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You would think, after a report came out of a horrific public assault against a journalist by a mob, people might be able to set aside their personal and political hobbyhorses for a few hours and not exploit the situation.
You would be wrong. Shortly after the news that Lara Logan was beaten and sexually assaulted in Cairo, Nir Rosen, a …
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Last night, The Good Wife aired its much publicized episode based on Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook and the controversies around the accuracy of The Social Network. (Emphasis on based on! I noted how conspicuously Diane referred to the plaintiff in the defamation suit as “a Mark Zuckerberg in the making,” so as to make crystal-clear that …
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Spoilers for last night’s Glee follow:
After Josh Levin’s essay in Slate, there’s been a lot of discussion this week about the effect that weekly online reviews of shows have on TV criticism. (Here’s my response to Levin’s piece; see also Myles McNutt’s and Alan Sepinwall’s responses if you’re curious, and Levin’s response to the …
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Spoilers for last night’s Jeopardy IBM Challenge coming up:
We can console ourselves with this: when our new computer masters take over, apparently very soon now, we can be assured that they will comprehend our pathetic natural-language pleas for mercy with a certainty of upward of 90%.
Monday night, Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-playing …
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Disturbing news from Egypt: CBS News just issued a statement that reporter Lara Logan “was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating” by a mob while covering the downfall of Hosni Mubarak’s Egyptian government in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Friday. According to the network, Logan was separated from her crew …
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When networks program new shows, they often take into consideration “flow”—how well viewers will transition from one show into the new, hopefully compatible show. But there’s flow, and then there’s imitation so distractingly total that, in the case of CBS’s new Mad Love, the show might as well be called How I Met the Timeslot …
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Quick spoilers for last nights How I Met Your Mother coming up:
After Marshall’s father died, he returned home to Minnesota, as he described it, to help his mother out. As last night’s episode, “Desperation Day,” showed, there was much more to it than that: he was really going back home, in the end, to help himself out. His mother, …
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Jeopardy spoilers—and boy, is that one phrase I never thought I’d type here—coming up next:
The IBM computer Watson began its brave effort to supersede humanity and thus elevate the level of sentience on Earth last night,* taking on Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in the first night of a three-night Jeopardy competition. And I have to …
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Tonight on Jeopardy, Watson, a computer programmed by IBM, will challenge the program’s two biggest human champions to see whether man or machine can dominate the field of recalling arcane facts about Potent Potables. Here’s an overview of how Watson and the competition will work; to understand the larger implications of artificial …
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Over at Slate, Josh Levin writes a piece (in which I’m quoted) about HitFix’s Alan Sepinwall, and how his style of TV blogging—reviewing weekly episodes of dozens of shows—has changed TV criticism, and readers’ expectations of it:
At its best, new-school TV writing is brainy and inquisitive, thoughtful commentary borne out of a
…
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Cee Lo Green could be a great performer if he would just stop taking himself so damn seriously, couldn’t he? Cee Lo, pictured here, performed with his Glee stand-in, Gwyneth Paltrow, in a Grammy Awards that featured several defining themes:
* Songs that have been featured in the past season of Glee
* Rihanna duetting with someone
* …
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Before you read this post, run back to the car to get the pliers, then watch last night’s Big Love.
“I’m having a hard time reconciling my beliefs with my feelings.” —Ben
You and everybody else, Ben. In “The Special Relationship,” various characters in and around the Henrickson family struggled to deal with the dissonance between …
TIME picks the perfect tunes for those nights of love-induced misery. Wallow away
