Category / Weekly Links

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 2/24/17

This week seems to be the week that male pop culture figures do surprising things.

  • Tom Hanks is publishing a book of short stories … about typewriters (via AV Club). Which kind of makes me think he played the wrong part in You’ve Got Mail.
  • Chuck Palahniuk has published a coloring book (via Paste). This interview also reveals another famous-man-doing-surprising-things factoid: Stephen King privately distributes a small novel as a Christmas gift each year.

Critics are really liking The Good Fight–possibly more than we did. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 100% so far!

  • Pop Matters writes, “The Good Fight is great. It’s not good, friends. It’s great.” This one’s really interesting because it sees the whole “you can only get it if you pay CBS $6 a month for their shitty streaming service” not as a perverse form of self-sabotage on the part of the network (which is how I saw it) but as a signal of glass-ceiling breaking: a female-led, racially diverse drama being used as the draw for a premium service. A really good point!
  • The Hollywood Reporter writes that the show has “above-average brains, structure and humor, the kind of strong mainstream network drama that’s always welcome, only with cursing.” Ahh, the cursing!
  • Michael Ausiello gives it only a B+ but writes, “Baranski makes a helluva leading lady.”
by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 2/17/17

NYMag published what I can only call a surrealist work of art: Night-Time Voicemails From The White House.

The Good Fight is on its way! There is a generally positive review in the New York Times. We will be watching and covering it here! To answer the inevitable questions: yes, you do have to have CBS: All Access to watch it, and yes, we have it, and yes, that’s ENTIRELY because we forgot to cancel it after The Good Wife ended. Don’t judge.

Dude who directed The Arrival (which some of us may have hated) is now announced to be directing Dune (via bleedingcool.com).

We’ve been writing a little bit about a new anti-Islamophobia attitude on Homeland‘s latest season. The intrepid Bitch Magazine has a piece where they conclude that progress may not be permanent–but that they remain hopeful. Read it here.

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 1/27/17

Let’s be real. There’s only one thing we’re reading about this week, and it has nothing to do with books or movies or TV. In fact, this creature we are obsessively reading about doesn’t even READ books. A fascinating specimen, isn’t he? (Just ask him!)

Here, inspired by the magic of Google’s auto-complete search box, is a giant collection of listicles: books that the world WISHES Trump would read. Taken together, it is a grand list of books about social justice, science, history, civics, logic, and morality. You know, all those niche topics that he hasn’t really had time to grasp the basics of yet.

Elle has some great, surprising choices, including one about Japanese internment camps. And who knew Ta-Nehisi Coates had written a graphic novel? Not me!

Book Riot has a list of seven, including several great books on racism and, oddly, How to Win Friends and Influence People, like, I think he’s got more influence than he deserves already, mk?

Washington Post went basic (but all strong choices), with Washington, King, and Roosevelt. And the Constitution, though we all know Trump’s not interested in THAT.

NPR went scientific, wishing that Mr. “Let’s just Build Up Our Arsenal” would educate himself on the history and science of nuclear weaponry.

The Washington Independent Review of Books has really good stuff on its list, with War and Peace alongside The Once and Future King, though it’s noticeably short on the “educate Trump about how racism is bad” thing.

Inc.com, somewhat surprisingly, put together a totally legit reading list for our fearless illiterate, including The New Jim Crow, which is amazing and was also on Book Riot’s list.

 

 

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week – 1/13/17

Because of library software that automates purging of unpopular books, these librarians created a fake patron to “save” the unpopular titles they believed were too valuable to be purged. Boing Boing writes, “The problem here isn’t the collection of data: it’s the blind adherence to data over human judgment, the use of data as a shackle rather than a tool.”

There’s a new full trailer for The Good Fight. The trailer is very, “See? Aren’t you glad it’s on CBS: All Access? It has bare butts! And the f-word!” And I’m embarrassed to say it worked on me.

Avid.ly, LARB’s fan blog, argues that Gilmore Girls’ obsession with Clinton was just papering over their Reagan-esque neoliberalism. Fascinating piece.

This little infographic about 11 Disney Princesses whose eyes are literally bigger than their stomachs reminds me of me and my sister’s first act of feminist activism: angry handwritten letters to Disney about their princesses’ unrealistic bodies.

 

 

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week – 1/6/17

Aeon posted a video essay by the Nerdwriter explicating E E Cummings’s famous love poem, “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in].”

A lot of people are convinced that a recent Netflix tweet means a possible new season of Gilmore Girls (although I’m pretty sure it’s just a hilarious joke). Read about it on IndieWire.

Nashville’s back on CMT, and with it, according to the Detroit News, we might be seeing some increased efforts at representation, including a recurring character who’s African-American and another who’s the first out transgender actor on CMT.

Someone at The Outline recut all 10 hours of Westworld into chronological order. It’s amazing.

Related:
Our Gilmore Girls posts
Our Nashville posts
Our Westworld posts

 

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 12/23/16

Kate Washington writes about one of the rarely-mentioned characters from the Anne of Green Gables universe, Leslie Moore, as a window into the life of a caregiver. (via LA Review of Books‘ subsidiary Avidly)

Did you know Alec Baldwin only gets paid $1,400 per episode when he plays Trump on SNL? The NYT found out this and other interesting facts about Baldwin-as-Trump.

Get excited: Homeland is coming back soon! Here’s the full trailer:

 

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 12/16/16

He was wonderful on Growing Pains, but let’s also take a moment to remember how funny Alan Thicke was on How I Met Your Mother:

Nashville premieres on January 5th on CMT. Connie Britton gives an interview with the New York Times where she is way more honest than you’d usually expect an actress to be, candidly evaluating the past few seasons of Nashville as being too soapy (which… I think was part of the pleasure of it). There’s also a bit where she talks about not having gotten into the business as a “beauty queen” and thus not having to freak out about aging (she’s 49), which is amusing because I think many people think of her as one of the most beautiful actresses out there, and that has only increased as she’s aged, rather than decreased.

Emmy Rossum’s fight for pay equity on Shameless was successful. Love what William H. Macy had to say in her support, too! (via Vogue)

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 12/10/16

“A lot of the classic, great stories were written by truly great writers. Joseph Conrad, Edgar Allen Poe, Edith Wharton, Henry James — they wrote what we would now call “genre fiction.” It got me thinking, “What happened?” When did that stop being something you could do and still be considered a serious writer?” Michael Chabon, whose novel Moonglow just came out, talks to Electric Literature about genre fiction.

American Gauntlet, a satire site, published the hilarious “Study Suggests Gilmore Girls Revival Coupled With Political Coverage to Create Wave of ‘Super Disappointment’ for Women.”

Ann M. Martin talks to The New Yorker about feminism in the Babysitter’s Club: “I still wanted to present this idea of girls who could be entrepreneurial, who ran this business successfully, even though they were not perfect.”

The NYT has an excerpt from Anna Kendrick’s book, where she discusses the making of the immortal Camp.

If you want to, you can review one Professor of Paleontology at NYU. Think he is too into his sandwiches? Think his crunchy hair is weird? Think his spray tan is kind of uneven? Share your feelings at Rate-My-Professor. “Looks a bit like this super chill dude who used to sell cookies outside the dorms a few years back… or am I confusing him with the falafel guy?”