Oh my God, they were roommates.

If he were a leftist, he’d say “Zionist friends.”

Interestingly, the woman in the photograph “An American Girl in Italy,” claims that she found the experience empowering, and she wasn’t at all distressed.

I agree that Albie and Portia’s stories are interesting, but I do think Portia does want that more aggressive, take-charge kind of guy. The first three episodes have seen Portia demand from the outset some casual sex—a romantic vacation tryst—and end up becoming an appendage of a man who she clearly finds increasingly…

The statement is equally true of the supporters of “anti-imperialist revolution.” The anti-French nationalists in Algeria, the FLN, had a deliberate policy of murdering Algerians working with the French or accepting benefits from the French, specifically to polarize the population and prevent Algerians from being…

I hate to pull the “as a gay Jew” card, but as a gay Jew, I’d never say “antisemitism is murder” or “homophobia is murder.” It’s just not true. Homophobia is ignorant and unkind and increasingly socially unacceptable, but it’s not murder. Murder is murder. Bigotry is just... bigotry.

Weird historical coincidence: the wealthy young woman Mou Mou marries is from the Khashoggi family, the aunt of the yet-to-be-born Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist murdered on the orders of Saudi Crown Prince MBS. Dodi was Jamal Khashoggi’s first cousin.

I thought this was obvious: to establish Philip’s capacity for empathy and humanity when it comes to people outside “the system,” drawing his utterly heartless rebuke to Diana into stark relief. To me, it was blatantly a message about how, whether the royals are good people or not, the system crushes the humanity out…

The poor, much-maligned Ies! #NotAllIes

Well, I think a lot of people use “South America” to mean “everything in the Americas except the US and Canada,” so by common convention, you’re not wrong. But Mesoamerica is definitely geographically part of North America.

Just to be petty, the ziggurat makes it more likely Mesoamerica, which is technically in North America, not South America. This is especially true is Talokan is based on Mesoamerican mythology.

I’m enormously glad that this remake is headed by a female director. 

I really feel like we watched two different performances. She’s uniformly dour and negative, and her “criticisms” are ultimately assertions that her lifestyle and life choices are always better.

I would find a male character who was smug, self-righteous, and incredibly judgmental of others to be equally unlikable. 

Plaza’s character may have an impressive career, but she is a deeply unpleasant person. I’m really enjoying watching Plaza play a character who’s acerbic but genuinely unpleasant, rather than acerbic and funny.

Gold Case was clearly the better version.

I genuinely can’t understand the visceral rhetoric people use about an essentially powerless head of state, as if chucking a millennium’s worth of history aside for some elected bureaucrat like in Ireland or Germany would make any difference whatsoever to their daily lives.

I think the challenge is that, with Rhaenyra out of King’s Landing, there’s simply no real urgency. The Greens have days to plot and prepare and do what they want to assure Aegon’s succession before Rhaenyra even learns of her father’s death, let alone rallies people to her cause. If there were two parallel plots…

It’s worth pointing out that Aegon is essentially a child of absolute privilege who was never given any duties prior to being pulled out of a marble hidey-hole and told he was going to be king. For his entire life, Rhaenyra has been heiress and he was just a spoiled brat who didn’t have to be prepared for anything,…

What I like about unobtainium is that it sounds exactly like what some VP of Marketing would name a substance of inexpressible value.