Tim Carvell

It is so funny to go directly from “we need to stop being elitist, and connect with the vast middle of the country and the things they care about” to “we will be aggressively covering the mayor of New York City nonstop”.

Yeah, I think we agree on all this. And it’s difficult! I get wanting outlets to break the narrative of “genius demands suffering” while at the same time knowing they need to acknowledge that some sources for the story may still on some level subscribe to it. It can be done but it’s not easy!

Weirdly, I read those sentences as being less about trying to mitigate the abuse, and more about traumatized people trying to explain why they stayed. Not that they need to explain anything! But I think it’s a very human response to want to offer that explanation preemptively.

listen, this isn’t a lie, but it’s really close.

when you google it, the top source is Siskind’s own Facebook page.

the actual audio is just a meaningless blanket statement from which no one should draw any conclusions.

no actual news source has covered the quote, including Fox.

Here's the Karoline Leavitt interview people are talking about.

Maria Bartiromo asks if Trump might send ground troops into Iran, because "mothers are worried" about a draft. Leavitt replies that ground troops aren't in the current plan, but Trump won't rule them out. No mention of the draft.

This isn’t going to make things any easier for Caitlin Flanagan.

Weirdly, no —my three are She Said, An Education and Promising Young Woman. (I know she’s been in others! I’ve seen them! I just can never remember them!)

This is like the (apocryphal) Kundera story about how propagandists removed every part of a Czech leader from photos but his hat, but somehow crasser and clumsier.

I will say, today was not the first time the Cinematrix has forced me to confront the fact I can name exactly three Carey Mulligan movies, and I just have to hope they fit the categories.

I did use the monkey heart! (The biggest surprise for me was that “The Vow” was somehow a rarer answer than “Kuffs”.)

And, of course, it turns out it's a stock photo taken in Canada in 2011.

www.istockphoto.com/photo/winter...

This is… literally the exact jungle gym they have at the park I take my kid to. I mean… I guess he’s welcome to come and use it but he’s gonna have to be willing to take turns on the twisty slide.

(It's the magazine equivalent of writing awards-show patter. I've had the experience of coming in thinking "let's make fun of this form" and realizing what audiences actually want is to look at pretty celebrities doing standard jokes, and those are actually harder to write than it looks.)

I feel like there were a handful of times where the "let's Challenge the Form" gambit paid off, and those led to a lot more where it felt like preening. I feel like by the late '90s the smarter mags just had hacks on staff who specialized in those profiles or did the bare minimum, like a short Q&A.

Well, you shouldn't have gotten to his house early, then.

(I think a lot of those gimmicky anti-profiles were about the internal tension at magazines that needed to make all sorts of accommodations to publicists to get the cover photo that moved issues, even though everyone at the magazine had disdain for the profile that had to accompany that photo.)

Yeah, though I feel like there could be a tendency to do those in a way that felt like, "I'm way too talented a writer to do a mere celebrity profile", and, like... fine? But also -- you didn't have to write one at all if you didn't want to?

I remember watching it on MTV and having a moment where the switch flipped and I realized “being a kinder and more reasonable person than Adam Carolla does not mean you are a kind or reasonable person.”

I am so ready to have actors in scrubs take turns reciting facts from the Wikipedia page for "waterslide mishaps" at me while walking fast.

The rare name that doubles as a complete Onion headline.

Weren’t the vaccines widely rolled out in spring/summer 2021?

I still remember an amazing episode of “St. Elsewhere” where each act was a self-contained story that — without the show making a big deal about it—tracked the stages of life from birth to death. Long seasons let showrunners get weird!

Pierce Brosnan on ice

Police have released a photo of the suspect in his getaway vehicle.

@bencollins.bsky.social I did a double take here because I was 99% sure the guy in the middle of the illustration was Stan Kelly.

I'm gonna be honest, my "zombie bite" thesis is looking more and more plausible by the day.

I remember reading once that, in the run-up to the Puppy Episode, the "Ellen" writers room dropped so many increasingly-blatant hints about where things were ultimately heading that they joked about having a bell ring each time, and every time a new story about this guy drops, I can hear a "ding!"

This feels like an elaborate effort just to get people to say the phrase “lemon party”.

This is what “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” is called in Horsetown.

"This is the cup of a carpenter."

“Monster Mash” but it’s slowed down, acoustic, and telling the events of the Charlize Theron film “Monster”.