Today a celebrity sex video isn't a stigma that requires penance and smarm removal; it's a branding device, a platform enhancer, a show reel.

It's the contemporary woman that movies don't know what to do with, other than bathe her in a bridal glow in romantic comedies where both the romance and the comedy are artificial sweeteners.

Even the most piddling life is of momentous consequence to its owner.

The Internet and blogging made writing somewhat more solitary and more splintered. It removes the whole sense of the magazine as an organism. A certain dynamism. At The Village Voice, there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers. The New Yorker used to be notorious for everything that went on, sexual intrigues and people had individual offices, they could close the door and take a bottle out of their bottom drawer or have sex on their desk.

I root for hurricanes. When, courtesy of the Weather Channel, I see one forming in the ocean off the coast of Africa, I find myself longing for it to become big and strong--Mother Nature's fist of fury, Gaia's stern rebuke. Considering the havoc mankind has wreaked upon nature with deforesting, stripmining, and the destruction of animal habitat, it only seems fair that nature get some of its own back and teach us that there are forces greater than our own.

Slashing its way to the finish line, Black Swan is the first ballet movie for highbrow horror fans for whom ballet itself signifies little to nothing. Those of us who know and love ballet can only look on it with a different kind of horror.

What stars do in their off-hours is a never-ending source of diddling curiosity to the tabloid sensibility.