The economic and technological changes are real, but I just can't bring myself to wax apocalyptic about the future of books.

I'm more encouraged by the saplings: new music groups, tiny new venues, entrepreneurial musician-composers who aren't waiting to be discovered but are instead building their own Establishment.

I think I can safely call 2012 average. Overall, it was a stronger year for nonfiction than fiction - a situation that would've surprised me back in January, when I was looking forward to big new novels from several authors I really love.

The economic and technological changes are real, but I just can't bring myself to wax apocalyptic about the future of books.

Some reviewed 'The Master' on their knees, and while I respected its distinctive discordancy - can a movie be at once feverish and glacial? - I was unmoved.

Russell Crowe is normally an actor who disappears so far into his characters you'd swear his DNA has been altered.

As a critic, I try to stay neutral about movies before I see them, but I really wanted "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" to be great. It's based on a barbed memoir by Kim Barker called "The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days In Afghanistan And Pakistan." And its stars Tina Fey, out of her comfort zone, just as Barker was a fish out of water when, in 2004, she began covering the Afghanistan occupation for the Chicago Tribune.