How many critics need to tell you to watch [Mad Men] before you actually sit down and do it? Yeah, it’s a little slow, but slow things pay off. Like a spaghetti western. Or graduate school. It’s light on overt plot development and heavy on mood and subtext, but that mood and subtext are an effective, biting indictment of the misogynist, capitalist era it’s focused upon (an ear in which, some would argue, we still live). The acting is mostly presence, but most of the actors have the type of burning presence you just plum don’t see anymore. Also, I want Don Draper to be my boyfriend. Yeah, I know he’s married and I know he has other mistresses and he can be a little cold sometimes and I know we’re both heterosexual and I’m a record store clerk and he’s a fictional character and yadda yadda yadda. All I know is that when I’m in his arms I feel safe.

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It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.

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What vexes me most about “Filth and Wisdom” is the economics. Madonna has been a global star for decades. She has amassed a fortune, much of which presumably remains intact. She can’t have spent all of it on jodhpurs and conical bras. So why, when it came to launching herself as a film director, did she limit her budget to $365.23? Such, at any rate, is my estimate for the funding of “Filth and Wisdom.” If the actors were paid according to their talents, they cannot have cost more than forty bucks. In the case of Richard E. Grant, the one sizable name in the cast, his performance as a tweedy, sightless poet is so embarrassing that I trust he took no payment at all. The only major expense was the lighting: a toy flashlight, I would guess, placed carefully in the corner of each room and angled upward—hence the capering shadows that Andriy casts on his living-room walls. In technical terms, more professional productions than this are filmed and cut on iMovie, by ten-year-olds, a thousand times a day.

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I don’t like crooks. And if I did like ‘em, I wouldn’t like crooks that are stool pigeons. And if I DID like crooks that are stool pigeons, I still wouldn’t like you!

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When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. it’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

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What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
Like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

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If things keep going like this, there are going to be a lot of really smart drunk girls here.

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Those who dislike Godard’s films may well find the works’ resistance to large-scale coherence incredibly frustrating; those who admire the films have probably learned to savor a movie as a string of vivid, somewhat isolated effects.

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This frivolous lawsuit puts at serious risk the entire tradition of commentary on fiction. Any student writing a paper about the Harry Potter books, any scholarly treatise about it, will certainly do everything she’s complaining about. Once you publish fiction, Ms. Rowling, anybody is free to write about it, to comment on it, and to quote liberally from it, as long as the source is cited…. She let herself be talked into being outraged over a perfectly normal publishing activity, one that she had actually made use of herself during its web incarnation. Now she is suing somebody who has devoted years to promoting her work and making no money from his efforts — which actually helped her make some of her bazillions of dollars. Talent does not excuse Rowling’s ingratitude, her vanity, her greed, her bullying of the little guy, and her pathetic claims of emotional distress

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