BabyVegas

Thank you for bringing this up! If my memory is correct (50/50 shot at best), Christy has now had a teacher who had a drinking problem and a boss who has been abusing stimulants/downers. If I had Christy's history, I'd be worrying about triggers for relapse way more than she seems to be doing. Not to mention that California's bar exam is one of the most difficult in the country. Based on Christy's stats, she is unlikely to pass her first time out. I get that they're going for comedy, but considering how well-known the legal field is for having substance abuse problems, I think that ignoring it makes no sense. Yup yup yup. As someone who has had substance abuse problems, I would think Christy could be quite sympathetic to a defendant who clearly needs help. I also think it would be an interesting conflict to have Christy grapple with how she can help people in a way that might have been useful to her when she was still in the drinking/drug portion of her life but also struggling with trying to figure out who she should be giving those chances to. I mean, it might be harder to turn it into comedy but this is a sitcom about recovering addicts so I think it's doable.

I've always been curious how much independence Rachel's show has from the main NBC News organization. It seems like because Rachel's MO is a little bit more heads-down than some of the other news personalities, she stayed out of NBC's way and NBC stayed out of hers. The way I see it, there's probably two options: (1) NBC didn't interfere with this reporting for the reason you worry about - they're using Rachel's willingness to publicly believe NBC as a credibility builder or (2) their calculus said this was a no-win situation and trying to stop Rachel from talking about it would have just given more credence to Ronan's reporting of interference. Either way, I'm not inclined to be particularly charitable towards NBC management on this issue. My read on her during this interview was that she wanted to believe what NBC was saying, but didn't entirely. Especially when she was talking about the consternation in the building about NBC killing the story. In combination with the accusations in Catch and Kill about Andy Lack having had knowledge of Lauer's behavior as far back as 2014, I wonder if there's some level of her processing what might feel like a failure to see what was going at her own employer.

Ok, maybe it's just me but that scene kind of reminded me of the blind seer from O Brother Where Art Thou. There was something about the vast nothingness on either side with the figure on a handcart on railroad tracks. And I remember that O Brother Where Art Thou was a retelling of The Odyssey. I just can't figure out what about the Odyssey would be significant. Of course it's entirely possible that it's nothing and/or I'm losing my mind, but it just felt too referential to something. Also, Eleanor saying she enjoyed torturing Chidi really got to me. I'm starting to buy into the theory that they're the ones being tested to see if their improvements actually stuck. I both need to know what happens and am very sad this show will be ending.

And the same obelisk was in the season 2 episode where they showed the constant reboots. On the one hand, that could be nothing. On the other hand, this show is so detail-oriented it just seemed notable.

Rightly so, at least in my opinion. "Putin doesn't tend to go after people unless he's taunted that defectors exist" (Alexander Litvinenko would probably want a word if he hadn't been, y'know, murdered.) followed immediately by doing essentially what officials said would make things more dangerous for that asset. The entire time Ken was on, I wasn't sure what was newsworthy about the information. Unless I was missing something, the entire story seemed kind of pointless. I've always assumed that, given her high ratings and contributions to MSNBC's success, that Rachel has a fair bit of autonomy, or at least leverage, when dealing with management. Segments like this - stuff where NBC clearly just wants to get credit for "breaking" a story but doesn't have anything actually useful to add so they shove the correspondent off on MSNBC instead of putting them on NBC proper - really make me question how TRMS covers certain stories and how much management is involved.

To answer that one guy's question: it's called a pumpkin spice latte despite not having any pumpkin in it because the flavoring in the latte is the same flavoring as the spices used in pumpkin pie. Also, Starbucks has the stuff for a pumpkin spice latte all year round. People just like to make fun of pumpkin spice lattes because they are a thing traditionally associated with young women. Speaking of women...YEESH that main segment. Everything about that was upsetting. It wasn't my first exposure to the gender/race bias that occurs in medicine, but it still made me sick. Pesky hormones?! I mean, first of all, men have hormones too, so the idea that women are men+hormones is insane on a base level. But also one does not even need to be a doctor to know that those "pesky hormones" serve functions other than fucking with your mood. So if women have different hormones then of fucking course you need to account for that! Insanity. And the information about health issues that primarily affect women not being well researched is sadly so common. As far as I can tell, if you have an issue that affects or involves your uterus, the general medical solution is "have you tried birth control."

I follow Craig Mazin (the writer of Chernobyl and also Ted Cruz's college roommate who LOATHES him) on Twitter, which was actually the first place I heard about this Russian explosion. He's been talking about this since the day it happened and, as Rachel was talking about various events last night, it sounded exactly like the Chernobyl PR playbook. The news has gotten to the point where I have to watch Rachel on stop and start because it's too horrifying to watch it all in one go. I am forever grateful that she doesn't traffic in scare tactics (the actual news is scary enough) and she tries to give things real context. To me, that's what makes Rachel's show so vital.

