectacle of a cast of thousands (real, not computer generated) rampaging across an enormous, color-saturated screen. A couple of times [...]

In the upper-middle-class California suburban family of my youth, we applied to the universities we could afford, and went to the best one that sent an acceptance letter. It would never have occurred to me to apply to an Ivy League school. Not through failure of imagination or intelligence (necessarily). We were pragmatic. From our [...]