Linda Holmes

Any comics fan of any seriousness can rattle off female superheroes who have either had their own books or appeared in other or ensemble books.

But what about ordinary absorbers of culture?

The same people who don't actually read comics but can tell you that Superman is the idealized, square-jawed ...

After the huge success of The Hunger Games, both movie and book, it seems like a foregone conclusion that there's enormous pent-up demand for the next chapter of the film adaptation, Catching Fire. This is the book where Katniss' story becomes much more explicitly political, and her status as a ...

You may find a hint to the era in which you were born (as well as your taste in entertainment) in Linda Wertheimer's clarification that on the '80s nighttime soap Dynasty, actress Linda Evans played Krystle Carrington — Krystle with a K, that is. (And, she does not add, an ...

With Trey out this week, we called upon one of our very favorite people, Barrie Hardymon, to join us. We start this week with a discussion of the two-hour season opener of Mad Men, which isn't dropping any major bombs about plot, I don't think, but which isn't tiptoeing either, ...

As Eyder Peralta reported last night, the National Spelling Bee has made a big change to its rules.

For the first time, the written (or computerized) test students use to qualify for the semifinals and championship finals will include vocabulary questions requiring them to know the meanings of ...

Carrie was Stephen King's first published novel. First released in 1974, it was followed in 1976 by Brian De Palma's film adaptation, for which both Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie were nominated for Oscars.

King told Entertainment Weekly in 2011 that he didn't see much need for another ...

1. The symbolism was a bit heavy-handed. It's frustrating that Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner doesn't trust viewers of the show enough to allow symbolism to live in an episode as suggestion and not insistence. The Mad Men audience is small and self-selecting; it is made up of people who ...

It's Friday, and that means that television is serving up a few gems (new episodes of the wonderfully deranged Happy Endings) as well as a bunch of stuff intended for a target demographic of "started partying early; already passed out."

In that spirit, we bring you a few Real TV ...

This is an experiment with a minimalist approach to the Let's Rush To Judgment post.

Presumably, the jokes in this trailer are the best jokes in the movie.

That is all.

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On this week's extremely punchy round-table podcast, once we cover our most important landmark of the week, Stephen Thompson gets through some preposterous claims loosely connected to this video and we get on the topic of this really fun book, we deal with two ...

There's always been Roger Ebert. And when I read that he had died Thursday, that's what caught in my throat. Not just sadness, but bafflement. I don't understand. There's always been Roger Ebert.

This will be the first night in my life I go to bed and he's not out ...

While we go on about the Johnnys, Jimmys, Daves, Jays, Conans, and additional Jimmys of the late-night wars, where was Joe? Specifically, where was the enormous media coverage of the end of Judge Joe Brown?

CBS Television Distribution canceled Brown's show in late March, reportedly after ...

Netflix has announced that the new "anthology" season of Arrested Development will arrive — all 15 episodes at once — on May 26. The show, which ran on Fox from 2003 to 2006 and won an Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series, will bring back its entire cast, including ...

I was out of the house, as it happens, for most of the first half of yesterday's Louisville-Duke game, and when I got home and looked at Twitter, before I turned on the TV, there was a huge stack of stuff to read, and the first thing that caught ...

On this week's show, Glen and I are joined not only by our producer Jess Gitner, but also by a new face for PCHH: NPR Books editor Petra Mayer, whom you may very well know as much of the voice of our books team on social media.

We start with ...

Last night on American Idol was Motown Night, when we all learned that Motown songs (like "I Heard It Through The Grapevine") should all be sung as seriously as possible, wearing a scowl, with all the fun sucked out. (And that was a performance that was pretty good.) ...

On this week's show, the regular band is back together, and I am a rock. I am an island.

Specifically, now that the original feverish excitement over the Veronica Mars Kickstarter and what how it might change the landscape has subsided, we take a look at what it might mean ...

When rumblings began in early March that NBC might be preparing in earnest to replace Jay Leno with Jimmy Fallon, I felt more like Bill Murray than I ever have.

Not the Bill Murray in Ghostbusters or the Bill Murray in Meatballs or even the Bill Murray in Stripes. No, ...

When you read the words of Clotaire Rapaille, a "French-born psychiatrist-turned-marketer" quoted in yesterday's interesting Slate article about the marketing of cars to women, it's hard not to read them in a voice that's sultry and French and not entirely serious, as if he's some kind of sales ...

With the recent tragic news that this summer will not bring a new season of ABC's stupidest show, Bachelor Pad, this has been a very trying time for people who believe that Dancing With The Stars is too highbrow and lah-dee-dah for them. What are they to do? Where can ...