Her answer, I think, explains the idea of heaven more fully than any of the celestial fireworks that Dante spends the rest of the Comedy describing. Not all souls in heaven are worthy of the same amount of grace and proximity to God, she says, due to a variety of reasons (earthly imperfections or being associated with a slightly-less-superior virtue). Nevertheless, each soul is filled according to its capacity nonetheless, and therefore each is equally, which is to say completely, content.

I find this so powerful an image because I know only too well what it feels like to be mostly content—to know that perfection is just out of reach, over the horizon, at the end of one more task. Doubly so when it comes to writing: there is so much of it, and a relative abundance of decent and successful writing, and moreover, far too little of it is my own.

Egotistical? You bet. But writing is ultimately an act of imposing one’s ego on readers in one way or another, probably more so than any other profession. Unlike a surgeon or a cop or even a politician, a writer has little to offer the world except a vivid imagination and the ability to turn a phrase, period. And the extent to which your own work is read or ignored, linked to and retweeted or consigned to oblivion, is, in the end a direct referendum on your own ego.

So in an essay called “Envy, or, The Last Infirmity,” Sven Birkerts describes the feeling of artistic envy that stings every serious or semi-serious writer from time to time—myself most definitely included. Ostensibly an examination of the 1984 film Amadeus, Birkerts actually takes you on a tour of the indignities of his own writing life. What he feels when a colleague lands an article in a good periodical. Why he gets the most invidious over the worst pieces. How he can only quiet his jealous ego in the presence of actual artistic brilliance, just as, for all the indignities that Mozart inflicted upon Salieri, the latter still stood in awe of the Requiem as he transcribed it at the foot of Mozart’s deathbed.

“Nothing more fully discloses the artist’s, the writer’s, flawed character than envy of a peer,” he writes. This is unquestionably true, and the best I (or anyone) can do is simply tamp down my feelings and pretend like everything is great and I am unreservedly happy for whomever for their piece on wherever. Seething in private: one of my favorite pastimes, and I’m sure I’m not alone on that front.

So this is why I, too, long to feel the same as the angels in Dante’s celestial firmament: to be filled fully with contentment, even if the amount that I receive is not as much as the person next to me or the person writing for X publication. Instead, I am left to my feeble attempts at self-abnegation of the sort that eluded much better people (Siddhartha comes to mind…)

In reading Birkerts’s essay, though, I understand what he means about standing in the reflected light of brilliance. In a subtle way, and about the most unlikeable of topics, Birkerts has expressed something that I’ve felt but have never quite grasped in its entirety. For that little bit of self-awareness I can only be grateful.

Best of The Bureau: Ask Ono!

— Darryl Campbell

Empathy, in the abstract, is an unalloyed good. It exists beyond race, gender, nationality, and economics. My capacity to care is not bound up with biology or geography. It is a feature of my humanity. When this abstract empathy is animated into action is where the problems occur. For instance: young, male, Caucasian journalist dining on steak in London seeks to help starving, tortured, denizens of the North Korean gulag. What action should this young man’s empathetic desire for justice take?

This is the question that Mike Deri-Smith wrestles with in “North Korea Won’t Be Liberated in a Day” in The Morning News. The first thing Deri-Smith does is listen: to the stories of North Korean refugees, to the experiences of generations of writers who went on idealistic empathy benders (Hemingway, Greene, Vollmann) and came back to warn us of its folly, to the debate stirred up by Kony 2012 (particularly Teju Cole’s excellent analysis of the “White Savior Industrial Complex” in the Atlantic). Listening seems like a good first step. From there Deri-Smith comes up with a “Manifesto for the Modern iDealist” that is a simple eight point plan we can all tape to our walls when we want to help, but need some guidance. (I referred to the manifesto recently, after reading some entries at The Afghan Women’s Writing Project.)

The mental gymnastics of one white guy who wants to help hundreds of thousands of suffering North Koreans without coming off like an asshole may seem like a small issue. On the contrary, how to effectively help one another is probably the most important question of the 21st century, regardless of your vital statistics. Respectfully, sympathetically helping each other feels like the best response to the immense forces of politics, environment, and economics that keep some people in a state of abject horror while others choose between different packaged meats at the supermarket. Or is that too idealistic?

Best of The Bureau: Katie Boody is the perfect example of Deri-Smith’s modern iDealist, as shown in her excellent essay “Welcome Back Boody: Ignorance.”

— Jonathan Gourlay

“Getting Them Dead” by Francine Prose exemplifies the kind of literary analysis applied to everyday political and cultural life that the New York Review of Books does so well. It’s a close reading of that NYT essay on Obama’s “Secret ‘Kill List’” and reminds us how language bends its own insidious forms of power and threat. “Detail, word choice, diction, and tone,” writes Prose, directs and influences “the reader’s response without, on the surface, appearing to do so […] and make[s] a familiar narrative seem new.” She continues: “the language of the journalists and of their interview subjects may make readers feel that they are receiving fresh and troubling information.” Citing Orwell’s important essay, “Politics and the English Language,” Prose examines how certain phrases work to hide their own violence. “Personality strikes;” “signature strikes;” “aggressive techniques;” “enhanced interrogation” – what do these phrases mean and, more crucially, how do they mean? It shouldn’t take a material catastrophe for English-speaking America to interrogate such language.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s review of Cynthia Carr’s new biography of David Wojnarowicz Fire in the Belly for Bookslut is one of those book reviews I could only hope for, not expect. Like Maggie Nelson’s review of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Weather in Proust, it’s intensely poetic, personal, and incisive. That these two reviews touch on books by or about queer artists is a coincidence, though not irrelevant to the nature of such prose and content. They’ll leave one with goosebumps, and a desire not just to know – but to understand – more. They glitter the books themselves with the reviewer’s own desiring perspective, adding (not detracting) from the subject at hand. Sycamore does not prostrate herself to the image of the late Wojnarowicz, but remains both loving and critical of the conflicted artist at the heart of Carr’s biography. Care, responsibility, and ethics ring throughout the piece – more than one can say about most book reviews.

For personal blogs, I have no idea what you’re doing if not reading Natalia Cecire (see her post on Nate Silver and puerility) and J.R. Martin (here on homophobia, islamophobia, immigration, and more). They’re two of the most intelligent and generous minds on the internet.

Best of The Bureau: This zany piece about Reality Musical Theatre by Jon Methven.

— Jane Hu

Spelunky is an amazing game, but it’s appeal is elusive. It’s an action platformer, like the old Mega Mans or Castlevanias, made in the roguelike style, which means the levels are random and every time you die you have to start all over again. But none of that explains why it’s one of the best independent games ever.

Luckily, Russ Frushtick is here to help. In a lengthy feature for Polygon (shoe-in for best new blog if we were still doing that, by the way), Frushstick goes deep on Spelunky. Staring with the question “But it’s just randomized Mario, right? What’s the big deal about that?,” he profiles Spelunky‘s developer, explains just what the hell “roguelike” means, charts the rise of indie games, and follows the game’s development from retro PC freebie to polished Xbox gem, before bringing it all back around to tell us what makes this little piece of software so special.

The whole piece is well written and reported, but the introduction especially has stuck with me. Frushstick opens by having the reader visualize the first level of Super Mario Bros., then changes elements until that mental image transforms into Spelunky. It’s tough to describe unusual game mechanics in simple, relatable terms, but Frushstick makes it look easy. And once that understanding is in place, the rest flows smoothly.

What I like most about the piece, though, is just that it exists. Videogames are such complex pieces of media: they’re computer programs, they’re art, they’re interactive, they’re narrative, they’re audio, they’re visual, and so on. Capturing the whole of even a fairly modest title like requires a huge effort, as Frushtick’s piece shows. It’s awesome that web has reached a place where that, y’know, happens.

Best of The Bureau: H.P. Lovecraft Answers Your Relationship Questions

— Nick Martens

Growing up, I watched lots of re-runs of Hanna-Barbera cartoons. The Jetsons were never my favorite, probably because I really liked The Flintstones which, conceptually, was the opposite. But as Paleo Future‘s Matt Novak points out, The Jetsons is one of the greatest influences on our futuristic vernacular. The Jetsons represent an optimistic way to talk about the future, or as Novak puts it in his Jetsons 50th anniversary retrospective, “the distillation of every Space Age promise Americans could muster.” This piece is actually the intro to a series of recaps of the entire 24-episode run of The Jetsons (did you know there were only 24 episodes of the original show?). Novak touches on the sense of entitlement associated with nostalgic futurism (“Where’s my jetpack!?! Where’s my flying car!?! Where’s my robot maid?!?”), a lot of historical context (the NASA space program 35-45% public approval rating), and why the show didn’t last more than one season (not enough color TVs).

Best of The Bureau: For me, the most resonant pieces we published this year were Tyler Magyar’s tonal GIF narrative “Things I Don’t Want to Forget” and Avery Edison’s terrific, touching series about being a transgender woman, Right Body, Wrong Junk series.

— Kevin Nguyen

One doesn’t need further confirmation of the underrated brilliance of Azealia Banks or Selena or Nicki Minaj, but Trill Wave Feminism provides that outlet for those of us who grew up with “alternative” icons of feminist praxis. For those paying attention, 2012 was a year in which mainstream feminism (as in white, as in middle class) was consistently and thankfully challenged by some of the keenest writers, scholars, and average viewers online and in print for its tendency to exclude rather than include. Trill Wave Feminism feels like the natural progression of these challenges, affirming the strength and empowering essence inherent in performers, writers, and artists who are often denied a place in feminist iconography and rhetoric. The carefully “curated” selection of GIFs, videos, images, quotes, songs, and other media always feels just right. I nod my head every day and say, “Yes! THIS is my feminism!” But also, how can you hate a space that features Kat Stacks, Charo, Le1f, Fatima Al Qadiri, and Gertrudis Bocanegra in the same month? Answer: You can’t.

Britt Julious is the senior editor at This Recording, and a freelance writer and essayist based in Chicago. She blogs at BRITTICISMS.

Sarah Pavis

If I had to pick one favorite internet thing of 2012 it’d probably be Story Bundle. I love my Kindle but I hate paying hardcover prices for non-lendable, DRMified ebooks that Amazon can yank whenever they want. StoryBundle does a pay-what-you-want format for a handpicked bunch of DRM-free indie ebooks, often all in a particular genre. Yeah, I haven’t loved all the books I’ve bought but I love the concept (as did the Humble Bundle folks). And another group, Bundle Dragon, seeks to democratize the process by giving individuals a set of tools that let you create your own bundles. I dunno. I just love buying shit in bundles. Bundles, bundles, bundles.

