Brow Beat

Was Shakespeare a Stoner?

Nina Shen Rastogi — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 21:33:00 GMT

There exists an endearingly passionate camp of Shakespeare nuts who simply cannot believe that the son of a glover from a podunk market town 100 miles out of London could have possibly written the sublime, genius plays attributed to him. He had no education, they argue, no aristocratic standing, no opportunities to mingle with the literati of his day.

But what if he had some really, really choice weed?

Ten years ago, South African anthropologist Francis Thackeray first floated the Bard-bong connection when—inspired in part by sonnet references to "a noted weed," "compounds strange," and a "journey in my head"—he analyzed pipe fragments found in Shakespeare's garden and discovered traces of cocaine and myristic acid (a plant-derived hallucinogen), as well as hints of marijuana.

After reading the sonnets, "we put forward a hypothesis that Shakespeare may have used cannabis as a source of inspiration," Thackeray told the BBC in 2001—though the anthropologist was careful to note that his team wasn't claiming that Shakespeare owned any of the pipes found on his property, just that such drugs would have been available to him. (It should also be said that Thackeray's readings of the sonnets in question are decidedly unorthodox, particularly given that weed didn't come to "marijuana" until 1929 in the United States.)

Thackeray now says that he has petitioned the Church of England for access to Shakespeare's grave, located in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon. Sniffing out Shakespeare's pot habit isn't Thackeray's primary goal, though: According to FoxNews.com, he first plans to confirm that the skeleton does, in fact, belong to Shakespeare; then he wants to solve the long-standing mystery of how the poet died. Finally, he tells LiveScience, chemical analysis on "extremely small samples" of keratin left in Shakespeare's fingernails or toenails can be sampled for marijuana, and chemical analysis of his teeth could also illuminate his smoking habits (though not whether he stuffed his pipe with tobacky of the traditional or wacky variety).

Thanks to a high-tech technique known as "laser surface scanning," all this can apparently be accomplished without running afoul of Shakespeare's famous crypt curse: "Blessed be the man that spares these stones / And cursed be he who moves my bones."

Kind of makes us see that whole Yorick scene in a brand-new light.

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Should We Kill the Yearbook?

Nina Shen Rastogi — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 19:48:00 GMT

Eileen Reynolds of Book Bench,points us to a CNNMoney article on "the death of the old school yearbook." According to figures from the research firm IBISWorld, yearbook publishers have seen their sales decline by 4.7 percent per annum over the past few years.

This isn't exactly a new story (or a new headline) and the trend isn't so surprising: Those fat hardcovers, full of cringe-worthy headlines and embarrassing wardrobe choices, can be expensive for schools to produce and for students to buy. According to one CNN-quoted entrepreneur, whose company makes electronic, customizable, print-on-demand yearbooks, one school in San Francisco was regularly losing $2,000 a year on unsold volumes—enough to buy the school five new computers.

Economics aside, the notion of bounding up your memories in a time capsule (or, rather, the memories the yearbook committee has deemed "significant" to the student body as a whole) has started to seem laughably quaint in the always-documenting, constantly-archiving Facebook era.

Personally, I loved preparing for my appearance in my senior yearbook. I used to keep a little notebook in my backpack; for months and months, I kept one ear cocked for lofty-sounding lines and earnestly scribbled them down, hoping to find just the right song lyric to run underneath my photo. (Happily, I went with the Cure and not the Dave Matthews Band.) I carefully chose a strand of black beads to wear above my regulation black wrap-style top, thinking they projected the right balance of edge and class I wanted to be remembered for. I spent a half hour getting my hair to flip the right way.

But that was almost 15 years ago. As Nick Paumgarten notes in his article on online dating from this week's New Yorker, we create these kinds of "curated and stylized" versions of ourselves every day now. Do the acts of selecting a quotation, a hairstyle, a piece of jewelry, or a series of photos for the back pages for posterity mean the same thing to an 18-year-old today? Will they take the ritual as seriously as we did—and if not, what's the point?

Reynolds notes, rightly, that a yearbook isn't Facebook, since the former is a time capsule and the latter an unending, ever revisable flow of data, one that could theoretically stretch from middle school through your death from old age. But yearbooks aren't the only teenage time capsules we leave behind. I may have come of age in the pre-social media Dark Ages, but even then, my friends and I were constantly documenting and preserving our lives—swapping our class photos and filing them away in little plastic Hello Kitty wallets, hoarding letters and notes, hanging up our corsages to dry. I have piles of mix tapes copied from friends. Even if I never had a yearbook, I'd have plenty of fly-in-amber ephemera to remember those gawky, hormonal years. And the love letter, passed along in a dark rehearsal hall, is more moving to me now than a string of well wishes written on an arbitrary day in June.

All that being said, I think Reynolds has one slam-dunk argument for keeping the yearbook around. As she writes,

the yearbook, along with the high-school newspaper, provides one of the very first opportunities for the budding journalist to try her hand at publishing. There are stories to write, pages to lay out, ads to sell, and, of course, photographs to take ... I like to think that the students who [worked on my schools' yearbooks] learned something about the staggering amount of work that goes into putting together a large-scale publication. Finishing on deadline is one thing; feeling proud of what you've made is quite another.

The yearbook as a hands-on, pre-professional exercise, I can totally get behind. But as a nostalgia item collecting dust on my bookshelf, I'm not so sure.

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Tell Us about Your First Trip to a Gay Bar

Nina Shen Rastogi — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 14:42:00 GMT

When Dan Savage first walked into the Bushes, in Chicago, after six years of intense stress from hiding his homosexuality, the pressure lift was so intense that it made him feel lightheaded. "It was like stepping through an airlock," he writes. "I'm surprised my ears didn't pop."

On her inaugural trip to the "chintzy and tacky" Satan's, in Akron, Ohio, Alison Bechdel found herself wondering, "Was I going to be spending the rest of my life in places like this?"

Susie Bright uncovered an old family secret at the Bacchanal, in Albany, California. At a "skeezy and smelly pub" called the Rembrandt, in Manchester, England, Simon Doonan met a drag queen named Mother, a "scrawny, malnourished-looking World War I vet" who would recite "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in a Courrèges-inspired mini dress, her prosthetic leg peeking out through her nylons.

