Linda Holmes

I'm going to tell you a story, and then we're going to talk about Chris Christie, and if you're not into those two things, you can tag out. I won't be offended.

Let's see. How to begin.

There are enough pictures of me scattered around NPR that it's not a ...

Let us say this first: The Golden Globes are Hollywood culture at its most purely self-perpetuating. Given out by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a small group of journalists so gleefully obscure that there is usually a joke about how gleefully obscure they are, the Globes lack the gravitas of ...

Every year at this time, we at Pop Culture Happy Hour sit down to make some resolutions and predictions for the coming year. And, of course, we engage in the sometimes painful exercise of seeing how last year's resolutions and predictions turned out.

Well.

There is a moment ...

Saturday Night Live ignores so many perennial complaints — that it's stale, that it has a spotty history with women, that sketches are too long — that it was kind of surprising to hear in mid-December that it was holding not-very-secret "secret auditions" to find a black woman ...

There is something prickly and provocative about the back story of Spike Jonze's Her, a futuristic drama in which a man named Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love, as it were, with his artificially intelligent operating system. The voice of "Samantha" was originally that of actress Samantha Morton, but when ...

I have a few quibbles with this lengthy profile/evaluation of Jennifer Weiner in The New Yorker, particularly in that it makes the common error of describing her argument as primarily about why her own books are not considered literary fiction, when in fact a major part ...

On March 14, just about a year after it was funded by a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, the Veronica Mars movie will come to theaters, and you can now see the trailer.

Whatever your feelings about this particular project (and Veronica/Logan, which: uch), seeing this come to fruition so soon ...

In part one of our live show from December, you heard us talk about culture and the end of the year, as we often do. You heard us explain what's making us happy this week — it was pretty much a regular show, with the addition of our ...

When I was first explaining what I wanted this blog to be like in 2008, I shared with some folks at NPR a theory I have had for some time about writing about popular culture. It goes like this: If you think monkeys are fascinating and you want to understand ...

My holiday break last week took an unexpected detour when a broken bone (not mine) changed our plans for a full family get-together. Thus, I was left with a few days of unanticipated free time on my own, which led me to the obvious conclusion: if I can't be fully ...

On this week's round-table podcast, featuring special guest Chris Klimek, we start with a conversation about The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug. We talk about the dragon, the dragon-izer, the walking, the absence of lengthy dishwashing sequences, and many, many other things. Can Glen continue to hold the line for ...

There have been Ages of Innocence and Iron, of Jazz and Bronze and Ice. We've had Golden Ages of all kinds, though we note them less by experiencing them and more by debating whether they have started, whether they are over, and whether we will ever see their like again.

...

A&E has suspended one of the stars of Duck Dynasty after he grouped homosexuality with bestiality and terrorism in an interview. But what good do these suspensions do, when the show goes on?

A new iPhone ad looks to some like a celebration of teenage alienation, but reminds others of something fundamentally true about adolescence.

First of all: WOW. We did our live show at NPR HQ this week, and it was wonderful, and all of you who attended made a fantastic audience. You'll be hearing the live show in two segments over the holidays while we take a rest, but in the meantime, we've ...

To: Mr. Grinch
From: Who Who & Who
Re: Possible defamation claim

Thank you for visiting our offices to explore the possibility of a defamation claim regarding statements recently made about you.

Potentially defamatory statements

We will first take some of the statements you mention in turn to explain their ...

Taped in the run-up to Thursday night's Sound Of Music performance, this week's round-table podcast is not a review of it, but a consideration of the live event in general. Are we all just performance ghouls, waiting around for people to fail? What is it fair to ask from a ...

Much like Sharknado and most presidential debates, NBC's The Sound Of Music on Thursday night caused Twitter to explode in a frenzy of arguing and counterarguing. It was charming! It was dreadful! It was liiiiiiiive!

Most agreed on a few things, the most positive of which were — ...

A Thanksgiving tale serves as a good reminder of the importance of basic skepticism as you navigate a viral information economy.

As the world readies itself for the NBC Sound of Music live remake, we debate the merits of the original musical and film.