What do I miss most about the 1980s?

Certainly, there's a lot about the 1980s that I don't miss.  The crass yuppie marketing.  Movies like the original Top Gun, where you know the Tom Cruise character is a "maverick" because his nickname is Maverick!  The political culture where Ronald Reagan's war crimes were exposed, and the mainstream press responded by making the big issue the inadequacy of the Democratic candidates to succeed him! (Such weasels can be relied on to attack the safer target.) I remember a background report on the ABC news show This Week that said "Ronald Reagan can bask in the praise..." Is that reporting or worshipping?

But there are some things that I do miss.  I miss the video rental stores that appeared then.  You can get as much online today, but it was thrilling to go into the shop and see all the possibilities together!

I miss Phil Donahue's talk show.  He covered a lot of serious subjects and introduced me to interesting people like Christopher Hitchens and Vladimir Pozner, a Russian reporter who defended the Soviet system. (Years later, his show got cancelled despite having MSNBC's highest ratings, because he kept warning against invading Iraq.)

I also miss the TV show Miami Vice.  It wasn't just fancy visuals and music; it had a certain intelligent, downbeat sensibility, at least in the first season. (Someone said that in the later seasons the show ended up embodying the yuppie mindset it had formerly been criticizing...)

I also miss Spy magazine.  That was a snarky magazine that could be relied on to make fun of the celebrities and institutions of the time. (They famously called Donald Trump a "short-fingered vulgarian"!) Goings-on at The New York Times gave them enough material for a regular column.  They quoted the rapper Ice-T saying "That's the dopest shit I ever saw!" Every issue they'd have The Spy List, a list of living, dead and fictional people who all had something embarrassing in common, and they didn't say what.  It would turn out to be stuff like they'd all entered sham marriages or thrown up in public.

The 1980s was the golden age of the music video.  The industry reduced it to formula before long, of course, but some of the earlier videos were pretty imaginative.  I remember one for the Ultravox song "Dancing With Tears in My Eyes." It's about a city that's about to be destroyed in a nuclear accident and a couple spending their last moments together.  At the end we see an old home movie of them, and it melts away.  It meant a lot to me at the time.