This is Neal Stephenson's argument: that we once collectively used science and technology to do great, world-changing things like go to space and land on the moon, stuff that really showed off how great America as a society could be—but now we use them to go really small and individual, like designing the latest cell…

I'll put in a word for Remember Us to Life, chock full of Regina Spektor goodness—beautiful, surreal sadness and happiness. Spektor has an incredible breadth and range, perhaps Shakespearean, if that's not too hyperbolic; she has total freedom to do what she wants musically and lyrically, and she's a much greater…

This was an interesting episode, pace-wise. I thought three stories would be too much, but they handled it so that when I thought the episode over, they still had about ten more minutes to go. Each story was fine, though Lovejoy's and Krusty's had enough they could have been stand-alone for the entire show. I second…

I found the cliched ethnic ragging cop banter went on too long.

It's like the ghost of Jeff Zucker haunts the place.

Right, I meant a more clearer line that people recognize from government policies to their own socioeconomic lives, one even Republican mastery of marketing (which, face it, is why they keep winning elections) can't spin.

Though of course not intended, even the Plinko can be metaphorical, I think: successfully crossing the border requires entering it the right way and strategic positioning. But seriously, the Wall is the more generic of titles so they couldn't have come up with a new one, given it was a big piece of 2016 rhetoric?

Like Hitchcock's Vertigo, it has a hell of a damned ending.

During the show there was an ad for an upcoming game show that appears to have ripped off The Price is Right's Plinko, called The Wall, of all things. What is NBC doing?

I was thinking this morning that there needs to be a much more direct transmission between government policy and peoples' lives, so that we really feel what government does, that it's not unimportant, and that our choices or lack thereof matter. With Trump, the Democrats have to really get energized. But more than…

I don't know why I know this, but Rider Strong and Jerry Hall once did a play together, and Hall in a TV interview laughingly said he has a great name. So it's not just her ex-husband who may like them young. Or did, since she's now with old man Murdoch.

I would like to know that young man's interior monologue right about now.

(ahem) "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." That "What?" and scene leaving Roy.

(Stolen and paraphrased from Twitter) So Yakov Smirnoff will do Trump's first White House Correspondent's Dinner.

A paucity of pop culture this week. I saw Hell or High Water, and, while good, I found it underneath the praise it's been getting. A director's movie, with Englishman David Mackenzie portraying the beauty and blight of heartland America. The script, though, going for lean and elemental, felt too skimpy, like it was…

Or have more prizes for the arts the way they do for different fields of science. This would lessen the dumb criticism made right after Dylan won that literature is so precarious and fragile a popular part of culture that giving it to him is a waste, and blow for a reading culture. Which in my opinion is a crap…

Well that wasn't an apt song choice at all.

Philip Kaufman's last directing credit was the HBO Hemingway and Gelhorn in 2012. Hope he's doing okay.

I can see that. I feel that Rushdie is in a select group of writers where the best book is the one you just finished reading. I have to reread Moor's Last Sigh, which very well could be his best.

Has he ever tried non-horror acting, or is he a victim of typecasting?