I also know a lot of people convinced the “D” Herbie wants cannot be found in “D.D.S.”

I would not have recognized Jasmin Savoy Brown as Evangeline from Season 2 of The Leftovers without some fortuitous IMDbing to see if I recognized her in the background of another movie I watched right after this episode, but color me extra impressed!

Thanks, you too!

I mean, they are all, to some extent or another! But It’s a Wonderful Life definitely wears its darkness on its sleeve.

And for what it’s worth, I definitely love Carol way more than any of those other films!

If you’re of a delicate nature, there are Christmas movies for you: childlike offerings like A Charlie Brown Christmas, or Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. Traditionalists can have Miracle On 34th Street and It’s A Wonderful Life...These relative classics are safe, sure bets for maintaining a seasonal framework while…

I’ve said she’s not my personal favorite and I’ve explained why. The fact that I’m being accused of holding her to a contemporary standard of ideological purity while also faulted for citing a 1980 essay that fails to account for her later work is just the sort of incongruity Didion would point to as proof of this…

As I said in a few of my other comments, Didion was someone who seemed very grounded and confident in her own unique perspective. For that reason, I think she was better when writing about her personal experiences than when critiquing social movements because they didn’t align with her preferred aesthetic.

“The authors’ chief concern appears to be some level of moral didacticism or forthright ideological statement” feels like a deliberate misreading (or perhaps just an easy one to make if reading quickly—I can think of one potentially misleading sentence in particular). I don’t think pointing out the unfairness/easiness…

For what it’s worth, I find the critiques about Didion’s indifference to poverty and disdain for people willing to work to better the imperfect world we live in far more compelling than any snarkiness.

You’ll note I followed your lead and vaguely referred to a “graduate experience” with a “literary analysis/history” focus instead of just coming out and saying that I have a literature Ph.D. We pay attention to things like word choice, style, tone, etc., too—and that was the focus when I first encountered Didion’s…

Dear god, network television really is a wasteland.

I’m gonna go with no.

I think her stuff is...fine? But it feels more than a little dismissive to imply that liking/disliking Joan Didion can be boiled down to anything as simple as maturity.

The humor was so much better this episode, thanks to the theater troupe: “Hi!” “Don’t talk to him.” and “We’re doing Hamlet set in Poland.” “Portland.” “Whatever.” “Huh?” were my favorite exchanges.

I am contractually obligated to post this phenomenonal takedown as a writer who didn’t always understand Didion’s appeal and whose teachers were always telling me she was someone to emulate: https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/103/didion-per-harrison.html

Taissa in the past is possessed (?) and eating dirt, and that Taissa in the present is the woman in the tree who has been harassing her son, it is a gloriously well-earned and well-acted thrill. The sight of Taissa with her hand bleeding, out of her mind and animalistic was terrifying.

Yeah, I was trying to figure out which non-family Bob’s Burger characters were most likely to be involved in far right politics, and once I saw “Jimmy Pesto Sr.” I was like, “Oh yeah—that tracks.”

OK, I did some Googling, and I understand that the show’s title cards adjust the book’s setting (2005) to be 2020. Either way, it still feels extremely clear that the show’s 2020 is not our 2020. And that’s totally fair!

OK. So I’ve seen it now, unlike my previous replies, and so far I think it’s pretty good! It seems like it’s going to be hard for anyone to experience this show completely separately from their experience of the last two years, and that’s completely fair—but a lot of the reactions seem fairly harsh, especially around…