Is the software notably less glitchy? I love my paperwhite, but after a year of use, it feels like an old PC—over time the lag gets worse and worse, until it ultimately just freezes up and requires a reboot. Not everyday, but every couple months. Which is incredibly irritating when you're in the middle of a good book.

Yup, that's the entire point: spend a few weeks reading through 1300 pages of intricate, deliberate, decades-long plotting to destroy everyone who screwed him over. That's the kind of commitment to vengeance you just don't see in kids these days!

Sounds like it's right up Lindelof's alley: Create an intriguing high-concept mystery, set up multiple episodes/seasons/years of questions building up the mystery, then shrug and say "Eh, if you wanted answers you're watching it wrong." Screw you Damon Lindelof. You don't get another 10 minutes of my time. (Can you…

Does this count?

Well this is my point, these are arbitrary designations to begin with. There is no day on the calendar that says "end of Baby Boomer era, now entering Generation X." We draw a line somewhere to delineate groups of people who share some kind of cultural experience. And the idea that there's a kind of objective metric…

I think ambiguous demarcations for generations are indeed what we're discussing here. Because there are no demarcations that aren't ambiguous. Assigning any large group of people to a "generation" is an arbitrary (and yes, political and socio-economic) act to begin with.

Definitely! And it's not just arbitrary, it's tied to a specific story that some slice of people want to tell about themselves. When we say "Baby Boomer," we're not really talking about an objective classification of people born during the post-war years (even if that's originally why the term was coined). We're…

I think you are assigning far more rigid classifications to the notion of "generation" than are used in practice. Even your examples—Gen X/Gen Y are a lot more fluid than you're suggesting here. Gen X was supposed to be children of Baby Boomers. But even "Baby Boomers" is fuzzy when you start trying to apply specific…

OK, I guess I didn't understand your critique, but it seems like splitting hairs to me. I mean, the author of the Vox piece (and again, not trying to defend the Vox piece) isn't saying "the definition of the word 'generation' is as I have defined it." She's saying that looking at technology can tell you more about the…

Eh, I don't think it's less valid than any other attempt to define a "generation," which is an arbitrary distinction to begin with. You can try to assign some objective definition, i.e., people who fought in WWII (Greatest Generation) children born in the immediate post-war years (Baby Boomers), but even then, the…

You're right that the Vox article uses numbers lazily, and right to call them out on it. And trying to segment "generations" by technology may be a waste of time. But I think the basic premise of the piece—technology changes society faster now than it used to—is correct, even if it's clumsily substantiated. And the…

What's the fun in that? It's not movie night unless my children go to bed sobbing uncontrollably.

When I watched this with my kids, I kept fast forwarding trying to find the part where they make Snow White's mom put on red-hot iron shoes and dance until she drops dead. No luck. Maybe in the director's cut?

Both Queen and Country and Sleeper coming out, I'm getting misty-eyed...

Totally! Plus Dominic West already looks like him, and can play a drunk antihero like nobody's business. His natural accent's not quite right (a little too high-class, public-school Brit) but I'm sure he could fake it better than any American actor.

The guy who was born to be Constantine, and who will always get the role in my ideal adaptation:

Of course. But my issue (and I think many people's issue) is not with the quality of care provided by an OB/GYN but with the basic model. OB/GYNs are expensive. REALLY expensive. So they show up to catch the baby, and are not typically involved in the labor until it gets to almost baby-catching time. This is not their…

Indeed. Most women who have home births, assuming they are educated about it and considered low-risk prior to labor, will do fine with a home birth. The problem is just that the downside of being wrong is so great. You have to decide if you could live with yourself if you were the one in 500 births where something…

Definitely. You want the state-of-the-art medical care there if you need it, but it's absurd that that's still the dominant model pushed for normal births in this country. Apart from it being generally much more unpleasant for moms than it needs to be, I have to think it's way more expensive than having the kind of…

If you have a smooth delivery with no complications, home birthing is great. If you do have unexpected complications, you are much more likely to lose your baby or your own life. I'm not a statistician and I can't tell you whether you're more likely to get an infection at the hospital than you are to have an…