As part of her multipart series on the "riotous past and uncertain future" of the gay bar—running all this week on Slate—June Thomas asked 11 eminent gay, lesbian, and bisexual writers about their first visit to a gay bar.

Now we want to hear from you. What happened the first time you went to a gay bar? Was it exciting? Scary? Or was fraternizing with fellow LGBT folk old hat by the time you turned 21? Tell us your best stories in the comments, and we'll round up the funniest, sweetest, and weirdest in a future post.

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Peter Falk, RIP

Dana Stevens — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 19:44:00 GMT

Peter Falk—the anguished husband to Gena Rowlands' mentally unstable wife in John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence, the beleaguered best friend trying to save his pal from a mob hit in Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky, the fallen-angel-about-Berlin in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, and above all in many fans' minds, the irascible TV homicide cop Lieutenant Columbo—has died at 83 of complications from Alzheimer's disease.

There is something especially cruel about knowing that a mind-robbing disease like Alzheimer's was what took Falk's life. In all of his roles, but especially on Columbo, his was always the most perspicacious face on screen. Keenly intelligent and watchful, he was a warmer, menschier, more humble Sherlock Holmes, a man whose mind operated on a higher level than the rest of us. Nothing got by Peter Falk—but his hyper-alert vigilance always seemed to emerge from an underlying stillness, a state of openness to his fellow actors and to the moment.

In this scene from A Woman Under the Influence, Falk's character watches first tenderly, then in fury as his manic wife, just released from a stay at a mental hospital, brings a gathering of friends to an excruciating halt. In Mikey and Nicky, trying to buy cream at a diner to help his sick friend's ulcer, Falk believably builds in a matter of seconds from mild irritation to counter-vaulting rage. And in the interrogation scene below from the great 1972 Columbo episode "Etude in Black"—co-starring Falk's great friend and collaborator John Cassavetes as a murderous conductor who tries to make his pianist mistress's death look like a suicide—Falk's joy in the pure cat-and-mouse playfulness of the police procedural is apparent. This is the Peter Falk I'll remember: doggedly feeling his way to the truth (the truth about the fictional murder of the week, yes, but also the truth of the scene), squinting at his interlocutor with his one good eye, and listening.

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Remembering MJ and His Moonwalk

Nina Shen Rastogi — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 17:09:00 GMT

This Saturday marks the second anniversary of the death of Michael Jackson—pop icon, tabloid sensation, sensitive and dreamy rat-lover.

In 1983, the year that his album Thriller became an era-defining hit, Jackson debuted a strange dance move that made him look like a robot with water in his joints. Fans immediately started imitating him (or, in some cases, trying to and failing), and they never stopped. On the night of his death, SlateV compiled the following "organic tribute" to Jackson. As you head out into this sticky summer weekend, may it inspire you to new levels of personal smoothness.

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Live-blogging the Pottermore Announcement (from the Couch)

Chris Wilson — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 10:11:00 GMT

J.K. Rowling made a highly anticipated announcement about the Harry Potter franchise today. Here are details as they emerge.

10:50 a.m.: Pottermore or Potterbore? There's an almost universal story among Tolkien lovers of how, after finishing the final book in the trilogy and mourning that it was over, they discovered on the back page that there was a fourth book. It bore the mysterious title The Silmarillion, and you begged your mom to drive you to the bookstore that night to go buy it.

Only to discover that it's unreadable. It's a dry history of a completely different era in the Lord of the Rings mythology with no apparent tie to the main story. I would wager the median page at which one gives up is 30.

This was my first thought when I read that J.K. Rowling was releasing 18,000 words of extra material about the Harry Potter series—things like Professor McGonagall's affair with a Muggle or the 10 things you didn't know about House Hufflepuff. Rowling's world is far more vibrant and charming than Tolkien's, but she was also far more economical. She certainly wrote more pages, but there weren't a lot of details about the wizarding world that didn't inch her magnificent mystery forward—even if you didn't understand why until three books later.

I hope I'm wrong, but if what we're getting is cutting room floor material, or even new self-contained stories, I worry that the new information will lack that which made every detail of the books so riveting: that the fact that a rat is missing a finger in book one turns out to be the key to the mystery in book three.

10:25 a.m.: TIME's Sonia van Gilder Cooke has a more detailed description of the experience. "Users start out at Privet Drive, where they can explore Harry's cupboard under the stairs (replete with scampering spiders) before moving on to Platform 9 ¾, the Hogwarts Express, Diagon Alley and Gringotts," she reports. But "Pottermore isn't a game: it's a series of illustrated environments."

7:45 a.m.: A few more details. The Telegraph says users will chose a name, and then play interactive games on the site to choose a wand and get shorted into one of Hogwarts' four houses—the first two rites of passage for new wizards in the books. But it's still not clear what you do on Pottermore. Is it a reading experience or gaming experience, in which you unlock content as you cast spells and so forth? More than anything, this sounds like a digital theme park devoted to Harry Potter. And there's a giant stuffed Blast-Ended Skrewt with my name on it.

7:25 a.m.: Alright, this turned out to be the world's most pathetic live-blog. But here's what we know about Pottermore, based on Rowling's announcement and some embargoed news stories:

The site will have a lot of new material about the Potter universe that Rowling said she has been "hoarding."
Users (or is it players?) will be able to upload their own drawings and comments.
You won't be able to participate until October, but a lucky few will get access on July 31st, Harry's birthday.
The 18,000 words of extra content include info on wand wood, the other three houses at Hogwarts besides Harry's, and backstories for some of the secondary characters.*

7:15 a.m.: The live webcast of the announcement is hopelessly overrun, but the Pottermore website has the prerecorded video. The immediate news is that the Harry Potter books will be released as eBooks as part of the new website, which will involve fan submissions of some kind. Details soon.

6:14 a.m., June, 23: I swear one of those owls on the countdown page just winked at me. 45 minutes to go.

Correction, June 23, 2011: The original version of this post said that Pottermore would have 18,000 pages of new content.

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What Would You Pay $10 to See A Writer Do?

Nina Shen Rastogi — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 23:31:00 GMT

The New York Times has a piece today about how independent bookstores have begun charging for in-store events—a formerly "unthinkable" practice, but one that's become necessary as more and more readers opt to buy the book online, rather than at the store on the night of the program.

