It's something they've been told to care about.

The grooves are a record of the vibrations caused by whatever sounds were made during the recording process; playback just turns that process around. It's all just vibration, in different forms.

MURDERER!

Exactly. He is brilliant in Pain and Gain. I've seen one convincing Wahlberg performance where I believe he's really smart, and you list three great performances where he is, in order … let's go with averagely bright at best, incredibly stupid, and just dumb enough for his story to be sad?

Fair enough.

The thing that I find fascinating about Wahlberg is that I think he's really good, playing a very smart guy, in The Departed.

I saw the movie with a black friend (I know!) who laughed her head off during the movie, but was upset RDJ was nominated for an Oscar. And she basically said she didn't find the specific thing offensive, and it worked for her as entertainment, but the idea of a white actor in blackface being nominated for an award…

Plenty of white Mexicans.

The Rehearsal was one of the most interesting novels I've read recently (I have Catton's The Luminaries, which is much bigger and won the Man Booker prize, sitting on a shelf waiting for me to get to it) … I don't know if I think it was GREAT, but there was great stuff in it. A lot of the best material involved a…

Yes. It was astounding to me that CBS kept trying to get him in as the star of a TV show, and equally astounding to me that they finally got it to work.

I watched the pilot episode of this and have never seen it since, but Scott Caan was EASILY the most charismatic person on screen. Blew Alex O'Laughlin out of the water.

Yeah, I watched the first one or two episodes of South Park when it came out and stopped because I just didn't think it was funny, but then I was vaguely aware of the show's reputation for "ugh, people who care are annoying" type satire, whether or not that was fair … and then by happenstance the only episode I've…

You mean John Wall, or is Cowherd also going in on rappers I had to google?

I bet Conan Stevens is happy he left Game of Thrones to not play the number one orc in The Hobbit.

As someone who primarily loves the books but was really happy with the films when they came out:

That's about it, yes. I like the idea of fantasy in many forms, including superhero stories, but I'm likely to not be cool with fantasies that intrude on real human tragedies. For one thing it starts up the tedious "well, then why didn't … ?" gears in my head, which I don't want to happen, especially when there's a…

Liking Little Earthquakes more than Under the Pink might be the 20-year-old music take I am most surprised by in 2017.

If we're trying to come up with an explanation rather than the plain meaning of the words:

Given MSNBC's recent hiring decisions, I assume they felt she was too liberal.

I think part of it is special significance about Chicago - there's the magic of large numbers, and Chicago is inarguably a more violent city today than New York or LA. There's the "ha ha gotcha liberal" stuff about associating Chicago with Obama or Chicago with restrictive gun laws (often inaccurately, in terms of…