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To celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary last year, my husband and I spent the weekend at a funky motel in the Catskills. We arrived Friday night, poured some wine, put on Bonnie and Clyde, and exchanged gifts. The T-shirt I gave Adam featured a bear fighting a shark; he gave me earrings shaped like shark teeth (we often have similar ideas). Then we noticed there was a fly buzzing around the room, so Adam started chasing it, doing ninja moves in his underwear.

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Perhaps, taking in the bumble of buzz around the fall TV season, you have gotten the impression that the career of Zooey Deschanel is a matter of national import. It apparently has some kind of meaning distinct from (if dependent upon) her talents as an actress and a singer. The run-up to the network premiere of Deschanel’s first sitcom, New Girl (Fox, Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET), has found media types, post-feminist cutie-pies, and men on the street, all the sad young men, wondering what is up. “Is the American sitcom ready for a hipster sweetheart?” asked the cover of New York last week. Other queries issue from other quarters. Judging by the fuss, you would think that the lead role on Two and a Half Men had been given to Chloë Sevigny.

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Bennett Miller’s Moneyball (Columbia Pictures), adapted by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian from the nonfiction book by Michael Lewis, is a sports movie for people who don’t like sports movies. I know this is true because I enjoyed it. Many classic films about sport hinge on a climactic zero-sum contest—the “big game”—that leaves this viewer as indifferent as real-life big games do. This is in no way meant as a slight against the dazzlingly gifted athletes who play pro sports, or the fine people who follow them. (There’s one on my couch right now, watching the Phillies.) But secretly I’m always thinking, well, one side or the other has to win, and then the game and/or movie will be over, right? Can’t you just get back to me with the score?

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It has been a long time since Americans have been this depressed about the economy.

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What the hell is going on in Afghanistan? Specifically, what the hell is going on with Pakistan’s relationship to Afghanistan? Whose side is it on?

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Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 157 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, Seth Stevenson, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below or opening this player in another tab:

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In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Lt. Milo Minderbinder transforms the mess accounts of the American airbase under his care into a “syndicate” under whose terms all servicemen are potential stakeholders. But this prince of entrepreneurs and middlemen eventually becomes overexposed, especially after some incautious forays into Egyptian cotton futures, and is forced to resort to some amoral subterfuges. The climactic one of these is his plan to arrange for himself to bomb the American base at Pianosa (for cost plus 6 percent, if my memory serves) with the contract going to the highest bidder. It’s only at this point that he is deemed to have gone a shade too far.

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Willem de Kooning at the MoMA.

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Enough is enough. Over the past 10 years, I’ve spent far too much on concerts, scholarly lectures, flamenco performances, off-Broadway plays, and a host of other events. I recently tallied up the number of magazines to which I subscribe, and the total approached 20. Meanwhile, the guy who sells candy at the movie theater down the block is so familiar with me that he yells out “Mr. Sno Cap” upon my arrival to his sugary bazaar. I have been known to write $208 checks to Time Warner Cable for a single month’s service.

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Slate’s advice columnist Prudence counsels a man who’s infatuated with his ex-girlfriend’s sister.

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