This article seemed to hint at it through its invocation of the film camera as "the unblinking eye of a compassionate god," but the Dardenne Brothers have cited the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas as a major source for their film-making ethics. Levinas's work was premised on "ethics as first philosophy,"…

I think the whole poptimist trend of taking pop music seriously as an art form was a necessary and good corrective to both the old generation of rock critics, epitomized by Rolling Stone, who think popular music reached its apotheosis with Bruce Springsteen or U2, and the first generation of internet indie critics who…

Hah. I'm guilty of overusing that term.

It's not that Hannibal Buress is the first male to ever mention it, true. And the racial aspect is certainly significant in terms of how people have approached the story. But it still seems a bit suspect that the media is acting like this is a new story, when so far as I can tell the only new development is that one…

Absolutely, and that's to his credit, but that's sort of the point, isn't it? It shouldn't just be one dude who's talking about these things.

Yeah, that's a really good point. I appreciate putting a more positive spin on it — otherwise, I would just despair.

It's not that he shouldn't have talked about it. And we need men to talk about sexual assault, absolutely. The issue is that the media is finally beginning to talk about it after one comic mentioned it in a routine, when the allegations were there all along. I wasn't trying to criticize Hannibal Buress; I was trying…

That's a totally fair point, but I wasn't really trying to say that it's your obligation as a media consumer to know about these allegations. I was more talking to the entertainment media, the people who have been writing about Cosby for years, and who surely had heard about these allegations. I don't think it's the…

I'm glad that these allegations are finally getting the attention they deserve, but they've been out there for years and never seemed to derail his career. Seems kind of problematic that it took a male comedian raising the issue for people to pay attention to it, no? Reminds me of last December, when R. Kelly got…

Wayne Coyne is right up there with Billy Corgan, Morrissey, and Bono on the list of "musicians I thought I liked, whose recent behavior is making me reevaluate whether I ever really liked them to begin with."

How does Jon Wurster have time to do it all? He's a full-time member of three bands that have been very active in recent years: Superchunk, the Mountain Goats, and Bob Mould's band, and he co-hosted on WFMU with Tom Scharpling for many years. Yet he still finds time to write columns for drum magazines, write for TV…

I was worried this would happen when I heard about his liver transplant earlier this year, but I was really rooting for him to live long enough to at least make one more album, mainly because I hate the thought that he'll leave this world with "Lulu" as the last musical work he made.

SPOILER ALERT FOR THE BOOK…..

I don't think Robb is meant to be terrible at war at all. In the first season, and beginning of the second season, we see him as a great military tactician who wins battles against the Lannisters at overwhelming odds. Robb is good at war. He's terrible at everything else.

Theon was certainly a bad guy, but I feel like a big part of his story is the audience recognizing that his punishment isn't really connected to any of his particular mistakes anymore. He's being punished, at this point, because his captor (whose identity I won't reveal, if you haven't read the books) just feels like…

I think we just all want the spin-off Jon Snow-Stannis bromance comedy.

But isn't that sort of what makes "Song of Ice and Fire" a subversive fantasy series? In every other fantasy series, the story would end when the main war is over (presumably with the heroes, the Starks, having won). But Martin makes us stick around and see the aftermath, the landscape torn by war, the characters…

The Red Wedding sequence has gotten the most emphasis in almost all recaps of Sunday's GoT episode, and understandably so. It's one of the most shocking sequences in the entire series, and certainly one of the most anticipated from book readers. But I actually think that the sequence just before, with Bran and Rickon…