I'm not a lawyer, but I am studying to be one, so I decided to go look this up in my bar outline. I would certainly defer to anyone who actually practices in this area, but here's what my bar outline for Corporations says: "A director is elected by shareholders, responsible for major corporate decisions, and appoint officers." "An officer runs the corporation on a daily basis." "Directors and officers cannot receive unfair benefits to the detriment of the corporation unless they effectively disclose and obtain ratification of those benefits." "A director or officer usurps a corporate opportunity when that director or officer prevents money from coming into the corporation." So, I'm guessing it would come down to whether Charles is considered a director? I'm not sure of the exact structure of Millennial, but since he's supposedly "Chairman of the Board" I'm guessing he would probably be considered a director.

I agree that Rachel's interviews haven't been as good as some other interviews and I think some of it comes down to Rachel being more of a commentator than a reporter. Rachel's strongest area seems to be contextualizing the news rather than breaking it. When there's breaking news, she has reporters on the show to walk through the news, but she seems to serve more as a vehicle for their story - eliciting what happened and asking clarifying questions. But when she has interviewees on who could stand a little more of a face-to-face challenge because they're selling a particular viewpoint, that interview strategy doesn't work as well. From what I remember, she used to be better at this stuff. In particular, I'm remembering her having on more people who vehemently disagreed with her and she'd go to town really debating them. In particular I'm thinking that one guy from maybe 6-7 years back who wrote a book about how gay people are bad and she interviewed him and lit into him. (Sorry, I realize that is not a very specific description.) So maybe the problem is that she has a hard time finding her hook when she isn't dealing with someone who is neutral and she isn't dealing with someone with an opposing point of view?

Most likely. And it doesn't matter that he resigned from the board. He violated his duty of loyalty before his resignation and in the real world he'd probably be looking down the barrel of a lawsuit. It really is a bummer that they've made Charles suck so much. Especially him calling that author "matron lit." Good for Liza for telling the author what he said. I was looking forward to him and Liza being together and it has just been cringefest after cringefest. He was being awful putting Liza in the middle of his bullshit. And as heated as Kelsey was being, I honestly kind of can't blame her. She was thrown into the deep end by people who should have known she wasn't ready but did it anyway because it suited their purposes. I see now why they couldn't make Diana publisher. She's too competent and all this nonsense wouldn't be happening. Quinn is clearly no help. Charles is actively working against her. It's unreasonable to expect a late twenty-something who hasn't shown any particular business acumen to be a turnaround artist for a company that has been circling the drain while handling bad actors within the company. Hell, my hair would be falling out too. ETA: While I'm thinking about it, I'm not sure that even leaving would allow him to work at Mercury right away. (If he's meeting with authors and trying to woo them over, that's more than just pure financing.) If this were the real world, I'd imagine that there was a non-compete clause in Charles' contract. If there was an actual board, that would mean it wasn't just Charles running the whole show and I can't believe they wouldn't insist on at least some kind of non-compete. For me, the only way this storyline can end up anywhere believable is if Charles gets sued by Millenial/Empirical.

I heard that line and immediately flashed to an episode of Better off Ted where an employee died and the company tried to turn it into motivation for people to work even harder. For a show that was supposed to be an absurdist comedy about a relentlessly evil corporation...apparently it wasn't very absurd. The only people I know who do this don't have a car so to them it's no different from using Instacart. And they consider it more convenient than spending the time busing or catching an Uber/Lyft to the grocery store.

Elie Mystal's rant this morning was a thing of beauty. "We don't have quiche!" I always look forward to an AM Joy when he's a guest.

It's less common to have a dedicated civics class these days. In our school it got combined with history and then we had the option of taking a class in "government" for one year. We had to take a science class, an English class, a math class, a history/social studies class, and then we had two electives (usually a language and music/drama/similar). Civics classes have largely fallen by the wayside in favor of classes that teach standardized test subjects. Which kind of ties back to the LWT episode from a few years ago about the problems with standardized testing. If it's not on the tests, it doesn't get taught with any real rigor. Impeachment is mentioned in the AP US Government curriculum, but it doesn't look like it's covered in any great depth. It looks like it's covered as a subtopic under constitutional checks and balances. I'm glad John covers these types of topics. He does such a great job using humor to break the barrier so that people want to learn. I sent his net neutrality piece to a few of my older relatives to explain the importance of it and I imagine I'll probably end up sending this piece to a few people I know who don't really understand impeachment.

