Didn’t Oscar Wilde make some comment to the effect that Wagner was a real popular ticket because the orchestra was so loud nobody cared if you spent the entire performance visiting with your buddies?

Oh, I think ol’ drunken racist homophobe bigot-for-pay Joe woulda been face-first and waistband-deep in the trough like the rest of them.

Thank you for this! Charlotte doesn’t get nearly the idolization she deserves.

I believe you have hit upon the very thing. Trope awareness being common now, you’re just not going to get away with The Predatory Lesbian (TM) in 2020 the way you could in 1938. I mean, good, that’s a terrible, false image that has caused untold amounts of damage to innocent people, and it should rightly be consigned…

I wonder if they could have gotten away with Stephen Fry. Even in a pitch session.

It would end up like it did in HBO’s “Watchmen”. There are some indefensible dreams better left as indefensible dreams. And GODDAMNED CLAIMING OWNERSHIP OVER OTHER SENTIENT BEINGS THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU YOU UNMITIGATED MONSTER is one of them.

I’m wondering if this isn’t another instance of longing for what we might stereotypically refer to, in the absence of a better term, as street cred: the notion that the well-heeled so often have that their success should be regarded not as an accident of privilege, but as the result of their own scrappy, incessant…

I agree with you. White supremacists will weaponize this, as always, and anyone who isn’t a white supremacist will be in the horrible position of having to decide whether and how to respond.

It’s an understandable temptation, but impossibly to justify. I have a friend who claimed for decades to be part Cherokee. (To her credit, she never used it to claim tribal affiliation for monetary benefit, she just practiced what she thought were Cherokee rituals and, like, hung out at Cherokee art museums and stuff.)…

Every word from Ms. Ward is a glimmering glimpse into divinity.

This has been on an endless loop in my head for two days now.

You may be on to something here; this sounds exceptionally plausible.

Holy cow, the PBS News Hour took her call?

Presupposing that the bang-n’-watch parties took place, now I’m kind of wondering if Falwell the Lesser was relieved at the presence of another man because then he had no reason whatsoever to have to worry about his partner’s gratification, only his own.

In the early 1990s, I worked with an insufferable woman none of us could stand. At one point during the time I endured her, she walked by while I was talking to another employee.

The history of the intersection between the movements for abolition and women suffrage is just heartbreaking. The only way to understand it is to look at the entire history, not just little bits and pieces and this-and-that quotes from much larger, well-argued statements.

He’s also now pulling the “I am not a racist” card out of his back pocket, close to his heart, and reading it slowly out loud. Sorry, Mr. Former-Michigan-State-Official Tom, you don’t just get to declare that. It’s the people who are burdened by your jackassery who get to make that determination.

William Styron once called the n-epithet “our most powerful secular blasphemy.” I think that’s part of it: the temptation to say something shocking is just irresistible to some people, kind of like the sizeable percentage of the population that has an unscratchable obsession to know what it feels like to kill someone…

Back in the dear dead days, this mindset used to be called “reactionary,” and the term carried the connotation of waiting for some infinitesimal step toward progress to occur before the threatened lords of entitlement squawked forth nonsensical objections. “Regressive” is a good description too. I’ve been known to…

I wonder if Fedida’s lengthy tenure at ABC News is due to her saying or doing whatever is necessary to keep the talent from demanding commensurate compensation. Seems like developing and sustaining a reputation as an ass-ripper would be a great strategy to keep the talent from negotiating for what they’re worth as the…