At the last professional meeting I attended, the talk was all about faculty wanting to jump ship from public institutions in these states. The erosion of tenure is ensuring that anyone who can leave will, while the downward budgetary pressure ensures that departing tenured/tenure-track faculty will be replaced with…

Thanks for these reviews. As to the “Do we need this show?” question, I’d give it a qualified yes. Qualified, because I do think this would have had more impact after the legal case ran its course. Without a clear understanding of what penalties Elizabeth and Sunny will face, the ending seems incomplete. To be clear,…

You can clearly distinguish the point at which she got so big that no one attempted to edit her anymore. The last couple HP books were serviceable IMO, but I honestly don’t know how someone looked at that abomination of a play she wrote and decided that what Hollywood really needed was her screenplays for a new…

This is the double-edged sword of Bridgerton’s casting choices. If it wants to be race-blind, that makes it hard to address issues of race (and colonialism) in meaningful ways. Lady Mary running off to marry a clerk in India—and Kate being born of her father’s first marriage—had obvious colonial undertones as well as…

I’ll be sorry to see the season end as I’ve enjoyed the show overall... but it does continue to spend too much time on characters who are not that interesting. The Jack/Bridget thing felt completely random, like the show was trying to earn its rating as educational TV. I’d gladly have sacrificed that time, plus…

I initially felt a little let down by this episode, as another article I read teased that this would entail a major reveal about Peggy. You may be right about the nine-month sojurn... otherwise “Peggy had a working-class beau” is not much of a big deal in and of itself.

The Bad Batch largely stuffed the Crosshair-Hunter character work into the periphery for the majority of the season and outright ignored other dramatically rich plot points, such as Echo’s traumatic transformation ...

The “downstairs” portion of the show continues to feel like a neglected holdover from the show Fellowes originally planned.

True enough, though they made it sound like something of a scandal that Peggy is even allowed to live downstairs.

Surprisingly, Agnes is not nearly as horrified as expected by this development as one might expect. However, she insists on being kept in the dark about the political article’s contents.

I really don’t need a S2 if it’s going to be about Mace Windu. We already had Maul and Boba Fett resurrected for what turned out to be pretty lame story arcs in the Filoni-verse.

...Or just watch the other shows. I mean, The Clone Wars is surely tedious at times but at this point we’re all aware Filoni has his own story arc and these are all spinoffs/crossovers. There’s no point complaining if you’re jumping in now and don’t feel like catching up on what came before.

I told DH that the biker gang was lifted straight from Back to the Future II. I expected someone to crash into a manure truck, but I guess we get fruit instead. 

When I heard they were struggling with the storyline for the Kenobi series, I wondered why they didn't draw on the good (but non-canon) novel by J.J. Miller. Now I understand, because they seem to have borrowed quite a bit from that novel in this series.

There’s a lot of discussion about her absence (now she’s having sex in another city, London, after she and carrie had a falling out when Carrie fired her as her publicist), as Carrie and Miranda go on ad nauseum about how they’ve all tried to reach out to Samantha. It’s not their fault, the show appears to be…

They couldn’t make it more obvious that they don’t actually watch the show. SVU didn’t just deal with police brutality in a single premiere episode last season. Most of the last two years worth of episodes have been on police brutality, police misconduct, and/or racial profiling.

Indeed, making focaccia *was* one of the bread week challenges, IIRC. Her confident voiceover saying “I just learned it’s supposed to look like this!” made it even more bizarre because it was so visibly wrong.

I remember the conversations with my Ph.D. advisor about avoiding research on certain (controversial) topics before tenure. Of course, something like 70% of academics in the US will never even be on the tenure track. So, yeah. And believe, it's by design. 

I was wondering during dessert week why there wasn’t more sugar work. I guess this show answered that question.

I’m puzzling over how you played that long and didn’t see another dust storm. For me they blew up as soon as I went looking for a barn find... But driving into the dust storm is also the first chapter of one of the Horizon stories.