Yeah, I love Hunger (even if Hamsun's politics are pretty unsavory), and that's exactly the sort of book I was thinking of when I called The Loser an angry-rant novel. Any Bernhards you'd particularly recommend? My understanding is that his novels are all pretty similar in style. The only other thing I've read by him…

Yeah, I don't know if it's bad, just that it turns the magazine into a content warehouse more than a mission. If you buy Corey Robin's argument that "a great magazine of politics and culture … creates a project, it fashions a sensibility," then The Atlantic is failing on that front. But I'm not sure every magazine has…

My favorite non-2015 first-reads:

I haven't read his other stuff, but I was very taken with Satin Island. (See the other comment I just posted.) Are his other books very different?

Huge fan of Satin Island, which was by far my favorite book of the year. Definitely a polarizing read but exactly the kind of barely-a-novel-more-like-an-essay-but-yeah-it-is-still-a-novel novel that I love. I've been meaning to read Moshfegh ever since I first saw the title "McGlue."

So good. It's up there with the bridge scene in Wages of Fear for Most Physically Stressful Movie Scene.

This was a very weird piece. It felt like someone embedded some sponsored content from Bandcamp into an otherwise unrelated article.

They have a weird libertarian niche over there that McArdle used to fill. Now they've got Conor Friedersdorf (who is not nearly as bad, but is still very fond of "horrors of PC culture" writing) and frequently feature stuff from Reason magazine people.

The Atlantic is an very mixed bag. For a big national magazine, they don't seem to have any real point of view. But their internet game is strong. They know how to do those big, splashy, awful faux-sociology pieces that light the internet on fire. And they're associated with the extremely risible Aspen Ideas thing.

You gotta stop giving it away for free in the comments! They start embedding Patreon links in the comments, so I can financially support the commenters I like, keep them going. (And this would work even better if we could somehow devise a method to take money away from the shitty commenters.)

The times I've been paid for a book review, I got $50. (It's also not how I make my living, so I've done it for free as well, including a certain review that just when up at Slant's House Next Door blog yesterday!!, umm, but I digress…). When you factor in the amount of time it takes to read a book, formulate coherent…

Now, I prefer my Springfields dusty, buffalo, or containing an escalator to nowhere, but I gotta say, Rick was legitimately excellent in Ricki and the Flash. Genuinely moving performance and surprisingly hot guitar playing.

I guess if anyone's voice could be described as "a bunch of stuff tacked to the fridge," it would be Mrs. Miller.

Thanks, I'll definitely check those out!

She makes my heart go hidey-hadey!

Ah, that's too bad. I don't know him super well (mostly from the album he did with Coltrane), but whenever I run across one of his recordings, I always really dig it.

As someone who likes Ghostbusters and doesn't particularly like Sinatra (except for that 10-minute song about outer space https://www.youtube.com/wat… which is pretty amazing), I can honestly say this thing is 1000x worse than Genevieve's Ghostbusters article.

Ooh Johnny Hartman! Did her ever record any Christmas songs? I'd like to hear that.

IIRC Silver filmed scenes over and over. None of the cast knew the full story outline, and they would refine the scene with each take. So the movie generally uses the later takes if not the final take. (I went to a screening of this back in May with Silver and the cast there for a Q&A, so I could be misremembering the…

I would say it doesn't qualify. Silver apparently went to fairly great lengths to imitate the style of old HBO documentaries, specifically High on Crack Street. He even contacted one of the directors of Crack Street to find out what camera he used. The guy didn't remember, and so Silver had to try out a bunch of…