Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and James Wolcott are all fretting over how we’ll broadcast the wonderful stuff we’re reading and listening to in the age of the Kindle. By my lights, it’s gotten a lot easier to do this where it matters. Sure, the random folks you’re sharing a subway car with won’t see you’re […]

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In case anyone’s interested, I’m joining a bunch of other mostly-political blogger friends who are reading (and writing about) David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer over at A Supposedly Fun Blog.

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It’s scarcely news that Hollywood has spent much of the last decade mining the comics pages for inspiration—and little enough surprise that they should, since comics narratives  have already proven they will work visually, and often come with a a built-in fanbase. Yet as the Watchmen film proved, the most formally brilliant works invariably lose […]

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It’s a little sad that this fan-made trailer for a non-existent movie looks a hell of a lot more appealing than most of the real ones I see.  Someone should (ahem) greenlight this for serious.

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Guesting over at Sully’s, Lane Wallace recounts how a crappy job taught him the value of a liberal arts education: In a flash, I grasped the true value of a college degree. It didn’t matter what I majored in. It didn’t even matter all that much what my grades were. What mattered was that I […]

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At the end of the previous post, I mentioned a suspicion that merely deciphering the correspondences between the glyphs on Fringe and the letters they represent might not be the whole of the glyph puzzle. Being new to the show, I didn’t know a whole lot about it previously, but I did decide to poke […]

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Within the last week, two things happened: I finally got around to checking out the Fox show Fringe, the first season of which I noticed sitting tantalizingly in the Playstation Store, and my Ars colleague Erica Sadun wrote an article exploring all the delightful little Easter eggs sprinkled throughout the show. In particular she devotes […]

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My very brief take, since all my more specific issues with the film have been rehearsed at some length by others already: Watchmen is best thought of as the cinematic equivalent of a Super Powers action figure.  As a freestanding work of art, it has negligible intrinsic value… but that’s almost beside the point, because […]

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Just caught a local group called Hume—I’m assuming the name check is David rather than Britt, but who can be sure?—and have spent the last 24 hours listening to their maddeningly brief album Hume Presents the Phat Daughter String Quartet pretty much nonstop, though it actually sounds very little like the stringless (but excellent) band […]

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