YA is selling huge right now, so everyone is writing it — even rewriting their adult novels with younger characters in the hopes of cashing in. Most of those authors are writing shitty Twilight ripoffs, and a few are real talents. But then, so it is in virtually every popular genre…

That's a silly argument to me. I switched to adult books early, too, but I never lost a soft spot for the crazy dystopian and counterculture YA lit produced during the '70s, like William Sleator's House of Stairs. It wasn't Dostoyevsky, but it was often far better written than King or Crichton. For some reason or…

I have seen Columbus Circle. You can tell it was conceived in three weeks, though I wish I'd known that before I agreed to watch it. The script is plain silly, with exposition shoehorned in in incredibly clumsy ways, and the direction is like a hammy Hitchcock impression.

This doesn't make sense to me at all. I watched The Wire via Netflix, and now I'm renting Deadwood one or two discs at a time from my local video store (yeah, we still have one). Sometimes I did wait too long between episodes of The Wire and forget what was going on, but that was because I put off watching it, not…

Yeah. Also reminds me of Patrick Ness' Chaos Walking trilogy, where thoughts are broadcast involuntarily, and they're toxic — not to the body, but to any attempt at civil social interaction. I know it was "just YA," but it worked pretty well as an allegory of internet discourse, at least at the beginning before it…

Yeah — I have a strong preference for long forms, especially as entertainment, but I would never claim that Kafka's classic shorts aren't greater than his poorly structured and inconclusive novels, for instance — and, indeed, greater than most novels I've read.

I always preferred serial to episodic TV, just like I prefer novels to short stories; I just found daytime soaps too glacially paced and plastic to watch. I've been rewatching "Dynasty," one of the few TV shows I watched back in the '80s, and of course it's ridiculous, but damn, it's kinda fun.

I wouldn't call Cowboys & Aliens "art," but for me, this discussion is pointless because the average American cash-strapped moviegoer's tastes are so far from those of most critics. I'm not going to suggest that all critics are elitist snobs or anything (because I am one), but I do notice what plays the longest at my…

I could only get through Interview, and only because Lestat was amusingly evil and crude, basically the Spike to Louis' boring Angel (and yes, I know Rice originated the types, not Whedon). When she retconned him into a virtuous killer of evildoers who can deal perfectly well with the modern era in The Vampire Lestat,…

I agree, but people do the same thing with politicians — overanalyze them based on their public personae plus all the personal dirt we can get — and that's considered elevated discourse worthy of Pulitzers. It's human nature to speculate about our fellow humans, and anyone who chooses to be a public figure by running…

My sister gets very involved in these shows and tries to make me watch them. I think there's just something about the hybrid of documentary and drama that draws people in. Plus schadenfreude.

I saw The Vow, because I had to. There was not a single dude in that theater. When Tatum cuddled a kitty on his bare chest, the room exploded in awwwws.

I agree on TTSS — the conflict feels so abstract and removed from even ideology (let alone real people's lives) that it might as well be science fiction set in the far future. But that just makes it easier to focus on the characters and the complicated procedural. I admit, I only really liked it the second time…

I liked Clyde Griffiths in An American Tragedy. There's just something about an ill-fated, weak-willed, pretty-faced boy who drifts into murder… but in retrospect, the character seems like a dim bulb.

I had a crush on him when I first saw the movie, but then I realized guys like Lloyd don't exist. They are fantasy love interests, like Manic Pixie Dream Girls or Edward Cullen.

I was 12 when Empire came out, so for me it was all about "Maybe you need more scoundrels in your life" and "Never tell me the odds" and "I know" and watching him go into carbon-freeze.

Damn, I forgot Howl (book version), the slitherer outer. Being a fan of vain men, tricksters and schemers, I'd put him at the top of the list. But Chrestomanci was pretty hot, too.

My literary crushes were old school: Julien Sorel in The Red and the Black and Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons — though I saw the movie with Malkovich first, and his is the definitive portrayal for me. Never saw an adequate Julien on film; that book seems unadaptable somehow (and everyone I know who's read it only in…

I had a crush on Mulder for years.

Yeah, I prefer Henry Pollard to Ben Wyatt because he's got more of an edge and a mean side. Sad to say, no fictional character I ever crushed on was not fucked up.