Ask yourself, who benefited most from the Reagan assassination? Who? Not George H. W. Not Khomeini. That's preschool thinking. You have to look at this the way the CIA does. Who benefited? Whose career really took off? Who had three Academy Award and seven Golden Globe nominations post-1981, but only one of each…

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The plane knocked down light poles as it was coming down over 395.

I have a friend whose husband is into conspiracy theories in a big way. Chem trails, weather control, truther conspiracies, you name it. Dude is a big, big Ron Paul supporter—although I know saying that in this context is going to piss some people off. Point is, he loathes the government.

Sometimes people like to think of bullies as being closeted because it makes their bullying more sympathetic—it turns them into sad characters rather than straight-up villains, with the possibility of a redemptive arc, etc, if they could only come to terms with themselves. My guess, though, is that most of the time, a…

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I saw it. It was in color and mostly in focus.

Weirdly, it sounds like a Johnny Cash song. I don't know if that's just the fact that I've heard a hundred different people mention "Hurt" recently, or if it's because I saw a Cash cover band a few weeks ago, but honest to God, it sounds like Trent trying to reverse engineer an American-era Cash cover song.

The Year Zero remixed is pretty good. The best of the LP remixes, I think. At least the only one that I can really listen to apart from the LP, and not just think of the original versions.

It's all, all, all about context. There are playful grabs where you both laugh and someone gets their hand playfully slapped; there are grabs that represent an attempt to start something; there are grabs that are are aggressive and domineering.

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Littlefield, you may be interested to know, is a "diverse performance and art space" with an "industrial / organic aesthetic," "flexible design" and a menu created by "famed mixologist Tona Palomino of WD-50."

Mirman is one of the best comedy emcees around. I would go see Pretty Good Friends if my mother was in the lineup. And my mother is not funny.

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What's funny about this is that his books, especially the later ones, are full of batshit ridiculous, pulpy, over-the-top plot elements. Seriously, go read the Wikipedia summaries. As far as I can tell, the presidency / presidencies of Jack Ryan saw no fewer than three world wars, multiple catastrophic terrorist…

I honestly think these two shows are a kind of personality test. If you are the kind of person who, at your ugliest, thinks you are smarter than the people around you and are therefore prone to raging against your circumstances (e.g. most of Internet nerd culture), then you will probably identify on some level with…

So where's the line between a circle jerk and something that is genuinely interesting and well made, and therefore 90% of people are enthusiastic about it—as they should be? If you tell people how great the Godfather is, no one is going to say, "Fuck. When is this Godfather circle jerk going to end?" * And even if you…

Wow, I forgot that "havin a roni" existed. I wonder what other Vanilla Ice slang phrases are floating around in the sewer of my subconscious.

This is one place where struggling creative writers have an advantage over struggling musicians—there is such a thing as a stable creative writing day job, and it's called the university. The bar to a plum teaching gig isn't exactly low, but it's a lot lower than the bar to Chabon-like success; and for a lot of…

Yeah. Once is a mistake. Three times is a pattern, and not one I would expect to change just because they get married.