In theory, I have no problem paying $10 or $15 to support a bookstore that's gone to the trouble of organizing an event for my entertainment. (In-store author readings run on razor-thin margins, as Colleen Lindsay, a former event manager at a big indie bookstore, laid out in a blog post in 2008.) The only problem is, author readings usually aren't very entertaining.

I've attended readings because I've had an hour to kill and it was raining outside. I've gone because I needed a free first-date activity, or because I happen to know the writer. And I've gone, very occasionally, to catch sight of a celebrity in a respectable, non-gawking fashion. (Salman Rushdie wore pink socks the first time I saw him. Joan Didion looked like a tiny bird.) But those criteria only seem to apply to about two percent of the readings that happen daily in New York City.

In almost any other case, if there's a book that's piqued my interest, I'd prefer to learn more about it by reading reviews, checking out a Kindle sample, or looking on YouTube for the trailer or for BookTV clips than by schlepping to a fluorescent-lit bookstore to sit on a folding chair and listen to someone mumble passages from their book before answering less-than-illuminating questions from the audience.

One person noted on Twitter today that people will regularly pay $8 to $10, plus the cost of drinks, to see bands they don't know. But musicians are performers; writers, not always. So how can bookstores convince customers to make the same kind of investment on authors they're not already fans of? What would you pay $10 to see a writer do?

Slate staffers have a few ideas. Serve drinks and dim the lights. Offer a discounted copy of the book as part of the admission price. Get readers to choose the passages that the writer will discuss. Give us your best ideas for souping up the author reading, and if we get enough good suggestions, we'll round up the most promising in a future post.

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Defending Roger Ebert

Nina Shen Rastogi — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 22:27:00 GMT

The following is a guest post by Slate's chief political correspondent John Dickerson.

I'm glad Roger Ebert spoke up. Jackass performer Ryan Dunn killed himself and Zachary Hartwell Monday night in a car accident after leaving from a bar. Afterward, Ebert tweeted, "Friends don't let jackasses drink and drive." He was immediately set upon. How could Ebert be so crass? "I just lost my best friend, I have been crying hysterical for a full day and this piece of shit roger Ebert has the gall to put in his 2 cents," Jackass star Bam Margera wrote.

Ebert was right. I was sick to my stomach when I read about Dunn—but not because I knew Dunn or was a fan. I was sick for his friends and those who loved him, and for those who loved Hartwell, a former Navy Seal and newlywed. You can see the anguish in Margera's face. What a waste.

But it wasn't Ebert's gall that bothered me. It was Dunn's. He was driving 130 to 140 mph in his Porsche, endangering not only his life but Hartwell's and that of anyone else on the highway. It takes gall to be that cocky with other people's lives. It takes gall to be that careless with the love and friendship of your friends and family. Dunn, who'd been busted for speeding and drunk driving before, was also drunk. His blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit. That takes gall, too.

Maybe Ebert spoke too soon, especially since at the time all he knew was that Dunn had been drinking, not that he was legally drunk. We withhold immediate judgment on the dead for a reason: We don't want their last foolish act to be all that defines their life. We also want to be sensitive to the loved ones who are experiencing such pain.

But all of this pain is exactly why Ebert was right to speak up. This is the kind of pain that is caused by acting selfishly. Let the moment pass, and the lesson fades away. Maybe it's insensitive to make a lesson of death, but when you break the public trust by driving at murderous speeds—and you further break that trust by doing it at twice the legal drinking limit—you lose the protection of privacy.

We just spent several weeks hearing thousands of opinions about Rep. Anthony Weiner's lewd tweets. No one worried about crossing lines then, and few seemed to care about what the effect of the snickering commentary on Weiner or his wife or his family. It was as if his behavior opened the door to anything.

All Weiner did was send pictures. The stupid behavior underlying the sad deaths of Dunn and Hartwell is so much worse, and yet somehow Ebert isn't supposed to speak up? If only someone had the courage to speak up and keep Dunn off the road before this awful thing happened.

Photograph of Ryan Dunn courtesy of Michael Buckner/Getty Images.

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New Focus-Later Camera: Good for Photographs, Bad for Photography

Krishnan Vasudevan — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 20:34:00 GMT

Imagine being able to point your camera and, with a single click of the shutter, take thousands of pictures simultaneously with thousands of separate cameras. That's the basic idea behind Lytro's new "light field camera." Whereas a regular digital camera has a single sensor that captures the light that reaches its lens, Lytro's camera is built with an array of small sensors which capture the entire light field of the photo-the upshot being that you can refocus on any object in the photo after the fact, using special software on your computer.

You can even go into 3-D space and change the orientation and perspective of the image, as Lytro founder Ren Ng demonstrates in this AllThingsD piece by Ina Fried.

There's nothing new about light field technology: It was used over 10 years ago in this bullet time scene from the first installment of the Matrix series. What is incredible, however, is that Ren Ng and his team plan to sell a competitively priced point-and-shoot camera with this technology later this year. They've already garnered $50 million in funding, as the New York Times reports today.

Most people I know use point-and-shoots to simply document birthdays, graduations, and other social events to share with friends and family. Their photos are often out of focus or taken at an odd angle, and Lytro's camera will offer all these amateurs an easy-to-use solution for their bad photos.

However, as a photographer and videographer, I get excited when people want to actually learn how to take photos or shoot video. The idea that this camera allows you to shoot now and think later goes against the very core of why I take photos.

Over the years, I've developed a close relationship with my viewfinder and I've learned to not only focus on subjects, but also to deal with different lighting conditions and compose my shots precisely. Focusing is only one aspect of photography, and it alone won't make you a good photographer. Failure has made me a better photographer, and I worry that by making the process too easy, Lytro's camera will only further discourage people from really educating themselves about their equipment.

In Lytro's photo gallery, you can click through myriad well-cropped, well-composed "living pictures." If you want your photos to look as good as these, the focus-later option won't be enough-you still need to learn how to find the right angle and wait for the right moment to click the shutter. In other words, you need to learn how to take photos. Though I think Lytro's light field camera is a breakthrough in the point-and-shoot market, ultimately there's more to photography than focus.

