I definitely see where you're coming from, Todd. But I do think hindsight will be much kinder to this finale. I think the pacing of the final moments — the levity it seems to give the Mother's passing, the abrupt way it transitions to Robin — is an unfortunate consequence of having recorded the scene so early. I also…

Great article. It hasn't always been good (not by a long-shot), but it's always kept me interested. I think to those of us who see echoes of Ted in ourselves, the big emotional beats of the show — letting go of his Stella anger, the speech to Robin before "The Robin", the Time Traveler wishing for a few more days,…

I don't think Douay means "It originated somewhere before the Bible", he/she means it's nowhere in the Bible. Which is true. They've been floating around for a while, but we mostly have Dante to thank for making them popular.

I wasn't even aware there was a movie, to be honest. The book is a memoir about the author's faith, and it hinges on the idea that spiritual things are felt rather than known and forced onto someone else (the name comes from a quote about how he used to not like jazz because it didn't "resolve" — didn't make sense).…

I'm sad to hear the film version of Blue Like Jazz wound up so cliched. The book is one of the few (maybe only) modern popular Christian books I thought actually portrayed faith in a reasonably balanced way.

As someone who also comes from an evangelical background, I appreciate Todd's even-handedness. Many reviewers would tear the movie to shreds on grounds which are no deeper than the caricatures this film has for its own "evil" skeptics — and while Christian propaganda makes me cringe, I think misinformed views of…

You should read "Little Expressionless Animals", the short story by David Foster Wallace, if you'd like to see this dream realized. Most of it is here: http://www.theparisreview.o…

I don't like the picture any more than you do, but this is like judging a model by her ugliest candid Facebook photo. No one has any idea what the scene is about, or how it will actually look on film. All they know is Jason Segel, much like DFW often did (including during the road trip this is based on, if I recall…

Very late to the party, but I need to let you know that this is a fantastic play on words.

That seems a little dramatic. It's fine if you didn't like this one, but you actually can't /imagine/ a worse episode? It had true-to-life observations (the accidental curly fry), a charming first date with the person the whole show is about, and a sendoff for a variety of secondary characters, wrapped in a lesson…

I can understand why on the outside it'd feel that way. But you need to understand that Watson is exactly this "Dumb algorithm + lots of data" technique I mentioned — it works because virtually every question on Jeopardy has been answered, almost verbatim, on the internet. But when it failed, it showed its stripes.…

This movie is much more than one man convincing himself of something, though. The audience is clearly able to see Samantha communicating exactly as a person would: asking insightful questions, composing music, making subtle jokes. It's Turing Test level.

As someone who works in AI, I've got to say I think Kurzweil is being absurdly optimistic here. Even assuming immediate adoption (rather than the years of testing before a research concept makes it into a product), 15 years is less than the length of 3 generations of PhD students. There's a /massive/ gulf to cross…

This song makes it into a shocking number of playlists for me as well. I'm in neither the beginning or end camp — in my mind the two are meeting for the first time after a bad breakup. After months of bitterness/awkwardness (think "Damage"), they're finally ready to have the obligatory…

Time for the obligatory defense of "Infinite Jest". I've never read Joyce, Pynchon, Proust ("seems a little too long"), or any of those "difficult" authors, so I expected a serious challenge after all the hype. It would up being anything but challenging. The chapters are written with the intensity of bite-sized short…

Loved the Pardo/Voda CBB this week, and I highly doubt many would be offended. Maybe in a European podcast it would be mean spirited: here it was more naive (think Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame) than blackface. But after enough reiterations from Scott, I did want to shout at my stereo that Romani and Romanian are…

Agreed. This episode of DLM had me audibly laughing on an airplane full of sleeping people. It was wonderful.

Awesome use of the song. Though honestly, the Magnetic Fields and HIMYM are so full of potential, they could give me the feels with plenty of pairings. Like, let's say…

I'm a robotics researcher who did undergrad at Berkeley, working on a laundry-folding robot, and I'm told (by someone who only saw a pre-cut) that I show up in the film. I looked like Jesus at the time. Has anyone seen this? Are the rumors true? Intensely curious how it turned out. (NOTE: They spent about 4 hours…

Point taken