Because I am running around and collapsing into a heap of cardboard boxes today, the divine BabylonSista and Katie Welsh are going to help me out for the rest of the week. They’re both beta of the site, so please be as excellent to them as you have been before–I know I’m desperate for BabylonSista’s coming take on the Real Housewives of Atlanta. I’ll pop in intermittently.... 

I did warn you guys today was going to be girly. But as the last party of my nostalgic self-indulgence this weekend, I watched The Babysitters Club movie for the first time since it came out in theaters fifteen years ago. It’s got this weird flash of temporary nineties starletism: Larisa Oleynik and Rachel Leigh Cook are two of the main characters, on the cusp of their brief breakouts as sex... 

Guys, I was maybe kind of going to slack off today on the grounds that it’s right before a holiday weekend, and I’m letting my staff out early, and I’ve gotten excited and distractible about the possibility that I might buy an apartment. But my loyalty to y’all compels me forward. Also, the opportunity to freak out about the possibility of a Sandman television... 

So, half of y’all want me to read Perdido Street Station, and the rest of you split between other books on the list, so Perdido Street Station it is. I need to get a feel for how long it takes me to read a chapter or section, but I’ll start today, and by Wednesday, give everyone a sense of pacing. We’ll start discussion a week from this Friday to give everyone to get copies in whatever... 

Not to get all block-quotey today, but I think Katie has a good point about cop shows: Where’s the cop show set in the suburbs or a small-but-not-excessively-quirky town? Sure, there wouldn’t be enough major crime to make it a procedural, but a character-driven drama combined with day-to-day cop stuff could totally work. (The closest to this I can think of is, God help us, certain seasons... 

It was a year ago today I started posting regularly over here. I just wanted to thank you guys for sticking around and making it such a joy to write here. In honor of that, requests? Work, and life, are busy, but I will do my best to oblige y’all, and swiftly.  Read More »

From The Atlantic yesterday, on why you should read Ender’s Game to understand blogging today, particularly the confusion that surrounds Dave Weigel: Peter and Valentine are able to be successful–and more importantly–plausible in their guise as adult policy experts and demagogues because their online personas provide something that reading audiences want. Valentine, the... 

Noah Berlatsky and Sady Doyle have ably dismantled the social science and assumptions about safety and wellbeing that underly Caitlin Flanagan’s latest essay on the inner lives of adolescent girls in The Atlantic. They’re absolutely correct, of course, but I think there’s one other problem with the piece.  Flanagan’s misreading many of the cultural examples she picks to... 

Over at my blog, I called the week starting today “The Most Incredibly Exciting Week Ever,” and while that’s overstating things a bit, there is an awful lot of pop culture stuff going on in the next eight days or so. Alyssa suggested I link to the little calendar I wrote up, so here you go. There’s a lot of TV, plus some music, books, and movies. Oh, and Google. Enjoy!  Read More »

The Fug Girls put together this great slideshow of whether today’s young actors will became the prototypes laid out for them in the previous generation and a half.  Which raises an interesting question: is the generation of actors now in their forties and above now actually that fantastic and iconic? Has the acting world gotten big enough to make space for a large number of serious icons?...