This is the sort of thing that should be taught in history classes in school, but I honestly wonder how many schools actually touch on that nowadays. My guess is very few. It's been about ten years since I was in high school, but I don't think we went much past WWII, even in my AP classes. I don't think we had a separate social studies/civics class past middle school and what we did learn was incredibly simplistic. We might have learned a general understanding of what Watergate was. Maybe. And we most certainly never touched on Johnson's impeachment. The closest thing to an education on impeachment that I remember getting was watching All The President's Men with my parents. I think one of the reasons that people don't really get impeachment is because it's not well-taught in schools and the media kind of slurs it together into one thing. Frankly, an explainer on the mechanics of impeachment is not feasible within the structure of most news programs. LWT is built for the kind of in-depth explanation it requires, but most news is geared towards much shorter segments. Plus, where LWT takes a lot of time to define terms and make sure its viewers are working from an accurate vocabulary, a lot of news shows aren't rigid about terminology. They'll talk about Nixon but they rarely make a point of emphasizing that impeachment inquires were opened but Nixon was never formally impeached. And when they talk about Clinton's impeachment in one breath and then Nixon's resignation in the next, it probably confuses a lot of people because it's a distinction that requires some time to make.

Is it wrong that I laughed and rewound that moment of her sighing/facepalming? I was maybe 8ish when the Good Friday Agreement was struck, and the second that she played that clip of him talking about a wall my immediate reaction was "wait, wasn't that the big issue with Ireland/Northern Ireland?" I know several of us have commented on her snarkiness, but sometimes I think it's a "laugh so you don't cry" situation.

I think it also matters that they're on her platform and not vice versa. If the NYT had Rachel on their platform and she stated an opinion, I would assume that they approved of it, at least enough to publish it. If a reporter is on Rachel's platform, it's not reasonable to assume that the NYT holds that opinion because the show is under Rachel's control. And frankly the description of Rachel as "mega-ideological" is baffling. I would certainly concede that she has a point of view, but the idea that any political/news show is without a POV seems insane.

But the problem is that this is a slippery slope argument. And that was my problem with the segment. If she had invited on a lawyer who could have laid out the legal principles and rationale, then she could have talked about how and why this was concerning. That would have been exactly the kind of thing I trust Rachel's show to do. I've seen several journalists who are saying "I encourage sources to get more information all the time." We don't want to inhibit that, but the problem occurs when a journalist (or "journalist," in Assange's case) goes beyond general encouragement and into specifically how to commit a crime to get more information. And that's where the segment could have used more air. I think "why would the DOJ charge Assange like this?" and "how are these charges different from the original charges?" are very good questions that should be answered. And, frankly, I think answering those questions would give us a lot more information with which to accurately discuss the very real First Amendment concerns. But "this will be used to go after legitimate journalists" is a take that I don't think is quite yet supported by the facts.

I was surprised at Rachel's take on the Assange stuff. She seemed to be talking about Assange like he was a mere publisher and that's why the First Amendment stuff is so unprecedented. But the reason I watch Rachel is she really gets into the nuances of things and I thought she entirely missed the nuance in the Assange issue. The problem is that Assange actively encouraged Manning to commit a crime and participated in the commission of that crime. Assange/WikiLeaks is not like the New York Times or WaPo specifically because he was actively encouraging the crime and because he was disseminating the information not as a publisher but as an intelligence cutout. I really wish that she had invited on a lawyer for that segment because it's such a technical legal issue. I was also annoyed that she brought up Trump and how he would love to be able to argue that the press was committing espionage. If he wants to argue that, he's going to argue it anyway. He argues in bad faith. There's no reason to worry about giving him material. If he doesn't have it, he'll just make it up. Rachel is so good at the details that this segment was so frustrating to me. I should clarify, I'm not saying whether I agree with the filing of the charges or anything, I'm just saying that from an analysis point of view, it bothered me that she didn't explain the specifics that make this a closer call than it might otherwise be.

Funny enough, the inverse of Christy's situation happened to me. I'm a law student and I got a paid job my 1L summer and I assumed I'd just be doing the most idiot-proof of stuff, but I ended up being asked to do a bunch of different stuff and sit in on pretty much every meeting where the client was okay with it. A lot of bigger firms will have clerks who are in charge of copying/filing/etc. I was actually surprised that Christy was doing clerical stuff and not writing memos. Also as someone with ADHD, Bonnie's productive procrastination was the most relatable thing to me. My apartment is never cleaner than during finals.

