Whenever I see Diego Rivera’s distinctive art, my first thought is always to wonder once again why Nelson Rockefeller thought he’d be happy with one of Rivera’s murals in Rockefeller Center. Not only were Rivera’s socialist beliefs well known (he was a founding member of Mexico’s Communist party!), they inform virtually all of his work, so why in the world would the scion of one of the United States’ most famous capitalist families expect his own vision of “Man at the Crossroads” (the assigned subject) to be compatible with Rivera’s?!*

Rockefeller’s naïveté and arrogance become even funnier when you see the murals that brought Rivera to New York in the first place. Because so much of the internationally renowned artist’s work was fixed to the site of its creation, the fledgling Museum of Modern Art invited Rivera to create relatively portable murals at the museum itself. When he arrived, he created five frescoes with Mexican subject matter and three directly inspired by his visit to New York, and all of them deal with revolution, laborers, or inequality.

In short, nothing about the murals screams, “I belong in your family’s art deco temple of capitalism!”—except, of course, the fact that they’re beautiful and striking and bold. And in that the murals exemplify Rivera. His artistry is such that any fair observer would have to recognize it, but that artistry cannot be separated from Rivera’s political perspective any more than Bach’s St. John Passion can be separated from its liturgical foundation. That impassioned point of view is part of what makes the art so affecting and meaningful in the first place.

The MoMA murals, seven of which have been gathered back together for this exhibit, are small enough to be portable but still impressive in size: the most modest is roughly three feet by four, and the largest nearly eight feet by six. Like Rivera’s murals on the walls of buildings, the portable panel murals are frescoes on cement, created by painting pigments onto wet concrete so that the work was fixed when it dried. The drying cement forced Rivera to plan carefully, work quickly, and complete the murals in discrete sections called giornate, the borders of which must be obscured.

The exhibit displays sketches and X-rays alongside the murals themselves to illuminate Rivera’s process, which is fascinating, but the murals themselves keep drawing the eye. Online images of the frescoes simply can’t do them justify. In person, the colors are bolder, the scale is often remarkably grand, and the gritty texture of the concrete gives the paintings a raw, forthright quality that’s completely lost in photos.

The Mexican paintings are particularly vivid. In Indian Warrior, an Aztec jaguar kills a fallen Spanish conquistador with a stone knife through the neck. Agrarian Leader Zapata portrays Emiliano Zapata leading a band of peasant rebels as he stands over a dead hacienda owner, and The Uprising depicts a labor riot in strong colors: red for the revolutionary flags, blue for the laborers’ apparel. The violence in the murals isn’t graphic (at least not in the way we think of now, with blood spurting everywhere), but it is deeply unsettling in part because it is class conflict, usually with heavy racial undertones. Even in the ostensibly bucolic Sugar Cane, a light-skinned plantation owner lounges on a hammock while a heavily armed, noticeably darker-skinned foreman oversees the even darker-skinned laborers at their back-breaking tasks. The beautiful composition, foregrounded by Indian girls picking papayas, is darkened considerably by the subtext of economic and racial inequality.

Frozen Assets, the most spectacular of the American murals, critiques such injustice even more baldly, juxtaposing the city’s burgeoning skyline (Rockefeller Plaza stands in the middle of the tableau), a warehouse of homeless men, and a gated bank vault attended by a guard and a few elegantly dressed patrons. It’s a sad, stark painting that both marvels at the skyscrapers being built at the time and deplores the gross inequalities of the Depression-era economy. The verticality of the towers strains against the flat, quasi- subterranean warehouse and bank.

You could, I suppose, appreciate Frozen Assets on a purely aesthetic basic: the versatility with which Rivera wields his deliberately dingy color palette; the balance of his three-segmented composition; the delicacy with which he manages to depict light at its grayest, light devoid of hope; the dark echo of the broad-shouldered guard in the warehouse and then the bank. But that is not how Rivera would want one to experience the mural. For all his classical formality, drawing on styles of past masters, Rivera is a romantic in the sense that his art is meant to communicate something; it is not art for art’s sake; it is explicitly political art.

That kind of art always makes me a bit nervous. I suppose I idealize art for art’s sake; the idea that art need not justify itself with “meaning” appeals to me. But Rivera makes me see the nobility in meaning, the nuances that even a strong, clear voice can create. After all, that deal-breaking portrait of Lenin in the Rockefeller mural was, in all likelihood, making a more subtle, thoughtful point that Rivera’s critics were willing to credit. Painted during the rise of Stalin’s oppressive rule, Rivera’s Lenin probably represented a challenge as much to the Soviet Union as to the anti-Communist United States. And moreover, Lenin was but one face among many.

Rivera’s work might not be art for art’s sake, but it is still art: impeccably composed, darkly beautiful, and richly provocative. Yes, the MoMA’s exhibition makes it pretty obvious than Rockefeller was naïve in choosing Rivera for such a commercial project, but it makes something else obvious, too: he had excellent taste.

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*Yes, I know Rivera submitted sketches before beginning the mural itself, but sketches are sketches—preliminary by definition. No one should have been surprised when Rivera decided to make what one the previously undifferentiated faces into Lenin’s.

