Here’s a fantastic essay by Adam Nayman about the J.J. Abrams’ use of lens flare in Super 8 (via MattZollerSeitz):

Appropriately for something that makes it difficult to look directly at the screen, the meaning of this literally flashy technique can be a little bit tricky to discern. The artificial lens flare is a manufactured defect, a means of approximating the fallibility of human vision even when all or part of what’s being glimpsed by the camera eye has been created in a digital void—making it the perfect aesthetic signature for the CGI era. But Abrams, supposedly, is some kind of throwback analog figure: a commercial entertainer more interested in building his characters than blowing them up. How anyone could seriously make this assertion after seeing this transplanted television-auteur’s choices of feature film material (two mammoth studio franchises) is another good question, but we’ll go with it long enough to point out that the best thing about Super 8 is a scene that directly interrogates its director’s relationship to cinematic spectacle—a scene framed by, you guessed it, a lens flare.

Tina Rosenberg has written a profile of Timothy Brown, the man who used to have HIV but, after leukemia treatment, no longer shows any signs of the virus in his immune system. I love pieces like this because not only do they delve behind the headlines to give us more background information on the broader issues at hand, they also follow-up with the people involved to give a fuller picture of what happens after the media attention has subsided. Well done, all around.

Kathryn Schulz, on our society’s confused feelings about “fuck”:

For as long as some people have fretted about expletives in literature, others have seen fit to laugh at them. […] This idea rests on the assumption that “bad” words really are bad—and ditto writers who use them without exceptional justification. In crime fiction, foul language is justified on the ground that it is lifelike. (Art just imitates that shit.) In Go the Fuck to Sleep, foul language is not simply justified but justification: The whole book is about the taboo status of the word fuck. By contrast, outside of books like Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word or Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, it’s difficult to justify profanity in serious nonfiction.

But do we need such a justification, beyond the one a writer might mount for any word—i.e., that it works? There is, after all, no such thing as an intrinsically bad, boring, or lazy word. There is only how it is deployed, and one of the pleasures of profanity is how diversely you can deploy it.

A brilliant essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates about how X-Men: First Class misses an opportunity to incorporate the very relevant civil rights movement into its 1960s plotline:

In print, the X-Men are an elite team culled from a superpowered species of human. The mutants, as they are dubbed, are generally handled roughly by the rest of humanity and singled out for everything from enslavement to internment camps to genocide. As if to ram the allegory home, the X-Men, for much of their history, have hailed from across the spectrum of human existence. Over the decades, there have been gay X-Men, patrician X-Men, Jewish X-Men, Aboriginal X-Men, black X-Men with silver mohawks, X-Men hailing from Russia, Kentucky coal country, orphanages and a nightmarish future.

But as “First Class” roars to its final climatic scene, it appeals to an insidious suspension of disbelief; the heroic mutants of America, bravely opposing bigotry and fear, are revealed as not so much a spectrum of humankind, but as Eagle Scouts from Mayfield.

Inexcusable.

[UPDATE: Thanks for the great, thoughtful comments on this post. At this point, many of the nitpicks in this post have been addressed already, but I’m leaving it up for posterity’s sake. Be sure to read the comments if you’re seeing this post for the first time.]

WARNING: the following post will be extremely nitpicky without discussing anything of actual importance, and contain SPOILERS for X-Men: First Class (listen to our review with director Vincenzo Natali for an actual, in-depth discussion of the film). You’ve been warned:

• In the opening scene, how does Mystique know what Charles’ mother’s voice sounds like? Also, what is the power dynamic in that household? Does Xavier just get to do whatever the hell he wants (including taking in stragglers), regardless of what his parents think? If this is true, does Xavier control his parents using telepathy? If so, what a disturbing thought.
• If Xavier lived in New York as a child (and his family has clearly been there for generations), why does he have a British accent, both as a child as an adult?
• If Emma Frost is really able to convert herself into diamond form, how did Magneto almost crush her throat using the gold bed bannister? Diamonds are harder than gold on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. Also, how can Magneto control non-ferrous metals in the first place? (And if it was just some random metal that was colored gold, my first point is doubly true, since it probably wouldn’t have been as hard as gold). 
• In the first war room scene, after Colonel Hendry’s encounter with Shaw, wouldn’t Pentagon officials have known that Hendry wasn’t supposed to be there, and found it odd that he showed up suddenly and unannounced? 
• How did the Russians develop a helmet that could resist telepaths? This was before a time when people even had a widespread awareness that mutants existed.
• Why doesn’t Emma Frost use her telepathic or diamond powers to escape the CIA?

Have any answers, or more questions? Feel free to chime in in the comments and I’ll try to update this list. I’m sure that some of these have simple explanations that escape me. Note: I chose not to include any of the retcon stuff in this list because I’m sure the list would be huge.