What we'll be listening to, watching, and reading to sate our pop culture needs.
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Sunday night marks the beginning of the end. We’re talking about Mad Men of course and we’re getting all verklempt just thinking about it. Good thing there are so many other awesome distractions, we’ve listed them below.
It’s the end we’ve all been half-waiting for, half-dreading. At long last, part two of the final season of Mad Men will be gracing our screens, wrapping up Don Draper’s long, despairing, tumultuous journey—not to mention the stories of Peggy, Roger, Joan, Pete, Betty, Sally, et al. The no-details-spared look at NYC life in the ’60s and early ’70s, and character studies of epic proportions will live on in the annals of pop culture criticism for decades to come. We’re not ready to say good-bye, but like most of the women during the era of the show’s beginning, we don’t have a choice.
Women without children have long been judged by society, and most of those judgments are on the far side of harsh. This new collection of essays, edited by Meghan Daum and featuring DAME’s own contrib M.G. Lord, as well as Jezebel founder and Fusion editor Anna Holmes and novelists Kate Christensen and Elliott Holt, and faces those judgments head on, and gives a voice to women who have chosen not to procreate, whatever their reasons may be.
You might only enjoy Hal Hartley’s latest movie Ned Rifle, if you’re familiar with the other two films that began the trilogy this one completes—1997’s Henry Fool and 2006’s Fay Grim (starring Parker Posey!). Though not really like either one of them, Ned Rifle follows the same crew of eccentric characters, but this time Hartley’s added Aubrey Plaza to the cast, and her deadpan genius and slightly unhinged demeanor is right at home in his wacky world.
Released to celebrate what would’ve been Billie Holiday’s 100th birthday, The Centennial Collection is a single album featuring a cross-section of the icons greatest tunes. Original recordings of “Them There Eyes,” “The Very Thought of You,” and, devastatingly, the song that is all too timeless, “Strange Fruit,” will remind you why Holiday holds such an important place not only on the record shelf, but in our hearts as well.
Before she was Red on Orange Is the New Black, even before she was Captain Kathryn Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager, actor Kate Mulgrew lived a fascinating life, from her childhood as one of eight kids on a farm in Iowa, to placing her baby for adoption, to later being reunited with her daughter in 2007. Her new memoir covers that and more—you’ll have an even greater appreciation for her hardass character with a melty middle at Litchfield Penitentiary, knowing the real-life experiences Mulgrew draws from to play her.