I binged the six episodes that are out so far for The Magicians this season.

When Rick Atkinson was doing his book tour last year for his new Revolutionary War series - the first book of which is quite good - I went to his local talk and had a chance to ask him his overall opinion about Washington the general based on his full portfolio during the war rather than just what he’d written so…

I was actually thinking of mentioning Crate and Barrel earlier, since one thing the show does is to contrast Bosch - the uber detective - with his peers, yet it also doesn’t fall into the general trope of either making those detectives purely supporting or worse yet, outright incompetent.

Actually, Gottlieb of the Marry Him era would simply have told you that you needed to recognize the ‘leave him or adjust’ part a lot sooner than you did since you (quite reasonably) rank not having to be someone’s ‘administrator’ along with what that implies on your short list of must haves, and that you made the…

I once had a date with someone a couple classes behind me where they wanted to come with me to my then-upcoming high school reunion simply to show off how much weight they’d lost and how good they looked now to those in my class who had bullied them.

When the alternatives were at best Starbuck and the worst - and far more likely - stupidity a la Jon Snow, I’ll give the Duffer Brothers a lot of credit for basically saying ‘eh, we’re good enough at story telling so that we don’t need to do this.’

Ultimately, I set fire to the maybe-could-be-marriage relationship in the cowardly and destructive fashion of someone too terrified to make a choice.

Counterpoint to the snark: I like Bosch, and based on the Twitter reactions I’ve seen in the last few years, plenty of other people kept watching it too.

I’ve run across her blog from time to time when searching for something, but even though she’s very creative and some of her basic concepts have proven valuable, I’ve rarely used her recipes.

Yep, can’t recommend Katyn enough.

1917, which has one female speaking part, shows how far war movies have progressed in 50 years!

Thanks for this; I’d no idea they were that close. The story about Ali spending the night at Cavett’s place in Montauk - in fairness, I wonder if he might have been the first black man ever to receive an invite to one of the Seven Sisters and that part of the Hamptons - sounds hilarious.

And the “JL” thing when she was a commander and he was an admiral? That was clearly setting up for later when she starts calling him that, but it was totally inappropriate to how we know Picard interacts with his crew.

Interestingly enough, for me the meatiest part of the actual A story was the explanation and fleshing out of precisely why the mob wanted to take out Hoffa.

Even if that part’s wrong though, it’s hard to argue for its inclusion rather than what he did with it. If he’d added the higher ups, it’d have not only brought in far too many characters into the mix relatively late but also moved the focus from the crew chiefs up to the bosses. I can’t imagine a scenario in which…

the film is a meditation on gangsters in their twilight

Li is not alone among health care workers getting the short end of the stick.

I’ll refer you to the comments under their previous video blog for a pretty robust discussion about the characters and plot. One conclusion several of us reached is that the more you actually knew about the war the more you appreciated what Mendes did; the small details (and there are many) come across subtly, and I…

with a showboating white-elephant prestige picture like 1917 standing in its way