Links for 2011-08-13

"Andre Braugher's Pembleton is fiery and mercurial and theatrical, and he works so fast that it's as if he thought that extracting false police confessions was a category recognized by the Guinness Book Of World Records. First, he pretends to be angry with the "suspect," played by Isaiah Washington, complaining that he isn't showing him the same respect he extends towards the white Bayliss. Then, having thrown Washington off balance, he guilt trips him, telling him that he's responsible for the dead man's murder because he's to blame for him having been there in the first place, so that when in the moment that Washington parrots back the charge that killed his friend, he sort of believes it.
The scene may make you realize how carefully Braugher shaped his performance on this series, episode by episode: every shot of him being still and watchful and even a little recessive is part of the planning that goes into his being able to pull off something as big as this."

"For most of the months Dec-Feb (2010-2011) I recorded the times I left for work and the times I got there (excluding days that I stopped for gas etc).

I took almost exactly the same, route each trip, driving from my personal parking spot next to my apartment to the same spot in my office lot. I worked from home on snow days (except for one ... see the outlier). I usually covered the clock in my car so I could not be biased into a different driving pattern."

"The big news on the Internet today is that spoilers don't ruin books -- in fact, they actually increase the pleasure we get out of reading them. These scientific findings fly in the face of just about every other comment on every film and TV blog we've ever read, but we don't actually find them terribly surprising. Some of Western culture's best-loved a most-read books are, after all, ones whose endings are so widely known that most of us know them before we even pick up the book. After the jump, we've compiled -- and revealed the outcomes of -- ten classic works of literature that we read (and, in the case of plays, watch) even though they've already been "spoiled" for us."