Morning Coffee (8/2/19)

The Ripped Bodice Bookstore Announces New Award for Romance Fiction

Pioneering Investigative Journalist Nellie Bly Gets Her Own Monument

Watch the trailer for the lush adaptation of Jane Austen's unfinished novel Sanditon

Lizzo: Tiny Desk Concert

Ooh: PBS Orders Rita Moreno Documentary from Norman Lear and Lin-Manuel Miranda

Helen Mirren wields 'absolute power' in HBO's Catherine the Great trailer

Sandhya Menon's New YA Series Kicks Off With A 'Beauty & The Beast' Retelling Titled 'Of Curses And Kisses'

Benedict Cumberbatch, Colin Firth wage war in gripping 1917 trailer

‘They’re coming to you’: A man played his sax for a herd of cows, and they loved it

10 Adorable Bookish T-Shirts for Your Casual Friday Attire

Morning Coffee (2/15/19)

We made it to Friday! TIME FOR SOME HAPPY LINKS.

Aaah so excited for this anthology co-edited by my friend Katie: Cover reveal: ‘It’s a Whole Spiel’ puts Jewish YA in the spotlight

!! Chris Kelly, Bad Robot to Adapt ‘They Both Die at the End’ for HBO Yay Adam Silvera!

Ooh, Frozen 2 teaser!

Ben Whishaw is doing a Paddington TV show!

This is GORGEOUS: The TWA Hotel Turns an Abandoned Airport Terminal Into a Midcentury Dream

This sounds great: Dumplin' author Julie Murphy previews delectable new novel Dear Sweet Pea

Get a First Look at the Cover of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Forthcoming Novel

Stunningly preserved fresco of Narcissus discovered in Pompeii

Maybe your life would be improved by following cheese shops on Instagram.

19 New Skin-Care Products To Pick Up At Target This Month

Morning Coffee (4/11/18)

Me elsewhere: Holly and I have a new podcast episode on Breaking Up with Fandom!

Donald Trump is very confused about attorney-client privilege

Good! With $2 million, Kaiser Permanente wants to help revive underfunded gun-violence research

New Memo Shows How Republicans Used Tax Bill to Enrich Themselves

This is awful: Thousands of Indian Women Find Their American Dreams in Jeopardy

Ha: Scottish police ‘rescue’ metal fans mistaken for suicide pact members

The Pay Gap Is Way Too Entrenched To Be Solved By Women Alone

But good for them: HBO Fixes All Pay Disparities In Direct Response To Time’s Up Movement

The New Military-Industrial Complex of Big Data Psy-Ops

Furrowed Eyebrows Helped Modern Humans Evolve

Vitamins for your hair, nails, and skin are everywhere on Instagram. Don’t fall for them.

Morning Coffee (3/21/16)

Me elsewhere: The week's TV news!

The Republican Party Must Answer for What It Did to Kansas and Louisiana

Donald Trump's Media Enemies List

Scary: 25 Trump Supporters Say What Would Happen If Trump Doesn’t Win

In case you were wondering what Congress is up to these days: Recognizing magic. No, really.

One Weird Trick for Keeping Female Employees From Quitting

And: As Women Take Over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops

Ivy League Moves to Eliminate Tackling at Football Practices It's a good step, but also brings up some interesting/troubling questions about exactly which brains we as a society think are worth protecting vs. risking for our enjoyment.

Here's a useful look at what's going on at HBO.

This sort of thing is always fascinating: The Essentials for Giving Birth Around the World

How to Tell if You're in a Raymond Chandler Story

Morning Coffee (8/17/15)

Me elsewhere: TV news summary for the week.

This is a horrifying but very important read: ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape

This Jeff Flake profile is interesting.

‘Sesame Street’ goes to HBO and makes it clear why we should fund the arts

Not that I USUALLY understand the Bush family's choices, but as someone who also calls her grandfather "Poppy," the idea of using it as a child's name just BAFFLES me.

Man Poses as Target on Facebook, Trolls Haters of Its Gender-Neutral Move With Epic Replies

The new War and Peace looks super pretty.

TV critic James Poniewozik is leaving Time for the New York Times, and his retrospective goodbye post is worth a read.

If this happens, DC Comics will have shows on four of the five main broadcast networks.

Morning Coffee (10/16/14)

Me elsewhere: Pilot post on Marry Me, which I hated.

All of Friends is coming to Netflix streaming on January 1st!

Here are the finalists for the National Book Award. Obviously my plan to read a bunch and blog about it didn't exactly go according to . . . plan . . . but I'm still hoping to get a few in.

HBO will offer standalone streaming sometime next year, but we don't know the details yet.

Yesterday was Baby Loss Day and my friend Miryam posted a powerful essay.

This obituary of David Greenglass was fascinating.

Christmas creep, explained: Do early holiday sales really help stores?

Interesting: Headscarf ban turns France’s Muslim women towards homeworking

The Onion: Facebook Offers to Freeze Female Employee's Newborn Children

Morning Coffee (4/24/14)

If you missed it, here's the Cliven Bundy story everyone's talking about, containing the line "I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro."

The other thing everyone's talking about: The new net neutrality rules sound . . . not good.

South Sudan Could Be Facing an Ethnic Civil War and a Food Crisis at the Same Time

Sonia Sotomayor: Court’s right wing ‘out of touch with reality’

I actually was wondering why everyone was suddenly talking about Piketty, so this was useful.

The Pay Gap Is Because of Gender, Not Jobs

Big news in the TV world: HBO made a deal with Amazon Prime.

An important read: “His Career Will Be Absolutely Fine”: On Telling People About Being Molested

Morning Coffee (2/19/14)

Wow: Candy Crush game maker aims to raise $500m in IPO

An important read: The Monuments Men and Questions That Can’t Be Answered

Slate has some neat pictures of the first Winter Olympics.

