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TV Tonight: The Floating Soap Opera

On duty in the Persian Gulf. / PBS This week, PBS is airing what—if it had run it one hour a week like most networks do—would be called a reality or documentary series, Carrier, about life on the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz. Instead, airing two hours a night for five nights most places (check local [...]

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Dead Tree Alert: The Unbearable White-Maleness of News Anchoring

In the current issue of the magazine, my column is about the contrast pointed up by the current election, and by Katie Couric’s reportedly impending departure from CBS News: the presidential field is more diverse than the people—or at least the marquee news anchors and primetime cable hosts—covering it and asking the questions at the [...]

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Did Hannah Jump or Was She Pushed?

In a move that shocked parents and the Disney corporation’s accountants, teen star Miley Cyrus, a.k.a. Hannah Montana, has posed seminude for Vanity Fair’s June issue. In the photo, by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, Cyrus appears bare-backed, with a blanket clutched to her chest. (No actual Montanas were exposed.) In the article—and in Vanity Fair’s [...]

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BSG Watch: Nobody's Perfect

SCI FI Channel Photo: Carole Segal SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, gather a group of no more than twelve associates and watch Friday’s Battlestar Galactica. If you assume, and it seems pretty hard not to, that Battlestar Galactica was among other things an echo of America after 9/11, then what’s going on now [...]

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The Morning After: We're Back!

Sergei Bachlakov/ The CW I’m back from hiatus, as is much of the primetime TV schedule. Last night I caught my first episode of Aliens in America in several weeks. The show remains my favorite new sitcom of this season, and the episode—in which the Tolchuks befriend a convicted sex offender (so convicted for sleeping [...]