The premise was relatively simple: Mr. Burns’s company softball team, having lost 28 of 30 games the previous season, goes on an incredible run when Homer starts hitting, well, homers with his WonderBat, carved from the fallen branch of a lightning-struck tree. Sound familiar? As the season winds down, it becomes a two-team race for the pennant: Springfield vs. Shelbyville. While dining at the Millionaires’ Club with the owner of the Shelbyville Power Plant, a cocky Burns agrees to a handshake bet worth you guessed it $1 million.

That’s perhaps the best way to describe what HBO’s success has stunted. A meticulous attention to detail on the part of both those who create television and those who consume it has stymied a desire for the kind of experimentation and exploration working in the microcosm of episodes allows. Focusing on an uncertain, albeit exciting, future can negatively affect the equally unknown, but much more palpable, present. Everyone’s so concerned about getting everything right that they’ve forgotten how much fun mistakes can be.

This sense of having lived on too late, of having survived the demolition of past dreams of the future, is what gives the ruin its specific frisson, and it still animates art and writing.

I used to avoid talking about audio books. In general if you are 28 years old and in graduate school and you listen to audio books then the worst thing about the whole practice is admitting it to your graduate-school peers. Every time a book comes up in conversation, your dude friends will ask “Did you listen to that on audio book?,” and then they will laugh.

I thought about starting this essay by insisting that I listen to audio books for work, so that I could not be mistaken for that other kind of person, that kind of person who listens audio books because it brings her some kind of unsophisticated pleasure. I am not, I wanted you to know, your Aunt Paula. My kitchen is not decorated with rooster towel racks and rooster potholders and rooster trim. I am a very serious person.

Growing up, Colm Tóibín was haunted by the stories of previous generations, in particular his mother’s thwarted literary aspirations. He explores the relationships – inspiring, rivalrous, Oedipal – between authors and their parents, from W.B. Yeats to V.S. Naipaul.

As cliché as my favorite soap’s title was, the realization that I had only one life to live was the show’s greatest gift to me as an adult. At 26 I went through a painful breakup with my fiancée, Maureen, who recognized that I might be gay before I did or could. I insisted that I wasn’t, or in any event that I loved her more than I could imagine loving anyone. Yes, I speak in soapy dialogue sometimes. Maureen forced me to face my true self, rather than retreat into fantasylands like Llanview. But the characters of Llanview, whom I still followed from time to time, were reminders that happiness lay in reckoning with the truth, with your true identity, rather than retreating into alternate personalities or dwelling on past traumas and, let’s face it, luxury problems. In time I accepted who I am; I became, to use a favorite word of Viki’s, integrated.

Silent film is another country. They speak another language there—a language of gestures, stares, flapping mouths, halting or skittering walks, and sometimes movements and expressions of infinite intricacy and beauty.

Who knew Hello Kitty had so many interpreters?

Most political engagements with Hello Kitty have taken the mouthlessness issue as their impetus. They generally, through subversion or perversion, ironize Hello Kitty’s apparent inability to speak, suggesting her lack of expression is being upheld as a model, particularly for the young Asian girls who form Hello Kitty’s immediate target audience. A woman’s value, this particular feminine feline’s lack of mouth seems to say, is contingent on her voicelessness.

The revamped Battlestar Galactica announces the seriousness of its intentions with its riveting opening scene, in which an emissary of mankind is taken by surprise when the Cylons show up unexpectedly for a meeting they’ve been blowing off for 40 years. The Cylons are led by a robot in human form, later identified as model “Number Six” (played by Tricia Helfer). Number Six leans in and speaks the first lines of dialogue in the series, asking the question that will come to dominate BSG: “Are you alive?… Prove it.”

Do I know what I did a year ago? Almost. A story, buttressed by bits and bytes of my day, may have to suffice. This isn’t a comfortable way of accessing my past; digital data is neither literary nor clear. It doesn’t gently lounge with nostalgia and tea-dipped madeleines; instead, it’s organized in search engines, records, and bullet points. And yet, I remain. Here to write. My sterile, my fragmentary, my memory.