Linda Holmes

[This piece assumes you've seen the first four seasons of Downton Abbey. As to the fifth, it avoids specific spoilers, but does talk about themes and threads enough that you might be 20 percent less surprised by a couple of developments. It's the best balance I could strike.]

Let us ...

In early December, we had a live show at the Sixth & I synagogue, the first part of which you've already heard. But sometimes, we like to top off our live events with a little bonus madness, so that's what's on tap this week.

Before we get underway, ...

It's hard to remember that The Apprentice was sort of fun once.

NO, DON'T LEAVE.

In January 2004 when it premiered, it was sold as a proving ground for hustlers (in the "those with hustle" sense) and fierce competitors who knew how to make deals, sell stuff and manage others. ...

It's not an unfair generalization, I don't think, to say that identification with characters is fundamental to contemporary romantic novels. Most — not all, but most, by the numbers — are written for an audience of women, and they're emotionally centered on the romantic quest of a woman, often accompanied ...

Is there anything left to say about Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn?

That is the question that animates big parts of Andrew Levy's Huck Finn's America: Mark Twain And The Era That Shaped His Masterpiece, a richly researched, copiously annotated, fascinating argument that in all the debates over the book's treatment ...

We at PCHH are not together this week for the holidays, as we are scattered hither and yon, literally from coast to coast. But before we scattered thusly, we sat down with our friend (and film critic and musical theater aficionado) Bob Mondello to talk about Disney's new adaptation of ...

I am not a great maker of lists. Unless pressed, I will make exactly one each year, and this is it.

This is a list of 50 of the wonderful things that wandered through my field of vision in 2014. It is not a definitive list of the best things. ...

This week's show brings our pal Audie Cornish into the studio for a conversation about Chris Rock's comedy Top Five. We get into the balance of industry satire and romance, the particular variety of raunchy comedy the film favors, and how his deft handling of the agony of junkets contrasts ...

The sun'll come out tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there'll be sun

There is a thing that happens with songs where, when you've heard them enough times, you stop hearing them at all. They are less pieces of music than cultural baubles that pop up to stand for ...

Serial, the hugely popular (and sometimes controversial) podcast spun off from This American Life, wraps up its first season today. NPR's Audie Cornish speaks with Serial creator Sarah Koenig.

As The Conversation About Serial reaches a fever pitch in certain circles, those of us behind Code Switch and Monkey See have been talking quite a bit about the show. You can read Matt Thompson's initial entry in this conversation here and Gene Demby's contribution here.

...

Perhaps you are familiar with the oft-quoted wisdom of (allegedly) Coco Chanel that when a woman gets dressed and believes she's ready, she should take off one accessory before she leaves the house. If Chanel's advice had instead been that the woman should paint herself with glue, roll in glitter, ...

Chris Rock has been on a tear — a widely shared interview with Frank Rich in New York Magazine, a widely shared guest column in The Hollywood Reporter, interviews with Audie Cornish on All Things Considered, Terry Gross on Fresh Air and ...

My friend Alan Sepinwall and I have both written in the past about our affection for Parks And Recreation, the NBC comedy that is not only about to end, but is about to end in a burst of weekly back-to-back episodes that will have it over ...

U.N. talks on global warming are wrapping up in Peru, but a divide between rich and poor countries and how to divvy up targets to reduce greenhouse gases is a key sticking point that has remained unresolved.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has acknowledged that the issue is ...

On Tuesday night, December 9, we gathered at the historic Sixth & I synagogue in Washington for our biggest live show yet. Along with our great friend Barrie Hardymon, Stephen, Glen and I talked about some of our takeaways from the year, from podcasts to great books to the music ...

I very much liked the musical The Last Five Years when I saw it in Toronto in September. It features Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan in the story of a marriage that begins as the marriage is ending, leaps back to the beginning, and then follows the story ...

Here at PCHH HQ (PCHHQ?), we are hard at work preparing for our December 9th live show at Sixth and I in Washington. For that reason, we decided to bring you a couple of encore segments from past holiday editions of the show.

The first comes from only ...

The Nat Geo show Eric Greenspan Is Hungry is certainly not the first food show to get gritty about the origins and transformations of food; Anthony Bourdain, in particular, has been doing that for years and years. Still, it feels unusual in its pure focus on an established chef/personality — ...

It's a holiday weekend for many of us, but we've still got a fresh episode — and a sparkly new panelist in the fourth chair: Guy Raz, host of NPR's TED Radio Hour. When we asked Guy about coming on the show, we learned that pop-culture-wise, he — like our ...