Tom Hanks Dances on Univision to Plug His Film, Win Our Hearts

Nina Shen Rastogi — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 13:48:00 GMT

Sometimes, it's as if the Internet hive mind realizes that the world's office dwellers need a mid-week pick-me-up and graciously decides to provide one. Today's Wednesday Web Gift comes via Univision's ¡Despierta América!. Tom Hanks went on the popular Spanish-language morning show yesterday to flog his new movie Larry Crowne, in which he plays a laid-off guy who gets his groove back by going to community college, joining a scooter gang, and romancing Julia Roberts. (Hanks directed the film, and co-wrote it with My Big Fat Greek Wedding's Nia Vardalos.)

I cringe every time I see the film's trailer, which seems determined to mock our collective memory of Hanks' past rom-com glories. But this weather segment has me reconsidering Hanks' charms (and my early morning television choices). It's hard not to love a man who can pull off the old mime-going-down-the-stairs bit with such aplomb.

[Via Daily What, via Deadline]

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Episode 13 of "The Killing": "Orpheus Descending"

Nina Shen Rastogi — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 12:53:00 GMT

[Caution: There are spoilers ahead! So if you haven't yet watched "Orpheus Descending," come back when you have and share your thoughts and theories. If you need a refresher, read our write-ups of episode three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, eleven, and twelve. You can also check out AMC's helpful plot recaps.]

Last week, a teaser for the season finale of The Killing promised a final five minutes "so shocking" that we'd be talking about them all summer. I'm not so sure about that, but I do know that last night's capper had Slate staffers howling in frustration and then ranting for a half hour or so, before we all got tired and petered out.

The last thing I have written in my notes from last night is, "I'm so pissed off." And judging by some of the comments on AMC's online forum, I'm not the only one who was annoyed by the finale's non-ending of an ending. At the time it felt like a cop-out and—an even bigger narrative crime these days—a middle finger to an already aggrieved audience. The new mysteries it raised seemed more befuddling than intriguing. When, exactly, is Holder supposed to have gone rogue and gotten involved in the attempt to frame Richmond? One Slatester noted that it had to have been sometime during this episode, since at the end of "Beau Soleil," the audience watches as Holder goes to the corner of Fifth and Jackson, spots the campaign poster, and realizes that Richmond is Orpheus. But if he's already trying to pin the murder on him, then why does he look so surprised? There's no one there for him to be acting for, so presumably he genuinely is surprised. Anything that makes Joel Kinnaman more central to the story makes me happy, but I'm not thrilled at the prospect of his character turning on a dime for the sake of a cliffhanger.

Meanwhile, if it was Mayor Adams in that car, does that mean he's supposed to have killed Rosie? Or somehow discovered Richmond's connection to Beau Soleil (through Drexler?) and then tried to take advantage of it? Those of us who gathered last night spent some time trying to work out the possibilities, but in the end we just didn't feel compelled enough to bust out the graph paper and start drawing up timelines. Everyone still seems wide open as a suspect, and if there's one thing The Killing has taught us, it's that there's no point in getting too hung up on whatever you see in the final five minutes of an episode.

This morning, though, strangely, I feel much more satisfied with the way things turned out. Last week I said that I didn't think there was a single character whose confession would make for a satisfying season capper, and I still feel that way. If we'd found out that it was, in fact, Richmond—or Terry or Gwen, the leading suspects in our group—how could it not have felt flat and disappointing, like a little wet fart of an ending? At least this tactic got my fur up, and leaves open the possibility that the mystery can, in fact, be wrapped up in a satisfying way. (I'm nothing if not a cockeyed optimist.) It may have been crude, but it was effective. I'll be checking back next season—though most likely from the safe remove of my DVR.

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America’s Greatest Living Humorists: Parker and Stone, or Larry David?

Jeremy Stahl — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 17:14:00 GMT

South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker were the big winners at the Tony Awards last weekend, as their hit Broadway musical The Book of Mormon took home nine trophies, including the big prize for best musical. The pair is now halfway to achieving the EGOT, the grand slam of Hollywood trophies that includes the Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, and Tonys. (Parker really should be three-quarters of the way there already, but he was robbed of an Academy Award in 1999 by Phil Collins).

In a thought-provoking essay over at Salon, Matt Zoller Seitz uses the occasion of Parker and Stone's official conquest of Broadway to muse that the progenitors of Eric Cartman and Team America: World Police may well be the greatest and most consistent American humorists alive today.

I eagerly labeled Stone and Parker the greatest musical satirists of this generation in a video essay for Slate two months ago, but despite being a huge fan, I wouldn't go so far as to say that they're the country's greatest humorists, full stop. The competition is just too great, and their comedic achievements seem to me to be appreciated by too narrow of an audience. But the essay did get me thinking: If not to Parker and Stone, then to whom would I hand the title?

Going by the criteria Zoller Seitz set out—"audacity, visual flair, musical chops, verbal invention and gut-busting silliness, not to mention consistency of vision over time"—I can think of a few other serious contenders, including Jon Stewart, Conan O'Brien, and Tina Fey. (Okay, so none of them have demonstrated "musical chops," per se, but that seems like a criteria designed specifically for Stone and Parker.)

If I had to pick one person, though, who has more thoroughly influenced the American comedy landscape and offered consistent laughs for an even greater length of time than Stone, Parker, O'Brien, Fey, or Stewart, it would have to be Jerry Seinfeld's former partner, Larry David. Seinfeld, which David co-created, is regularly listed not only among the best sitcoms of all-time, but the best shows ever. The many classic episodes David wrote are still wildly popular in syndication and still hold up 20 years later, and after multiple viewings. His second show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, meanwhile, is going strong as it enters its eighth season.

David—when he's not defending reality TV stars—has continuously been able to combine insane premises (see "The Bubble Boy" episode of Seinfeld), coherent storylines (see Curb's season four The Producers arc), and side-splittingly funny set pieces (see all) as audacious, clever, absurd, and sophisticated as anything Stone and Parker have imagined, and he has done so without the nearly infinite liberty that animation provides. What clinches it for me, though, is the influence that David's work, specifically Seinfeld, has had over his fellow great humorists for the past two decades. If you look at the hallmarks of today's best comedy shows, it's easy to see the shadow of Seinfeld: the meta self-referential jokes; the obsession with cultural minutia; the almost perverse loathing of cultural niceties; the cringe-inducing awkward situations and characters; the season-long story arcs; and the warped, id-driven characters we can't help but love. Larry David may not have invented these techniques, but he perfected them, made them mainstream, and continues to purvey them at a higher level than any of his comedic rivals. And because he is exactly the type of person who would rather quit working on something than see it grow stale, as long as he continues to write, David will remain master of his domain.

