Welcome to Friday mailbag, where every week, I answer your questions as best I can. Some weeks, I will do so very poorly. This week, I aim to do so well. Kim, welcome to the program! What do you think about the advice column industry? Do you think it offers
A couple of years ago, I got into a big argument with a friend and fellow critic over what I thought was a pretty obvious question: Does Girls mean for us to take Hannah seriously when she says "I might be the voice of my generation" in the
In the last seven or eight months, it's become very popular to pitch Vox Culture for freelance articles, despite the fact that we don't have the sort of budget or editorial team we'd love to have to commission every pitch we love, let alone
Do you remember Zoobooks? Maybe you don't. I occasionally come across people who are vaguely familiar with the term, but only rarely do I come across people who actually subscribed to them. I did, however, for most of my childhood, and they gave me an endless series of
Hey, we've got a correction: When I said in Monday's newsletter with no equivocation that Master of None wouldn't be eligible for the Emmys this year, it turns out that's not true! I can't yet confirm if the show will
One of the big debates we're having in the TV world right now is how many episodes is too many episodes. More and more networks are going to 10 episodes, with a few hanging on at 12 or 13. And the broadcast networks continue to make as many
My natural inclination as a critic is to try to hook whatever I'm watching up to some larger emotional world outside of the film. This has gotten me in trouble before, when I've either left out a couple of the steps in my thought process or
A couple of weeks ago, a meme was floating around Facebook that asked what were 10 albums you loved as a teenager. And while I thought about participating, I quickly realized that my musical habits – which roughly involve fixating on one album for seemingly years at a time, then abruptly
Late in her life, I got to know my biological grandmother. She had immigrated to the United States in the 1950s but grew up in Nazi Germany. When World War II ended, she was just about to leave high school. Her family lived in a rural corner of Germany, far
(The first class we had after Sept. 11, my British Literature professor read us a long section from T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding," part of the Four Quartets, and I often turn to it when I'm feeling uncertain. Eliot was kind of a git,
Buried in the middle of Lindsay Ellis's terrific dissection of the musical Rent is a particularly trenchant observation for this particular moment in time. (If you don't watch everything Ellis makes, you should. She's brilliant.) Ellis talks about how hard it is to create
I have, since 1991 became 1992, felt a kind of keen sadness as December 31 rolls over into January 1. Some of this is realizing my favorite part of the year – roughly October 1 through January 1 – is over. Some of it is the leavetaking that accompanies the end of