Ta-Nehisi Coates

A lot of the discussion around this episode focuses on would Joan really do this, and hey, she's in a desperate situation because she has to care for her child as a single parent. Yes, it's true that Joan is a single parent, and it's true that that's a difficult situation. Except Joan hasn't brought that up. She hasn't talked about her fears about raising Kevin alone and hasn't seemed all that stressed about money (or alimony?), to the point that she declines Roger's attempts to pay off-the-books child support. 

She didn't sleep with scuzzy car guy just because she was desperate for the stability. She slept with him because she's in a liminal phase. Liminalty is the scary in-between times in our lives, the weird time when we're not who we used to be but we're not quite who we're going to be. Joan's in a classic -- classic! -- liminal phase right now. 

She's not the office vixen anymore, but she hasn't really transitioned to doting mother. And to top it all off, she's in the middle of a particularly traumatic divorce. Joan doesn't know who she is anymore; her entire identity is jeopardized.

In the wake of Mr. Awlaki's death, some administration officials, including the attorney general, argued that the Justice Department's legal memo should be made public. In 2009, after all, Mr. Obama had released Bush administration legal opinions on interrogation over the vociferous objections of six former C.I.A. directors. 

 This time, contemplating his own secrets, he chose to keep the Awlaki opinion secret. "Once it's your pop stand, you look at things a little differently," said Mr. Rizzo, the C.I.A.'s former general counsel. 

 Mr. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director and now an adviser to Mr. Obama's Republican challenger, Mr. Romney, commended the president's aggressive counterterrorism record, which he said had a "Nixon to China" quality. 

But, he said, "secrecy has its costs" and Mr. Obama should open the strike strategy up to public scrutiny. "This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and that's not sustainable," Mr. Hayden said. "I have lived the life of someone taking action on the basis of secret O.L.C. memos, and it ain't a good life. Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a D.O.J. safe."

You have Martin Luther King's statue in your office, but you are sending these unmanned drones out, and bombs are dropping on innocent people. That's not a small thing. That's not a small thing. We know from historic examples that if you engage in a certain kind of foreign policy it eats at your soul on the domestic front.

"I accept responsibility for and regret my thoughtless, insensitive, immature, stupid and childish choices that I made on Sept. 19, 2010, and Sept. 21, 2010," Mr. Ravi said. "My behavior and actions, which at no time were motivated by hate, bigotry, prejudice or desire to hurt, humiliate or embarrass anyone, were nonetheless the wrong choices and decisions. I apologize to everyone affected by those choices."

"I don't want my son to play football," Scott said. "I play football so he won't have to. With what is going on, I don't know if it's really worth it. . . . I don't want to have to deal with him getting a concussion and what it would be like later in life." 

Keeping kids inside a protective bubble has plenty of risks, too -- there are a lot more kids struggling with health problems related to obesity than there are kids struggling with health problems related to football -- but Scott said his 7-year-old son will get his exercise through non-contact sports. 

"He can play baseball," Scott said. "I really don't want him boxing, either, even though he wants to box. I won't let him box. It's not worth it. The most important thing for me is him being around and me being able to spend a long time with him and I'm sure, at the end of the day, all the things I'm able to buy him from playing football, he'd much rather have me."

But as impressed as I was by the look of the thing, I'm pretty sure I'll be skipping it. Gatsby, to me, will always be the ultimate study in the oxymoronic—a small book about a really big idea. That contrast—brevity and The Great American Novel, Fitzgerald's small world and the grand idea of American social-climbing—is what I come back to in the book. That, and of course, the characters.

Gatsby is a book that has come to mean something to people (or perhaps simply to Hollywood directors) that sometimes feels disconnected from the book itself. Fitzgerald's great trick was to write about two people who wanted each other, but not write a love story. Of course I root for Daisy to leave Tom every time. But my rooting is wrong, and by the end of the book, Fitzgerald has really shown you why. Daisy is the one that got away—except you have no idea what that means. That "one" isn't some better future. She is a person—a indelibly flawed American. Like you.

Gatsby is something I haven't seen recently in American film—a kind of anti-melodrama, an anti-love story. Perhaps it's my present biases, but I'd have loved to see the French take this one on.

PARKER 

 All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me. 

 INTERVIEWER 

 What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work? 

 PARKER 

 Need of money, dear.

INTERVIEWER 

Do you think economic security an advantage to the writer? 

PARKER 

Yes. Being in a garret doesn't do you any good unless you're some sort of a Keats. The people who lived and wrote well in the twenties were comfortable and easy living. They were able to find stories and novels, and good ones, in conflicts that came out of two million dollars a year, not a garret. As for me, I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that's too adorable, I'd rather have money. I hate almost all rich people, but I think I'd be darling at it. At the moment, however, I like to think of Maurice Baring's remark: "If you would know what the Lord God thinks of money, you have only to look at those to whom he gives it." I realize that's not much help when the wolf comes scratching at the door, but it's a comfort.