I really dug the pilot for The Man in the High Castle, so it's going to be the Thanksgiving air-travel binge-watch of choice, now that Amazon is going to let you download Prime titles. I'm going to have at least eight hours in airplanes that weekend. Buuuuuut Jessica Jones is what I'll watch with my sister while I'm…

Irony factor: Christian academic Alan Jacobs has taught Fun Home at Baylor, a Baptist University.

Fffffffffffff

I'm gonna have to start buying it, this is the kind of thing I'd love to support.

It's kinda fascinating and great to see art that's still pretty sexy (all those characters look gorgeous in the retro costumes) but catering more to a female gaze with posing that suggests action and agency. Diana on that motorcycle in the cover image, just great.

yaaaaarp

I love all of Connie Willis's time travel books. The Doomsday Book is more grim (unsurprisingly) but also so good, and I loved Blackout and All Clear.

That does sound fascinating. While I was traveling I listened to Radiolab's recent Mau Mau episode and it's incredible. I'm thinking about assigning the episode to my students when we read Derek Walcott's poem "A Far Cry from Africa." The last time I taught Walcott they responded really positively to him, but I think…

My sister and I constantly borrow phrases from Hot Fuzz in regular conversation. Martin Freeman's hilarious variations on "No," "nobody tells me nothing," "the greater good," etc. Somehow all those have stuck when other pop culture borrowings have faded from our conversation.

Hah! Well, fair enough, though there is this interesting microhistory of American and British women finding Nazi officers in the pre-war period a real turn-on. (See also: Unity Mitford.) The way in which the ambassador was so ill-matched to the historical circumstances was just astonishing to me. 1930s Berlin is…

If the serial killer aspect is a turnoff, perhaps find another book about the World's Fair. It's good, but Holmes is a pretty dominant figure, and it's what I remember most strongly, even though the parts about the Fair itself are quite well done.

I will definitely watch that!

Bertie Carvel has totally impressed me over the run of the series. He wasn't how I imagined Strange in the first episode, and I don't know that he lines up with my imagined version of Strange even now—but I like what he's doing so much that it doesn't bother me at all.

Yep. Exactly. And there are not a lot of ways to externalize Stephen's very complex inner life in such a compressed miniseries. He's been awfully flat as a character here, but I always found him deeply poignant as a character in the book. He should probably be present in more of Walter Pole's scenes, at the least, but…

I'd like that, but this first clip is so smugly meta ("Tee hee, the characters are all making highly self-aware comments about narrative!") that I'm keeping my expectations very low.

I had to read Stringberg recently and stumbled across these videos during that time. Injected some much-needed levity into the experience. "Diseeeaaaase!"

Yes! and you get the sense that he might have his own agenda, or at least goals that diverge in places from Norrell's. I love that he is a character who is fully aware of what's going on, and yet casts a skeptical eye on it all.

Absolutely loving Enzo Cilenti as Childermass, who is such the stealth MVP of the book. Enzo maybe isn't quite as physically large as I imagined Childermass, but he makes an A+ surly manservant, brooding all over the place.

I was Macbeth, so, you know, I died.

I mean, we are a bunch of grad student nerds (NEEEERDS), but I maintain that Shakespeare read-arounds are tremendously fun. Any good play, honestly. I'd love to do a Stoppard work this summer. Arcadia is glorious.