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The weakness in movies has multiple roots. Films, while in theaters, live behind a pay wall; television is free, once the monthly subscription is paid.

a collapse in home video revenue, caused partly by piracy, drove film salaries down. Television, meanwhile, raised its pay

But the number of films released by specialty divisions of the major studios, which have backed Oscar winners like “Slumdog Millionaire,” from Fox Searchlight, fell to just 37 pictures last year, down 55 percent from 82 in 2002,

“So, what does that mean for us as a culture?” Ms. Sylte asked of a vacuum that might occur if the better films went away. The hole, Mr. Gazzale said, to whom the question was relayed, would be a large one. “Movies remind us of our common heartbeat,” he said.

But because these three major films are in contention, the issue has come to the forefront of this year's Oscar race, and with it a thorny cultural question: Does the audience deserve the truth, the whole truth and nothing but? Surely not, but just how much fiction is OK?

In response to a complaint by a Connecticut congressman, Kushner acknowledged he'd changed the details for dramatic effect, having two Connecticut congressmen vote against the amendment when, in fact, all four voted for it. (The names of those congressmen were changed, to avoid changing the vote of specific individuals.)

Kushner said he had "adhered to time-honored and completely legitimate standards for the creation of historical drama, which is what `Lincoln' is. I hope nobody is shocked to learn that I also made up dialogue and imagined encounters and invented characters."

"Maybe changing the vote went too far," says Richard Walter, chairman of screenwriting at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Maybe there was another way to do it. But really, it's not terribly important. People accept that liberties will be taken. A movie is a movie. People going for a history lesson are going to the wrong place."

Walter says he always tells his students: "Go for the feelings. Because the only thing that's truly real in the movies are the feelings that people feel when they watch."

No subject or individual's life is compelling and dramatic enough by itself, he says, that it neatly fits into a script with three acts, subplots, plot twists and a powerful villain.

Reeves, who actually gave the "Lincoln" script a negative review because he thought it was too heavy on conversation and lacking action. He adds, though, that when the subject is as famous as Lincoln, one has a responsibility to be more faithful to the facts.

"This is fraught territory," he says. "You're always going to have to change something, and you're always going to get in some sort of trouble, with somebody," he says.

Futterman also doesn't begrudge the "Argo" filmmakers, because he feels they use a directorial style that implies some fun is being had with the story. "All the inside joking about Hollywood - tonally, you get a sense that something is being played with," he says.

Futterman says he was sympathetic to those concerns and would certainly have addressed them in the script, had he anticipated them.

Of the three Oscar-nominated films in question, "Zero Dark Thirty" has inspired the most fervent debate. The most intense criticism, despite acclaim for the filmmaking craft involved, has been about its depictions of interrogations, with some, including a group of senators, saying the film misleads viewers for suggesting that torture provided information that helped the CIA find Osama bin Laden.

have been questions about the accuracy of the depiction of the main character, a CIA officer played by Jessica Chastain; the real person - or even combination of people, according to some theories - that she plays remains anonymous.

screenwriters have a double responsibility: to the material and to the audience.

The debate over "Argo" has been much less intense, though there has been some grumbling from former officials in Britain and New Zealand that their countries were portrayed incorrectly in the film as offering no help at all to the six Americans, whereas actually, as Mendez writes, they did provide some help.

"When I am hungry and crave a tuna fish sandwich, I don't go to a hardware store," he says. "When I seek a history lesson, I do not go to a movie theater. I loved `Argo' even though I know there was no last-minute turn-around via a phone call from President Carter, nor were there Iranian police cars chasing the plane down the tarmac as it took off. So what? These conceits simply make the movie more exciting."

The political and methodological stresses within the historical profession are intensified by economic troubles. For a long time, but especially since the economic crisis of 2008, university students have turned away from the humanities, preferring to major in fields that seem to offer more certain and lucrative employment. Consequently, academic jobs in the humanities and especially in history have become radically more precarious for younger faculty—even as universities have sought to meet diversity goals in their next-generation hiring by expanding offerings in history-adjacent specialties, such as gender and ethnic studies.

