I have to believe that at one point Lee dated 30 Rock's Devon Banks. I'm just waiting for the flashback.

Russell looking both impressed and delighted after Gamby smashed the window, and then actually going in first after Gamby's "bitches go first" line was probably about as close as this show will ever get to heartwarming: a no-holds-barred gleeful sociopath demurring to implied bitchdom out of his pleasure that his…

Just going off the cast list and the title, Cowboys and Aliens should have been one of my favorite movies of all-time, and therefore I have a hard time forgiving it for being only okay.

Russell's closed-eye grooving to "Wind Beneath My Wings" was a highlight (further highlights: every article of clothing Walton Goggins wore in this episode and probably all subsequent episodes), and I loved Gamby constantly bad-mouthing his ex's incredibly sweet and relaxed new husband.

I'm now actively upset by the absence of this in my life, and also, an additional thousand upvotes for the exactly right italicization on "commit."

It's on some perfect, hypnotic borderline between "things an actual person might wear" and "definitely a Halloween costume," and he is 100% pulling it off.

That bit about finding the humanity in his characters and making you love them no matter how messed-up they are or what they do is exactly why I love him so much as an actor. Can't wait for this, it looks like it's going to be a ridiculous amount of fun.

I really like Funemployed—it's like slightly-guided improv sessions. In a recent family gathering, we played Funemployed and I ended up interviewing to be a professional athlete while hitting on my sister and claiming to be the heir to a butterscotch hard candy fortune. The cost of the game is a small price to pay…

That rings true to me, too. (I need to read the other Jackson Brodie books—thus far, I've only read Case Histories, which is ridiculous given how much I like Atkinson's writing.) With mid-century crime writers, too, I think there's a gender divide that, if I were going to make a broad generalization, which it seems…

Seconded on Gotham Central. Rendell-wise, I really liked A Judgement in Stone, which has a really great opening line—"Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write." She really is chilly, though: I bought a bunch of her backlist a few months ago and I'm spacing them out so I can…

I would really love to see it performed: my library has a copy of the movie, but I can't imagine this as anything but live, in the round, in semi-darkness. And I'm glad to hear that it actually keeps the meaning of the physics—that's not my area, so while it "sounded right," I couldn't be sure. I'm even more…

I will always stump for David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which, though very long, is also a really readable anthropological look at how the concept of debt has varied across times and cultures, from societies where returning something you've borrowed and not loaning anything else is considered rude…

Michael Frayn's excellent play Copenhagen, about Heisenberg, Bohr, and historical uncertainty—I hadn't read it in years, and it's just as contemplative and riveting as I'd remembered. Also just finished Ruth Rendell's first Wexford novel, From Doon with Death—I'd previously only read her stand-alones, and I was…

That makes me think of that joke in Shawshank Redemption about shelving The Count of Monte Cristo under "educational." Also: come on, people, seriously?

Traveling carnivals: I read this interview in part to reassure myself that permanent amusement parks really are astronomically safer than fly-by-night carnivals. I like roller coasters, but one incident of having to hold myself in a stuck-upside-down ride car because the safety bar wasn't working at a particular West…

Yeah, a lot of the more formalized book donation programs for prisons (plug: Midwest Pages to Prisoners is a good one) specify that they really don't need more romance novels.

That's an amazing summer reading list. I'll throw in a recommendation for Jackson's recent "collection of the uncollected," Let Me Tell You, which has a great blend of her fiction and nonfiction. The first story alone is a masterpiece of paranoia well-worth the price of admission.

I'll agree that Strangers on a Train has some first novel bits (and Guy bores me for most of it—Highsmith had a lot of skills, but "making ordinary decency interesting" was never one of them), but

Rewatched this last night and will be accepting sympathy bouquets and cards for the next week or so. On the ever-available subject of drama and choice, one of the small heartbreaking moments of the scene with Lem and Shane in the body shop is where Shane, tilting ever closer to his decision, asks, with this…

Great point on the wit. I always think of Dix's wearily snobbish reaction to the hat-check girl's enthusiasm for the novel: "It's what I call an epic." "And what do you call an epic?"