I’ve thought about Caravaggio as well. We go to extreme examples, don’t we, to illustrate our ideas. In this case, that if we demand our artists be good people and good all the time and applied this retroactively, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages would be a lot easier to carry across campus.

While you are not wrong that true that the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until 25, generally, not necessarily true for every individual, we have defined adulthood and adolescence in a way that makes a 22-year old an adult, and characterizing her as a adolescent flies in the face of almost everyone’s…

I think this is many men. If you take out the flirting, its a very timeworn dynamic that I remember Nora Ephron writing about: Women want to be friends with men because they find men interesting and want to understand men, while men aren’t as interested in making friends with women. They already have friends, other…

Nassar is a scumbag who did horrible things, but aren’t judges supposed to be . . . judicious? Above the fray? I don’t have a problem with the sentence—it should be longer—but Chuck Norris-inspired gems like “I just signed your death warrant” seem unprofessional.

I agree that the conversations started by cases like Aziz’s are important. But I wonder what the proposed level of punishment or censure is appropriate in his case, as if anyone actually has the hand on that lever. So far, while our understanding of rape, harassment and coercion is nuanced, the sentence has remained…

I do think you’ve identified a major fault line, that between those who think there is something indelible in the tensions between men and women and the anti-essentialist, it’s-all—socialization position that all this can be conclusively remedied. And to be fair, neither side can actually point to some science and…

Has Richard Jenkins ever won an Oscar? He kind of plays versions of the same guy, but he has been doing it forever and is so good.

This is definitely a fault line between those who say, see, Allen is sexually interested in children because of the way the projects his leering male gaze on teenage girls and young women and others that say an interest in post-prebuscent girls and pedophilia are completely different.

If Pompeo finds her acting to be boring, she’s not alone. I had in fact forgotten about Grey’s Anatomy. I have never, however, forgotten about Network, or Bonnie and Clyde, two un-erasable moments of film history. So people are motivated by different things. In the world of letters, almost nobody is getting paid like…

If people are going to discuss this case, online of off, I think actually parsing the details of it, “litigating it,” is not inappropriate. I find the Woody Allen case to be something a Rorschach test. Few people actually dive into the murky, conflicting details of the case, and instead they just sit on their…

Seinfeld . . . what? What are you talking about?

Horrific.

I wonder if we’ll ever get the details of the Keillor accusations. What I hear is not that he’s an asshole—in fact, I hear the opposite—but that’s he’s profoundly socially awkward and shy.

I’ve posted this before. I consider Woody a creep solely because of the Soon Soon-Yi scandal. But I’ve also done a deep dive into the case, and I can’t believe anyone who has also done this can really emerge with the absolute certainty that Woody molested Dylan that people express on this site. Here’s a piece by…

So, I did a deep dive into the Woody case, which I don’t think many people have. I don’t really have the time to process it all, but here’s a post from somebody who did a similar dive, and while I don’t agree with all of the ways the info is contextualized, it is pretty comprehensive.

Mic. Drop.

My question. John Goodman works steadily. I have a hard time believing he needs the money. And I thought things went badly for him and Roseanne at the end. Why is he doing this?

Rose McGowan has always been an edgelord, and her twitter rants are both understandable, given what she’s been through, and consistent with the in-your-face, dramatic persona she has cultivated since The Doom Generation and which could be just who she is.

I scanned the story, and my thought was, “well, this is well-timed.” I thought it was a paint-by-numbers zeitgeist piece, and a story so obvious that it was amazing that nobody had written it yet.

But upon really sitting down with it, I came to appreciate it more. I didn’t think she was a great writer, though, possibly…

That’s an mischaracterization of Al Franken, who was clearly pushed out and with the exception of the photo, his first statements—closely read—only admitted that the photo was bad and that he can’t flat out deny the rest in the current political environment. And he took back that last part in his resignation speech.