Steeped in niceness but also a special kind of performative inclusivity. As the piece points out, the fact that Rowling wanted to retcon Gay Dumbledore or Black Hermione always felt a bit disingenuous because she wanted a big pat on the back for it... But those weren’t the characters she created. The terfiness but…

Came here to ask if “Massachusetts” is any less obviously Canada in this season. Last season the failure of anyone to even attempt the correct accent took me out of the show, as well as the sloppiness of plot points unlikely to happen in Massachusetts, like a 19 year old walking into the liquor store and legally…

I know it’s British and all, but dessert week is kind of a let-down when (with the exception of the technical) it’s basically all fruits-and-booze. This season feels like its lacking contestants who do innovative things flavor-wise. Dessert week also seems like an invitation to show off chocolate work, sugar work,…

Qualley’s ... wide-eyed wonder at the bleak fuckery of it seemed designed to make this a fish-out-of-water tale about an outsider getting a temporary taste of what it’s like to be a working-class victim of domestic violence.

focaccia is known as being idiot-proof.

GoldenEye was too good in a way. It did such a great job setting up a post-Cold War Bond that it committed the franchise to moving forward on that timeline. Unfortunately, a lot of the plots that came after were hokey and forgettable and tried to hard to be relevant with cyber-handwaving and pathogens, etc. Now that…

Doom Patrol all the way for me. I was always lukewarm on him as Bond, but IMO the material really didn’t let him show his strengths.

“a year of no Greek life”

I’ll go a step further and say the implications the reviewer makes here speak to our society’s larger tendency to undervalue economic class as a distinct social category. If the show were Maids instead of Maid, I’d be all for a broader cross-section. As it is, the implication that a first-person narrative from a poor…

Given that Barbara Ehrenreich (author of Nickel and Dimed) wrote the forward to the book Maid, I’d say they definitely want you to make that connection!

Herein lies the dilemma: If you want Bond to be in the modern era, he needs to be in the modern era—complete with all of the politics that entails. Otherwise, reboot the franchise and send it back to the Cold War. There, you can have Bond engaged in many of the classic shenanigans of the franchise.

Last bullet point in this review is spot-on. Of all places to set a show like this, presenting Montgomery, Alabama as a locale where the white people were pretty cool about integration and spoke in hushed tones about MLK’s death displays a willful lack of historical knowledge. Check out the book Bending Toward Justice …

I don’t watch Days but will be curious to see how this fares. Soap fans are known for bemoaning repetition among plots, but at the same time resisting anything truly boundary-pushing. Fan resistance to recent storylines about trans characters, open marriages, and LGBTQ relationships come to mind. Hell, even…

I can only assume these nurses who resigned are making a bee-line for Kay Ivey's vaccine freedom land of Alabama, which is now desperately recruiting healthcare workers. I mean, who'd want to stay in a state with high vaccination rates where life is returning to relative normalcy when you could have the "freedom" to…

This exactly. 9/11 was a terrible act of violence— but it wasn’t a “war.” Positioning it as such just because that was most Americans’ frame of reference naturally led to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and all the human tragedy that came after. (For policymakers existing in the “Clash of Civilizations” mindset…

This is a decade or so old now, but I continue to be haunted by this BBC report on child death in the U.S., which zeroed in on Texas as a state with shocking rates of child death due to abuse. In large part, it’s because social services are woefully inadequate.

My odds are on money being a sticking point. I could see Burton asking for something on par with what Trebek earned. Bialik, Richards, et al., were probably willing to work for much less and therefore became more appealing candidates.

It’s also a position that comes with no additional money, unless you happen to be at an R1 or very elite liberal arts school (which seems to be the setting for this show). At most places I’ve worked, chair is either a rotating position where everyone reluctantly takes their turn, or it’s a position the most ambitious…

Now, if we went with “Critical Race Theory and the Novel...”

You couldn’t even watch Burton’s episodes in our (major) market if you had cable or live TV streaming. Jeopardy normally airs on the local NBC channel, but because of preemptions for the Olympics the show was shuffled off to a small, affiliated digital channel. We only found out the shows were airing on that channel…