Links We Loved This Week — 9/30/16

 

Svetlana Mintcheva, writing for Salon, manages to tackle the Great Lionel Shriver Internet Meltdown without herself melting down, articulating a nuanced but still socially responsible take on the responsibilities of fiction writers:

Whether they succeed in communicating empathy and in creating a character that is complex and true, depends on the capacity of the writer as a writer and his or her creative integrity, not on the person’s skin color, sexuality or cultural background.

Do you follow Rabih Alameddine (author of one of my favorite-ever female fictional characters) on Twitter yet? The New Yorker wrote an interesting piece about his process.

Not technically a pop culture related piece, but by one of our favorite novelists: Michael Chabon wrote a devastatingly beautiful piece about his teenage son’s love for fashion, for GQ.

In case you missed it, the New York Times published an exquisitely mean review of a new Jane Jacobs biography, including jabs like this:

It often seems to be muttered as much as written, like one of those garbled subway announcements you cannot understand but suspect might matter.

 

Links We Loved This Week — 9/23/16

Joss Whedon got basically his whole stable of actors to film an irreverent PSA on exercising your civic rights to vote. (This should hardly need saying, but don’t read the comments.)

“Do we want to just be the white male anti-hero network? We need to try to broaden out.”
–an FX exec, on turning down Breaking Bad

At Hitfix, Alan Sepinwall writes about the ascendancy of FX, which is apparently due in large part to the creative direction of the network head, John Landgraf. (via Longform.org)

AV Club wrote a great review of This Is Us, but it paled in comparison to this delightful Gilmore Girls-related exchange in the comments:

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Elliott Holt writes on the return of omniscient narrators in contemporary fiction, comparing them not to God, but to a smartphone (via the NYTimes)

Links We Loved This Week: 9/16/16

Vulture has a complete breakdown of this fall’s TV reboots. Obviously we’re excited for Gilmore Girls here at Adversion; we’re also definitely going to be watching Westworld.

Read Fusion.net‘s breakdown of why this year is a good one for women of color on TV (financially, at least… we still feel pretty bad for Mindy that her new love interest sucks so bad).

One of the smartest literary blogs I follow is Word and Silence by Tim Miller. This week, he posted a link to an exquisitely scathing NYT piece on Thomas Wolfe by Harold Bloom.

We liked Braindead this summer, but apparently the Kings are planning to have larger bugs each season, so we’re not sure we can in good conscience hope for it to be renewed. The first season bugs are disgusting enough! (via MovieNewsGuide.com)

 

Braindead 1×11: “Six Points on the New Congressional Budget: The False Dichotomy of Austerity vs. Expansionary Policies”

Recap

Previously on Braindead: So much happened! No, literally, the voiceover says that, and then basically skips to summarizing a fake show called Gunsmoke, involving a sheriff and a fatal shootout and other Western-reminiscent things. (I have no idea why, but I’m glad Jonathan Coulton is having fun with his task I guess?) In actuality, what has recently and relevantly happened is that Gareth and Laurel broke up because he is a slut-shamer, Luke’s possibly-infected wife Germaine gave birth to a possibly-infected baby, Wheatus had this secret room called SRB-54 that we know will be important because they mentioned it so much, and Ella and Wheatus let their ear-bugs mate and it was totally gross.

Gareth is trying to compose a stilted resignation letter in a Word document when Wheatus interrupts him to announce that he likes the new Jewish intern. The intern, Gary, says he’s half-Jewish and Wheatus trumpets that he’s “a friend to the Jewish people.” How nice of you, dude. Then he ushers Gary out, casually mentioning the “rumors” that are going around due to the fact that his other interns have died very bloody, very disgusting deaths. Gary is too dumb to be worried about this. He just grins and bobs his head and leaves.

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Links We Loved This Week — 9/9/16

Renee Zellweger gave a starkly honest interview to Hollywood Reporter about sexism in media coverage. (That’s a problem that Leslie Jones and Margot Robbie have suffered this summer too — and they’re just two of the best-known out of many, many examples.) It doesn’t mean we want to see Bridget Jones’ Baby, though.

Vox agrees with us that you should probably be watching Braindead (among other things, including Mr. Robot and You’re the Worst), in its list of 18 summer shows you should be watching.

OK, this one is old, but somehow we missed it. Rory Gilmore gives Michelle Obama some books. And then some more books. And then some more…

Don’t forget that Rory got her start as a journalist on Obama’s campaign bus, just months before he was elected the first black president. CALLBACK!

This was amazing:

The Mountain Goats are definitely an acquired taste, but her description is beyond perfect: “I don’t know if you ever heard of that band; it’s more just this one guy. He’s got a guitar, he has 4 chords—odd little white man—and he has a voice that should not work for me… but when he sings, he will flense your heart.

I don’t agree with the characterization of Buffy as “vapid,” but otherwise this analysis of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from Hitfix‘s Alan Sepinwall is delightful.

