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I haven’t seen Sherlock Holmes yet, but I’ve seen way too many writers who ought to know better pitching the so-contrarian-its-now-CW line that Guy Ritchie’s transformation of Conan Doyle’s überrational sleuth into a two-fisted brawler is actually faithful to Conan Doyle’s original stories. After all, Holmes is described as being not just a skilled boxer, […]

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Via Radley—sometimes you forget just how many fantastic little moments they packed into this series. The really insane thing is that, just off the top of my head, I can think of a dozen other bits every bit as good as these hundred—and that’s after not having watched The Wire since it ended.  Damn but […]

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I’m a huge fan of Patrick McGoohan’s classic series The Prisoner, but for such a visually striking program, the quality of the A&E DVD release always left something to be desired. So I’m pretty psyched to see that we’ll be getting a BluRay version next week. Judging by the clips I’ve seen from the British […]

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I’m happy to join in a bout of public lamentation over our national ignorance of—and hostility toward—science, but I’m extremely skeptical about this story, which seems to be getting a good deal of bloglove.  The premise is that a critically-hailed biopic about Charles Darwin isn’t finding a U.S. distributor because it will be “hugely divisive” […]

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Jonah Goldberg looks to pop culture as a barometer of American values and concludes that many of the abhorrent practices revealed in the 2004 IG report on CIA interrogations will not be considered outrageous by the modal citizen: I’ve long been fascinated with the disconnect between what pundits, politicians and various activist groups complain about […]

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It’s bad enough that the late-lamented 90s alt-rock band Soul Coughing split after recording only three albums. What’s truly infuriating is that some of their catchiest songs—”The Brooklynites,” “Needle to the Bar,” “Rare Star Ball”—were only ever released as B-sides, vinyl promos, short-lived Web downloads of studio outtakes, or bonus tracks on foreign pressings. A […]

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I don’t normally describe things I like as “guilty pleasures,” because I’ve never seen any particular need for guilt over enjoying (say) fun, frivolous, dumb pop on its own terms. “Womanizer” is not a Terry Riley piece or even an Ian Curtis song, and it’s not trying to be. It’s trying to get you to […]

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A confession: Regular readers may be aware that these days I mostly listen to indie rock and modern classical music, but in my younger and more vulnerable years, when I had hair down past my shoulders and routinely sported tie-dyed shirts, I was a huge Phish fan. Over the course of my late teens and […]

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Remember this theme music? If, like me, you spent many an evening in your childhood glued to PBS Mystery‘s broadcasts of the fantastic old Granada Sherlock Holmes adventures starring the inimitable Jeremy Brett, it triggers a sort of Pavlovian surge of anticipation and endorphin release. I’d half forgotten I had the full run in my […]

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