Photograph of Larry David courtesy of Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images.

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A New Harry Potter Book? My Prediction.

Chris Wilson — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 15:53:00 GMT

Participants in a viral marketing campaign initiated by J.K. Rowling turned up a website yesterday, called Pottermore, that suggests that the Harry Potter author will have big news next week. At the moment, the only link on the page is to a YouTube channel with a countdown to 12 p.m. British time, June 23, when Rowling will make her announcement. I did not have the slightest desire to get up for the royal wedding, but I'll be awake and alert at 7 a.m. six days from now.

But the news will almost certainly be disappointing, because the only thing worthy of this sort of hype is news of a new Harry Potter series, and Scholastic has already said the announcement does not concern a new book. The reigning theory seems to be that it's a comprehensive website for the series. But to be honest, we don't need a new book about Harry Potter. He's an adult now, settled down—spoiler alert, I guess—with Ginny Weasley and their three children, the youngest of whom is nine when the curtain closes on the epilogue in Book Seven. But I believe I have correctly guessed Rowling's plans for another series, whether it's to be announced next week or in years to come. I believe this series will take place in the Potter universe, and concern a character named Ted Lupin.

Ted, you will recall, is the orphaned son of Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks, both Order of the Phoenix members killed shortly after his birth in the final battle with Voldemort's forces. Ted has the makings of such an ideal protagonist, I find it hard to believe that Rowling would invent him just to abandon him to the world's fan-fiction writers. I present the following evidence for why Ted is Rowling's perfect hero for a new series:

Like his mother, Ted appears to be a Metamorphmagus, a rare condition in which he can alter his appearance at will. (When Remus Lupin announces Ted's birth to Harry and his friends, he notes that, like Tonks as an infant, Ted's hair color changes hourly.)
He may also be a werewolf, like his father. I don't know precisely how that works, since werewolfdom is transmitted through another werewolf's bite. Wizarding genetics are complicated.
He has Harry Potter-like characteristics that will make him appealing to fans of the original series. Like Harry, Ted lost his parents to Voldemort as an infant. Harry in fact anticipated this. When Remus appeals to Harry to let him accompany him on his search for Horcruxes in the beginning of Book Seven, Harry refuses him on the grounds that Tonks is pregnant and he does not want the child to be raised without a father.
He is Harry Potter's godson, an obvious analog to Harry and Sirius.
He has dark wizard ancestors, adding a dimension to his past that was lacking in Harry Potter's infallible parents. We know from the Black family tapestry at 12 Grimmauld Place that Sirius Black had three cousins: Bellatrix, who became Voldemort's cruelest servant; Narcissa, who married Lucius Malfoy and spawned Draco; and Andromeda, who was outcast for marrying a Muggle-born wizard, Ted Tonks. Andromeda was Nymphadora's mother. Bellatrix would go on to kill both Sirius and Nymphadora before she herself was killed. This makes Ted a second cousin to Draco's son Scorpius, who also appears in the epilogue.
He's a ladies man. In the epilogue, he is seen snogging Victoire Weasley, daughter of Bill Weasley* and the exquisite Fleur Delacour.

If I were writing this new series—email me, J.K.!—it would go something like this: Shortly after the epilogue, when Ted is just out of Hogwarts, something happens that requires Harry Potter to go abroad or in some other way generally exit the picture, making room for a new storyline and a new hero. (Harry can make Dumbledore-like appearances now and again if necessary.) Ted is training to be an Auror like his mother, a pursuit that has lost its luster in the years of peace that have followed Voldemort's death. He is reticent about his time at Hogwarts, but we learn that he was in fact a Slytherin, and that he was briefly involved in a gang of students who increasingly turned to the dark arts. Those gang members become second-generation Death Eaters and produce the new villain, whom Ted will have to vanquish. The book almost writes itself.

*Correction, June 22, 2011: This post originally stated that Bill Weasley is a werewolf. He was injured by the werewolf Fenrir Greyback, but did not become a werewolf himself since Greyback was not in wolf form at the time. He did adopt some wolf-like characteristics, such as a preference for very rare steaks.

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A Short History of Car-Tipping

Will Oremus — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 22:38:00 GMT

When Vancouver's beloved hockey squad, the Canucks, lost Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals last night, the team's hometown fans took part in a time-honored ritual: the sports riot. Videos show violent Vancouverites taking out their anger on the usual scapegoats in such situations: store windows, the police, one another, and of course, cars.

The flaming undercarriage of an automobile has become such a familiar image in the aftermath of riots, sporting-induced and otherwise, that it has long since lost its shock value. These days, if a bunch of hooligans congregate and all the cars are right-side-up at the end, it hardly counts as a riot. But when did car-tipping become de rigeur?

In the pre-Henry Ford era, street mobs tended to make their feelings known mainly through the hurling of ballistic objects. The Boston Massacre, for instance, was touched off when restive colonists chucked sticks, stones, and snowballs at redcoats to protest the Townshend Acts of 1767. That practice makes sense: It's instantly destructive and it's easy, even for those in the crowd who may be less than sober. But toppling a 3,000-pound Toyota?

"That requires a real coordinated effort," says Clark McPhail, a University of Illinois sociologist who specializes in the study of crowd behavior. "It takes some people pushing and other people lifting just in order to get the car rocking. It's not something you can do in an instant on a whim."

It makes sense, then, that some of the earliest historical examples of angry crowds upsetting large transportation vessels had a practical purpose beyond simple chaos. In the American railroad strikes of the 1880s and 1890s, irate workers (or possibly opportunistic thugs) overturned Pullman cars in order to block the tracks, inflicting direct economic harm on the industry. From there, it was not a great conceptual leap to modern-day car-tipping, although here in the United States, the exercise seems to have really taken off with the race riots of the 1960s, when burning chassis provided irresistible visuals for news accounts. McPhail hypothesizes that this widespread, mass media exposure is what led to the acceptance of car-tipping as standard practice.

