It’s impossible to dissect with certainty why the Democrats lost in 2016, but I doubt whether Democratic over-confidence - particularly among voters, was a big problem. It was a pretty high turnout election, so it’s not like people stayed home. And by all measures this is also going to be a huge turnout mid-term, with …

I thought your concern was that Trump would be able to use Democratic obstruction in the legislature as rallying cry to keep his base enthused, and that it would give him an excuse for his inevitable failure to achieve anything positive. To which I would have said, “Trump would blame Democrats even if they weren’t…

I wouldn’t stress about it. At this stage in the election process, there is a tremendous amount of inertia towards whatever the result is going to be. A huge fraction of people already cast their ballots. Of the remainder, it’s going to take something pretty huge to sway them. Pelosi exuding confidence on a show with…

I meant that the experience of being on the ship is portrayed in way that makes it look enjoyable. I wasn’t commenting on the entertainment value of the movie.

Hey, if you stop watching Titanic after the first hour, there’s a lot to like.

My comment was poorly worded. The “trope” I was referring to wasn’t just “time travel” generally, but the specific time travel trope of good time travelers trying to stop bad time travelers from disrupting history.

It’s more than just the broad time travel trope. It’s the entire structure of the story: landing in a time period without a clear objective, being in awe meeting the historical figure, realizing a major historical event is about to happen, deducing that a time-traveling antagonist is trying to stop that event, trying…

Can you think of any other examples?

If you enjoyed this episode, then you’ll really enjoy NBC’s Timeless. Having seen a couple of seasons of that show (nearly every episode of which involves time travelling heroes going to major events in America’s past to stop a nefarious time traveler trying to change history for the worse), this felt a bit…

It seemed to me that Matt was trying to stop Dex from killing Vanessa, whom Dex seemed to be targeting with most of the projectile shots (though the first one on the dance floor it was hard to tell). I interpreted it as Matt being okay with letting Dex kill Fisk, but not being okay with letting him kill Vanessa.

I neglected to research the point, as I’m in the middle of a business meeting. I was probably remembering when there was two TV shows and a TNG movie in simultaneous production (as Charles R referenced below).

Why is this a Star Wars lesson? You don’t need to look further than Star Trek to learn the same lesson. They had three shows going at once, at one point. Burn out is the reason Star Trek went on a TV hiatus for more than a decade.

It didn’t look like a cross-cut shred. It looked like you could spend a couple of hours with a glue stick piecing it back together against some posterboard. It obviously wouldn’t look the same, but it’d be recognizable as the same piece, and would convey the interesting story of what happened to it.

I did watch Breaking Bad. The comparison illustrates a lot of things that Ozark could do better. In addition to plotting that’s more courageous, Breaking Bad also had much more dramatically interesting character arcs, even for the supporting cast. The character arcs really drove the dramatic tension in Breaking Bad. Oz…

I binged the first two seasons over the past week, on a whim. I got a new TV and wanted to watch something that would look pretty.

This is indicative of a problem I have with slate elections, dating back to my days in student government. Votes are driven pretty much exclusively by how people feel about the President. The other people you tack onto the ballot are just getting a free ride, yet they ostensibly have democratic legitimacy.

If these early downloaders are like me, they may have auto-download enabled, or may just be downloading them on faith that they’ll be good. Running out of pod is the stuff of nightmares, so you always stock up.

The tweet identifies everyone in the photo. That’s Michael Chabon.

Like most creatives, it seems like he might have different gears depending on how passionate he is about a project. Because he definitely has some hot trash on his resume (epitomized by Batman & Robin), but he also some genuinely good stuff, particularly in the realm of serialized sci-fi TV (of which Fringe is the…

The biggest clue of food poisoning was right under their noses all along: it was Chipotle.