NEW YORK (AP) — A dog’s plaintive wail. A courtroom couplet-turned-cultural catchphrase about gloves. A judge and attorneys who became media darlings and villains. A slightly bewildered houseguest elevated, briefly, into a slightly bewildered celebrity. Troubling questions about race that echo still. The beginning of the Kardashian dynasty. An epic slow-motion highway chase. And, lest we forget, two people whose lives ended brutally. And a nation watched — a nation far different than today’s, where the ravenousness for reality television has multiplied. The spectator mentality of those jumbled days in 1994 and 1995, then novel, has since become an intrinsic part of the American fabric. Smack at the center of the national conversation was O.J. Simpson, one of the most curious cultural figures of recent U.S. history. Simpson’s death Wednesday, almost exactly three decades after the killings that changed his reputation from football hero to suspect, summoned remembrances of an odd moment in time — no, let’s call it what it was, which was deeply weird — in which a smartphone-less country craned its neck toward clunky TVs to watch a Ford Bronco inch its way along a California freeway. |
France is trying Syrian exKid Rock 'uses NRishi Sunak to apologise for worst treatment disaster in NHS historyDame Judi Dench's tears as she receives Sycamore Gap tree seedling at Chelsea Flower ShowColton Herta shows speed as Honda fights back in penultimate Indy 500 practice sessionSarah Jessica Parker divides opinion with enormous hat on set of And Just Like ThatQueen Camilla reveals she's seen the first season of BridgertonJulian Assange's fiveJudge blocks Biden administration from enforcing new gun sales background check rule in TexasI visited the most crowded island on Earth