Still one of my favorite thrillers for the ways in which it charts a world of surface glamor that turns deadly. Style becomes claustrophobic, and there's no better example than when Laura (Faye Dunaway) is struggling down the street swathed in more shawls than one person could possibly manage to keep on. Other great moment: the "Let's All Chant" photo shoot. Blessed with great performances by Raoul Julia and Tommie Lee Jones, "Laura Mars" is still dense and rich and shocking--an amazing time capsule.

Joan, I don't know what filter you wore when you watched the Wright nterview, but you completely missed so much that it's hard to know where to begin.

Others are making the points well, but I feel compelled to add: Wright never said that 9/11 was defensible. He said what many scholars and military analysists like the acclaimed Chalmers Johnson (author of three books on American imperialism which you need to read) have said: we are suffering from blowback from the Muslim world. They don't hate us for who we are but for what we do.

As for your profound misreading of his preaching, I am shocked to find you so Bibically illiterate. Having read and studied Deuteronomy, I know exactly where Wright is coming from when he talks about blessings and curses. Nothing he said was shocking or unclear or un-American when he inveighed against America's wrongs. Let's not forget, the full quotation from Carl Schurz is: "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." You lament him not offering redemption? This isn't a bedtime story with a happy ending--he is calling America to account and calling it to its senses. You seemed not only to have missed his charm, humor, and warmth--you also have missed his erudition and his grounding in his faith. I'm not even a Christian and I saw it.

What can you expect of Williams when he stands up for Rush and calls him a friend, and much more? Case closed.

I have posted about her before, and will do so again because most people haven't heard Noonan in person. Her fake-rhapsodic tone is even more unbearable when she speaks uninterrupted for an hour or so, and her air of self-importance is stunning because there is absolutely no substance to what she says. She gave one of the worst, most pompous and uninspiring keynote addresses I have ever heard anywhere. She is so clearly in love with herself, the sound of her voice, and the soi-disant brilliance of her insights that there's something really macabre about the whole performance. Maybe she's really one of Tracy Ullman's characters. . . .

Graceful? Try thin, self-imitative, boring, and dull. Not one song half as inspired and driving as Vogue. This CD reminds me of Bowie's Let's Dance: superficially interesting, but really proof that his best music was years behind him. Maybe re-mixes will save this CD, but I doubt it.

Surely it's not accurate to label Bernard Lewis as a "scholar" in quotation marks,implying that he's a fake or his scholarship is irremediably shoddy. I don't have to agree with him to acknowledge the facts: he taught at Princeton and has written or edited close to two dozen books, many of them well-reviewed. As a former academic with some academic publishing myself, his credentials make him look like a legitimate scholar to me and would to other academics, past or present, whatever they think of his biases.

What hypocrisy! Thanks to the machinations of my state's democratic establishment, Michigan voters were denied a voice several times over. We didn't get to vote for whom we wanted (if we supported Edwards or Obama); we couldn't cast a write-in vote; and the whole thing was a farce. Clinton herself said the primary didn't count and didn't campaign here, and now she wants the votes? The only voice she wants hear is her own.

Try boredom.

I'm stubborn so I'm sticking with the show until the end, but most weeks it's dim and dim-witted. Latest complaint: Balthar has never said one word to be convincing as a messiah, and the response to him seems like a mid-afternoon crowd at a mall book store author signing. It's all fake, fake, fake. As is the endless vague gassing about "the gods" and "the one god." Week-in and week-out, it feels like a rough draft that the writers never bothered to fill in. The show may cost a lot, but its scripts are no longer even half as witty, entertaining, and filled with character depth as Torchwood (which in addition has a cool bisexual vibe).

Not really.

Polls showed that Wright and the media madness were a factor, but the pollsters didn't ask specific enough questions, so that we don't know if people voted for Obama because the controversy disgusted them, or against, or what exact role Wright had in their vote.

More shoddy polling, more shoddy punditry from the MSM.

Maybe the camera work, but the rest of the show is like something concocted by comp lit grad students with a buzz on. You want real darkness? Try the episode of Torchwood where murder victims are brought back to life for two minutes so the team does can find out who killed them. There's more metaphysics in one episode like that than the whole dreary season of BG. I'm hoping that when they get to Earth, the Cylons are already there and blow the planet up. It can't happen too soon.

Mike, a basic point in writing: if you make an assertion, you need to back it up with an example.

You say

"--gave an introductory speech Monday that could double as a brief for sainthood."

But the following quotes do not remotely support that. You made me feel not just disappointed, but as if I were back teaching freshman comp.

I expect better from salon.