You’re wrong. The storyteller was Youhenna Dyâb (“Hanna”), a real person whose own memoirs mention meeting Galland and telling him the stories:

Not sure why you feel the need to paraphrase Wikipedia to show that what you wrote is wrong and what I wrote is correct. But thanks, I guess?

No he didn’t. The version written down by Antoine Galland (apparently told to him by a Christian Syrian storyteller, which would mean it probably *was* an Arab folk tale) is still set it China. It was Disney that changed the setting to Arabia, though they were certainly not the first to do so.

Best known for “The Caine Mutiny”, surely.

“There are smart, ethical people in both parties”

At this point, when the RNC is backing a candidate whom leaders of the party have agreed is probably a child molester, that view is becoming untenable. Democrats are no saints, but the GOP is so ethically bankrupt that membership in it disqualifies you from calling…

Oh, good. Now George RR Martin will have time to release the last books before the TV show finishes.

I’m enough of a pedant to object to “pedophile” for someone preying on post-pubescent teens. “Child molester” will do just fine, though.

So rather than 1 out of 20 it’s actually 3 out of 19? Yeah, that’s still not great, but it’s significantly better.

“Scurrying around like ants”, right? (Formica being the Latin name for ants.)

He was also an unstable bipolar alcoholic with fascist sympathies, who made a number of grave wartime errors and dangerous miscalculations (often due to sheer overweening arrogance, and sometimes perhaps outright delirium) that cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives.

In a world where there’s a [i]The Hobbit[/i] movie trilogy, the obvious way to go is to split it into two or three movies. The first part in particular is a pretty tight story. I’ve talked about this before – how I would do it as a mystery, not revealing the identity of the traitor until the end, maybe even changing…

To me it didn’t feel like a cop-out at all. It was more chilling than the rest of the book put together, because it suggested that Alex was NORMAL.

One review I read for this film pointed out that Christie’s books have sold in the billions, something like a hundred times more copies than JK Rowling (though that’s spread across more titles). It’s crazy to me that any literature person would not have heard of her.

Yes, the series is finished.

Yes, that’s the one with the foreshadowing (and the reveal is in “Vesuvius”). I pretty much agree with you about the ending: the Mother being dead isn’t a terrible idea in principle, it’s more the execution and all the other stuff around it that leaves a bad taste. I’ve gone on at length about this in the comments…

The “twist” in HIMYM was foreshadowed more than a season earlier and revealed several episodes before the finale, though.

Jesus Christ, this article...

This show is a favorite, and though it bombed in its day it’s great to see it recognized in retrospect. Gravity Falls owes a lot to Eerie, Indiana.

It’s the old Ebert’s Law of Economy of Characters: the murderer is the character who appears throughout the story although there’s no apparent reason for him to do so. (In fact, googling “ebert conservation of characters” to find the exact name of the rule brought up a blog post about The Snowman as the first hit.)

The issue I have with the “normalize” argument is that it presumes that if the media had just shouted LOUDER about how unfit Trump was, he wouldn’t have been acceptable to voters. As if the warnings weren’t deafening to anyone willing to listen.