The reason smart, socially aware people don’t talk a lot about how smart and special they are is because they know it’s more a warning sign for some pretty garbage personality traits, like arrogance and insecurity, than something that will convince most people it’s true.

If only we had some national political figure…

Ah, yes, the “rap beef” approach to celebrity. Though I’m guessing her flow sucks.

Yeah, unless he gets hit by a bus or something, I think it’s more of a when than an if. If he keeps winning Oscars for supporting roles and doing whatever he wants, that might stretch it out a bit, but eventually careers hit rough patches and the $75 million he was paid for Endgame might start to look pretty appealing…

This sort of rhetoric, an empty platitude at the best of times, seems vaguely insane when Trump is on the ballot. “In the interest of national unity and peace, I refuse to tell you whether I prefer the moderate grandad or the perpetually aggrieved lunatic who made ‘vengeance against my enemies’ a cornerstone of his…

You can maybe speak to this better than I can, but most of the implied contracts I’m aware of involve a situation where, in the absence of an explicit agreement, a clear pattern of past behavior or social norms establishes a reasonable expectation of reciprocity. The examples I get when Googling are things like…

The line between this and “I made up some terms in my head that I think she should be legally bound by” is so razor thin that I doubt there is any practical difference in most cases.

“The remaining claims include Pitt’s assertion that the couple had an ‘unwritten, unspoken implied contract’ that Jolie would not sell her shares without Pitt’s consent”

I’m not a lawyer, but that sounds rock solid to me.

His vision also evolved quite a bit, even if nobody wants to admit it. The original idea of an interracial, multi-national crew was legitimately progressive for the time, but Kirk, Spock, and Bones are the only ones with personalities for a while, and they were constantly bickering. But my guess is that fans told him f…

“Picking a side potentially alienates half of my most lucrative movie market, so this movie about American political divisions has nothing to say about American politics, promise!”

Seriously, this quote is some clueless white guy goober shit, the sort of thing you only say when your basic rights are always pretty safe…

The press absolutely changes minds, just not as openly or through the direct methods more aspirational depictions hope. But the now widespread notion that every minor policy dispute is a level-10 emergency or existential threat to the nation is 95% down to the tone of our media coverage. It’s arguably what made Trump…

Yeah, ethics aside and in purely mercenary terms, James Gunn wrote the playbook for handling this sort of thing. Apologize, take full responsibility, and keep the company out of it as much as possible (and yes, I know his accusers were mostly right-wing trolls acting in bad faith — he still did exactly what needed to…

Agreed. Men felt like it worked backwards from its central metaphor in a bad way. Like a lot of themes of Dracula are pretty xenophobic at their core, but the book still codified vampires as one of the most memorable and versatile villains in horror fiction, and Dracula-type vampires are everywhere now. You can filter…

It’s weird to see the AV Club suggesting that Brosnan successively found the magical combination of words that proves his apology is sincere and now everyone is bringing too much of their own perspective to it when it seems way more likely that we’re cool with this because the offense was relatively minor and didn’t…

A lot of it depends on how the question was asked, too. If a journalist e-mailed their campaign or it’s up on the website, it’s much more likely to be a heavily sanitized answer chosen by committee. If a reporter caught them live after they read Goodnight, Moon to a kindergarten class or something, the answer won’t…

I was being glib; an actual candidate’s list would be in the same spirit but obviously feature more Americans. The four books by Americans in Modern Library’s top ten of the 20th century are The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury, The Grapes of Wrath, and Catch-22, and I’d be shocked if the first three of them…

I’m not really arguing the literary merits of each, and like I said, I love Shakespeare and am neutral at best on the Harry Potter series. I am suggesting that loving Shakespeare is the safest opinion in literature, and an unwillingness to venture outside of it is more likely the sign of an insecure or incurious mind…

Yeah, I think I don’t love her take not even because I disagree that Dickens is better written than Harry Potter, but because that position reminds me of the sort of intellectual cowardice I’d often see from people who thought they were being smart. There is no risk in saying Dickens or Shakespeare or Milton are good…

The sports thing is a solid analogy, as is the idea that the real problem is picking any small sliver of culture and making it your whole personality.  I was a lit major, so I love me some Shakespeare, but the people who only read Shakespeare are also weird as fuck.  

I think they more you tend to break down what’s actually happening, the more complicated it gets. Something like Space Jam 2 is a great example. The original film is super-mid ‘90s, not just because that’s when all the athletes involved were in their prime, but also because it was riding and in many ways capped off an…

His position just seems to be “I made the best movie I could, some of the decisions were hard, and I don’t want to be constantly reminded of or debating the good stuff I had get rid of as part of that process. The easiest way to make sure that doesn’t happen is to keep it to myself.”

I get that it’s a minority view…