No!  Not Philippa Gregory!!!  I'd suggest Jane Dunn's Elizabeth and Mary.  It's straight up history (not hist fiction) about Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots.  You get the sense of Elizabeth as Hilary Clinton, rolling her competent eyes at Mary's endless Palinesque drama and disaster.

Wow- only two weeks behind on the New Yorker.  The impossible dream!

Devil in the White City is a lot of fun.  Once you start reading it, you'll zip right through it.  Just the right blend of informative history and potboiler.  I've been meaning to read Larson's new book on Nazi Germany, but keep forgetting to borrow it when I'm at my friend's apartment.

I finished rereading Bring Up The Bodies which I still found a little disappointing, compared to Wolf Hall .   I think at base I didn't like that the book treated the adultery accusations as credible.  Isn't it more interesting and historically accurate to see it as another of Henry's show trials?

One of the upsides of Jenny's solo work is never having to say "Oh, Blake sings this one?"

I don't own anything that would play a cassette tape.  Sell it to me as a file, Rilo Kiley.  Is this the new vinyl, where we're all supposed to be cool and pretend that the sound is just so much better on cassette than on those soulless mp3s?

I feel like it's taken me forever to see that the Coco/Alyssa boring dramz is 100% Coco and 0% Alyssa.  I think I'll like Alyssa a lot more when I rewatch this season.

I know- those faces she makes in the mirror are SOOOOO Telenovela.  You're already 90% there, Alyssa!  Just bring that to the challenge!

And "BACK ROLLS?!?" [pulled-back neck, skeptical look]

Yes, that was hilarious.  "Sure, Jinkx can sing, act, create characters, do impressions, and write/perform comedy, but we're getting to the point in the competition where you need skills!  Like I have!"  Haha, did someone tell Roxxxy there was a swimsuit competition coming up?

I'm not sure whether I'm disappointed that this collection doesn't have some of the uncollected tracks I love (Glendora, Pull Me In Tighter), or happy that it has so much I haven't heard before.

"I Love LA" is on this new record, titled "Let Me Back In".  Sadly, no "Pull Me In Tighter".

I am extremely late to this party, but I had to join in on the Denby hatefest.  Fuck that joyless old crank.  I take it from your post that I wasn't the only person who read American Sucker with a lot of schadenfreude.

So gross.  Thanks for ruining Father's Day forever, Kevin Spacey!

I'm in the same boat.  I watched this when the series was first released, and I wanted to read about it/discuss it then, but there was no real place to do that.  (The "entire series" page was busy/spoilery for the first day or two and then dead.)  And now that Ryan's reviewing the last few episodes, I've forgotten the…

@avclub-173af0430bc192b8a027af7cdba82cd7:disqus  I think he gets away with it in Kind Hearts and Coronets- wasn't the forgets-his-memoirs ending added by some (US? British?) production code to show that crime doesn't pay?

I've never been able to get past Chaplin's sentimentality either, and I didn't enjoy this film for exactly that reason.  I'd read so many rave reviews that I really wanted to love it, but I just couldn't.

Carrie was the only one who half wanted to see Padma's head in the box.  The rest of us completely wanted to see Padma's head in the box.  So boring…  I was really hoping that Padma was Falcon, but guess not.

We roll our eyes slightly, say "Oh… so it's one of those basketball things", and go back to our New Yorker fiction issues.

I agree, and it also doesn't help that I watched these all in a big jumble.  It would be helpful if they started these reviews with a quick bullet outline of what happens in this episode.