Other cool 2012 things: the rise of verticals, the rise of videogame blogs, and the rise of videogame verticals. BuzzFeed putting on its big boy pants this past year has been fun to watch (and, disclosure, participate in). And The Verge launching Polygon has been awesome. I love their in-depth stories and browser defying layouts. Though I hate the Penny Arcade comic, Ben Kuchera is bringing some honest to goodness videogame reporting to the Penny Arcade Report. After a great Kickstarter, Venus Patrol took a while to launch and it’s taking a while to find its feet. I enjoy it but, since Venus Patrol is a one man operation, it seems like Brandon Boyer has more ambition than time. Finally, though I like the AV Club’s Gameological Society, the suddenly crowded video game blog space leaves it feeling like the forgettable best friend in a rom-com. I’d say this is an unstable growth rate for video game blogs but I am managing to read them all. Now if only I had time to play some video games.

Sarah Pavis is a mechanical engineer and writer who wants to play boardgames with you.

Jonathan Gourlay

13 Ways of Looking @horse_ebooks

I

your bird, the sky for the times when Kool-Aid soaks in paper towels. The only thing moving

II

I was one of three Wedding Blondes and a black bird. To become, to become, to become, to become, THEN successfully market

III

you keep a schedule and work insurance. Be internet, be savvy, be cheap, be yourself, htis value + value + value + value + value +

IV

tern and swallow. This thing listens to itself. SHUT IT OFF!

V

thisman, every bird, inflections

VI

indecipherable (be)cause indecipherable (be)cause indecipherable (be)cause indecipherable

VII

FEET EFEET FE FET FEE TFE EET FEET TETEFEFE F EE E E E T [O] [O] WOMEN

VIII

Realize Your Dream Of Becoming Inescapable. Money Systems Know Shame Searching For Heart Broken Man. How To Earn Targeted http://tinyurl.com/brcpvts

IX

ABC. A, A Attention. Interest. Decision. Action. Attention.

X

What even is this? Why do I even have this? I don’t understand. I come home and want the pdf manuals.

XI

He rode over Connecticut in a glass coach. DEEPLY SHOCKING!! Then very likely the most (without

XII

She looked at him closely and thought, I, for one, have a bird that becomes agitated by the color of the afternoon when

XIII

laughing ah! Tin k. . . harmful if swallowed now become serious

Jonathan Gourlay is an editor at The Bygone Bureau.

C. Max Magee

I’m not an early adopter (I fall somewhere between over-caffeinated tech blogger and AOL-using septuagenarian in terms of new tech uptake), so I have added nothing of note this year to my tech regimen that was actually unveiled to the public in 2012. I have, however, become an avid user of a number of services that the more aggressively plugged-in were likely hep to in the 2009 to 2011 timeframe. One of my favorites has been WeatherSpark. Since discovering this beautiful and very useful visualization of recent weather conditions and the upcoming forecast, I can’t bear to look at Weather.com’s generic five-day forecast, which now feels quite staid in comparison. Other discoveries this year: I joined the rest of the planet in experiencing the wonders of Spotify (and followed some instructions somewhere and have managed to turn off those nefarious updates on Facebook). And as someone who runs a decent-sized online magazine, Asana is my new favorite dead simple tool for managing a team, while the newish “Real-Time” feature of Google Analytics is a daily dose of info-crack.

C. Max Magee created and edits The Millions.

Ryan Bateman

Twitter is a perfect platform for comedy. Its ephemeral nature and 140-character restriction acts as a catalyst for the punsters, comeback kings, and armchair comedians of the world, giving everyone a chance to put out their zinger. It has also slowly become home to professionals like Conan O’Brien, Steve Martin, Kyle Kinane, and countless others, each using the platform to spin out their own particular brand of comedy within its bounds. The platform also slowly began to give rise to less conventional comedy stars. Parody accounts became prolific. @horse_ebooks, ostensibly an automated bot tweeting parts of the ebooks it tries to sell, rose to Twitter stardom in 2011 once its non-sequiturs and disconnected turns of phrase (“Worms—oh my god WORMS”) began spreading across the internet. 2012 seems to have been the year of a new kind of comedy—“weirdtwitter”. Rather than aiming to appeal to shared experience or to twist an expectation, Tweeters like @ActualPerson084 or @ConorTripler instead seem to aim for a brand of bizarre, unwieldy comedy that wouldn’t work on any other platform.

AUTO-CORRECT BEGINS CHANGING MORE AND MORE WORDS TO “SADNESS.”

— Daniel Manitou (@ActualPerson084) May 23, 2012

you’re in a park hangin out w people. all the people are dogs and youre a dog. youve never heard of twitter and your life isnt miserable

— Conor Tripler (@ConorTripler) March 17, 2012

While aiming specifically to subvert our expectation of humor isn’t a new approach to comedy, both do so in such a way that feels more native to the internet and its culture than the stand-up comedy of old. And it seems to be paying off. @ConorTripler’s 13,000 followers have awarded him over 110,000 faves, while @ActualPerson084′s Lovecraftian #NightOfTheFreeIpad tweets set off a minor trendstorm each time he sends them out into the twittersphere.

Whether it’s a new genre of comedy in and of itself is debatable, but as reallyreallyreallytrying asks, “Yo how come Goofy can talk but Pluto is just [A STRANGE & MALEVOLENT DRONE ENACTING THE WILL OF THE UNKNOWABLE DARKNESS]?”

Ryan Bateman is a freelance software developer currently living in London. He is insoluble in water.

Aaron Cohen

I thought dub step cat was really good and some boats in a race was really good, but was this commercial for DollarShaveClub.com any good? No. It was fucking great. The video is the kind of great where you envy people watching it for the first time, nostalgic for their glee, jealous of their surprise. It’s the kind of great you can’t be bothered to email or IM to friends. That’s not good enough. This video demands more, so you have to get all dark social and walk around the office making sure the right people see it as soon as possible.

While the ad is hilarious and features the right level of dryness and absurdity, I wonder if it took off like it did because it spoke to a greater question in our world. Why are razor cartridge replacements so expensive? In any case, I haven’t heard much about Dollar Shave Club since this ad heralded their launch, but if they never do end up reaching the volume of memberships surely required to make it as a company, they will have at least added 2012′s best web video.

Aaron Cohen is the founder of Eat Boston, Super Precious Art Gallery, and Pets Are Superheroes. He blogs at Unlikely Words and Kottke.org. He’s on Twitter.

Leah Reich

For whatever reason, I don’t like to put a lot of stuff on my fridge. Maybe because I don’t have the right magnets and stuff always falls down, or maybe because it always looks cluttered rather than charming like it does in other people’s houses. But for about seven or eight months this year, I pinned a piece of paper, a face peering out from it with half a smile and a name emblazoned down the side:

LOUIS CK

The best, newest thing for me on the internet in 2012 was watching Louis CK go out on a limb with ticketing for his shows after successfully selling his standup show through his website for a flat, $5 fee in 2011. Ticketing has to be one of the most loathed parts of the entertainment industry for artists and audiences alike. He ditched Ticketmaster to sell tickets directly through his website with a flat fee, including tax. But more than just selling tickets directly, what Louis CK did was bring back an important human element to the ticketing process: He humanized it, explaining why he was doing it and why it was important for him to take this risk. He made each step transparent. He was open and communicative, including fans in the process and further endearing him to them.

The success of his ticketing experiment—135,600 tickets in the first week of sales and a major reduction in scalping—was immediately apparent and astonishing. The entire process was beneficial for both parties, rather than only for a third party. Let’s hope his success will spur others to follow his lead, perhaps even with Kickstarter-like tools to help emerging artists manage their audiences and ticket sales.

Leah Reich has a PhD in sociology and works as a researcher at Mule Design Studio in San Francisco. She lives in Oakland, where she subsists mostly on avocados and is writing a paean to her love of the trumpet. She is on Twitter.

Hallie Bateman

Hallie Bateman is an art director at The Bygone Bureau.

Kevin Nguyen

I’ve never understood the appeal of the YouTube talking head. Despite the popularity of this style, someone talking into a webcam, no matter how quickly cut or zany or funny the personality is, has ever made a compelling argument to me. (And trust me: I’ve seen my fair share of these things. My middle school-aged cousins post them on Facebook all the time.)

PBS and Mike Rugnetta’s Idea Channel has changed my mind about that (and it’s not just because he has a record cover of Televisions Marquee Moon featured in the backdrop). Rugnetta is adorable and nerdy, but also articulate enough to guide his enthusiasm into a coherent and well-researched argument. It’s made me realize that this format, which I previously thought to be lazy, can actually make for a condensed, hyperspeed lecture of sorts. My favorite from the past year is Rugnetta’s posit that Minecraft and Makerbot are the first signs of a post-scarcity economy, which argues that maybe a world where we can make things out of thin air is not so far-fetched.

Even when Rugnetta’s ideas don’t entirely come together, you’re still treated to a fascinating history lesson and Rugnetta’s charming mug. Like every YouTube series, Idea Channel videos end with a plea to subscribe. This is the first time I’ve been happy to oblige.

Kevin Nguyen is a founding editor at The Bygone Bureau.

Nick Martens

This June, Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency launched a modest Kickstarter campaign to raise $6,000 to fund a video series called “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games.” Then, for daring to discuss the topic of sexism in a medium that has brought us such strong female characters as Lara Croft, BloodRayne, Cammy, and The New Lara Croft, she became the target of a viscous campaign of misogynistic YouTube comments, Wikipedia vandalism, and pornographic images. The story blew up, her Kickstarter swelled to nearly $160,000 and 7,000 backers, and the mob grew more hateful.

Sarkeesian is amazing for having the fortitude to withstand 30 days in that maelstrom. But she didn’t stop there. She’s spoken about her experiences with online harassment all year, most recently in a brilliant talk at the TEDxWomen conference, where she somehow manages to be depressing and inspiring in equal measure. And in their sickeningly predictable way, her harassers have continued their silencing tactics, using each of her media appearances as an excuse to unleash another wave of sexist venom.

This relentless bigotry shows the staggering magnitude of the problem women face in gaming, to say nothing of the plight of queer gamers, gamers of color, or disabled gamers. It almost seems hopeless, until you remember we have people like Anita Sarkeesian to help us turn the tide.

Nick Martens is a founding editor at The Bygone Bureau.

Darryl Campbell

In the wake of the Newtown shootings, Jason Kottke at Kottke.org started devoting a significant chunk of time to covering the ongoing debate about the place of guns in the United States — from the words we use to talk about it to a look at the issue from a public health perspective.

I love the aw-shucks, look-at-this-cool-stuff-I-found tone of most linkblogs as much as the next guy. But in the gun debate, Kottke has presented it in way that only a linkblogger could. That is, he can be opinionated to a degree that would get a “real journalist” crucified; he can support someone and point out their hypocrisy in the same day; he can pack an op-ed column’s worth of irony into a tweet’s worth of words. Most of all, he can do the legwork of filtering the messy public sphere into a few digestible cross-sections, and, to his credit, do so without being shrill or melodramatic—something that takes a significant amount of self-awareness, or self-restraint.

