In its first season, Mad Men glamorized the life of its male characters, who personified early 1960s cool and who seemed to (using a phrase I still get quoted for) "get off… Read full post »

This is the way a generation gap begins: not just with a bang, but also a whimper.

In Mad Men’s latest episode, “Favors,” an exchange of the sexual type of those leads to Don’s downfall as his daughter’s hero, the one who she thinks supports… Read full post »

Last night, Mad Men redressed what some of us have come to see as a growing flaw in the series: trying to depict late 1960s America entirely from the East Coast, when many of the most significant cultural and political changes were occurring in California. After… Read full post »

So, is your relationship butter or margarine? What about your life?

According to Don Draper, one is fresh and the other is indestructible. Don, of course, knows all about being fresh, and he also used to seem indestructible. Like James Bond (to which I’ve often compared him),… Read full post »

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

So begins “The White Album,” Joan Didion’s famous essay conjuring the events and atmosphere of the late 1960s, which she spent living on both the west and east coasts. In L.A., she covers part of the M/… Read full post »

Writing about the premiere episode of last season’s Mad Men, I covered the “reveal” of Don and Megan’s sexual relationship as follows:

The nature of their erotic relationship only becomes clear towards the end of the episode, however, and… Read full post »

You want me to say what? 

If Mad Men didn’t jump the shark last night, it at least jumped the Chaough, which coincidentally turns out to be what Peggy longs to do.… Read full post »

Come Monday morning, it will all be a dream. ~ Sylvia

The fires of hell that Don’s descending into this season erupted into full flame in last night’s Mad Men episode, which bears the seemingly oxymoronic title, “The Flood.” Ostensibly a quote from Gi… Read full post »

“Which twin has the Toni?”

So asked a famous and long-running ad campaign for Toni home permanent kits, which promised women that a Toni perm was so good that it would fool people into thinking that you had naturally curly hair.

By the 1960s, this sloga… Read full post »

Is there some damage that human beings just can’t recover from? 

Last night’s Mad Men episode, “The Collaborators,” answers that question in such a dark fashion that it leaves us little hope for the series’ main characters. As they continue t/… Read full post »

Heaven’s a little morbid. ~ Don pitching to clients and sinking fast

Heaven is a place, the Talking Heads sang, where nothing ever happens. Hawaii, the closest thing we have to it on earth, is a place where everything happens, but you can’t put the experience into wo/… Read full post »

I left the church once I became an adult. So why does it still matter to me?

^{In Krakow, images of native son Pope John Paul II are everywhere. Here he looks down on passersby from a second story window.} 

In recent years,… Read full post »

Thanks to all of you who have sent messages saying you hoped I would be writing commentary about Season 5 of "Mad Men," which premieres tonight. I'm happy to say that I will be, but over at "big" Salon. I actually have a pre-season article up on Salon right now, and my commentaries wil… Read full post »

As the final film (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2) unspools in Muggle theaters, there will be no real surprises for the fans, who know full well how the saga ends from having read the books (to pieces, in many cases). But even… Read full post »

I spent the summer I turned 21 working as a hotel maid, cleaning up other people’s messes. Having started my work life at age 14 in a frozen banana factory before progressing up the chain of summer jobs to bus girl, waitress and fast food shift supervisor, I was… Read full post »

The color nature gave me (at age 20, in the French Alps) 

How I look today, unplugged (early AM, no make up), 30+ years later 

In Nicole Holofcener’s recent film, Please Give, a middle-aged woman acidly characterizes her grandmother’s… Read full post »

One of the great pleasures of the Harry Potter movies has been watching the extraordinarily deep bench of British acting talent fill literally mesmerizing roles. At this point, so many of the country’s best-known actors and actresses have appeared in both recurring and one… Read full post »

If you watched the World Series, you no doubt saw a commercial from Microsoft touting their soon-to-be-released Windows smart phone. In it, a slick flurry of scenes depict people so engrossed in their smart phones that they spill drinks, trip over or trip up other people, neglect their cl… Read full post »

Will you at least put me out of my misery before you go? ~ Don to Faye

That’s two. ~ Topaz client

It’s good to be a gangsta, and it’s great to be Don Draper. Your company may be… Read full post »

 The Return of Persephone by Frederic Leighton

In Greek mythology, Demeter is the goddess of the harvest, who controls the seasons and the fertility of the plants. She has a daughter, Persephone (fathered by Zeus) who as a young woman is abducted by Hades, the god of the underworl… Read full post »

Don: We can’t start over; we just started.

Peggy: You always say if you don’t like what they’re saying about you, change the conversation.

Don:  To what? What they’re saying about us is true.

Of course, truth is just a starting… Read full post »

They’re about the meaningful life a woman leads when work is done. ~ Peggy

Ah, but a woman’s work is never done, as the old saying tells us. Sometimes just getting through her life is work. And sometimes work is… Read full post »

Stop it, kill it, at least find out how far it’s gone. ~ Don to Pete

“Cheer up. When God closes a door, he opens a dress,” goes a classic Rogerism from an earlier season of Mad Men.  In the episode “Hands and/… Read full post »

It’s like men are this vegetable soup and you can’t put them on a plate or put them on a counter. Women are the pot. They hold them. They contain them. Who wants to be a pot? Who says we’re not soup?

~ Joyce on gender relations… Read full post »