This season's resonance with our current historical situation is uncanny. 12 months ago I had a lot more faith in democracy, jury trials, checks and balances etc.— all those institutional backstops that are supposed to stop the Vargas of the world. But if the shortsighted Moe Dammiks of the world are making all the…

I don't think you can start a season like that and not have that character be part of the endgame.

I'm not sure yet, but this episode may have totally redeemed a season that I've mostly found scattershot, pretentious and unpleasant. Finally these characters are resonating with me emotionally.

Part of my distrust for the rapturous reaction this movie has received from The Mary Sue and other sites of its ilk is the advocacy function those sites serve in addition to the critical analysis function. And let's face it— the "feminist genre fandom" community was desperate for a broad pop-cultural hit, especially…

And I still enjoy whenever anyone points out that he got to his position through nepotism. But he's still right.

Poor, poor Kim.

I'm fairly left-of-center, but one of the things that irritates me about contemporary leftist discourse is the way the left's worship of subjectivity combines with the internet's amplification of the most extreme, unrepresentative voices, and the continued need for One True (Not-Too-Complex) Framework for…

I liked Sense8 enough to watch the whole run, and… I shared Rainbow Kite's impression of the episode in question. On a scene by scene basis, this has to be one of the most frustratingly uneven series in the history of television. Dizzying highs, and eye-rolling lows.

There are individual scenes on this show that are the most eye-rollingly awful out of everything on TV. Scenes like Nomi and Amanita having dinner with Amanita's two dads, where everyone is congratulating themselves on their enlightened politics, and then this one at the wedding. I wasn't aware every witness gets to…

That's exactly how I've felt about this whole season. Occasionally it pulls me in with a cool scene or a dash of pretension that makes me wonder if it's heading in an interesting direction or if there's more going on under the surface, but in the end it doesn't add up to much.

Based in Cincinnati, I believe. They really lean in to the junk food angle with the donuts, crushed up potato chips, etc.

I like to think that the dick scanner was an outgrowth of the Shazam-for-penises technology Jian Yang came up with on Silicon Valley. Not Hotdog.

Bummer. I thought he looked like MSNBC's Chris Hayes, but obviously way more into capitalism.

I love how uncomfortable Titus sounds drawing out that last "booobs" in the chorus.

To me, the show seemed successful at portraying Xan and her roommates as teenagers. The roommates are cliquish and I see their attempts to weaponize their political beliefs against an individual as a sign of immaturity. But they seemed genuinely nice to Kimmy in a way that Xan still often isn't. And then there's…

They sound like awful people but they are hardly the worst of contemporary pop. I don't change the station, either.

For me, the last two have been growers, but Challengers immediately felt like a classic.

Music criticism as a whole seems to be in a pretty bad rut. I want to blame the current political climate for this, but then, I see Trump in my shredded wheat every morning.

It actually seems somewhat foreign to Spanish, too— there aren't a lot of Spanish words ending in x that aren't loanwords.

So… suddenly it feels like we're in Westworld now. With frozen yogurt.