Creepy TV ads can now target individual viewers

Punching Above Its Weight, Upstart Netflix Pokes at HBO

The Worst-Designed Sport of All Time

Interesting: Mount Hua, Home of the World's Scariest Cup of Tea

What Were The Highest-Grossing Movies Filmed In Each State?

Morning Coffee (6/7/13)

Happy Friday!

BABY MOOSE RESCUE

BUNNIES.

24 TV Shows To Be Excited About This Summer

The Fairy-Tale Story Of An “Avengers” Extra Who Became Joss Whedon’s Big New Star

If Disney Movies Had Honest Titles

Cronut scalpers??

Fascinating: 22 Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Totally Differently From Each Other

Here's an interesting graphic of top-rated HBO seasons.

Morning Coffee (6/13/12)

Happy Wednesday! It's cold and rainy and Dallas is coming back to TV tonight. So there's that.

The Olympics opening ceremonies are going to be awesome. Sheep! Cricket! The Glastonbury Tor!

Heartbreaking story of the day: Arranged Marriages Drive Many Iraqi Girls to Suicide

Talk about missing the point. Of, like, the entire concept of fiction.

Alyssa keeps making good points about how it's not in HBO's interests to let you have whatever you want however you want it: Cord Cutters and Time Shifters v. The Rest of the Country

I love this: Stately Sandwiches

The Awl has a good take on Gone with the Wind.

Sexposition, Spartacus, and the male gaze

I've liked some of David Carr's work in the past, but what he's saying about movie criticism is either deliberately obnoxious or mind-blowingly stupid, and either way, it makes me totally uninterested in reading anything else he writes ever.

Fun: The Childhood Homes of 20 Famous Authors

Morning Coffee (5/15/12)

I know it's May, but 6am is VERY early for ads featuring "Back Home Again in Indiana," ESPN.

Look at this awesome Diamond Jubilee cake!

Tumblr of the day: Is This Feminist?

If you're someone who complains about HBO's business model, you should read this.

Leonard Chang (one of the writers) has an amazing post about Awake's cancellation.

I am SO EXCITED about The Newsroom...

..and over at TheTelevixen I explain why, and also embed a few promos for your viewing pleasure!

I know you want to read another post about #Girls.

Since everyone else in the world is talking about Girls, I figured I might as well throw in my two cents. On the one hand, I thought it was an absolutely pitch-perfect representation of (a subset of) people from roughly my generation and socioeconomic background. Virtually every line seemed right on, seemed to be something I have actually heard someone say.* So that made me say "This is amazing and I must watch it." On the other hand, the people it so realistically portrays are ones who often drive me completely nuts in real life, so whether I'll be able to keep watching it without being wholly annoyed by the characters is an open question. But I'm willing to give it a chance.

A lot of the discussion about this seems to be happening in extremes - "They're amazing!" "They're awful!" "They're just like me!" "Not everyone is like this!" - and I think that sort of willfully misses the point. Hannah isn't a hero, but I don't think the show tries to claim she is. And I don't think she's a villain either. As someone who insisted on moving out and supporting herself as quickly as possible when many of her peers were not,** I definitely sympathize with the "JUST GET A JOB" contingent, but it's also true that we grew up being told that we were different, that we were special, that we could do anything we wanted and should follow our dreams regardless of dumb stuff like money. Some of us, you know, got over that, and some kept buying into it. (My favorite quote from Josh Charles's character on The Good Wife comes to mind: "What happened to work? Not everybody can pursue their dreams. Someone has to work.") For what it's worth, I thought Hannah continuing to take her parents' money while she had an unpaid internship was much less morally objectionable than her parents cutting her off with no notice. Two months or something, fine, but no warning? She could lose her apartment! It could seriously mess up her credit rating! It just didn't seem like a constructive step toward actually getting her to the point of successfully supporting herself in the long run.

It also seems that the money-related things are taking up most of the air in the discussion, but while I was yelling "Just go get a job in a store! That's what I did!" at the screen for a lot of that, so much of the other stuff, about friendships and relationships and jobs, seemed very true and possibly more universal - by which I mean universal to this specific demographic, not universal to everyone. The self-delusional faux-intellectual nonsense, the friends we don't actually like, the sketchily-defined romantic and sexual relationships . . . that was all done really well. "Joy Lin knows Photoshop" is one of the most perfect lines I've heard in a while. So I'm hoping that in future episodes the show focuses less on the one specific issue of parental support and continues to explore all these other things as well.

I don't have the time or energy to get into the whole question of privilege right now, except to say: Yes, the main characters are from privileged backgrounds. But most shows on TV are about characters who are at least upper middle class, or even unquestionably rich (Bones, Castle, and Gossip Girl come to mind there), and while I'm not saying this shouldn't be discussed in general, I'm not sure why people are making an issue of it in Girls specifically. Also: I've always assumed that TV that is generally aspirational draws bigger audiences, or in other words, people like to watch people in nice clothes and pretty houses. Again, not saying this is good, but if I were to complain about this, Girls is not where I would start.

* Well, okay, I'm not getting into questions of apartment size/what New York is really like/etc. Just talking about the general emotional/life stuff.
** And fine: My phone is still on my parents' family plan. So the line about that cracked me up.

Morning Coffee (6/17/11)

Friday! Finally! Hello, Friday!

Scroll down to the next post to find out if you won the Demon's Surrender contest! I posted the winners late last night.

Listen to Selena Gomez's new song. I rather love it, honestly.

Giggle at these updated famous opening lines.

Get excited about HBO's development slate, because More as the Story Develops has done some more casting (John Gallagher Jr.!) and Hobgoblin has a director: Darren Aronofsky!

Read about a day of awkwardness with Mitt Romney.