Links We Loved This Week — 9/2/16

Stylus writes about Echo and the Bunnymen‘s eerie–and apropos–“Villiers Terrace.”

EW‘s Fall Book Preview, including Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, Elena Ferrante’s “dark and eerie” tale of a doll abandoned on a beach, and Margaret Atwood’s comic about a part-bird, part-cat superhero.

Variety‘s list of most anticipated movies this Oscar season, including Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence starrer Passengers, Derek Cianfrance’s Light Between Oceans–starring real-life couple Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender–and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival.

Speaking of Arrival, it’s getting RAVE reviews out of Venice. Here’s our favorite, from The Playlist.

You’re the Worst came back this week! We’ll be posting coverage of the premiere shortly, but for now, here’s Stephen Falk on the characters’ unsuitability for parenthood and the “traumatic” romantic experiences of the writers.

[Saying “I love you” is] never a mutual thing, it’s always one person says it. But yeah, in the writer’s room, we tell a lot of personal stories, and I do remember, yes, a lot of stories of saying it and getting a “thanks” back, or something horrible like that. All the writers have a lot of romantic trauma in our past, so there’s a lot to mine in that room.

Did you think Kafka made up the hunger artist idea? I did, but Atlas Obscura revealed that this was actually a long-running obsession in Europe.

It’s Our Birthday!

This blog has officially been in existence for one year, since we published our intro post on August 28, 2015. It’s been a fun year for Adversion. Every week we get together at a local cafe and work on our posts and argue about Gilmore Girls. And we’ve published some things we’re really proud of, from fanwanky TV recaps to “short” posts on whatever we’re reading that week (that often turn into essay-length screeds).

Here are the top ten most popular posts we’ve published in our first year:

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Links We Loved This Week — 8/26/16

The LA Review of Books tackles why the new Bourne movie was so unsatisfying. No one cares about your daddy issues, Jason.

Sure, we’re all thrilled to death about the Gilmore Girls revival—but don’t forget that other bookish heroine, Anne of Green Gables, who falls in love with a boy only after long years of vying with him for the top of the class. She too is being revived—and Netflix has just partnered up with the reboot, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The part of the internet that we read is clamoring with support for Leslie Jones, who has been the victim of incredibly frightening racist harassment. Here is one piece on the topic worth reading, from The Establishment. We don’t usually address celebrities directly because, let’s face it, we’re way too small for them to care, but: Our hearts are with you, Leslie!

The University of Chicago has taken a stand in the culture wars that kicked off on campuses last year. While one sentence is never going to capture all the nuance in this issue, we at Adversion can definitely agree with a call for college students to be challenged and made uncomfortable by literature.

Aldous Huxley sent his former student George Orwell a letter that basically amounts to one extended neg. Open Culture describes it as “My Hellish Vision of the Future Is Better Than Yours (1949).” (DISAGREE, Huxley!) [Keets: the scoreboard is definitely on Huxley’s side, though…]

The Times Literary Supplement takes a look at some recent books on Byron–from the vindication of Lady Byron to the burning of his memoirs. Interestingly, Byron’s daughter Ada “is widely celebrated as having anticipated computer coding by over a century.”

Links We Loved This Week — 8/19/16

Heather Havrilesky, who writes the fabulous “Ask Polly” columns at NYMag, interviews Winona Ryder and discusses the pathologization of female emotion.

Even if the phrase “fag hag” is so 1999, you won’t care while you’re reading this absurdist ranking of the Top 10 Fag Hags of Henry James. (via LA Review of Books)

As, it seems, always, McSweeney’s lit crit is killing it: Quiz: Are you an unlikable female narrator?

Idiocracy director tells The Daily Beast why his movie has become a documentary.

Freud has a field day as the “subtle” metaphors of the James Bond credits are revealed (via Slashfilm).

Links We Loved This Week — 8/12/16

Margot Robbie deserves better than Suicide Squad’s sexism, or The Big Short’s, or Vanity Fair’s, or The Wolf of Wall Street’s. She has been objectified for her entire career but still manages to knock it out of the park every time (via AV Club).

Jeffrey Dean Morgan didn’t like The Good Wife finale either! But for VERY different reasons from us. For some reason he didn’t notice that he was playing a complete asshole. (via EW)

It’s happening, guys! According to TVLine, Rupert Friend is coming back to Homeland. We were not exactly thrilled about how his supposed exit played out, so let’s hope the show redeems itself and uses Rupert Friend’s talent a leetle bit more wisely, and less sentimentally, this season.

The Americans is ending after its sixth season (boo-hoo), and according to Indiewire, the showrunners have a 50-page document detailing everything that happens in the next two seasons, called the Final Plan. They also reveal that Margo Martindale and Frank Langella will wrap up their storylines next season. Do we think that means they’re going to die??

The Lost Boys of Hook reunited to pay tribute to Robin Williams and Vulture collected their reenactment tweets. It’s pretty amazing.

The Atlantic writes on the mess that is Unreal Season 2 and the potential for an amazing season 3.

Kindle delenda est.