Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. issued a Nov. 14 memo to the staff, which was supposed to sooth the fretful, but reading it is like wading through a field of wheat paste. I don't even work at the Post, and I wanted to commit suicide after I trudged through its final, gloomy paragraph.

The Post exodus: what it means for political journalism. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine

If ever there was an antithesis to Leibovitz's airbrushed glamour shots, the images of Sontag are it, made during the last few days of her illness, and finally, after her death. Swollen and scarred, lying prostrate in her bed, Sontag suffers mightily in front of Leibovitz's lens, a reality that is especially hard to reconcile when one remembers how preening and proud Sontag could be in life.

Annie Leibovitz's reckless candor | Salon Arts & Entertainment

Sofia Coppola is the Veruca Salt of American filmmakers. She's the privileged little girl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory whose father, a nut tycoon, makes sure his daughter wins a golden ticket to the Willie Wonka factory by buying up countless Wonka bars, which his workers methodically unwrap till they find the prize. If Coppola's 2004 Academy Award for best original screenplay for Lost in Translation was her golden ticket to big-budget filmmaking, Marie Antoinette is her prize, a $40 million tour through the lush and hallucinatory candy land of 18th-century France. Of course, Roald Dahl's insufferable Veruca Salt was eventually seized by angry squirrels and hurled down a garbage chute. Will Coppola suffer a similar fate when Marie Antoinette opens this Friday?

Marie Antoinette reviewed. - By Dana Stevens - Slate Magazine

"I've had a lot of interviews where people come in and they go, 'Well, I was expecting to hate this movie,' " he says, with a tone of incredulity. "Why were you expecting to hate a movie? I don't pick up a book expecting to not like it. I pick up a book expecting -- hoping -- it'll change my life. It seems a weird thing, that if you like something very much, you can't like something else as well. It's like you're only allowed 10 good things, and you have to lose one every time something good comes into your life."

Jones: Small Shoes to Fill In the Other Truman Show - washingtonpost.com

Cook is more like the harmlessly affected guy who lives in the dorm room next door, the one obsessed with UFO abduction, killer-bee attacks, sexual humiliation, clubbing, hot chicks, and the other predilections of youth. (He's like the guy who's always trying to show you something he found on the Internet.) Cook's jokes often begin with "this is what everybody does when …"; he's a generalizer rather than an advocate of a particular (or particularly crude) worldview.

Dane Cook: insert punch line. By Bryan Curtis - Slate Magazine