In the wake of the shooting, even the professional commentariat seemed reluctant to engage in the usual cant that dominated the discourse about guns before the 14th. And into that discursive pause came Kottke, with thirty-five posts’ worth of statistics, essays, and marginalia about gun violence and its effects. (Among many others, of course; but to my knowledge no one has delved not just into hard news and opinions, but also history, literature, movie criticism, and public policy.)

Like many Americans, I spent last Friday following the news in a state of mute shock. As a society we claim to regard public schools as sacred, innocent, inviolable spaces. Doubly so for me: I have spent at least one day a year for the last fifteen years volunteering or visiting at my mom’s elementary school classrooms. I was also in high school when the Columbine shooting happened, and watched live TV coverage as it happened.

I am not sure why, when these shootings happen, we are quick to express outrage but slow to do something about their ultimate—not proximate—causes. Maybe this time, with politicians, businesspeople, and even Rupert Murdoch signaling their willingness to revisit the central place that guns have in American society, we can do something else. And I think that the broad, public, but also highly personal overview of the gun question that Kottke has been writing over the past few days can help us cut through the Gordian knot of sublimated partisan interests and uninformed hyperbole.

(On a more lighthearted note, this year I also enjoyed the proliferation of Russian dash-cam footage, which more or less speaks for itself.)

Darryl Campbell is an editor at The Bygone Bureau.

Louie balks (“I’m not that kind of funny”), and turns to leave the room, his face contorted with fear, sadness and shame, but stops to plead: “This is either a door or a wall for me.” Exhorted again, Louie spins around angrily and yells, “You’re just a … pencil … PENIS par-ADE,” breaking into a ridiculous, infantile, all-too-brief dance/belly rub. For a beat, the two men are silent. “You’ve bought yourself another week,” Dahl deadpans.

This GIF alone ought go down in television history, but the conceit is genius. The scene turns on a dime from tragedy to comedy. After two decades’ apprenticeship, Louie’s comedic legacy is fart noises and insulting a heckler’s penis. (See: “My daughter is a fucking asshole.”)

To try to be funny and fail is “to die” in standup parlance; here Dahl is asking for Louie to take that leap for a shot at immortality (of sorts), though the thousandth death hurts as much as the first. “Look them in the eye and tell them the truth,” Dahl advises Louie; also: “You have to go away to come back” — shown in the choreography of this scene. Yes, this was so much more than a dick joke. — Janet Manley

I wasn’t allowed to watch television as a kid, and as a result I have zero impulse control and do things like watch five episodes of Nashville on a Tuesday night. Thanks, parents! This year for me included a couple of lost weekends to HBO’s Game of Thrones, and for me the best thing on television in 2012 was Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister.

Thrones is better than it looks — if you can surrender to the tired tropes of fantasy, most of the characters are complexly rendered and interesting — but Dinklage is the star. As Tyrion, he’s the show’s antihero and the lynchpin of an enormous cast. The role would likely be compelling even in the hands of a lesser actor, but Dinklage elevates it to the bar set by performers like James Gandolfini and Bryan Cranston (as already noted by many other critics).

The schlockiness of some of Thrones makes Dinklage shine brighter, but it also makes me want to see him capitalize on the audience he’s built to return to more sophisticated projects, like 2003’s The Station Agent. Thrones is good fun, but Dinklage has a real audience now. I anticipate watching him write his own ticket. — S.J. Culver

At first glance, Veep’s Jonah Ryan seems like he’s going to be a typical wonky government stooge, albeit an obscenely tall one. He’s sauper-psyched to work at the White House, and when he’s not casually rattling off the number of times he spoke to POTUS that day, he says things like, “The President of the United States of America is very keen that your going to the fundraiser should be fundamentally the sequence of events that does actually take place this evening.”

But over the short season’s eight episodes, a rich portrait of an idiosyncratic d-bag emerges. Timothy Simons’ political sleazeball always refers to women as numbers signifying their attractiveness, but he’s gloriously inept at speaking with them (and also everybody else). The fructose-intolerant wonk always has broad, Kramer-style entrances — “Whazzuuup, as they say in the late ’90s” — their unfunniness underscored by the lack of laugh track, which is, of course, what makes them funny. He likes a metal band so extreme they don’t even have a name, and his similes always have a gross sexual component that would make anybody uncomfortable. He’s a cringe-humor folk hero. There are moments where we’re almost made to feel for Jonah, in the way that Dwight from The Office became less repugnant over time, but then the very next thing he says is a reminder that in real life, some people are irredeemable. Never change, Jonah. — Joe Berkowitz

Solange’s “Losing You” is among my favorite songs from the past year, but when it comes to the music video for “Losing You,” nothing else I’ve seen is even in the running.

“Losing You” is relaxed, washed in an Instagram filter-like retro tint. Surrounding Solange are Congo’s Le Sapeurs, a society of chic men elegantly dressed in a bright palette of handmade suit jackets, dress shoes, and fancy hats. The flamboyance of their apparel is a stark contrast to the homes in the impoverished slums of Cape Town. It’s this tension that suits “Losing You” so well. Lyrically, Solange details the heartbreak of an inevitably doomed relationship (“I don’t know why I fight it/ clearly we are through”) over celebratory samples and upbeat instrumentation. There’s also an aesthetic dynamic between the organic beat of African drums and the ominous, droning synth that haunts the periphery of the melody.

But what comes through most in the video is Solange’s personality — playful, goofy, stylish, undeniably cool. No article about Solange will ever be able to ignore that she is the little sister of this decade’s great diva. But at least now they’ll refer to her as Beyonce’s younger, hipper sister. — Kevin Nguyen

– Yael Levy

The Dirty Projectors’ Swing Lo Magellan opens with handclaps and humming, and spends the next 42 minutes adding layer upon layer of tone and texture. The sound is somehow both stripped down and rich, crisp but tactile. When I listen to it I can picture drum sticks bouncing on a snare, fingers sliding across a fret board, vocal cords straining slightly to hit the highest notes. But after a few spins you stop thinking about what instrument you are hearing, or how many voices comprise that harmonic chord. Everything melts away and you’re left with twelve deceptively simple and accessible songs with melodies that linger for days.

The subject matter varies from track to track — some clearly sing of love, one addresses oil industry abuse, another questions the point of making music. But most are pleasantly enigmatic, at least for me, after 40 listens or so. Like many great albums, concrete themes are slow to reveal themselves. When I catch myself thinking too hard about the meaning of a lyric or song, I come back to these lines from “Dance for You,” the album’s sixth track:

“There is an answer
I haven’t found it
But I will keep dancing ‘til I do”

— Ryan Abbott

I was lucky enough to see Dr. Dog in concert earlier this fall when their tour, in support of their album Be the Void, took them through Boston.  For the first part of the show, I thought their strongest asset was Scott McMicken, who looks on stage like a cross between Gilligan and Issa, the Palestinian terrorist from the Munich Games.  His cool confidence was a nice juxtaposition with his reedy voice.  But then I heard Toby Leaman perform “Lonesome,” one of my favorite songs of the past twelve months.  Leaman’s voice alone is so growlingly primal and convicted, but to see him lean into it, to see him mean it from the soles of his feet, as though his whole body were wet clothing being wrung to the last — it was the most sincere performance by any artist I got to experience in 2012. — Josh Fischel

If you or someone you know has ever been wrapped up in a dramatic on-again off-again relationship, you know there’s a triumphant eye of the heartache/rage storm. It’s the moment you realize you (or your friend) realize life is full of possibilities once you wash your hands clean of this torturous mess forever! But then the ex apologizes or TNT plays You’ve Got Mail and suddenly peacetime is over. Any previous promises of sane avoidance are dashed to shreds. Tragic to experience, horrific to watch.

If only there were a way to bottle that conviction of Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Getting Back Together”! Enter Swift and her hit that you can put on repeat until iTunes crashes. A good musician inserts a new sound into culture. A great musician inserts a new idea into society. Everyone is at risk for repeated dilly-dallying with the wrong person, but especially young women, Swift’s most popular demographic. I admire her message to teens. 1.) It’s not condescending, it’s accessible. 2.) While Swift jabs at the other romantic party, the real focus of the song is celebrating your own emotional health. It puts the responsibility on the listener to have control of her own issues. Things have changed a lot since my middle school days of Britney Spears’s “I Was Born to Make You Happy.” 3.) Similarly, Swift doesn’t play the gender blame game. No “boys suck” or “girls rule”; just “some people don’t belong.” 4.) The song is so much darn fun. What can top that “NOOO!” post-bridge? It will never get out if your head, in a good way. Never ever ever. — Alice Stanley

I was all ready to talk about the clever little details that make Fez awesome. Then a friend walked into my apartment, watched me play for about two seconds, and said, “Wow, that’s really cool. What game is that?”

And I realized, for all its subtle charm, the real greatness of Fez is on the surface.

Fez is a 2D platformer, like the original Super Mario Bros. The twist is that the game’s world is actually three dimensional, and you can spin it around on its axis, 90 degrees at a time, to reveal a new 2D face. This is the mechanic that impressed my friend, and for good reason. The first time you spin the world, it’s pretty mind-blowing. The new face looks familiar, but because of the Looney Tunes-esque logic of 2D gaming, the way you interact with it changes completely. A platform can be all the way on the other side of the screen from one view, then right next to you when you rotate it. What looks like a tiny stub reveals itself to be ten times longer from another perspective.

While that might sound like a lot to wrap your head around, the game has another feature that keeps it in balance: its atmosphere. Fez is serene. It takes place in a world of lush, surreal landscapes rendered in gorgeous pixel art. Sometimes, you’ll just want to sit and gawk at it, and since its gameplay is rooted in the puzzle-platformer tradition, it will never rush you. There aren’t enemies to kill; just mysteries to unravel. And you can go about that at any pace you like.

There’s a lot more to Fez (like, I’ve listened to its soundtrack as much as any album this year), but in some ways its all beside the point. If a game has a world that’s a joy to be in and interact with, the rest is gravy. — Nick Martens

– Elizabeth Simins

I was apprehensive about Sleepwalk With Me because I’d become so familiar with comedian Mike Birbiglia’s material about his REM behavior disorder and worried that I’d be bored by the film. I shouldn’t have been concerned, though, because even diehard Birbigs fans will find a wealth of new content in this charming and incredibly well-produced chronicle of Mike’s early years in comedy. Sleepwalk With Me had such a powerful effect on me that I can almost forgive the filmmakers for taking so long to bring the movie to Canada. — Avery Edison

Films set in regions that have traditionally lent themselves to caricature — the deep South, Appalachia, Long Island — too often traffic in condescension, exaggerating the residents’ accents, mannerisms, or folksy ways either for dramatic or comic effect. Richard Linklater easily could have done the same in his film Bernie.

