Emily Gordon writes:
While recovering from sickness recently, I watched some execrable movies on cable. I love movie-watching so much I rarely suffer in the process of seeing almost any movie, and I saw this one all the way through. But at about the halfway mark I started reading the Rotten Tomatoes reviews as I half-viewed the images and half-listened to the dialogue from my horizontal pillow-state. You can click on the link below to see what movie this was, but it’s not important, I think. What’s important is how grand Roger Ebert is to have written this:

Why? I wanted to ask the filmmakers. Why? You have a terrific cast and the wit to start out well. Why surrender and sell out? Isn’t it a better bet, and even better for your careers, to make a whole movie that’s smart and funny, instead of showing off for 15 minutes and then descending into cynicism and stupidity? Why not make a movie you can show to the friends you admire, instead of to a test audience scraped from the bottom of the IQ barrel?

Let every person sitting in a Hollywood meeting ask himself (or, less likely, herself) these questions, and then answer them!

From Wikipedia, which, as Jesse Sheidlower could surely tell us, is also a verb, as in “Wiki that shit before you go around spouting nonsense!”:

Experience of the K-hole may include distortions in bodily awareness, such as the feeling that one’s body is being tugged, or is gliding on silk, flying, or has grown very large or distended.^{[citation needed]} Users have reported the sensation of their soul leaving their human body.^{[citation needed]} Users have also often reported feeling more skeletal or becoming more aware of their bones – the shape of their hands is also often of interest.^{[citation needed]} Users may experience worlds or dimensions that are ineffable, all the while being completely unaware of their individual identities or the external world. Users have reported intense hallucinations including visual hallucinations, perceptions of falling, fast and gradual movement and flying, ‘seeing god’, feeling connected to other users, objects and the cosmos, experiencing psychic connections, and shared hallucinations and thoughts with adjacent users.^{[citation needed]}

Yes, primary sources, people!

_Emily writes:_
Of the assorted Mad Men recaps I read every week, New York magazine’s are often my favorite. I interrupt myself to say, though, that the first one I read each week, and very nearly hyperventilate while waiting for, is Mark Lisanti’s matchless, dirty Mad Men Power Rankings, which are less recaps than they are manic fanfic, or meta-dystopias, or thought balloons kidnapped from the dank shadows of the writers’ room.
Then, throughout the week, I savor the Slate TV Club dialogues, which I love; letter-writing and -answering is still such a civilized form, and the correspondents’ sign-offs always make me laugh. Plus, the Slate trio (Michael Agger, John Swansburg, and Julia Turner) often cite reader comments and research, which is classy. You’d be a fool to miss James Wolcott’s (and others’) recaps at Vanity Fair, which include a playful plaint on the weary burden of recapping that is, as a friend of mine says, “the stuff of an S. J. Perelman Greatest Hits.” In the same column, Wolcott writes, elegiacally, of Sally:

I hate seeing Sally cry; there’s something so pure and defenseless about her plight. She’s either going to evolve into a saint forged in suffering or develop telekinetic powers and turn their next residence into a house of flying daggers, converting her mother into a lovely order of shish kabob. Either way, we’re pulling for you, Sally! Your tears shall not spill in vain!

I also enjoy the Lemondrop recaps, which have an appealing carefree zest but are sometimes a little sloppy. I can wait a few episodes to catch up with the Movieline recaps and Entertainment Weekly‘s “Mad Men Central,” though I relished EW‘s “‘Mad Men’: Unpacking ‘The Suitcase.'” Correct me if I’m wrong, but is EW a couple of episodes behind? Think of the people, like me and Duck Phillips, prone to the shakes!

Anyway, back to the always expertly composed and deeply considered writing on the show from New York. I thought this was an especially elegant, and relevant–see the Observer‘s recent instant classic “So Sorry To Do This! Flakiness Epidemic Sweeps Digital New York”–graf from Logan Hill this week:

This season, the show has become more critical of the actual conditions of Madison Avenue. Abe was the first character to really embody a hard-left critique of the ad world (only Midge’s bohemian critique came close) with his “Nuremberg on Madison Avenue” jeremiad. There are a whole lot of historians and sociologists, like David Montgomery (or Christopher Lasch, whose Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged seems especially pertinent to this episode) who might be frustrated by the way a lot of the period arguments we fans have had about Mad Men — in terms of women in the office and work-life balance, and gender roles and so forth — tend to occlude the macro-level changes in the ways Americans work. We talk about how Betty’s a bad parent, and Don’s a bad parent, but rarely about how the way work — and, particularly, this kind of obsessive Manhattan work world — is eclipsing all other sorts of power and order, requiring and overtaking more and more of people’s values and lives. When, at a funeral, there’s more talk of money than religion, more talk of work trips than the journey to the afterlife, the show’s making a point.

Read the rest. This is rewarding, satisfying television criticism. That’s not an implied slight to anyone else’s (I hate the blog idiom sometimes–it’s so binary), but here’s to Logan Hill for doing this so well. Meanwhile, can someone pay Mark Lisanti to blog all day? I’m sure he has better things to do, but it would make a major contribution to my quality of life.

See also: 5 Other Necessary Mad Men Tumblrs, from Movieline.