Salon.com > New Age

Is “Enlightened” quietly the best show on TV?

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:48:00 +0000

The second season of "Enlightened" started recently, and if you haven’t yet discovered this show, it’s a real pleasure to fast-watch the first-season episodes and get up to speed. As a “comedy of alienation,” according to show writer Mike White, "Enlightened"is remarkably good, an insightful satire of the symbiotic relationship between the New Age self-actualization movement and the worker hell of corporate America.

The basic premise of "Enlightened" is an inspired one. A 40-something woman named Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern) has a sobbing, shrieking breakdown at her workplace, Abaddon Industries. The first shot of the pilot episode is of Amy’s tear- and mascara-streaked face, clownishly distorted by anguish. Betrayed by the married executive she’s been sleeping with and facing a demotion from the Health and Beauty Department to Cleaning Supplies, Amy stages a hysterical confrontation in the sleek corporate hallways. She chases her betrayer to the elevators and pries the elevator doors open with superhuman strength, wailing, “Health and Beauty was mine, Damon! Health and Beauty was mine.…”

The Maya apocalypse is not nigh

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 17:50:00 +0000

Earlier this year Reuters reported that 10 percent of people believe the Maya 2012 phenomenon could signal the end of the world. Speculation surrounding the advent of the apocalypse has gained enough currency that a cranky NASA astrobiologist taped a video explaining that tomorrow will not be doomsday. What’s going on?

Tomorrow is the date 13.0.0.0.0 in the Maya’s (the generally accepted anthropological term) “long count” calendar. Remember the hoopla attending Y2K? This milestone is “almost exactly analogous to the end of the millennium for us,” according to Todd Little-Siebold, a professor of history and Latin American studies at the College of the Atlantic. But tomorrow is when the Maya’s cyclical calendar resets after a period of more than 5,125 years, or 13 Baktuns (a Baktun lasts approximately 394 years). While it's clearly not something that happens every day, it doesn't quite explain why a calendar that had disappeared before the Spanish invasion continues to captivate, especially since, as Little-Siebold put it, “There’s not a lot of evidence that the Maya believed [the world] would come to an end” in 2012.