I know I don’t write about sports very often here, though I appreciate that my other home base at The Atlantic includes sports under the general rubric of culture. But are any of you as depressed as I am by the prospect of a football lockout in 2011? Thinking about it, I realized that 1995 was the first time I lived in an area with established professional sports teams (somehow, the Hartford... 

Sorry for being about posting these, folks. It was a busy last week. But, I expanded on our conversation about how to make good religious movies, wrote about the odd hold Eliot Spitzer has on popular culture if not on our nation’s actual current events, and recapped the latest episode of Community.  Read More »

I wrote about why Noomi Rapace may actually be the winner in the American remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  Read More »

I took Michael Bay and company to town for putting an extra in danger—especially since they may do it again in DC.  Read More »

I wrote about the weirdness of how Eat Pray Love approaches prayer. And other things.  Read More »

I revisited the Spice Girls: I had a flashback to the international insanity that made the band an international phenomenon in the first place. They really were kind of inexplicable, weren’t they? The market-testing that went into designing the bandmembers’ identities was so crass and obvious that no one ever bothered to disguise it in the slightest. They couldn’t dance. Their... 

I wrote about The Imperfectionists, a book I sorely wanted to like, and didn’t: Journalism isn’t dying because the people who work in the industry are all cravens and fools. It would be convenient and comforting if that were true because then all you’d have to do is swap out the bad folks for good ones, and everything would be fine. But that’s not remotely the case. Rachman’s... 

Sorry I forgot yesterday. It’s been a little hectic around here! But at least you get two this time out. First, an appreciation of Bethanny Frankel, and second, on the difficulty of assessing Woody Allen.  Read More »

I started blogging about A Game of Thrones! Go over there, check it out (these are very preliminary thoughts) and we can have an open thread on that first installment in the series here or there, whichever you guys prefer. I promise to jump in a lot.  Read More »

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy videocrab. In addition to the work I do for them already, the folks at The Atlantic were nice enough to ask me to contribute to their Ideas Report, a special project to discuss ways to shake up the way we live now. Lots of my colleague came up with smart, practical things, like ending close reading in schools or embracing speed cameras....