I’m happy to report that the writers nominated for the Adapted Screenplay Oscar mixed a little fiction into their reading diets last year. A very little. One novel.

I watched Friday Night Lights in real time, as it aired. I wonder if it would have been as much of an influence if I had “binged-watched” all five seasons back-to-back in one or two months’ time. Instead, the show stretched out over the course of five years, 2006-2011, which for me were years when I had to throw out most of the fiction I wrote.

I want my Secretary of State to be clear that, for as long as her job description includes tending to ISIS, then tending to ISIS is more important than the PTA.

Beneath the laughs, of which there are many, The Trip to Italy is an anxious comedy supremely anxious about comedy itself.

The documentary Finding Vivian Maier recently joined the burgeoning conversation about its titular subject, a reclusive Chicago nanny whose collection of street photography was discovered at a storage auction shortly before her death in the form of thousands of undeveloped rolls of film.

On the second day, I attended a Seder, with 14 pounds of beef brisket. On the fifth day, I saw Noah, with Russell Crowe looking like 14 pounds of brisket in a distressed denim bag.

Only a true Pollyanna would try to minimize Detroit's staggering problems. But buying into the dreary old ruin-porn narrative is, in its way, as myopic as rosy optimism.

Even as the RoboCop movies have declined in quality, they have served as ever-sharper reflections of what's going on in the culture at large.

We are not revisiting these characters and conceits because we are out of new ideas. A very old idea resonates; it comforts and entertains. In the case of Sherlock, even after all these retellings, it still manages to surprise.

What is the wider cultural influence of literary magazines? I am not sure there needs to be one.

It seems clear that if Tennessee Williams and Lorraine Hansberry were writing today they would be showrunners for a cable series, because that’s where the audience is.

We're deep in Bret Easton Ellis country here, southern California zip code. Which means there will be sex and there will be blood and anything goes and nothing matters.