Set in Carthage, a small town in East Texas that seems ripe for lampooning, Bernie hinges on a real-life murder committed by a gregarious assistant funeral director, but its true focus is on the curious ways that residents of Carthage reacted to this crime. Linklater, himself a native of the Lone Star state, smartly created space in the film for actual residents of Carthage to voice their ambivalent feelings about Bernie’s actions. These talking-head clips portray the residents neither as wholesome eccentrics nor as uncultured yokels but as opinionated members of a rather insulated community who have cumulatively rendered an unorthodox verdict on the crime. For as good as Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine, and Matthew McConaughey are in Bernie, the Carthage residents really steal the show. I could have listened to their distinctive drawls for ninety minutes and enjoyed the film just as much. — Luke Epplin

This year, David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook seduced me. Partly because Bradley Cooper seduced me: not as a man (never), but finally as an actor. He plays Pat, a bipolar sub teacher who has just finished a stay at a mental hospital. He enters having assaulted his wife’s lover; he leaves determined to revive their love. In his quest to win her back, he meets a mutual friend’s sister (Tiffany, played by Jennifer Lawrence), who’s gone through some shit herself.

He wants his ex; she wants to win a dance competition. They agree to help each other, at first in transactional terms, but ultimately out of heart. Here, Cooper’s performance rivals Lawrence’s: it’s choppy, manic, and steered away from the macho swagger he’s known for. Their characters, unhemmed and fraying, run on the stifling discomfort of not being the person you want to be. They’re both aggressively self-centered, but we’re witness to the small transitional pockets of tender empathy peeking through. That’s something to really fall in love with — at least for me.

To many, this is a movie about mental illness: everyone has their particular brand of neurosis. And by that reading, Silver Linings Playbook might fall short. It’s probably clinically inaccurate, and a little politically dodgy — most films on mental illness are serious dramas for a reason. But to me, it was simply about messy people, trying to find their own sense of order. So they find it in each other’s snags and tangles. We’ve all been there. — Tracy Wan

I watched Jason Moore’s Pitch Perfect on a Friday afternoon alone. It would be two days before I’d see it for the second time in theaters. A day too many, you say? Perhaps, but my mom wasn’t feeling it that Saturday, and I was pretty adamant she go with me. Dear reader, you likely are not my mother, but I still urge you to see Pitch Perfect if you haven’t — and in theaters if possible. It’s the best cinematic representation of collegiate a cappella yet — and I really do mean yet, since Moore’s film will hopefully spur Hollywood on an all-vocal-instrumentless renaissance (and not that kind). Oh, and let’s not talk about Kay Cannon’s incredible screenplay; let’s sing about it. It’s been nearly three months since Pitch Perfect premiered and I miss the emails friends would send after their viewings, such as this one: “Is it just me or was there not enough singing in this movie? That there was not a musical number over the credits ruined my life, basically.” It’s not just you. So Universal, what do you say? Let’s remix this business. — Jane Hu

Cloud Atlas was the only 2012 movie that felt like Calculus class. It was a grand differential equation that, ultimately, signified nothing — or Nothing — or, maybe, Something. I guess the point was that everything is connected and recurring. The universe is set on an infinite spin cycle in the Laundromat of Life. Cloud Atlas was a shallow pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. The less you contemplated it, the better it was.

Cuddly Cloud Atlas actor Ben Whishaw recurred as “Hipster Q” in the Bond film Skyfall, complete with a mop of hair and the not terribly cinematic ability to type on a keyboard intensely. If you watch the Bond 50 box-set in random order, you basically have Cloud Atlas. The same characters waltzing across time in different garbs and genres and yet remaining essentially the same.

The very best example of knotting up old genre-tropes to crochet something new was The Cabin in the Woods, easily the best film of the year. Cabin didn’t just recycle material (‘80s horror flicks) but brought it to new orgiastic, cathartic, anarchic heights. Also, Sigourney Weaver. — Jonathan Gourlay

I keep high hopes for the Palais de Toyko, the unapologetic brat of a museum that shares a courtyard with Paris’s Musée d’Art Moderne. The place boasts no permanent collection, its walls constantly shifting around to accommodate what comes next. Though I’m often left disappointed, between the arrogance and the “artspeak,” simply being within the space is often enough. Sometimes, it’s the best part.

The place is strangely romantic — it was once the site of the Polish Embassy, and Nazis used the basement to store pianos stolen from aristocratic Jewish families. La Cinémathèque française, the world’s largest French film archive, was even based there for a while. Sipping wine above the courtyard’s fountain while fire-breathers rehearsed became a weeknight ritual of mine.

After sitting in a state of disrepair for a few decades, the basement has since been renovated to a modernist’s standards. The space served as host to a rare exhibition this past spring, however, construction still in full force. Tarps strewn about, it was a bizarre juncture of past and future. Sounds of piano keys echoed against the raw concrete, a nod to a past life. It felt like a privilege, a secret. It was the finest exhibition they’ve had in five years. — Tyler Magyar

Alan Clay is an IT consultant on business in Saudi Arabia, preparing for a presentation to King Abdullah. If it goes well, his client will be awarded a juicy contract and Alan’s commission will allow him to conquer his mountain of debts and keep his daughter in school. A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers is a contemporary parable packed with other parables. It’s a lean tale told with humor and sympathy that touches on the Plinko-like effects of outsourcing and globalization, a sort of Waiting for Godot for the modern era. Anyone who has ever waited for an important person to show up so a meeting can start, or experienced technical challenges of the audio-visual variety, or wondered why the West doesn’t manufacture much anymore, should consider this novel required reading. — Ryan Abbott

At worst, art criticism can read like notes from a wine tasting: opaque, adjective-laden, and reeking faintly of bullshit. You probably know what I’m talking about — reviews that say “I loved it I loved it I loved it” in eight different ways, that tell you lots about the reviewer and only superficial things about the piece under review. So I’ve tended to regard writing about art as more hoax than criticism, more a question of fraud than expertise.

In Glittering Images, Camille Paglia is the voice in the wilderness — the strict but dazzlingly knowledgeable art teacher I wish I’d had. From ancient Egypt to the modern cineplex, she takes the reader through 29 works that were not just worthy technical achievements but cultural watersheds. Why, for instance, a painting of a broken ship getting swallowed by the Arctic ice represented an artistic paradigm shift. Why it’s not surprising that Art Deco became the look and feel of steampunk and Civilization V and, as a result, got ignored by the high-art world. How to read a Mondrian, for those of us who are more familiar with his style in cake rather than canvas form.

Some caveats: yes, the book is Western-centric and yes, Paglia has strong, sometimes off-putting opinions. This is not a book for specialists, who will demand more detail. But you have to start somewhere, and for those who wonder what the big deal is over Cubism or Abstract Expressionism (and who are the sort to find Wikipedia articles not quite enough), let Paglia be your guide. She has produced an art historical survey that is neither pandering nor boring — a rare feat. — Darryl Campbell

Title illustration by Hallie Bateman

That’s right, yatches! Last fall season I crammed my face with a bumper crop of pumpkin junk and wrote about it. You might have thought, thanks to my helpful article on all treats pumpkin, you’d be set for life on choosing appropriate pumpkin items. But fall came back around with a seasonal vengeance. Let’s discuss the new pumpkins on the block in reference to last year’s winners.

ICE CREAM

Dutch Bros.’ Pumpkin Pie Shake beats out last year’s champ (Baskin Robbins) with its subtle pumpkin flavor in a mostly vanilla shake and crunchy pumpkin spice on top of the whipped cream. Coldstone Creamery Pumpkin Ice Cream then went on to beat Dutch Bros.’ with its ballin’ pumpkin-like consistency and addictive flavor.

However, the competition was extensive this year as Culver’s unleashed three pumpkin concretes. I ate them all at once (don’t wanna talk about it, I’m a heifer, it’s fine, I’m over it). Number one: Pumpkin Spice Shake — probably vanilla custard with pumpkin syrup. It’s in the top half of pumpkin ice cream overall, but simple. Number two: Pumpkin Cheesecake Concrete Mixer, not so great — too rich and the cheesecake was blended too smooth, meaning no gratifying chunks to chomp. The best of 2012 (and 2011) is the Pumpkin Pecan Concrete Mixer: the solid flavor and texture of the pumpkin spice version with pecans! I give it five out of five jack-o-lanterns.

Not tested: Ben and Jerry’s Pumpkin Cheesecake ice cream. It’s harder to find than an orange balloon in a pumpkin patch.

COFFEE

Paradise Bakery Pumpkin Pie Latte was pretty sugary and blandly pumpkin. Halfway through, I didn’t want anymore, but until then, it was a good time. To be fair, I tried the same pumpkin syrup in a Panera chai latte, and then the fall flavor actually came through. I had a Caribou Coffee Pumpkin White Chocolate Mocha, but the pumpkin flavor was so subtle I literally couldn’t taste it. Dutch Bros’ Pumpkin Latte: solid B. Average in flavor and coffee blend. And, finally, Jazzman’s Pumpkin Latte was disgusting. It was overly herby and bitter. Threw it in the trash. The sunny side to lackluster coffee consumption is going back to the Starbucks original and sincerely appreciating the consistency.

BAKED GOODS

Last year the Starbucks Pumpkin Scone was sold out so often I considered it a myth, but I finally got my paws on one. The flavor was meh, and the consistency was just short of cinderblock. I mean, it’s a scone. But! Einstein Bros Bagels’s managed to make a soft little lump of delight for their scone. You may remember the underdog Circle K winning last year’s coffee contest. The latte is back, and so is a pumpkin donut — a donut I could only eat one bite of. Underdogs can’t surprise us every time, y’all.

Jazzman’s is now 0-2 based on its Pumpkin Chai Muffin. Sounds good, right? A lil’ muffin drizzled with chai syrup! First bite was dry, tasteless, and hard. Walnuts inside pumpkin baked goods is a thing. No one asked my permission to include walnuts in the holiday fun. In the wrong context, they’re gross. Literally the same day, I saw a delicious slice of pumpkin bread with chocolate chips in it in the bakery case of Caribou. I took a big bite to find raisins. (Also, it was dry and flavor-lame even if you don’t find raisins a major offense, which you should.) To-do: set fire to Caribou Coffee headquarters. Paradise Bakery’s Pumpkin Nut Muffin also suffered from walnuts, but beyond that it was moist with classic pumpkin flavor. However, this is the only muffin I have ever met with a better stump than top because the top was hard and covered with sugar. Panera muffin was a solid A — soft, pumpkinful flavor, topped with a dusting of sugar.

Pepperidge Farm’s limited-edition Pumpkin Spice Swirl Bread isn’t bad, but it’s just some flavored-white bread. Soulplantation & Sweet Tomatoes’ buffet dessert of Gooey Caramel Pumpkin Cake was eh at best (like a B-). So the best new baked good award goes to Pepperidge Farm Pumpkin Cheesecake Cookies — super soft, very fall, and honestly not too sweet.