The result has produced a generational divide. Younger scholars feel oppressed and exploited by universities pressing them to do more labor for worse pay with less security than their elders; older scholars feel that overeager juniors are poised to pounce on the least infraction as an occasion to end an elder’s career and seize a job opening for themselves. Add racial difference as an accelerant, and what was intended as an interesting methodological discussion in a faculty newsletter can explode into a national culture war.

One of the greatest American Africanists was the late Philip Curtin. He wrote one of the first attempts to tally the exact number of persons trafficked by the transatlantic slave trade. Upon publication in 1972, his book was acclaimed as a truly pioneering work of history. By 1995, however, he was moved to protest against trends in the discipline at that time in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:I am troubled by increasing evidence of the use of racial criteria in filling faculty posts in the field of African history … This form of intellectual apartheid has been around for several decades, but it appears to have become much more serious in the past few years, to the extent that white scholars trained in African history now have a hard time finding jobs.

Much of academia is governed these days by a joke from the Soviet Union: “If you think it, don’t speak it. If you speak it, don’t write it. If you write it, don’t sign it. But if you do think it, speak it, write it, and sign it—don’t be surprised.”

Yet this silence has consequences, too. One of the most unsettling is the displacement of history by mythmaking

mythmaking is spreading from “just the movies” to more formal and institutional forms of public memory. If old heroes “must fall,” their disappearance opens voids for new heroes to be inserted in their place—and that insertion sometimes requires that new history be fabricated altogether, the “bad history” that Sweet tried to warn against.

If it is not the job of the president of the American Historical Association to confront those questions, then whose is it?

Sweet used a play on words—“Is History History?”—for the title of his complacency-shaking essay. But he was asking not whether history is finished, done with, but Is history still history? Is it continuing to do what history is supposed to do? Or is it being annexed for other purposes, ideological rather than historical ones?

Advocates of studying the more distant past to disturb and challenge our ideas about the present may accuse their academic rivals of “presentism.”

In real life, of course, almost everybody who cares about history believes in a little of each option. But how much of each? What’s the right balance? That’s the kind of thing that historians do argue about, and in the arguing, they have developed some dismissive labels for one another

Those who look to the more recent past to guide the future may accuse the other camp of “antiquarianism.”

The accusation of presentism hurts because it implies that the historian is sacrificing scholarly objectivity for ideological or political purposes. The accusation of antiquarianism stings because it implies that the historian is burrowing into the dust for no useful purpose at all.

In his mind, he was merely reopening one of the most familiar debates in professional history: the debate over why? What is the value of studying the past? To reduce the many available answers to a stark choice: Should we study the more distant past to explore its strangeness—and thereby jolt ourselves out of easy assumptions that the world we know is the only possible one?

Or should we study the more recent past to understand how our world came into being—and thereby learn some lessons for shaping the future?

The August edition of the association’s monthly magazine featured, as usual, a short essay by the association’s president, James H. Sweet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Within hours of its publication, an outrage volcano erupted on social media. A professor at Cornell vented about the author’s “white gaze.”

But the VHS tape itself may be immortal.

Today, a robust marketplace exists, both virtually and in real life, for this ephemera.

“Hold steady. Price seems fair. It is a Classic.”

Driving the passionate collection of this form of media is the belief that VHS offers something that other types of media cannot.

“The general perception that people can essentially order whatever movie they want from home is flat-out wrong,”

“promised as a giant video store on the internet, where a customer was only one click away from the exact film they were looking for.”

“Anything that you can think of is on VHS tape, because, you’ve got to think, it was a revolutionary piece of the media,”

“It was a way for everyone to capture something and then put it out there.”

preservation

“just so much culture packed into VHS,”

a movie studio, an independent filmmaker, a parent shooting their kid’s first steps, etc.

finds the medium inspirational

“some weird, obscure movie on VHS I would have seen at my friend’s house, late at night, after his parents were asleep.

“The quality feels raw but warm and full of flavor,” he said of VHS.

views them as a byway connecting her with the past

from reels depicting family gatherings to movies that just never made the jump to DVD

“I think we were the last to grow up without the internet, cellphones or social media,” and clinging to the “old analog ways,” she said, feels “very natural.”

