While driving home from fly-fishing yesterday afternoon, I happened to listen to a PRI: The World story about a recent blog written by the current British ambassador to the United States.

It was about his observation of the trend that British actors are popular fill for vampire roles in mainstream film, American television series, and an upcoming PBS drama.

The PRI piece about the blog and the ambassador’s blog itself are “fun,” slightly tongue-in-cheek pieces about this phenomenon which on its face seems verifiably factual.  I don’t intend to fact check the actual numbers of British actors versus American actors in vampire roles.  Even if the view of a trend is a British conceit, there might be something to it.

The pieces got me thinking because, like a lot of material in popular media including superficially “intellectual” sites like NPR, PRI, etc. there is still a lot of description that passes for or at least implies “explanation.”  And in the current cultural epoch where assertion attempts to pass for description, explanation, and analysis all at once, a bit of analysis from them would have been interesting. Continue reading →