The Canucks' demise, painful as it may have been for Canadian fans who haven't sniffed the Stanley Cup north of the border since 1993, would seem to offer a weak excuse for mayhem compared to the plight of poor urban blacks in the 1960s. But the sports riot has a long, not to say proud, history of its own. As early as 1879, Australians stormed a cricket pitch in rage at an umpire's contested call. More recently, Chicago basketball fans and Ohio State football fans, among others, have shown that victory can spur human-on-car violence as readily as defeat can. And Canada, despite its peaceful reputation, has never been immune to hockey-related hell-raising. Nor has Vancouver, despite its reputation as the world's most livable city.

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Charting The Killing's Demise

Nina Shen Rastogi — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 20:17:00 GMT

AMC's murder mystery The Killing debuted in March to strong reviews, with a Metacritic score of 84 (landing it in the "Universal Acclaim" category). Critics who watched the premiere—including Slate's own Troy Patterson and the Culture Gabfest—praised the show's moody tone, prickly characters, and confidently unhurried, absorbing pace.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Wapi Eagle Casino. As the 13-episode season wore on, emotional arcs flatlined and subplots failed to cohere. The investigation at the show's center dribbled out in a series of silly red herrings and unsatisfying dead ends, underpinned by some very questionable police work. Characters made increasingly preposterous choices. And by God THE RAIN, IT JUST WOULD NOT STOP. Among the brigade of recappers who stuck around week after week (including yours truly) frustration occasionally shaded into anger, and often exploded into flat-out mockery. As Vulture's Andy Greenwald put it by episode 10, "Hating on The Killing has become not only popular, but also easy."

On Monday, AMC announced that it's picking the show up for another season. The press release, wisely, quoted reviews that mostly date back to the show's debut. (They must have realized that critical comparisons to Scooby Doo were not going to get viewers pumped to return.)

Just how far did The Killing fall over the past three months? We decided to see by charting out the shifting opinions of some of the web's top episode-by-episode reviewers. Some had already assigned their own letter grades, which we converted to a 5-point scale; for the rest, we assigned our own numerical score from 1 to 5. (Full list of recappers at the bottom of the post.)

As you can see, overall critical opinion started dipping almost immediately, with some uptick on episode 6 (when the Ahmed storyline started heating up), and a downturn on episode 9 (when the Ahmed storyline crashed and burned). Most people seemed to think episode 11 (which took a major detour from the main investigation to explore the detectives' relationship and follow a separate, contained mystery) was a step in the right direction. But as a whole, the chart shows a distinct downward trend—though perhaps not as steep a decline as I would have imagined.

Last Sunday's episode was, in my mind, the most exasperating of the season, and while not everyone agreed, many seemed to find it a step backward from episode 11. Will Sunday night's finale be killer enough to save The Killing? I'm having a hard time believing it, but I'll be excited to read what the recappers have to say on Monday.

—with Stephen Davis

Read the recaps here:

Alan Sepinwall at HitFix

Meredith Blake at the A.V. Club

Andy Greenwald at Vulture

Maureen Ryan at AOL TV

Todd VanDerWerff at the Los Angeles Times' Show Tracker

Me here at Brow Beat

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Celebrate Bloomsday without Leaving Your Computer

Nina Shen Rastogi — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 15:18:00 GMT

Today is Bloomsday—the day when James Joyce obsessives gather to go on pub crawls and recite long swathes of the great Irish author's masterwork, Ulysses.

Most cities are hosting some kind of celebratory performance, such as the beloved Bloomsday on Broadway reading here in New York, which begins with Mulligan and Daedalus on the tower roof at noon and ends with Molly Bloom's soliloquy sometime after midnight. (Sadly, Stephen Colbert will not be making an appearance this year, though Fionnula Flanagan—yes, the lady from Lost—reprises her acclaimed turn as Molly.) The Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog has some great suggestions for events in other American cities, and Dublin's James Joyce Centre has put together this handy Google Map of international celebrations.

But what if, like me, you'll be chained to your computer all day? Here are seven ways to celebrate Bloomsday without leaving your desk.

Get jiggy , then get up-close:

For a quick introduction to the Irish literary giant, begin with this rap (the term is used loosely) by Frank Delaney, the author and broadcaster whose weekly, 5-minute Re:Joyce podcasts have been tackling Ulysses line-by-line for the past year. "Ulysses is full of allusions which are easily missed by the general reader," Delaney tells More Intelligent Life, "but when I looked at the annotated editions, there were lots of gaps. I thought, 'Why not do the book in such a way that there is not a single unexplained reference?'" He's just finished explicating chapter 1. "Hope to see you, right here—every Wednesday, for the next twenty-two years," the 68-year-old says jauntily on his website.

Listen in:

Solitary night owls can tune into Bloomsday on Broadway on WYNC online; the radio station will begin broadcasting the event from 8 p.m. EST until the reading finishes, after midnight. Or you can check out Radio Bloomsday, a program of Ulysses-related readings with a slightly starrier line-up: Alec Baldwin will be reading Lord Tennyson's poem Ulysses, plus an excerpt from the Wandering Rocks episode. Paul Muldoon, Pulitzer-Prize winner and Ke$ha expert, will read an excerpt of the Proteus episode. Garrison Keillor, Bob Odenkirk, Wallace Shawn and Jerry Stiller will be joining in, as well. The broadcast begins at 7 P.M. EST and goes till 2 A.M.

Read a comic-book version:

Ulysses "Seen", a serialized comic-book adaptation of Joyce's novel, gained some notoriety last year when Apple refused to distribute it in the iTunes store, thanks to some panels featuring naked people. That decision was overturned in time for last year's Bloomsday, and today, you can happily download the comic—envisioned as a kind of souped-up students' guide to the book—to your iPad, in addition to reading it for free online.

Tweet at your boy, Leopold:

What if you took Joyce's classic, nearly 800-page novel and turned it into a piece of Twitter performance art? As part of the Ulysses Meets Twitter 2011 project, 70 volunteers have broken the novel into 96 sections, rendering each into a string of tweets they're calling a "Bloomsday burst." The bursts are going out every quarter hour today on the @11sses Twitter account. Latest, mystifying tweet: "Why do you call me nought? You naughty too? Tell me I want to. Know. O. Trails off there sad in minor. Sign H PPS La la ree."

Enjoy some fun but possibly useless geekery:

See the entire text of Ulysses, rendered as 2D bar-codes you can scan and read on a mobile device with a barcode-scanning app. At the very least, it would make for a good desktop background for the day. [via Jacket Copy]

Listen to the man himself:

A few recordings exist of Joyce reading his own work; I particularly like this hypnotic mash-up of Joyce reading Finnegans Wake, played over an animation painted on a copy of Ulysses, by the artist (and acquaintance of mine) Alex Itin.

