Movies have gradually become more homogeneously templated to the three act structure and to more focused, readily digestible premises - I guess for marketability reasons - with the result that the first 3/4 of the movie is spoiled by the longline alone. All the trailer has to do is hint at the outcome (or hint at…

This show has the production values and cast of prestige TV, but the plotting is often torpid and characterization infuriatingly inconsistent. Part of that, I guess, is the need to gradually build up to mind-fuck reveals, but prior to (that is, most of the time), it just feels sloppily written. I'm honestly not sure…

Only Victory Gin I'm afraid.

I'm sure there are even earlier examples, but Revolulionary Road (1961) had parts about this being a self-satisfied cliche by the mid-50s.

*Braces for the second wave of thinkpieces about this where they debate whether plagiarism is different from having an uncredited speechwriter write stuff for you*

Kind of feel like there was a higher hit-to-miss ratio with jokes and bits closer to the beginning of the run. I don't think it helps that the pre-taped sketches that start off the show now (which are a relatively recent tweak) are uniformly egregiously unfunny/hacky.

What!? *stares in revulsion at jar of HBO-brand glue I just bought*

*Angrily throws spin-off spec script for "That's so Three-Eyed Raven!" in the trash*

Pedantic correction: Montgomery County is not a township—it's a county. Townships are the next smaller governmental units in PA after counties.

Except you didn't say it with confidence, since you added the "right?".

"I'm just an insurance lawyer—your cold war espionage games frighten and confuse me."

Whenever I the line "but… I'm just an insurance lawyer!" comes up in the trailers, I think of the "look, I'm just a school teacher" part from Saving Private Ryan. Idk if there's enough moves for this, but I demand the internet make me an all Tom Hanks "Schucks—but I'm just a humble [job title]!" supercut.

Case in point: Justin Bieber is pretty good at solving Rubik's cubes.

I meant they hadn't been republished or collected since their initial publication. These were the deep cuts, for those times when conspicuously reading Nine Stories during lunch wasn't quite emo enough (which it apparently wasn't for me).

Salinger actually wrote a number of pre-Catcher short stories that include Holden Caulfield. None of these were republished as far as I know, but I remember reading them on the internet when I was in high school and they weren't reconcilable with the plot/characterization in Catcher.

As a John Mayer apologist, I have to disagree. Sure, a lot of his songs are pretty lame, but (a) he's fucking nasty at guitar, and (b) see (a). In fact, based on his live shows, I'm not entirely convinced that his whole songwriting career isn't just a pretext to trick people into listening to him rip awesome solos for…

Also, I kind of reject the whole premise of this article. Bumping a song up a step or a step and a half toward the end is just too common a songwriting pattern to merit an inventory. Not to mention that doing this in guitar-based songwriting, where transposing is just a matter of moving what you're doing up or down a…

He played Prof. Flitwick and Griphook in all the Harry Potters. http://fivethirtyeight.com/…

FiveThirtyEight had an article recently about how he was the actor with the best post-Star Wars career of any of the actors in the original trilogy (based on grosses of the films he's been in).

Haven't seen this, but I vaguely recall that the book was pretty good… so… yeah, I'm not sure why I'm writing this comment.