Well you’ll probably never see this — thanks Kinja! — but he is absolutely worth reading. His more recent books — I haven’t seen this one yet — do tend to overgrowth but they’re still pretty good, and ‘The Corrections’ is great. Read that one; the first ten or twenty pages is a slog but you can skip it entirely and…

Agreed. The Corrections is part of the modern canon; everything else is puzzling, sometimes good, but never great. Special mention to 27th City, the plot of which involves descendants of Gandhi somehow all relocating to St. Louis in the 80s and orchestrating an authoritarian municipal coup.  It’s like an acid trip…

I think The Corrections is a dang masterpiece. Freedom is the only other Franzen I read and I found it to be sanctimonious trash. As the byline of the article taunts, he’s very divisive, so I’d say give it a shot and be fine with it if it’s not for you.

The Corrections is fine. The others? Absolutely hell no. It’s a commitment that simply does not pay off and if Purity had been written by anyone else it would never have been published.

“The talentless hack’s talentless hack”.

The 1997 appearance on Conan with Thorne-Smith is the best video on YouTube. It’s simultaneously hilarious and oddly genuine (heartfelt?) and I have watched it over 100 times. The set-up leading to “is it spelled B - O - R - E - D” is the funniest thing I have ever watched. 

I would put Norm in the 4 funniest people of all time, and the 1997 episode of Conan with him and Courtney Thorne-Smith as the funniest thing television has ever made.

Neil Patrick Harris AND Jonathan Groff?

I have seen some “actually, spider-man 2 isn’t that great” retro claptrap lately.

Lost in Translation is one of my all time favorite movies. No pandemic can change that. 

15 Some Once-Great Movies Gawker Websites the Pandemic Slideshows Completely Fucking Ruined

“...poor, sweet Paula”

For an ordinary adult, the notion that it took him this goddamn long to figure out how bad that slur is, and the fact that his daughter had to carefully explain it to him, should be a goddamn embarrassment.

“He isn’t so reckless as to blame her outright for his death, but there’s a palpable change in tone when she enters the narrative. And while Argento is indeed a complicated person, the fact that she does not appear in the film to defend herself—nor do any of the other interviewees defend her—results in a biased…

“but she not responsible for driving anyone to suicide.”

so woody allen is a demon and asia argento is a “complicated person”, that is disgusting

That’s a lot of it, but there was also the part where she turned out to have committed statutory rape and paid off the child in question: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/19/us/asia-argento-assault-jimmy-bennett.html

Obviously in the end, nobody chooses suicide except the person themselves, and there was clearly a lot more to that decision for Bourdain than whatever went on in the last two years of his life.

Cask of the amantiallo, hands down.

Look, I understand that Norm Macdonald may have irreparably fucked his career going forward, but your list not including this interview pretty much invalidates it: