Speaking of February ratings, here’s who else had a good February: Bravo, which just reported its highest ratings yet on the month, including all time ratings highs for Top Chef and multiple Real Housewives series. In my column in the print TIME this week, I look at how Bravo is riding high in the [...]

Chuck gets an upgrade for season 2.0. / NBC One of many weird things about this fall is that the traditional “premiere week” begins next Monday, and yet you could argue that the biggest new fall debuts have already happened: 90210, Fringe, True Blood. What we have left is a few very minor pleasures (like [...]

My column in this week’s Time is about the McCain/Palin strategy of running against the media: Palin, who majored in journalism but has since seen the error of her ways, not only out-celebritied Obama but also showed him how real celebrities handle the press. Real celebrities don’t make themselves available to every Tom, Dick and [...]

FRANK OCKENFELS / AMC Mad Men‘s second season debuts Sunday, and my review is in the print TIME this week. It begins: “Nostalgia. It’s delicate. But potent.” It’s November 1960, and ad writer Don Draper (Jon Hamm), in the first-season finale of Mad Men, is pitching a room of Kodak executives on a campaign for [...]

This Tuesday, I deep-sixed the TIME column I had already written to write a new one about the politics of humor(lessness). If you’re a regular, much of it incorporates some of what I already posted on the New Yorker Obama cover hoo-hah earlier this week. (I know, I know; but the shamans whom we pay [...]

There was a great episode of South Park in which the environment is threatened by a massive “cloud of smug” generated by hybrid-car drivers. Some of the shows on the celebrity-obsessed eco-channel Planet Green—the subject of my latest print Time column—generate a cloud of smug so vast it threatens to blot out the sun: One [...]

Eleswhere at time.com, I and other Time critics were enlisted to blurb four things in our respective fields that we’re curious about / looking forward to this summer. Readers love this, because it allows them to plan their summer entertainment calendars! Advertisers love it, because it means they get critics to write quasi-positive things about [...]

In this week’s Time, it fell to me to write The Moment—the mini-column that opens the magazine—on Miley Cyrus. Think of it as a last-minute asterisk on her Time 100 entry, written before the Vanity Fair incident, by the frighteningly prescient Donny Osmond (“Miley’s fans are not thinking about the fact that she will grow [...]