This Weekend's Best Bets

All aboard! Kenneth Branagh steers Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express as both director and detective. It’s up to Hercule Poirot to puzzle out whodunnit, and how, with a train full of travelers and a locked door. The wheels turning in your mind will be more than enough to warm you up on this chilly November weekend.

For those who like their murder more visceral than cerebral, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a darkly comic take on what happens after. The critics are already seeing Oscars written in the raw performances and complex story.

A companion piece to last week’s A Bad Moms Christmas, Daddy’s Home 2 takes holiday drama up a notch with wacky stunts and dueling dads!

Originally posted 11/10/17 on Latest and Greatest

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Media I’m Thankful For

D irk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency , airing Saturdays at 9pm on BBC America Join Dirk Gently, a detective who doesn’t so much observe and deduce as stumble over the solution to a mystery he hadn’t learned about yet, and his friends as they find themselves in a fairytale. Somewhere between Disney and Grimm lies a realm where storybook characters find our world to be of immense interest, thanks to an ancient prophecy. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is currently rocketing into the final third of a truly spectacular second season, but you can easily marathon all episodes on the BBC America website or Hulu . It Devours! by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor If you took my advice from August and started listening to Welcome to Night Vale , then you’ll understand how excited I was to read the second novel in that universe. Nilanjana Sikdar, a scientist who studies but does not really connect with her chosen home, follows a dangerous t...

Book Rec: Blackfish City

"Money is a mind, the oldest artificial intelligence. Its prime directives are simple, its programming endlessly creative. Humans obey it unthinkingly, with cheerful alacrity. Like a virus, it doesn't care if it kills its host. It will simply flow on to someone new, to control them as well. City Hall, the collective of artificial intelligences, is a framework of programs constructed around a single, never explicitly stated purpose: to keep Money safe. What would it take to rival something so powerful? What kind of mind would be required to triumph over this monstrosity? What combination of technology and biology, hope and sickness? How can we who have nothing but the immense magnificent tiny powerless spark of our own singular Self harness that energy, magnify it, make it in something that can stand beside these invisible giants, these artificial intelligences, weighty legal words on parchment and the glimmering ones and zeros of code in a processor somewhere? You sco...

Book Rec: The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

I've lived my whole life near enough Salem, Massachusetts for an easy weekender, but I've never done so. I mean, it's roughly the same time as my usual monthly trek to see my long-distance paramour, just the opposite direction, and yet, I've never gone. It might be that I'm worried the mystique will wear off; or, just as likely, that the mystique will increase to the point where I'm another silly tourist, dropping dollars left and left on callous reminders of a deeply misogynistic rampage-turned-horror movie twaddle. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane , by Katherine Howe, is an immensely effective way of checking yourself before you wreck yourself when getting into the mythos of Salem. I'll quote the author biography on the back flap for some insight into what this book is really about: "Katherine Howe is completing a PhD in American and New England Studies, and is a descendant of Elizabeth Proctor, who survived the Salem with trials, and ...

And Not to Yield

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