Yup! An on-shelf treat is sweeping the 2012 pumpkin-lympics, but, still, Starbucks’ Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffin reigns supreme probably forever and always. To be fair, I didn’t try the Bob Evans’ Pumpkin Bread, but I’d rather kill myself than eat that garbage. Also, Panera and Paradise Cafe sell a pumpkin cookie, which is the current wallpaper of my cell phone. It’s super dang cute (jack-o-lantern icing what!) and delish, but not pumpkin-flavored in the slightest — just orange frosting on a sugary shortbread cookie. Still, I’d recommend it.

BAGELS

Both Panera Bread and Paradise Bakery’s pumpkin pie bagels are mediocre. Not very pumpkin-y, more cinnamon-y. The Thomas’-brand Pumpkin Spice Bagels are super dope — soft, moist, and strong flavor. Last year, I crowned Philadelphia Cream Cheese the winner, but it’s time for the position to be usurped. MVP of all pumpkin foods in 2012 goes to the Dunkin’ Donuts Pumpkin Cream Cheese. Holy Halloween, this stuff is amazing. It has unsweetened taste of pumpkin butter with the consistency and substance of cream cheese. I seriously paused for a mildly religious experience after my first bite. Highly, highly recommended.

RANDO (In Order of Worst to Best)

Hershey’s Kisses, Pumpkin Spice: grody white chocolatey faux-spiced drops. Pass.

Jet Puffed Pumpkin Spice Marshmallows: just tasted like a dang marshmallow.

Betty Crocker Pumpkin Spice Cookie Mix: I mean, it’s a step up from plain sugar cookies. It comes in a bag. It is what it is.

Celestial Sweet Harvest Pumpkin Holiday Black Tea: Just all right. It’s black tea with a hint of spice.

Pop Tarts Pumpkin Pie: What you’d expect from a Pop Tart. They were a good time, and I found them delightful, although the amount of pumpkin filling is a teeny little gel inside the pastry, and the icing didn’t seem pumpkin flavored at all.

Nature’s Path Organic Granola Bars, Pumpkin-n-Spice: Pretty stellar. I especially appreciated the seeds. New fave granola bars.

Cheesecake Factory Pumpkin and Pumpkin Pecan Cheesecake: If you like cheesecake and you like pumpkin, you’ll love these. That’s really all there is to say. The cake melts in your mouth, appropriately sweet and creamy, and if I were rich I would fill a pool with this pumpkin cheesecake. I don’t even care if I ended up suffocating. If you like additional crunchy consistency, you’ll appreciate the pecan version of the classic. Both are delightful.

Could not find to save my dang life: Silk Soymilk Pumpkin Spice, Eggo Pumpkin Spice Waffles, and SAY WHAT Pringles Pumpkin Pie Spice chips. Apparently, Arizona isn’t “fall” enough for these brand treats. Maybe next year. Until then!

In the new James Bond film Skyfall, there’s a scene at the London National Gallery where Bond meets his much younger counterpart Q for the first time. They are two men who are attractive in different ways. Daniel Craig is ruggedly handsome, well-built, and donning a traditional tailored suit; Q, played by the boyish Ben Whishaw, has a skinnier frame, a tighter suit (later he will have a brown cardigan), and thick, two-tone hipster glasses. Q’s deliberately and beautifully tussled mop is a stark contrast to Bond’s jagged crew cut.

After a quick, hushed introduction (they are spies after all), Bond questions the competency of his young tech and weapons expert. Q says, “Age is no guarantee of efficiency”; Bond retorts that “youth is no guarantee of innovation.” This is the film’s central conflict: new vs. old, technology against tradition — a fitting theme for a sequel in a rebooted series.

The past decade has seen a number of commercial action film reboots, four of which I would consider successes: Batman Begins, Spider-Man, Star Trek, and Casino Royale. Director Christopher Nolan’s re-imagining of the Batman franchise is the most popular, but in many ways, it’s the least ambitious, since the films are based on a wealth of darker, grittier Batman material that had already gained popularity in the late ‘80s. The 2002 Spider-Man did the opposite by placing its web-slinging hero in a bright palette of colors and slapstick. Star Trek was more interested in being a funny, smartly self-conscious film than an homage to the series’ thoughtful sci-fi dilemmas.

Casino Royale was poorly paced and uneven in spots, but its aspirations and audacity are the reasons I think it’s the best of these reboots. Royale wasn’t simply a darker, meaner James Bond. It played with our expectations and familiarity of the Bond franchise, often for the sake of humor (“Shaken or stirred” a waiter asks Bond, who replies “Does it look like I give a damn?”) and for narrative (the torture scene, where villain Le Chiffre threatens to emasculate Bond in the most literal way possible), all while maintaining the central elements of a Bond film.

After the misstep of Quantum of Solace, a film that suffered from the writer’s strike and a miscast director, Skyfall successfully explores and breaks down the Bond tradition again. It lacks some of the inventiveness and humor of Casino Royale, but its plot is stronger and more consistent.

(Fair warning: I’m about to spoil most of the movie.)

Skyfall opens with a thrilling chase sequence in Turkey that ends with Bond getting shot and plummeting from the top of a moving train car, off a bridge, a hundred feet into the river below (told you it was thrilling). Bond doesn’t die, but when he returns to MI6, he is not quite himself. He’s out of shape and his reflexes are not as sharp, creating a new self-doubt in a character that has, throughout franchise history, been defined by an unshakable overconfidence. Has a Bond film ever made the audience question how good of a shot he is? Or how fit he is to be in the field? Or whether his role is even necessary?

These questions are raised by Skyfall’s villain Raoul Silva. I tend to judge an action film not by how compelling its protagonist is, but by its bad guy. Luckily, Javier Bardem is terrific as Silva, a former MI6 agent whose bleach blond hair is supposed to evoke Julian Assange. Silva is charming, unhinged, and smart enough to throw Bond off his game. He teases Bond by sensually touching his leg and his chest (a postmodern nod to “a huge homoerotic undertow in a lot of Bond movies,” according to director Sam Mendes).

An extremist cyberterrorist, Silva is able to hack into MI6’s databases; to send a message to MI6 boss M, he exposes the identities of undercover agents and blows up her office, all from his computer. At one point, there’s talk about how difficult it is for spies to operate in a world where there are no longer any shadows, another reference to the Wikileaks ideal that government should be transparent to its core. The film’s biggest missed opportunity is confronting these ideas. It turns out Silva’s motives are much simpler: revenge.

But this actually opens up an interesting reversal in the role of women in Bond films. There are two pretty young women featured in Skyfall, which is standard in classic James Bond films to A) give him the opportunity to sleep with two women and B) make him wonder which one will betray him. But the film’s central Bond girl turns out not to be either of these sexy women, but wrinkled, shrewd M. That’s right: Judi Dench is the movie’s true Bond girl, who garners nearly as much screen time as Bond himself. Though there thankfully isn’t any romantic tension between Bond and M, Silva is able to disrupt their relationship by making them mistrust each other.

The young women are more or less helpless, while M’s hardened wisdom becomes the most effective weapon against Silva. She’s is also braver than the other Bond Girls, willing to play bait after Silva announces he will move heaven and earth to kill her (M, it turns out, sold him out to the Chinese government after he performed some unauthorized hacking).

But it’s their similarities that bring Bond and his boss back together. M is under attack by Silva’s men, and like 007, under pressure from a world that is no longer interested in her old-fashioned methodology. Advances in technology have rendered her Cold War thinking obsolete; the use of violence and force is now considered barbaric when so much spy work can be done via the internet. As far as I can remember, this is the first Bond movie that questions the use of violence, and a rare blockbuster that does.

Internet espionage, of course, would not making for very compelling cinema. Skyfall features plenty of spy business carried out through fist fights, shoot outs, and motorcycle chases. But the best action sequence is the film’s finale. Skyfall turns out not to be a space station or a satellite weapon but, in the movie’s strongest narrative twist, is revealed to be the name of the estate where Bond was raised. Skyfall is set in an isolated, rural Scottish countryside, the most impressive cinematographic set piece in the film and a contrast to the rest of the movie’s urban locales (Istanbul, Shanghai, London).

This is also more of Bond’s past than we’ve ever seen before, something that the classic films deliberately omitted, perhaps to make their hero appear innately charming and talented. There are passing references to his dead parents, and Bond’s difficult upbringing as an orphan (hinted at by the perceptive Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale). Here is a Bond that struggled growing up, and now, struggles to adapt to the modern world; Craig represents a far weightier, more human Bond than the arrogant effortlessness of Sean Connery or the unserious self-parody of Roger Moore. An origin story evolves the Bond film franchise to a heroic mythology.

Skyfall is an expressionistic battleground. Classic Bond films end with a raid on the villain’s secret hideout or base. In Skyfall, Bond, M, and the estate’s caretaker Kincade play hold-the-fort with hunting rifles and improvised explosives while the mansion is being assaulted by Silva and his men. After a grueling fight, Bond triumphs, but M passes on. It’s a bittersweet victory, as is the end of any era.

Though the characters‘ fear of the future and resistance to change is perhaps overstated throughout the film, Skyfall doesn’t land on a lesson that glorifies the good old days. It’s a film that boldly questions and acknowledges the irrelevance of its central hero. In the final few scenes, Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) takes over as the new M; Eve (Naomie Harris, one of the Bond girls) becomes the new Moneypenny. These reveals promise exciting changes in the next Bond installment.

At the beginning of Skyfall, Mallory says that MI6 operatives have a short lifespan. Bond acknowledges that he won’t be around for much longer, and perhaps that speaks to the franchise as a whole: this incarnation of Bond won’t be relevant forever. When it’s time, Bond will die and be reborn — a reboot always ready to be rebooted again.

In my home office, where I keep a lot of things I should probably throw away, I have a desk drawer dedicated to game manuals. The last time I opened it was shortly after I moved to my new apartment, back in June, and even then, it was only to retrieve the power strips and miscellaneous cables that I’d temporarily stored in there. If I held these poor little booklets to the same standard that I held my wardrobe—throw away anything you haven’t used in a year—they would be long gone. As it is, things aren’t looking good for them. We just got a puppy, and his growing file of doggy paperwork needs a permanent home that isn’t my nightstand.

And these manuals are useless in every sense of the word. I haven’t played most of the games that they came with, such as Neverwinter Nights or Starfleet Command 3, in six or seven years now. But even when I did, I don’t think I ever consulted these books for the nuts and bolts of installation and game mechanics.

For me, the draw was always the flavor text — that collection of mental jetsam that has no impact on gameplay itself, but for some reason makes some of them feel more worthwhile and, I don’t know, heftier than others. Did anyone find the black-and-white, blown-up-and-highly-pixilated sprites from Command and Conquer or Civilization III useful at all? Did anyone but me care about the model numbers of Starcraft’s Wraith fighters? (It’s the CF/A-17, with the “G” variant able to cloak, thank you very much.) Probably not. But for me, these things mattered.

