criticism
Zadie Smith on 'little sparks of something like actual life' and her latest, 'NW'
What then ultimately brought her back to fiction, she was asked. “There are little sparks of something like actual life,” she said after a deliberative pause, “and I don’t think an essay could ever create that friction, that feeling of being alive. And when you’re a kid, that’s why you read, and some people forget that, but for me that feeling of the fake-real, the almost-real, I get pleasure from thinking I could do that.” More
It's a mess, sure, but there might still be reason to watch 'Watch What Happens Live'
It has long been Bravo’s policy for popular personalities from regular series to star on spinoffs, from "Tabatha Takes Over" (Coffey was a contestant on the first season of "Shear Genius") to "Bethenny Ever After" (from "The Real Housewives of New York"). Cohen was sort of a star already, right? Boom: Five nights a week, he and a couple of guests sit down and run through 30 minutes that are unrehearsed, unwritten, and generally fueled by cocktails prepared by a guest bartender. As often as not, at least one person on camera with Cohen is from a Bravo series. More
Rethinking 'The Graduate's place as the defining film of '60s, and Ben Braddock's accidental rebellion
If, like me, you're the child of Boomers, Mrs. Robinson was an irresistible pop tune about an old lady long before Anne Bancroft polluted your mind. This distortion is telling; the idea of The Graduate was more important than the film itself, which wasn’t passed down. It became their movie, like Easy Rider, and I didn’t bother to watch it until college. Both of those films felt fiercely protected, somehow inviolate, wrapped up with a whole mess of concepts and feelings that don’t crop up in either movie. But The Graduate is useful when seen as a film that could only be made, or at least find a mass audience, right as American society opened up. It’s less radical than we want it to be in retrospect, perhaps, but then again, so was America then. More
(1)'Game of Thrones' is bloodthirsty and depraved, but its pleasures shouldn't feel like guilty ones
I am among those convinced that "Game of Thrones" is the best show on television. I'm even more assured after watching the first four episodes of the show's second season, which premiered Sunday night on HBO. So, are we all depraved, or can this madness be justified? More
(2)Portrait of a reporter in mid-sneer: David Rakoff's 'Half Empty'
As Rakoff’s collection moves towards arguments against the constructed worlds of Rent and of LDS Utah, though, the sense of Rakoff’s book being hard to argue with becomes a weakness, not a strength. (This is leaving aside, for the moment, his lengthy condemnation of the Bush administration in the first essay—none of Rakoff’s demographic will disagree, but some may be hungry for some fresher red meat.) More
