Anna Wintour and Age of Ultron: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Self-Publishing
Laura Bennett | Slate Book Review
Selfish is an insane project, a document of mind-blowing vanity and deranged perseverance. It’s also riveting. I can’t recommend it enough.”

The Apple Watch: More Than Just a Bracelet
Jody Rosen | T: The New York Times
“Nearly a week in, I am still poking lamely at the Watch, wearing a pained expression last seen around these parts in 1983, when my grandfather spent a long night of the soul wrestling with a Betamax.”

Searching for Forgiveness at Friendly's
Keith Pandolfi | Eater
“Whenever I walk in the door, I want it to feel the same way it did back when I was a kid, but it doesn't, and I doubt it ever will again.”

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Hot Shmurda
Robert Kolker | Vulture
“On the calls, Pollard sounds less like a criminal mastermind than a kid who grew up in a tough part of Brooklyn, where guns and drugs and violence were part of the landscape—as was music.”

In Conversation with Anna Wintour
Amy Larocca | New York Magazine
“'I hope that I set as good an example as I can, but it’s not—I don’t wake up in the morning thinking, I’m going to set a really good example today!'”

One Last Rave
Hua Hsu | The New Yorker
“Electronic dance music is now big business, a mainstream bacchanalia with its own universe of corporate-sponsored festivals and celebrity d.j.s. But the nostalgia for rave culture also seems like an attempt to recover something utopian.”

Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill was a powerful, DIY feminist statement
Annie Zaleski | A.V. Club
“Because it was so different, naturally many people weren’t sure what to do with Morissette and went for the predictably sexist (and misguided) assessment that she was an angry young woman.”

Engineers of Addiction
Andrew Thompson | The Verge
“'If we knew what that perfect game was, we'd just keep making that game over and over.'”

Age of Ultron's 'Black Widow Problem' Isn't a Problem: It's What the Movie Is About
Sam Adams | Indiewire
“Far from being an incidental character trait, Natasha's inability to bear children is inextricable from Age of Ultron's central theme: evolution.”

Through a Glass, Darkly: The Lady From Shanghai and the Legend of Orson Welles
Brian Phillips | Grantland
“Isn’t there something faintly preposterous, now, about the idea of genius? And especially about the kind of overblown, masculine, 20th-century variety of genius represented by Welles?”