In part, I think this is due to the same sort of traumatic bonding that, say, leads hostages to identify with their captors. I started playing games in the early ‘90s, in a world without Starforce or Steam or any such copy protection software that would run in the background. Instead, this generation of game designers added the occasional challenge or question that would send me scurrying to my manuals to look up one thing or another.

At its simplest, I’d just look up a serial number or a specific phrase in the text of the manual. But for the two games I played the most, the copy protection scheme not only unlocked the game in a literal sense. They also unlocked something more metaphorical; made me feel just a little bit more immersed in the world of the game.

One of my two favorites, Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat, had me look up statistics about the same fighter planes I was virtually flying — the maximum speed of a P-51, for example, or the climb rate of a MiG-15. This being the era of Top Gun, I could pretend that by looking up these facts and figures I too was a student at flight school, whose success or failure depended on knowing my planes inside and out.

My other favorite was called Darklands, and it was a role-playing game set in medieval Germany, where you could (among many other things) brew potions. Its copy protection scheme tasked me with matching a certain symbol to its alchemical meaning; the symbols were distributed across the massive brick of a manual that came with it. Often times, the symbols would be set opposite a beautiful woodcut or an interesting historical tidbit, and on the way to solving the copy protection challenge I’d sometimes get sidetracked for twenty minutes in the world of medieval Germany. A lot of it was extraneous, of course; but this simply made it much easier to imagine my way into the heads of my characters, where such arcane knowledge would live anyway. For a ten year old with an overactive imagination, the manuals were no small part in making me love these games.

For me, the apotheosis of manuals came not long after that. First there was Warcraft: Orcs and Humans’ faux-parchment-covered, runed-and-illustrated ambigram of a manual, which dedicated far more space to transmitting backstory than it did to describing the nuts and bolts of software. Dramatic illustrations of knights fighting demons, paragraphs of text about why Orcish buildings were rounded instead of squared off, a whole short story about the kingdom of Azeroth — these things, not the crude graphics and MIDI music, made me understand the stakes of the game and immersed me completely in its world.

Where Warcraft made me feel like a warrior-king charged with saving (or overthrowing) the world of men, the book for Master of Orion II seemed perfectly suitable — in terms of binding, in terms of tone, and in terms of sheer heft — to a godlike technocrat whose only goal was to raise an alien race to galactic dominance. The gruff, medievalesque storytelling gave way to clinical technobabble that would be as dry as a bone if it weren’t describing things like lasers and cloning centers. At about three hundred pages, it was something that demanded your attention, and rewarded it lavishly. If not with gameplay tips, then at least with the smug knowledge that you understood exactly what you were unleashing when you exterminated the population of some random planet with the Death Spores biological weapon. Much more satisfying, to me anyway, than only being told that your new technology made your randomly-generated dice roll more likely to beat the computer’s.

Obviously, I don’t want to return to the days of obtrusive, game-breaking copy protection, either, even if it is cleverly managed. And in terms of “user experience,” most games I play nowadays don’t need much more than a twenty-minute tutorial to get you from the moment you’ve finished downloading your file from Steam to your first real in-game hours. I recently bought the new game XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which is a reboot of a franchise that released its first game in 1994. I marveled at how easy it was to pick it up and play — much easier than its original version, which was basically unplayable without having the manual open next to you (I would know: my original copy shipped without one, so I struggled for two weeks while my replacement came from MicroProse).

At the same time, though, I do feel like I’ve lost one of the most direct ways to connect, emotionally anyway, with a game — at least, now that manuals and story guides are becoming digitized, wikified, and/or treated as mostly superfluous. (At least, superfluous when it comes to being included in a game’s supporting material. Don’t get me started on game or game-related novelizations, which you may have attempted to read before, and if you haven’t, then good for you.)

Maybe it was out of necessity that there was more to games back when computers were less capable. Nowadays, we have actual voice acting and recorded sounds instead of tinny PC speaker garble; we have million-polygon, three-dimensional objects instead of rudimentary, eighteen-pixel-tall stacks of boxes; we have everything we need on the monitor and in the speakers. We don’t need the multimedia experience of manuals and code wheels and real maps to translate what was in the designer’s head to what you experience in-game. You don’t need to make any imaginative leaps to play video games anymore — in fact, if you do need to make any, it’s considered a fault rather than a virtue. Maybe I’m just outmoded or out of touch, but this ruthless efficiency in forcing everything into the virtual world has, perhaps, stripped something vital and creative (on the gamer’s part, anyway) out of the gaming experience.

Take XCOM, for instance. It is addictive and adrenaline-pumping, more so than any other game I’ve played in a long time. Yet I felt like there was still some mental barrier keeping me from getting fully invested in it for a long time. It wasn’t until I decided to visit the “memorial” room in headquarters, where the game keeps a list of all your squad members who have died in the entire game, that that barrier came down.

Here at least was something non-essential, a part of the game that had no bearing on the rest of it. It does not make you or your squad kill aliens any faster or better. It is something you can go an entire game without visiting once, and not have it affect you adversely.

Yet the memorial treats the characters in the game as more than just chess pieces with plasma weapons — it pretends, for the few seconds you’re in there, anyway — that they are real human beings who occasionally need to remember their fallen comrades.

In other words, it is a single concession to a lost age of sentimentality and imagination; a nod to the old philosophy of game design that, once upon a time, drove game creators to make the kinds of manuals that I collect.

Photo by yoppy

As a kid, I really wanted to play violent videogames, mostly because I wasn’t allowed to. My parents were adherents to the ESRB, a rating system that judged what games were appropriate for what audience, and I was forbidden from playing games with an M (for Mature) rating, the ESRB’s equivalent of an R rating for film. This was the ‘90s, a time when it was widely questioned whether violent videogames induced violent behavior in adolescents. Pundits went as far as blaming games like DOOM for the shootings at Columbine.

I’ve never really thought about violence as an issue in games, nor have I ever been particularly sensitive to the digital spilling of blood and guts. That was until I recently played Hotline Miami, a violent new indie game styled to look like the kinds of games I played in elementary school. And despite the fact that it’s critically adored, I find myself sounding like my parents when I say that violence is an issue with this game.

I’m afraid all criticism levied against Hotline Miami will be unceremoniously lumped in with this Gamasutra post, in which Devin Wilson objects to the game’s celebration of violence even though he has never played the game. Hotline Miami actually has a lot to say about violence in videogames; it’s just that none of those ideas are particularly interesting.

You’re a masked hit man of sorts who answers phone calls, shows up at a designated location, and murders everyone there. The aesthetic of Hotline Miami is terrific, evoking a moody, drugged out ‘80s nightmare, complete with slurry new wave electronica. It’s like a 16-bit take on the film Drive.

Hotline Miami’s music and neon palette is more enjoyable than actually playing it, although there is a maddening, compulsive sort of fun to be had. The trailer for the game is a little misleading. This isn’t a run-and-gun game based on reflex (though good reflexes do help). Hotline is extremely difficult, and punishes you for every mistake. It requires a lot of trial-and-error and tactical thinking. The concept is smart, balancing stealth and around-the-corner shooting to make your movements as efficient as possible.

But the most disappointing feature of Hotline Miami is the narrative, which shows a lot of promise at the start. Throughout the game, you start to question the source of the phone calls, and the pre- and post-mission sequences become increasingly surreal. The game descends into a macabre sort of madness, and there’s a clever post-credits perspective change that introduces a few more levels. Hotline Miami’s big reveal is that the phone calls are coming from the game’s developers, who manifest themselves in-game as janitors. The final scene actually has dialogue options (the first in the game). When you ask them what’s going on, they simply reply, “We’re playing a game aren’t we?”

It’s this final moment in which Hotline Miami reveals itself as a satire on the idea that videogames are murder simulators. It’s just not very funny, and the criticism is only skin-deep. The janitors are asking: how is being instructed to kill people any different from doing what a videogame asks you?

Well, actually, very different. In Hotline Miami, you don’t have the choice of disobeying your instructions. You can’t clear a stage until you’ve brutally murdered every single enemy on the screen. The game encourages you to kill as savagely as possible, awarding you extra points for bashing people’s skulls in.

The gameplay mechanics — beating levels, scoring points, powerups — deliberately trivialize the violence. But the retro-styling of the game makes the violence abstract; bad guys spew big, pixelated blocks of red.

It wasn’t until near the end of the game that the violence started to bother me. There are a few clumsy boss fights. In one of them, you fight a woman with a katana. After you disarm her, you have to bash her face into the ground, not once, but twice. The first time, the game does it for you; the second time, she’s crawling away, and you have to click the mouse to bash her face each individual time. With the game’s maddening repetition, I had to experience this several dozen times to beat the level. This was the point and I felt disgusted.

The narrative power of videogames is based in interaction, the way you play the game. If developer Dennaton Games wanted to say something meaningful about violence, why does the gameplay glorify violence? What Hotline Miami needed to do was to criticize violence with its interaction, not encourage it and then slap the player on the hand with a half-assed postmodern wink. What Dennaton Games has done is designed an environment where murder is fun and appealing, then effectively slapped an M-rating sticker on it, like that will deter players from taking pleasure in that violence.

But maybe I was wrong earlier. Hotline Miami might be linear, but you always do have a choice: play or don’t play. I suppose the developers are doing you a favor by recommending the latter.

Trying to explain Pretty Little Liars is like trying to summarize Lost, except harder. When Rembert Browne started writing PLL recaps for Grantland, beginning with season three, he didn’t expect non-viewers to really know what he was talking about either. He did, however, give them a tweet-sized summary:

Four girls all hot fifth dead who killed? Creeper texts girls, boys involved all suspects. Murder arson girls now hotter: MOMS. Secrets Lies.

So true, Rembert. So true.

The Halloween special, “This Is A Dark Place,” aired last Wednesday — after a two month hiatus, which will be followed by another two months of silent suspense (the second half of season three will start up again in January). Pretty Little Liars is a teen-drama thriller (something of a mix between The Killing, Veronica Mars, Twin Peaks, and Gossip Girl), but it’s also a classic, almost campy, form of horror storytelling. When the show got renewed for a second season, the writers knew to capitalize on its gruesome and ghoulish aspects: season two featured a standalone Halloween special on October 19, 2011. That special, also isolated with a two-month buffering silence, brought in 2.5 million viewers. Last week, 2.85 million tuned in. These are impressive ratings for standalone episodes, but given that they’re airing on ABC Family, they’re even more so. Once known as The Family Channel, ABC Family has been picking up in the 15-30 demography these past five years especially – its decision to go more soapy (less sitcomy) with shows such as Pretty Little Liars, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and Switched at Birth cannot be underestimated. Pretty Little Liars isn’t quite reaching the numbers of a show like ABC’s basic cable drama Revenge (with its firm 8-million-something viewers per week), but Pretty Little Liars is certainly holding its own. Even other relatively popular ABC Family shows such as Switched at Birth and Bunheads usually hit below the 1.5 million ballpark. It’s a testament to Pretty Little Liar’s ability to hook viewers despite, or because, of ever complex narratives. The Halloween special, by emphasizing the show’s use of the horror genre, offers some of the most vigorous ground for enlarging on the Pretty Little Liar’s twisting plot lines.