Learn up:

Bookforum's Paper Trail points us to this documentary on Joyce and Ulysses, which is available in nine parts on YouTube. Part of a 1988 British miniseries on influential modern writers, this artful film contains dramatic reenactments of famous scenes from the novel, coupled with readings from James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, written by Joyce's longtime friend, the artist Frank Budgen. In between the well-acted scenes, Budgen explains how the author was unique in his ability to capture detail—a characteristic brought to life by the film itself. Watch Stephen sing an Irish lullaby to his ailing mother, take in images of dusty whiskey bottles and stale loaves of bread, and transport yourself to Dublin right from your computer.

—with Brahna Siegelberg

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So What Did Critics Think of "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" 2.0?

Nina Shen Rastogi — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 13:58:00 GMT

Last night, three months after the epically fraught musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark scrubbed its original creative team—including director and co-creator Julie Taymor—a revamped, super-Bono'ed revision opened at Broadway's Foxwoods Theatre. Well, the reviews are in, and critics are falling all over themselves to damn the show with unanimously faint praise. Yes, the story is now easy to follow, bearing little resemblance to Taymor's flustered fever dream. The sets look good, the flying rigs seem remarkably OSHA-friendly, and Patrick Page, as the villainous Green Goblin, is a hammy delight. But the book and score are lame, and considering all the folderol that came before, the end result hardly seems worth the fuss.

Ben Brantley wins the underminer award for his New York Times review:

[Is] this ascent from jaw-dropping badness to mere mediocrity a step upward? Well, until last weekend, when I caught a performance of this show's latest incarnation, I would have recommended "Spider-Man" only to carrion-feasting theater vultures. Now, if I knew a less-than-precocious child of 10 or so, and had several hundred dollars to throw away, I would consider taking him or her to the new and improved "Spider-Man."

The most entertaining write-up comes from Vulture's Scott Brown, who's quickly become one of my favorite theater critics. His whole piece is worth a read, but here's the kicker:

Spider-Man ... is like that good-and-crazy friend with a highly entertaining substance-abuse problem, the one who went off and got clean, and came back a different and diminished person. With his manias and overmuchness, you realized, after he returned, how very little you ever had to offer one another. With Taymor gone, and the ruins of her monstrous Lovecraftian vision overrun by Lilliputians, there's simply nothing to see here, other than the sort of "stunt spectacular" that wouldn't look out of place amidst a backdrop of roller coasters and toddler-vomit. It's a vast emptiness, void even of its animating madness. It shuffles and smiles and subsides, like a good inmate, its hummingbird heartbeat slowed to a crawl. Put your head to Spidey's chest, and all you'll hear is the dull smack of a damp wad of cash hitting the boards.

Meanwhile, Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal calls it "the best-looking mediocre musical ever to open on Broadway," a "white-bread commodity musical" that's "as unpoetic as you can get." His final verdict: "$70 million and nearly nine years of effort, all squandered on a damp squib ... Never in the history of Broadway has so much been spent to so little effect." EW.com's Thom Geier gave it a C+ , saying, "It may be an admirable work of revision, but it's an unsatisfying meal, like one of mom's end-of-the-week casseroles made of leftovers she couldn't bear to toss." However, RollingStone.com's Evie Nagy, while noting that "grown-up snarkers" might find the show "a little too blandly and competently whipped into shape," writes that there's "magical potential" for children, who presumably don't know any better.

Until tickets drop below the $70 to $150 level, I think I'll just amuse myself with Spider-Monster:

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This J.Crew Ad Looks a Lot Like My Book Cover

Robin Romm — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 06:14:00 GMT

In 2009, before my memoir The Mercy Papers came out, my publishing house showed me ten very questionable book covers. Even my editor thought them cringeworthy, and sent them to me with weary trepidation. One featured Adirondack chairs in soft colors, overlooking the endless sea. Another, a naked woman's back, her slightly damp curls suggesting an earlier lovemaking session. My memoir, a furious and raw account of my mother's death, was far from placid or erotic. Yes, one scene takes place looking out at an ocean. And the naked woman seemed to be standing next to some hospital sheets...which were sort of deathy. But I feared these covers would sentence my book to a place on the remainders table.

I had the good fortune of pitching a fit the week that the wonderful designer Rex Bonomelli joined Scribner. He read the book, and an unexpected image jumped out at him: the popsicle.

The popsicle was one of the last foods my mother could eat. By the end of her life, and by the end of the book, she couldn't hold them. Her hands shook, so they would fall to the floor and break. The three red popsicles, going from whole to broken against a dreamy blue backdrop, signify the breaking down of childhood as well as decline from illness and, ultimately, death.

Instantly successful, the cover piqued the interest of booksellers and blogs. It's the sort of book jacket people reach out to touch. Not only is it beautiful, it both clashes with and magnifies what it's meant to suggest, the way any good metaphor should.

It was surprising, then, when a similar image popped up in Esquire's female sex survey in 2010. On a backdrop in a very similar shade of blue as my book cover lay four popsicles in various states of wholeness. On Mercy Papers, it had been an image of emotional and physical diminishment; here, it was a graph showing how much women liked to give blowjobs.

I took it as a kind of backward compliment that a magazine like Esquire might be alluding to my book. At least that would mean they were paying attention. Moms! You mean MILFs? Awesome, give ‘em a "popsicle!"

I guess popsicles are kind of phallic.

Now, a picture that looks strikingly like my book's jacket is serving as the campaign image for J.Crew's summer sale. True, they used only one popsicle, not three, but it disappears in a series of animated clips. The color scheme and precise hues—cherry red, light blue backdrop with some shadow, white font—are exactly the same. The disappearing red popsicle now lures you to buy not a heartbreaking book about my mother's untimely death, but tiny, light blue chino shorts.

One of my writer friends suggested that J.Crew could put The Mercy Papers near the register in stores—perhaps with some cute polka-dot Kleenexes (to catch the tears!). Until that happens, J. Crew shoppers can find the book here. I happen to think that my fierce and excellent mother would make a wonderful companion as you sunbathe on your sailboat in Nantucket, sipping gin, straw bucket bag by your side, overpriced flip-flops dangling from your feet.