Ugh, Patrick is the worst. And he's not even a smooth manipulator. That or Richard is the pushover to end all pushovers. I sincerely hope that the actor who plays Patrick is the nicest person on the planet because that character is so punchable. Even when he was doing his "poor little boss" routine, I was fresh out of pity. If he doesn't have the skillset to be in charge, then he doesn't have the skillset to be in charge. Stop whining and go learn it. As villains go, he's about two seconds from twirling a moustache. I know subtlety has never been this show's forte, but I'm starting to find it too hard to watch. Also that was wildly inappropriate of Tia. There's focused on your work and then there's no concept of context. Why on EARTH would she think it was a good idea to go to a small dinner party thrown by someone else to get money? Even if she didn't realize that Kat had romantic motivations, it still could have just been a friends thing and still inappropriate to ask for money. I'm enjoying Sutton's storyline. I'm enjoying seeing her blossom career-wise. I don't even mind her storyline with Richard. His friends were a bit condescending, but it's definitely a very real thing that people with a 14 year age difference would be at different stages in their lives. And she was right that he should have been talking to her about the idea of moving. With their age differences, it would have been more unrealistic if these sorts of things weren't an issue.

Yeah, I assume that's why we see Joyce Vance, Chuck Rosenberg, and/or Barb McQuade any time there is late-breaking legal news and Michael Beschloss if there's some other big event that she doesn't have time to get in-depth on. And it's probably the best possible solution. Maybe she could expand that stable a little bit more into topics other than the legal field? I would think that would help take some of the burden off. One thing I have always liked about Rachel's show is that she makes an effort to have actual experts on to explain things instead of just a panel of people yelling. I think it's what sets her show apart from most other cable news programs and I am certain she is fighting as hard as she can not to lose that, but it does probably make her show significantly more difficult to do, given the breakneck pace of the news these days. Honestly, if it were me, I'd have stopped bothering to come into work before like, noon. But that she doesn't is why Rachel is Rachel and I'm not.

What's frustrating me about this show right now is that this doesn't track at all, in my mind. Ray clearly felt bad about getting caught, but if he really felt horrible, I don't think he would still be trying to get back into Will's good graces. As far as I'm concerned, the only good part about Ray is how much Frankie hates him.

He dresses women who are not model-thin, so I think he does at least have some moral high ground on the issue, but I personally thought it was completely disingenuous of him to pretend like Tessa was saying something unusual when the fashion world has been a bastion of size-ism and body image issues for a good long time. And I don't even like Tessa! As a plus size person who sews for herself, Tessa wasn't wrong when she talked about the different considerations in designing for plus size. I'm not impressed when designers shy away from working with the bigger models because it comes across as laziness or a dearth of skill, but in a competition when ever minute counts and the judges seem to be responding better to the looks on skinny models? Hell yeah I'd be worried about getting one of the two plus size models. I'm glad they're not just using stick-thin models and I think designers should be able to work with plus-size models, but it's not as simple a conversation as this show occasionally likes to imply. Hester, of course, can GTFO of my screen at any time. She is so aggravating. And Venny was starting to get on my nerves with his talking in the third person. What is that? Is it just a way to get his name out there more? I always think it makes people sound crazy.

TRMS Law School is one of my favorite segments. First because I come away feeling like I really learned something and second because having multiple of MSNBC's legal commentators on at the same time lets them bounce off of each other and really analyze more in depth. I know Rachel generally resists doing panel shows, which I appreciate because it usually just ends up being a series of talking points, but I think that when she does panels with legal experts they're very focused and it's about each expert teaching their field of expertise to Rachel and the viewer. I really, really, really wish that they would do that segment more often.

I hated Sean's dress. There was something about the shape and length that looked like a pair of curtains framing the model's crotch. I couldn't believe when he won. Overall I thought Wendy had the most reasonable commentary on the dresses. I think sometimes the designers lose the fact that there's a woman at the center of the garment. That's why Django's looked ok when the model stood still but didn't look good when she walked. When she was just functioning as a clothes hanger, the garment could be in the one shape it looked ok in. When there was movement, it distorted and looked bad because it didn't have any curve to it. I thought Irina's should have won. I thought the shape was flattering and the reversible sequins were a fun touch. Plus it looked like it would photograph beautifully on a red carpet. Added bonus: when the award show enters its fourth hour and you are bored out of your mind, amuse yourself by finger painting designs in the sequins! Michelle's was not great, but I could see where she was going. I think if a better designer had taken a shot at that, it might have worked, but the fabrics draped too differently and with the weight of a full-length dress, it made it look wonky. It says nice things about Anya that the other designers were willing to help her out, but I think she was gone from the moment she admitted how much help she got. And rightfully so. The dress was basic and she couldn't even do it herself.