“I think that people are nostalgic for the aura of the VHS era,”

“So many cultural touch points are rooted there,” Mr. Harris said of the 1980s.

It was, he believes, “a time when, in some ways, Americans knew who we were.”

Not only could film connoisseurs peruse the aisles of video stores on Friday nights, but they could also compose home movies, from the artful to the inane

“In its heyday, it was mass-produced and widely adopted,”

She inherited some of them from her grandmother, a children’s librarian with a vast collection.

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

the first technology that allowed mass, large-scale home media access to films.”

Mr. Arrow said that home videos captured on VHS, or taped television programs that contain old commercials and snippets from the news, are particularly insightful in diving into cultural history.

“There’ll be a news break, and you’ll see, like: Oh my god, O.J.’s still in the Bronco, and it’s on the news, and then it’ll cut back to ‘Mission Impossible’ or something.”

Marginalized communities, Mr. Harris said, who were not well represented in media in the 1980s, benefited from VHS technology, which allowed them to create an archival system that now brings to life people and communities that were otherwise absent from the screen.

The nature of VHS, Mr. Harris said, made self-documentation “readily available,

people who lacked representation could “begin to build a library, an archive, to affirm their existence and that of their community.”

VHS enthusiasts agree that these tapes occupy an irreplaceable place in culture.

“It’s like a time capsule,”

“The medium is like no other.”

“Superhero movies take away mystery because there’s nothing in the shadows. All is revealed. And that’s not how our relationship to the world is, because, unfortunately, you can know only a fraction. So it gives a false impression of our might.”

Genre fans must be terrible worriers, he continues; prisoners of “an extreme state of anguish” soothed only by narrative certainty. “Superhero films let people put away their fears. But this ‘saving’ is not very realistic. And if you create only objective films that avoid big questions of life, then we just create machines to eat popcorn.”

“Sunset is really about our perception of the world,” shrugs Nemes. “It’s a labyrinth. The audience has to accept confusion as part of the process – and people don’t like that! I have come to understand that it creates major anxiety. But that is the challenge and the promise: to experience the world through the eyes of someone who is not a god. Then you’re not just a popcorn-eating machine, you’re someone for whom this experience can become personal and subjective and meaningful.

Antisemitism has always been a barometer to measure the moral temperature of a civilisation, for almost mystical reasons. The Jew can go unseen. They are hard to distinguish and so can be the threat coming from inside. Today, it’s therefore very alarming. Almost like we’re now past a critical point.”

“For the first time since I left Hungary I found this oppression of having to adapt my discourse to a sort of well-received set of ideas. It’s extraordinary that internet on a voluntary basis creates a new form of totalitarianism. One that is much more dangerous because people think they are free.

Sunset is more than a historical study. It is a warning that sophisticated societies can combust. Actually, it’s a prophecy; Nemes thinks it inevitable that we will follow suit.

What can he say, he grins. He’s from Eastern Europe, fatalism is in his blood, Kafta taught him that while humans struggle to build meaningful things, they are also digging their own graves.

What has actually got Nemes fretful is, it turns out, computers. They’re making it much, much worse. “We take from our brains so much power and give it to machines,” he says. “It’s unprecedented. Likewise the incredible amount of imagery we’re producing and the fact so much is virtual. We are building a sort of narcissistic image of ourselves through social media that means we perceive people as potential angels. There’s an increasing self-righteousness, and a great moral expectation on human beings I don’t think is realistic. Then there’s a backlash when we realise we can’t meet this ethical standard.

“I would love to be wrong, but I really believe that democracy and the internet are not compatible. New technology channels so much of our darkness and we are blind to it. And sometimes the accumulation and spreading of knowledge means people reach a new level of ignorance.”

Recently, he says, he has found himself in situations in which communication was impossible. Where he was speaking to people who couldn’t think freely because they had been enslaved by ideologies fed to them by the web. Who believed themselves individuals while reciting mass rhetoric

“I really have the feeling that a self-assured civilisation such as ours is preparing our own destruction,” he says. “Even Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, this incredible whirlwind of creativity and positivity, was already longing for its own demise.”