Screengrab of oral sex chart from Esquire.com.

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Episode 12 of "The Killing": "Beau Soleil"

Nina Shen Rastogi — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:51:00 GMT

[Caution: There are spoilers ahead! So if you haven't yet watched "Beau Soleil," come back when you have and share your thoughts and theories. If you need a refresher, read our write-ups of episode three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and eleven. You can also check out AMC's helpful plot recaps.]

No, no, no, no, no. That's about all I have to say about that.

I'm sure that last night's Big Twist will turn out to be the season's big red herring. And I know that I've complained about the fact that the campaign storyline feels thoroughly disconnected from the murder investigation. But teasing Richmond as the killer, or even as a simple sicko who likes to patronize high-end escorts, just destroys our faith that the show takes anything it's built up about its characters seriously. Next Sunday, when it's revealed that Richmond was just hiring Beau Soleil girls that look like his dead wife (we know from the photos in his apartment that she's dark-haired, like "Celine," and like Rosie, for that matter) so that he could work out some of his deep-seated emotional issues about her passing (Get it? Orpheus? Get it?), it'll still be annoying, because the writers assumed that we'd give the theory some credence—that we'd be willing to accept a conclusion that completely obliterated, in an uninteresting way, all that had come before.

(I've asked this before, but do we know for sure how Richmond's wife died? Didn't a reporter once note that Rosie's death seemed a lot like Richmond's wife? If so, "Orpheus"'s behavior makes sense, in a creepy-but-not-killery sort of way.)

According to last night's commercials, next week's season finale features a final five minutes "so shocking," we'll be "talking about it all summer." I imagine I'll be too busy gritting my teeth to talk much. At this point, I don't know if there's a single character whose confession would make for a satisfying season capper. I keep thinking back to the excellent first season of Veronica Mars, which was also built around a season-long murder investigation. The big revelation at the end was soapy and ludicrous, but because the show had spent so much of its energy up to that point developing the characters and their relationships—including those of the murder victim, Lily Kane—there wasn't so much riding on the final twist. But despite last week's welcome departure, The Killing hasn't made character elaboration a priority, and I fear that failure's going to be glaringly obvious next Sunday.

For what it's worth, my money's still on Terry being involved somehow.

Some random observations:

- Linden sure does like her Battlestar Galactica alums—Helo Agathon is Jack's dad! I'm guessing that by hiring Tahmoh Penikett, who's not a huge name but did recently star on a high-profile show, the writers plan to bring Greg back around next season.

- Seriously, is Linden a terrible detective? She's going to smoke out the bad guy by ... flooding his inbox?

- Drexler is a pain in the ass (and a supremely irritating character), but he does have striking taste in indoor pool design.

- When all else fails, plant an Indian burial ground under your opponent's big civic infrastructure project! Works every time. Them Indians don't play.

Photograph of Gwen Eaton (Kristin Lehman) and Darren Richmond (Billy Campbell) by Carole Segal/AMC.

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Eleven Great Movie Threats Made by Women

Nina Shen Rastogi — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 20:33:00 GMT

Last week, we watched Harry Hanrahan's insanely-detailed supercut of the Greatest Movie Threats of All Time and couldn't help but wonder—where were all the threatening ladies? Of the 100 moments in Hanrahan's compilation, only 6 featured women doing the menacing. So we asked you to submit your favorite female-delivered film threats—and while we didn't quite come up with enough to make a new, gender-balanced montage, we think these distaff additions are pretty scary. There's less swearing in this list than Hanrahan's, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, penis injury plays a prominent role here, as well.

(Wear headphones for this one):

Norma Shearer as Mary Haines in The Women (1939)
"I've had two years to grow claws, mother. . . Jungle Red!"

Dolly Parton as Doralee Rhodes in 9 to 5 (1980)
"If you ever say another word about me or make another indecent proposal, I'm gonna get that gun of mine, and I'm gonna change you from a rooster to a hen with one shot! And don't think I can't do it."

Carol Burnett as Miss Hannigan in Annie (1982)
"You're supposed to clean the bathroom and the kitchen before lunch, my little pig droppings, and if you skip the corners, there will be no lunch."

Olympia Dukakis as Rose Castorini in Moonstruck (1987)
"Old man, you give those dogs another piece of my food and I'm gonna kick you ‘til you're dead!"

Kim Walker as Heather Chandler in Heathers (1988)
"Monday morning, you're history. I'll tell everyone about tonight. Transfer to Washington. Transfer to Jefferson. No one at Westerburg's gonna let you play their reindeer games."

Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 (1991)
[after breaking a man's arm] "There's 215 bones in the human body. That's one."

Lena Olin as Mona Demarkov in Romeo is Bleeding (1993)
"You can dig one grave or you can dig two."

Rebecca De Mornay as Countess D'Winter in The Three Musketeers (1993)
"And with a flick of my wrist [pointing a dagger at a man's penis], I could change your religion."

Amanda Plummer as Honey Bunny in Pulp Fiction (1994)
"Any of you fucking pricks move, and I'll execute every motherfucking last one of you!"

Lena Headey as Queen Gorgo in 300 (2006)
[after stabbing a man, and holding the sword in his body] "This will not be over quickly. You will not enjoy this."

Sandra Bullock as Leigh Anne Tuohy in The Blind Side (2009)
"If you so much as set foot downtown, you will be sorry. I'm in a prayer group with the D.A., I'm a member of the NRA and I'm always packing."

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Brow Beat

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Tell Us about Your First Trip to a Gay Bar

Peter Falk, RIP

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Remembering MJ and His Moonwalk

Live-blogging the Pottermore Announcement (from the Couch)

What Would You Pay $10 to See A Writer Do?

Defending Roger Ebert

New Focus-Later Camera: Good for Photographs, Bad for Photography

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Episode 13 of "The Killing": "Orpheus Descending"

America’s Greatest Living Humorists: Parker and Stone, or Larry David?

A New Harry Potter Book? My Prediction.

A Short History of Car-Tipping

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Charting The Killing's Demise

Celebrate Bloomsday without Leaving Your Computer

So What Did Critics Think of "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" 2.0?

This J.Crew Ad Looks a Lot Like My Book Cover

Episode 12 of "The Killing": "Beau Soleil"

Eleven Great Movie Threats Made by Women