Also . . . his improvements came relative to Mitt Romney, who got the lowest numbers among non-white voters in documented history, so that's not saying much. Trump didn't come close to matching either GWB or McCain's numbers with Hispanic voters. He might have done better than McCain with black voters (unsurprising…

Had Biden been the Democratic nominee this year, I don't think there's any way he would have lost to Trump. But I don't really see what his path to becoming the nominee would have looked like. The Democratic primary is essentially three groups: progressives/students, black and Hispanic voters, and white…

Donna Brazile didn't work for the DNC when she fed Clinton questions; she didn't become chair until afterward. It's still unethical as hell, but it was CNN's ethics problem to deal with, not the DNC's.

Washington inexplicably has a caucus and a primary. Sanders won the caucus 73-27 but lost the primary 48-52—so that'll give you a good sense of how much caucuses can distort support.

Well, the numbers quoted in that article are from the same outside monitoring company as the ones quoted in this article, so if the numbers they quote for Good Girls Revolt are wrong, there's no reason to expect the ones they quote for Transparent/The Man in the High Castle to be right. But yes, it's entirely possible…

I would guess some combination of both, along with tracking what people watch—seeing if new users immediately gravitate toward specific shows, how much of them they watch, how quickly they watch them, etc.

Outside ratings numbers for streaming services aren't terribly reliable, so they could easily be wrong—but Transparent does notoriously not-great when it comes to pure viewership numbers. Amazon keeps it anyway because its critical buzz is enough to drive new users to sign up for Prime to check it out, which is a more…

Amazon/Netflix/etc. aren't traditional networks, so their profits aren't driven by viewership numbers. They're driven by how much buzz a show can create that might convince a non-customer to sign up for the service to check it out, or in Amazon's case, how much business that show can drive to their other platforms. A…

Nobody's arguing that you're supposed to sit around rooting for the villain to win! The identification, like I said above, is temporary—for a few seconds, or at most a minute or so, at a time. There is literally no reason to set up the Saw movies like they're set up—as puzzles!—unless you're trying to evoke that…

I've gotta assume you're trolling at this point, so I'll just leave it at that.

I can't speak for Last House on the Left, which I haven't seen, but of course the Saw films fit that definition—the entire point of the Saw films is that transgressive glee and curiosity the viewer feels (or at least is supposed to feel, YMMV) when you see these poor people trapped in these insane puzzles and see what…

That literally couldn't be further from my read on the scene, but I guess that's why it's good to have these discussions—different stuff reads differently to different viewers.

Well, we certainly don't disagree on it being overly brutal, but I think the difference between torture porn and flat-out torture is that torture porn pushes you to—however temporarily—put yourself in the shoes of the torturer, whereas torture invites you to empathize with the victim. There are plenty of other…

The Variety article in question names several shows, including "Jessica Jones" and "The Americans," who have handled the subject well.

Assuming we're thinking of the same incident, none of those things are addressed immediately, but they're all addressed eventually. She's introduced as a character a few episodes later and all those questions are resolved. Either you missed a few episodes or we're thinking of different storylines.

I didn't enjoy watching the rape scenes in Outlander at all, but you can make a reasonable argument for how they were done "well" relative to a lot of rape on TV—they treated the subject seriously and at length, the fallout for the victim was portrayed in depth, it wasn't simply glossed over for a tortured backstory,…

Okay, I'm finishing up "Seymour, an Introduction" right now, and one thing that caught my attention this time around is how Buddy Glass mentions that he's the writer of two previous stories about Seymour, and he describes them—they're "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" and "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," although…

"Wide open" is an exaggeration. Clinton kept pace with Obama for most of the '08 primaries, and she actually won the popular vote. Had Obama been slightly less adept at planning his strategy to maximize delegates rather than actual votes, he would have lost.

Not ineligible, but it would be the Obama's-birth-certificate thing all over again, but worse because Trump's presidency will have emboldened all the racists to stop hiding their racism.

If they had moms, they wouldn't be allowed to do anything cool, and the movie would be really boring.