“I’ve never been called a white man until recently,” he says. “But now I’m a white guy from eastern Europe who is a Jew. And so I should only speak about such people.

“This is fractioning humanity – and it’s actually reverse racism. It works as racism, but cloaks itself in the beautiful, beautiful dress of tolerance. And that’s extremely dangerous.”

Her core discovery, made with a co-author, Erik M. Conway, was twofold. They reported that dubious tactics had been used over decades to cast doubt on scientific findings relating to subjects like acid rain, the ozone shield, tobacco smoke and climate change. And most surprisingly, in each case, the tactics were employed by the same group of people.

The central players were serious scientists who had major career triumphs during the Cold War, but in subsequent years apparently came to equate environmentalism with socialism, and government regulation with tyranny.

In a 2010 book, Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway called these men “Merchants of Doubt,” and this spring the book became a documentary film, by Robert Kenner. At the heart of both works is a description of methods that were honed by the tobacco industry in the 1960s and have since been employed to cast doubt on just about any science being cited to support new government regulations.

Dr. Oreskes, the more visible and vocal of the “Merchants” authors, has been threatened with lawsuits and vilified on conservative websites, and routinely gets hate mail calling her a communist or worse.

She established her career as a historian with a book-length study examining the role of dissent in the scientific method. As she put it a few months ago to an audience at Indiana University, she wanted to wrestle with this question: “How do you distinguish a maverick from a crank?”

Dr. Oreskes found that Wegener had been treated badly, particularly by American geologists. But he did not abandon his faith in the scientific method. He kept publishing until his death in 1930, trying to convince fellow scientists of his position, and was finally vindicated three decades later by oceanographic research conducted during the Cold War.

As she completed that study, Dr. Oreskes sought to understand how science was affected not only by the Cold War but by its end. In particular, she started wondering about climate science. Global warming had seemed to rise as an important issue around the time the Iron Curtain came down. Was this just a way for scientists to scare up research money that would no longer be coming their way through military channels?

the widespread public impression was that scientists were still divided over whether humans were primarily responsible for the warming of the planet. But how sharp was the split, she wondered?

She decided to do something no climate scientist had thought to do: count the published scientific papers. Pulling 928 of them, she was startled to find that not one dissented from the basic findings that warming was underway and human activity was the main reason.

She published that finding in a short paper in the journal Science in 2004, and the reaction was electric. Advocates of climate action seized on it as proof of a level of scientific consensus that most of them had not fully perceived. Just as suddenly, Dr. Oreskes found herself under political attack.

Some of the voices criticizing her — scientists like Dr. Singer and groups like the George C. Marshall Institute in Washington — were barely known to her at the time, Dr. Oreskes said in an interview. Just who were they?

It did not take them long to document that this group, which included prominent Cold War scientists, had been attacking environmental research for decades, challenging the science of the ozone layer and acid rain, even the finding that breathing secondhand tobacco smoke was harmful. Trying to undermine climate science was simply the latest project.

Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway came to believe that the attacks were patterned on the strategy employed by the tobacco industry when evidence of health risks first emerged. Documents pried loose by lawyers showed that the industry had paid certain scientists to contrive dubious research, had intimidated reputable scientists, and had cherry-picked evidence to present a misleading pictur

The tobacco industry had used these tactics in defense of profits. But Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway wrote that the so-called merchants of doubt had adopted them for a deep ideological reason: contempt for government regulation. The insight gave climate scientists a new way of understanding the politics that had engulfed their field.

Following Dr. Oreskes’s cue, researchers have in recent years developed a cottage industry of counting scientific papers and polling scientists. The results typically show that about 97 percent of working climate scientists accept that global warming is happening, that humans are largely responsible, and that the situation poses long-term risks, though the severity of those risks is not entirely clear. That wave of evidence has prompted many national news organizations to stop portraying the field as split evenly between scientists who are convinced and unconvinced.

Dr. Oreskes’s critics have taken delight in searching out errors in her books and other writings, prompting her to post several corrections. They have generally been minor, though, like describing a pH of six as neutral, when the correct number is seven. Dr. Oreskes described that as a typographical error.

