It’s nice to know that even in a year of horrifying revelations that threw Hollywood into chaos, the Golden Globes are still as committed as ever to the time-honored principle of getting as many A-list stars as possible to kiss their asses. Battle of the Sexes? That’s not even plausibly deniable starfucking!

“And that’s when I understood. Over here, we lost some of them. But over there, they lost all of us.”

The funny thing is that it was originally supposed to be some weird alien accent, but then Majel Barrett shows up as Troi’s Betazoid mom, and presumably Roddenberry knew better than to ask his wife to try to copy Sirtis’s diction, so instead they gave her a throwaway line about how Troi got the accent from her human…

I probably would’ve made the same assumption if I didn’t already know about Roddenberry’s reputation for creepsterism. For instance, when TNG was first in development, he was the one who originated the concept of the Ferengi as this race of untrustworthy, money-grubbing horndogs who keep their women naked and…

M’eh, the DS9 finale has some really terrible stuff (everything with the pah-wraiths, basically, which is empty fantasy nonsense out of a twelve-year-old’s D&D campaign), but also some stuff that’s pretty terrific (the fate of the Cardassians and of Odo).

I know there’s a significant portion of the Trek audience who feel the way Sirtis does, though I’ve always been on the pro-DS9 side of that argument myself. Insisting that Trek is “about space exploration” in some deeply meaningful thematic sense has always seemed silly to me, an insistence on enshrining form over…

I don’t think there was an outcry from any corner of fandom to have fewer women on TNG. On the other hand, the behind-the-scenes attitude toward women on the series, from Roddenberry and others, was rumored to be . . . not great, to say the least. So I don’t think this was a “playing to the audience” kind of thing.

“Tried to sell it as fact.” My goodness. I’m not sure why you saw me use the term “tell” and assumed that I intended it to mean “a rigorous scientific proof of dishonesty,” considering that’s literally not a thing that exists. But just to be clear, I only meant to share an informal opinion about human nature as I’ve…

Crap, I didn’t even think to check the comedy nominees; I just assumed it would be The Good Place plus a bunch of shows I don’t care about. Yeah, that’s another huge snub.

M’eh.

The allegations against Franken are just as credible as any of the other recent reports of harassment, reported independently by multiple news outlets, based on stories from women across the political spectrum, and corroborated by friends and associates who were told about the alleged behavior years ago. The notion…

I certainly don’t mean to suggest that Franken’s alleged actions are as bad as Moore’s or Weinstein’s or anything like that. But habitually groping your constituents during photo ops is pretty bad. The bar for Senate membership really should be higher than “Did not literally commit a felony sexual offense.”

To me, insisting that multiple credible accusations of sexual misconduct render one unfit to serve in the Senate seems like the exact opposite of surrendering.

LOL. I’ll get right on that, just as soon as I finish revising my paper “How to Tell Whether Someone You’re Talking to at a Party Is Bored with the Conversation: A Data-Driven Approach” for the journal Belaboring Every Human Interaction.

Yeah, that’s about it. I’ve known people who sometimes lie, myself included, and I made some observations about how they tend to do so. Nothing more complicated than that; I’m not purporting to be like a mindhunter or anything. :p

Yep. Plus, if you’re deliberately withholding the main thing that actually explains why you did something, it leaves a pretty big hole, and in the scramble to fill it you often end up running through a bunch of less persuasive explanations that still don’t quite do the trick.

I mean, it’s a rule of thumb, not a magical truth serum. I’m certainly not suggesting that Bryan Singer should be arrested because of a random dumb thing I noticed in college. But it’s a dumb thing I’ve found to be true more often than not—to the point that even when I’m giving someone a not-quite-true excuse, I have…

Years ago, I realized that there’s one extremely common tell for when someone is lying: regardless of how overdetermined an incident might be, people can almost always provide a single overriding explanation for why they ended up doing something. “I was late because I overslept.” But when someone wants to lie about…

Time always insists that the Person of the Year isn’t necessarily intended to be an honor, but it almost always bows to politics to prevent someone truly infamous from being named. See, for instance, 2001, in which it selected Rudy Giuliani instead of Osama bin Laden.

Yep, but only once that I can recall: