Long Novels and the End of Mad Men: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Highlights from seven days of reading about entertainment

Justina Mintz / AMC

A Woman on the Edge
Jessica Gross | Longreads
“If you look at memoirs from time immemorial, a man in his fifties will repeat a whole conversation the family had when he was eight years old. What? He’s making it up. And there’s nothing wrong with it.”

Los Angeles Plays Itself
Dayna Tortorici | n+1
“Nothing in Los Angeles happens overnight, but this is how people like to talk. Why, I don’t know, but I think it has something to do with wanting the city to be either a dream or a nightmare, like in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.”

The Original, Resonant, Existentially Brilliant Mad Men Finale


Emily Nussbaum | The New Yorker


“We could talk endlessly about this show and this episode; this is a day-after recap, though, which has its limits. Has Don become the ‘Real Thing’? My Magic 8-Ball says, ‘Very Doubtful.’”

Judy Blume Knows All Your Secrets
Susan Dominus | The New York Times
“In so many of Blume’s books, her main characters’ bodies insist on their inherent, primal messiness; they crave, they ooze, break out in rashes as strange and humiliating as desire itself. The body is reckless, but telling.”

All (Hopefully) of the Bad Arguments About Rape on Game of Thrones Debunked
Amanda Marcotte | Rawstory
“The fact that a lot of people still expect things like the last-minute daring rescue—or assume that being raped makes a character weak—shows that while they may intellectually know that rape is wrong, they haven’t really haven’t grappled with what rape is, what it does to people, and what is so wrong about it.”

When Did Books Get So Freaking Enormous? The Year of the Very Long Novel
Boris Kachka | Vulture
“At publishers’ sales conferences, buzzwords like important and audacious quickly give way to immersive and addictive.”

Not My Apocalypse: A Black Woman Reads a White-Guy Prepper Magazine
Latoya Peterson | Fusion
“Reading OFFGRID makes me realize that though the future might be a brave new world, it will have the exact same people in it.”

Game of Thrones Has Always Been a Show About Rape
Alyssa Rosenberg | The Washington Post
There’s no requirement that anyone like any of these storylines or that anyone who feels exhausted from spending his or her days in a world marked by sexual violence retreat to a worse one for pleasure. But that’s not the same thing as proof that Game of Thrones is generally careless in its depiction of sexual assault or that rape doesn’t serve a purpose on the show.”