In the leaked emails, Dr. Singer told a group of his fellow climate change denialists that he felt that Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway had libeled him. But in an interview, when pressed for specific errors in the book that might constitute libel, he listed none. Nor did he provide such a list in response to a follow-up email request.

However much she might be hated by climate change denialists, Dr. Oreskes is often welcomed on college campuses these days. She usually outlines the decades of research supporting the idea that human emissions pose serious risks.

“One of the things that should always be asked about scientific evidence is, how old is it?” Dr. Oreskes said. “It’s like wine. If the science about climate change were only a few years old, I’d be a skeptic, too.”

Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway keep looking for ways to reach new audiences. Last year, they published a short work of science fiction, written as a historical essay from the distant future. “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future” argues that conservatives, by fighting sensible action to cope with the climate crisis, are essentially guaranteeing the long-term outcome they fear, a huge expansion of government.

Branko Milanovic, a former economist at the World Bank, called it “one of the watershed books in economic thinking.

“Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” with its title echoing Marx’s “Das Kapital,” is meant to be a return to the kind of economic history, of political economy, written by predecessors like Marx and Adam Smith. It is nothing less than a broad effort to understand Western societies and the economic rules that underpin them.

he said, are his generation’s “founding experiences”: the collapse of Communism, the economic degradation of Eastern Europe and the first Gulf War, in 1991.

Those events motivated him to try to understand a world where economic ideas had such bad consequences. As for the Gulf War, it showed him that “governments can do a lot in terms of redistribution of wealth when they want.” The rapid intervention to fo

The reason that postwar economies looked different — that inequality fell — was historical catastrophe. World War I, the Depression and World War II destroyed huge accumulations of private capital, especially in Europe. What the French call “les

In 2012 the top 1 percent of American households collected 22.5 percent of the nation’s income, the highest total since 1928. The richest 10 percent of Americans now take a larger slice of the pie than in 1913, at the close of the Gilded Age, owning more than 70 percent of the nation’s wealth. And half of that is owned by the top 1 percent. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Mr. Piketty, father of three daughters — 11, 13 and 16 — is no revolutionary. He is a member of no political party, and says he never served as an economic adviser to any politician. He calls himself a pragmatist, who simply follows the data.

Net wealth is a better indicator of ability to pay than income alone, he said. “All I’m proposing is to reduce the property tax on half or three-quarters of the population who have very little wealth,” he said. Write A Comment Published a year ago in French, the book is not without critics, especially of Mr. Piketty’s policy prescriptions, which have been called politically naïve. Others point out that some of the increase in capital is because of aging populations and postwar pension plans, which are not necessarily inherited.More criticism is sure to come, and Mr. Piketty says he welcomes it. “I’m certainly looking forward to the debate.”

“reversification” to describe the phenomenon. “I mean by it a process in which words come, through a process of evolution and innovation, to have a meaning that is opposite to, or at least very different from, their initial sense,”

the word “enable” had a dubious cast in the common parlance of therapy and gossip: an enabler was someone who handed the broody tippler a fresh cocktail; to enable was to unleash the codependent. Now it’s a technological upgrade

To have something liked online is not as great as having something actually liked. It doesn’t even necessarily mean someone enjoyed it — it might simply mean, “Got it,” or more wanly, “This provoked some kind of feeling, however minor.”

To tag someone online is a far nastier enterprise. Anyone can resurface disparaging photographic evidence of youthful folly and post it on a social network, “tagging” it with the unsuspecting’s name.

Most people think long and hard about their favorite movie, novel, people and even color. Online, favorites are not so special. To “favorite” (now a verb) something on Twitter is to say, in effect, “I saw this thing and liked it O.K., but not enough to retweet it.” Or a tepid “I see you wrote something about me and I will acknowledge that by favoriting. But expect nothing more.”

Even for adults, sharing has historically been considered a commendable activity, no matter the tangled motivations. Sharing in Internet parlance? Pure egotism. Check out my 6-year-old on the viola. Don’t you wish you were this attractive at 41?

Being a star in real life signifies tremendous professional success or, at the very least, celebrity; to “star” something on Gmail means you need to write back.