“ART BELL. DANG:” “Perhaps it’s because I grew up waiting for the scary / sci-fi movie after the news on Saturday night — the interesting stuff was either rationed or marginalized. The occasional monster movie, comics for dorks,” James Lileks writes. “Once a year a big sci-fi movie with Chuck Heston. You felt underrepresented in the culture, but don’t most of us in adolescence? Art Bell addressed that audience: the people who believed none of it and the people who believed all of it and everyone in between…At some point we were going to get the pieces that made the picture come into focus, and helped to answer this weird mood in society that had been thrumming along since the early 90s. As I said on Twitter, it was all post-Cold-War end-of-history Y2K anxiety plus anti-government suspicion.”

Fascinating that America’s timeout between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 could be so ripe for paranoia. But then, what era isn’t?