Since Rembert’s tweet, not much has changed. The central cast remains the same four girls (Spencer Hastings, Hanna Marin, Aria Montgomery, Emily Fields) who are on the hunt to solve the murder of their fifth friend (Alison DiLaurentis), which took place three years ago. As per the show’s title, the girls are all gorgeous. But the pretty girl (as so often dictated by horror) doesn’t always die as punishment for her beauty. In PLL, the pretty girl might also be the Final Girl — the one who escapes and survives. We’re not at the show’s end, however, and though our four pretty liars evade death again and again, they’re still receiving threatening texts and emails from the anonymous “A.” Theories about the identity of “A” abound, but thus far we only know that there exists an “A team,” including one Mona Vanderwall (now locked away in asylum, but y’know, able to escape such as on the most recent Halloween). Secrets Lies.

What we want to focus on here, though, is on how “boys involved all suspects.” While the girls get hotter, the men grow more insidious. You didn’t think the men could get any more treacherous, what with them casually wanting to murder one liar or another, but even the liars’ romantic others to come armed with meaningful and suspicious side-glances. It’s horrifying.

This year’s Halloween special takes place at a party, which is hosted by the “Rear Window Café” and takes place almost entirely on a train. The debt to Hitchcock is obvious, so will someone please explain why we got costumes such as Marilyn Monroe and one questionably ambiguous Lauren Bacall, but no Eva Saint Marie?

Emily and her lesbian partner Paige getting it on in their own private cabin was a nice nod to Guy and Bruno from Strangers on a Train, except that Emily and Paige aren’t out to murder women because they are women. That continues to be the logic of Pretty Little Liars: men murder with a sweep of their hoodies. It might be the most misandrist network television show out there.

As an enclosed and claustrophobic space, the train is one of the most perfect settings for unfolding drama. Our girls are cornered into locked rooms, storage spaces, even the coupling between train cars. You can run, as they say, but you just can’t hide forever on a train. The vehicle is as determinedly closed-off as a coffin, and this is nowhere more literalized than when Aria gets trapped in a wooden box — ready to be tipped off the train, right before her three girl friends save her. In “This Is A Dark Place,” people keep showing up and disappearing, these acts made more confusing with the added costumes and Adam Lambert’s distracting singing. Obviously. Especially since her boyfriend last-minute cancelled on coming to the train party, plus he’s a dude, so we don’t really expect him to be in it for the long haul except eventually to kill her. I’m not even a little kidding.

The more I watch this show, the more I try to unravel the points of association between the male characters. Pretty Little Liars is at its core about four teenage girls who are best friends, no matter how much their other relationships get in the way. For us as viewers, all character interiority belongs to these girls, as does our attendant empathy. The men are in many ways marginal characters — appendages to the female networking at the heart of this mystery. The men rarely interact. Or, at least, we rarely see them interact. That’s what makes them so inhumane, so horrifying. Each time a liar tells her boyfriend a secret, it’s akin to seeing a girl strip a layer of clothing in any classic horror film. You want to reach through the screen and tell her to stop — that she’s showing too much skin. This vulnerability will not pay off, you want to say. But the fact about Pretty Little Liars is that vulnerability — innocence and sheer prettiness — becomes a form of seduction, not just for male characters, but for viewers as well. Don’t underestimate what a little bit of make-up can do, or hide. —Jane Hu

Ezra Fitz and Byron Montgomery

Neither as nervous as Emily and Spencer nor as insecure as Hanna, Aria (played by Lucy Hale) appears to be the most stable and least vulnerable of the Pretty Little Liars. Aria’s problems don’t stem from internal conflicts; everything that’s ruining her life (aside from the ongoing “A” saga, of course) is there on the surface. Her dad, Byron, cheats on her mom, and eventually his infidelity destroys their family. But that same father is suddenly a model of moral uprightness when he hears about his daughter’s relationship with former high school English teacher, Ezra – who, in turn, has an ex bent on sabotaging Aria. Then there’s Mike, Aria’s mentally disturbed little brother who breaks into houses. See? Pretty stable.

Part of the reason that Aria’s problems seem to be predominantly external is that we don’t get into her head as often as we get into the other three Liars’. Painted as a precocious miniature adult who’s actually equipped to handle a relationship with a man in his mid-twenties, she’s calmer and more self-contained than her friends. Being a writer, she’s also a natural observer. But everything that’s happens around her offers valuable clues about what might be tormenting Aria.

In her love of language, she shares something with the two men in her life, Byron and Ezra. Yet, on this Freudian-by-way-of-Hitchcock show, these men have more in common with each other than with Aria. Both are teachers, making each an authority figure in her life. This also means they’re performers. If Byron and Ezra are trying to get away with something — be it an extramarital affair or a romance with an underage girl — they’ve got practice winning over tough crowds. What’s most worrisome about this is that it also means both are comfortable living double lives.

With betrayers like Spencer’s boyfriend, Toby, and psycho-killers like Lyndon James torturing Emily — not to mention widespread suspicion from how little we know about Hanna’s boyfriend, Caleb — the men in Aria’s life seemed relatively innocuous. When you’re surrounded by potential murderers, a little bit of infidelity doesn’t seem quite so dangerous. But in this week’s Halloween special, we received one damning piece of information leading right to Aria: Byron spoke to Alison on the night of her murder. In fact, Byron spoke to her right after Garrett pretended to kill Ali for Jenna’s benefit. Her words to him come off as threats: “I’m not the one that makes people do these things. If you don’t pay for your mistakes, how can you become a better person?” And, finally: “You know what I’m capable of.” Is this just about his affair with Meredith, which Alison witnessed alongside Aria, or is there something more? As ever on Pretty Little Liars, the interactions between teenage girls and grown men are fraught with deception, mistrust, and dark sexual tension. Reversing or obliterating the roles of child and adult, these relationships force the Liars to assume uncomfortably grown-up roles.

Although Ezra is less than a decade older than Aria, the two are not exempt from this pattern. While he casually covers up his past mistakes and hides from his family, Aria is his conscience, coaxing him to take responsibility. Is it possible to truly keep him honest, though? He spent the Halloween special twitchy and uncertain, his meaningful frowns registering as more than the usual twee, literary awkwardness. After that emphatic side eye, there’s no way Ezra simply went to a meeting in Philadelphia about ghostwriting a book. If only viewers knew whether his story is setting off alarm bells for her, too. Will Aria ever let us into her head? Or, like her Halloween costume as Daisy Buchanan, will she remain the sum total of what two men — and we, the viewers — project on her? —Judy Berman

The N.A.T. Club

The creeps that make up the N.A.T. Club, which our resident Latin nerd Spencer Hastings identifies as standing for nos animadverto totus, which she roughly translates as “we see all,” are occupied by the driving activity of Pretty Little Liars: secretly video-taping or photographing the residents of Rosewood, particularly its teenage girls, for unspecified nefarious ends. Taking photographs of any kind is pretty much the most sinister thing you can do in Rosewood, and it also appears to be, along with amateur cell phone repair, the town’s most popular hobby.

The club seems to have been mostly active when its members (Ian Thomas, Garrett Reynolds, Jason DiLaurentis, and possibly others) were in high school, around five years before the show takes place. They secretly used to record the four girls at their school, sometimes in compromising position, like in the tape we see of blind-not-blind Jenna Marshall seducing her stepbrother. All of the N.A.T. members were also in Alison’s room on the night of her murder; we’re still not totally sure why. Alison may have discovered their spying and threatened to take their secret public, which resulted in her murder. Maybe. Who ever really knows with this show.

Like all men on Pretty Little Liars, the members of N.A.T. find sixteen-year-old girls irresistible. Ian, who seems to be the most outright bad of the club, shares a clandestine kiss with his age-appropriate girlfriend Melissa Hastings’s little sister Spencer while coaching her on her field hockey form. It’s later revealed that he was having an affair with Alison at the time of her death, which convinces our little liars that he murdered her, believing she was blackmailing him by threatening to go public with their romance. Alison might be sixteen, but blackmailing has always been kind of her thing.

Ian corners Spencer terrifyingly in a church’s bell tower on the season one finale, where he may or may not have fallen to his death (again, who really knows?), strangled by bell ropes. He’s later found dead in a barn with a suicide note that was faked by “A.” (Seriously this show is crazy.) In contrast to creepy creep Ian, probably the most sympathetic member of the N.A.T. Club is Alison’s brother Jason, who has a bizarre back story about being a high school punk with a drug problem who later got clean (read: preppy) and went to Yale. In season two, Jason returns to Rosewood and improbably buys his family’s old house. (He is simultaneously a more suspicious and more likeable character, as they replaced the actor playing him with a considerably cuter actor.)

Jason’s life is fraught, and his dead sister is the least of his problems. We learn that he is the illegitimate son of Spencer and Melissa’s father, a fact even more disturbing since he once dated Melissa. He was also black-out drunk on the night of Alison’s murder, and Jenna and Garrett left him a note making him believe he had killed his own sister. In these ways Jason is eerily reminiscent of Veronica Mars’ Duncan Kane, what with accidentally making out with someone who may be half-sister and fearing that he killed his sister in a blind rage.

Jason isn’t all angst, though. He still might be legit evil. He always had a thing for Aria, and the girls break into his shed to find it plastered with pictures of her. He claims that the pictures of Aria were on a roll of film that was with Alison’s things, but like I’m ever going to believe anything anyone in Rosewood says. He is the N.A.T. member who has so far been the least implicated in Alison’s death, so it might soon be his turn.

Then there’s Garrett Reynolds, who got a job as a police officer in order to cover N.A.T’s tracks. Let’s just say the Rosewood P.D. is not exactly Scotland Yard. Garrett had a long affair with Jenna (who is of course underage) and it’s she who eventually turns him in for murdering Alison. Apparently Garrett made then-blind Jenna think he murdered Alison (Why did he do this? Why???), but his name is later cleared somehow by an anklet Spencer finds at an antique store. In season three, Garrett appears to be dating Melissa, and there is even some suspicion that he was the father of her (possibly fake?) baby. (LIKE I SAID THIS SHOW IS CRAZY.) In the Halloween episode, he spills some secrets to the liars about the night Alison was killed and ends up immediately dead, so we might conclude that there is some lunatic out there picking off members of the club one by one.

This new theory — that the N.A.T. Club are not targeting the liars, but rather they are targets themselves — turns some of the show’s misandry on its head. All three of the club members have a romantic connection to Melissa, and Jenna has the most legitimate beef with Alison and the liars, seeing as they did blind her. It is plausible that the ultimate villain, and the one who is murdering the N.A.T. Club, could be one of them. The men on the Pretty Little Liars are immoral, but not ultimately as dangerous as one single woman — let’s not forget that the most psychopathic character on the show is Alison herself. It becomes more and more clear that the leagues of dark, flawed men who populate Rosewood are just pawns. Pretty Little Liars is a girls’ game. —Alice Bolin

The reality of the Bartlet White House is a flood of mistakes. An agenda hopelessly stalled and lacking a coherent strategy. An administration plagued by indecision.—West Wing character Mandy Hampton

In a flashback in The West Wing, one character tries to convince another to leave his job and come work for an ailing presidential campaign; they’re both bright people working for lousy causes. The first, Joshua Lyman, asks, “If I see the real thing in Nashua, should I tell you about it?”

“You won’t have to,” replies Sam Seaborn. “You’ve got a pretty bad poker face.” Lyman gets a brief taste of presidential candidate Josiah Bartlet’s (Martin Sheen) honesty and cranky blazer-over-head shenanigans in New Hampshire (“You got hosed,” Bartlet admits to a farmer whose subsidy he cut). Lyman hurries back to New York to recruit Seaborn, appearing at the door dripping wet from an apparent hurricane, with a look of “it’s always been you, Rach” on his face. The dream team is born.

America experienced a similar giddiness during the Obama campaign in 2008, when bumpers, lawns, and dorm rooms all extolled “hope” and “change.” (Recall the Bartlet speech: “We can do better, and we must do better, and we will do better, and we will start this moment today!”) My future husband, Josh, a former congressional intern, introduced me to The West Wing staffers in the early-2000s, back when Dick Cheney worked from his death star in the Old Executive Office Building. Two prized items sat on Josh’s dresser from his brief time on the Hill: a photo-op with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and a group shot with Congressman Gary Ackerman, who is wearing a chef’s hat and waving a pickle in the air. (Not pictured: an anecdote about Ackerman’s second yacht, “the Unsinkable II,” after the first went to a watery grave.) Supplementary to these and a White House Post-it pad was the box set of West Wing DVDs, each in their own “brief”; a perfect introduction to the American political psyche for a cynical foreigner like myself.
As the real 2008 primaries got into full swing, we tore our way through season after season (“Let Bartlet be Bartlet”) while watching the parallel rise of the Obama campaign. When the Illinois senator visited Denver, we watched him speak at the Colorado School of Mines, satisfied that he lived up to the hype in terms of his rhetorical skill and the ambition he brought to the arena, evidenced in the sheer excitement among volunteers, audience members and t-shirt vendors. Like an atheist dancing in a gospel church, I was swept up by the thrill of this man whose election would have ramifications for global politics, also. 

The Guy Who Rides Amtrak From Delaware

On August 5, 2008, prior to Obama announcing his vice-presidential pick, Josh had a six-hour layover in LAX. Not a week prior, he sat for the Colorado bar exam and was deep in decompression mode, sporting a feral beard and bleach-splattered black hoodie, and running on Sublime tunes. Standing adjacent a phone-charger station in a quiet wing of the airport, he noticed a white-haired man in an expensive suit. Allowing a moment’s naked staring to make sure, Josh pegged the man as Senator Joe Biden, head of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and a presidential candidate in the 1998 and 2008 elections. This is the guy that rides Amtrak from Delaware to D.C., he thought. He had a U.S. senator just paces away, on his own; an opening anyone from Washington would kill for. Fuck it, I’m going to say hello. And for ten minutes, Biden was generous enough to speak with him about law school, loan repayments, health care and the scarcity of jobs — that is, my husband had no job and no health insurance to speak of at the time. In their brief chat, Biden agreed that health coverage for all Americans was “one of our country’s great tasks.” (As opposed to something that 47% of Americans audaciously believe they are “entitled” to.)

Nearing midnight in airport limbo, this was one of the last times Biden would travel by commercial airliner, absent a security detail and a press corps. On August 23, Obama formally announced Biden as his choice of vice president, following a highly secretive August 6 vetting in Minneapolis, according to New Yorker staff writer Ryan Lizza’s account. Josh touts the night as a fleeting opportunity to have a direct discourse with a United States senator. The last thing Josh asked Biden was, “So Obama — is he the real deal? I mean, do you know if he is it?” Biden gave some pause, then replied, “He surrounds himself with a lot of great people, and his choices are always well thought out. And yes, I think he’s the real deal.”

We were already sold on Obama at this point (though as an Australian citizen, my vote is purely symbolic), but recall that the real race up until that point had been between Hillary Clinton and Obama, with John McCain yet to make his fateful vice-presidential nominee pick. They were two good choices, the latter too new to Washington to have been corrupted, but also too new to necessarily have a lock on the job; he was too idealistic, too naïve, too esoteric. The proposition of Obama for POTUS recalled the words of Leo McGarry: “They say a good man can’t get elected president. I don’t believe that, do you?”

The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight

In hindsight, we know that at the start of his first term Obama was walking into policy negotiations far tougher than anything Aaron Sorkin had dreamed up for the Roosevelt room, with American Reinvestment and Recovery and Affordable Care acts in the wings. President Obama has acknowledged his personal sense of failure and frustration at times, while an obstructionist Congress turned filibustering from the topic of a novel episode of The West Wing into a daily ritual.

The big question is: where did we go wrong in the last four years? The bungled debt-ceiling negotiations-turned hostage situation between Republicans and Democrats is the best example of Bartlet’s maxim that “Decisions are made by those who show up.” Obama’s pragmatism hit a wall when it became apparent that John Boehner couldn’t deliver the votes even if they struck a bargain. The Republican tactic again and again was simply to filibuster and thwart progress on the economic front, dragging out extensions of highway funding, setting a doomsday machine of budget cuts to go off in 2013 and campaigning all the while to cut taxes further. As the Bartlet administration found in The West Wing, raw idealism could only get you so far in a game requiring sharper skills. (TWW communications director, Toby Ziegler: “I’m tired of being field captain for the gang who couldn’t shoot straight!”) Obama may have set out to “raise the level of public debate in this country, and let that be our legacy” (TWW chief of staff, Leo McGarry), but he has presumably faced a reckoning with himself over the past six months over why he is there, and what he thinks he can achieve, given another four years.

Obama, like Bartlet, has demonstrated that a great president can be terrible at politics; that skill in the policy arena can preclude skill in the campaign arena. You could picture a horrified Toby or Josh watching Obama’s performance in the first presidential debate with Mitt Romney, against a (gasp) human opponent, rather than the malevolent robot conjured in debate prep. (Recall the crop of “moderate” and reasonable Republicans written by Sorkin.) Following a rough first term and reelection campaign derailed by too much political strategizing, Bartlet asked his chief of staff, “What are we doing?” Someone might well have asked Obama the same question after his failing to show up to the first debate, conviction curiously absent from his responses. His apathy was handily offset by the visceral conviction of Biden last Thursday, who demonstrated Sorkin-like rapid-fire retorts to Paul Ryan and rebooted the stunted campaign just in time for the fourth quarter. I believe that what we’ll find out in November is whether a good man can get elected president twice.

I’m really sick of zombies, especially in videogames. It speaks to creative laziness that so many games want you to blow apart hordes of ugly monsters with brain-dead AI. But The Walking Dead games are something else: an adventure game mini-series that understands that survival isn’t about twitchy reflex and shooting monsters in the head, but weighing choices and making tough decisions.

The setup is similar to The Walking Dead comics and TV show, though with different band of survivors. There’s a zombie outbreak in Georgia. Gameplay takes the form of a series of choices and dialogue scenes as you control Lee, a former college professor with a questionable past. There are puzzles and a few action scenes interspersed throughout, but the meat of the game is your decision-making ability.

The developer is Telltale Games, a small-ish studio that specializes in rebooting old adventure game franchises (Monkey Island, Sam and Max) and popular Hollywood properties (Jurassic Park, Back to the Future) and releasing them as episodic downloadable games. Currently, three of The Walking Dead’s five episodes are available.

In the past, I’ve lamented that adventure games give dialogue options that are either too obvious or too obtuse, and rarely, result in meaningful decisions. It’s an inherent issue with the genre: a game needs to be won, and when the most important gameplay element is dialogue, it becomes about saying the right thing at the right time. I understand why this concept is so prevalent; it’s just often times not very fun.

It’s also the reason that I’ve disliked the handful of Telltale’s previous games I’ve played, which have focused more on nostalgia for adventure games than making them relevant again. But The Walking Dead has a couple simple innovations that fix most of my complaints. First, each choice is timed. If you don’t pick a dialogue option within a few seconds, the game interprets your inaction as, well, inaction. To not give an answer is the game’s only true wrong answer. (Update: Sarah Pavis says that at certain moments, silence just “felt right”.) This forces you to sometimes make quick decisions, which may lead to mistakes because you read too quickly or you press the wrong button. This might sound frustrating, but it makes dialogue an active gameplay element. Even small decisions feel tense, and it keeps the pace of the game moving.

The second clever thing the game does is a much broader design philosophy: The Walking Dead strips its decision-making of all morality. Whereas most games have strict dialogue trees with objectively better or worse answers — either ethical or goal-based — all the dialogue in The Walking Dead has a different consequence. The game never judges your decision, since each choice results in a balance of positives and negatives. To make some characters happy, you have to make others upset; saving one person inevitably kills another. The hardest decisions are the subtlest ones: The second episode, for example, opens with your group of survivors arguing about the food rations. There’s not enough food to go around, and you have to decide who gets fed and who doesn’t.

What the game establishes is a sense of meta-morality, one that you impose on yourself. Your connection to each character is not defined by their utility, but by how much you like them (trust me, you’ll get attached). Put simply: you get as much emotional investment out of the game as you put into it. In that way, The Walking Dead has more in common with the open-world sandbox of Minecraft than it does the cooperative survival in Left 4 Dead.

In my playthrough of episode three, one of my favorite characters was killed off in a shocking moment of swift brutality. I screamed at my television — out of anger, out of grief. I thought back to what decisions I had made, and if there was anything I could’ve said that would have saved her. Imagine the moment Aeris dies in Final Fantasy VII, only you’re wondering if there was anything you could’ve done to avoid it.

The Walking Dead games have been recognized for “great survival storytelling.” The voice acting is strong (fun fact: Lee is voiced by the Hulu guy), but otherwise, there’s not a single original thing about the writing. In fact, if you’ve ever read Robert Kirkman’s mediocre The Walking Dead comics or its stupefyingly melodramatic TV adaptation, it’s clear that there’s not much that’s compelling about the story. But Telltale’s The Walking Dead illustrates how interaction can elevate an all-too familiar setting into a unique, affecting experience. The story may not be original, but the storytelling can be.