The Marvel universe is so damn weird. I don’t understand how mythical gods and aliens and ordinary assassin types are supposed to exist in the same universe on a reasonably level playing field. I don’t understand what S.H.I.E.L.D. is or who, exactly, it’s supposed to have jurisdiction over. I don’t understand the logic of the interdimensional portals—if there is any logic. But whatever. Writer-director Joss Whedon finds exactly the right tone for this nonsense, neither acting above it nor trying to puff it into something more serious than it is but simply embracing it in all its goofiness.

He meanders a bit, perhaps inevitable in a story about how disparate individuals come to unite around a common cause, but the journey is colorful and clever and fun. Classic cinema it’s not, but with its endearing sketches and witty banter, The Avengers is better than it has any right to be.

Following up on both Iron Man movies, Captain America, and Thor—plus The Incredible Hulk, technically, though the lead actors don’t match up—The Avengers brings together those titular characters (played by Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and Mark Ruffalo, respectively), as well as Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), to stop Thor’s sociopathic brother, Loki (Tom Hiddleston), from using what looks like a spectacularly ill-advised interplanetary alliance to conquer earth with an alien army.

The alien army stuff is pretty stupid, but it’s also pretty much beside the point. The point is getting everyone together, despite their differences, which gives the actors the opportunity to play off one another—and Whedon the chance to explore the group dynamics, something he virtually perfected in creating the cult-adored ensemble shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. Unlike some other writers known for their distinctive banter, Whedon has a knack for grounding quips in character. Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, for example, express themselves very differently. Their scenes together are witty and sharp in large part because Whedon never sacrifices character for a punch line.

The big action sequences are well done (though Black Widow’s first scene is basically straight out of Buffy with a few contextual changes, which probably should have annoyed but which I mostly found rather cute). The filmmakers get a lot of mileage out of how the superheroes work together, playing their powers off each other, which makes for some creative bits of choreography. But it’s the character stuff that truly makes The Avengers come alive, which is refreshing in a big summer blockbuster. I imagine it must be nice for the actors, too, to have actual people to play amid all the explosions and green-screened insanity, and they make the most of it.

Ruffalo somehow manages to communicate Bruce “The Hulk” Banner’s inner torment without becoming morose. Watching how the other characters relate to Banner is fun, too: the otherwise dauntless, imperturbable Black Widow betrays real fear when trying to recruit a reluctant Banner—a great touch—and the rapport between Banner and Stark, both scientists as well as superheroes (albeit with markedly different relationships with their powers), brings out the geekiest in both. It’s a side of Stark that Downey doesn’t always get to play, as Stark’s narcissistic swagger tends to overshadow his ingenuity, so it’s fun to see him get to explore some different shades of the man.

Captain America and Thor, on the other hand, aren’t super-smart along with being super-strong, etc., and as an unfrozen dude from the 1940s and an exile from Asgard, they lack a lot of contemporary cultural references to boot. The movie does a great job of playing without their ignorance without making them stupid—a fine balancing act. Evans and Hemsworth are probably key here, too. Simple, upright types tend to become dull killjoys on screen, but both actors have the charisma and the comic timing to keep their characters sparking.

In the end, it’s all so much fluff, with some painfully noticeable plot holes and an allegedly worldwide threat that is defeated in the space of Manhattan. I simply can’t take The Avengers seriously—and given my druthers, I do prefer movies I can take seriously. But then again, who wants to be serious on a Saturday afternoon?

• Stephen Colbert’s extended interview with Maurice Sendak, broadcast just a few months before Sendak’s death this week, showcased the author’s sad, biting wit beautifully. (Also, I know everyone loves Where the Wild Things Are—it’s lovely—but when I was a kid, Outside Over There, about a girl who must rescue her sister from goblins, hit me even harder. If you’ve never read it, check it out.)
• Anne Helen Petersen’s periodic posts at The Hairpin about scandals from Hollywood’s Golden Age are invariably fascinating, and this one, about Laurence Olivier and his doomed romance with the unstable Vivien Leigh, is particularly entertaining, with lots of pretty photos. (They were a crazy-attractive couple.)
• The fashions at the annual Met Gala are always stunning—not always in a good way, true, but they’re not boring. In any case, New York has a thorough slide show from the red carpet. (If that’s too much to take, Tom and Lorenzo’s annotated highlights are delightful.)
• Drawing on the latest episode of Mad Men, Alex Ross makes some insightful points about the non-universality of music.
• Slate has some fun examining the trendlet of YouTube videos in which zoo lions attempt to attack human toddlers through glass, and as I find those videos surprisingly hilarious, I found the article amusing as well.

The Met’s Engelhard Court, part of the newly expanded American Wing, is a roughly cube-shaped room, several stories high, all marble and glass and stone. It is an incredibly live space, so reverberant that sound takes five or six seconds to decay into silence. In other words, it’s actually not ideal for a concert. The space swallows up finer points of articulation and enunciation, turning everything into a beautifully resonant but undeniably muddy wash of sound.

The singers in Chanticleer compensated as best they could like the pros they are. They must have been crisping every consonant to make the lyrics remotely legible and hitting some of the faster passages staccato to keep the line from running into one long gliss. That worked on some pieces more than others, but it was all still beautiful. And to be honest, an overly reverberant space can be a fun novelty. Hearing the music crescendo to fortissimo, cut abruptly, and then linger there, like perfume, for an impossibly long time can be downright magical, which is something I associate with Chanticleer anyway.

To honor the Met’s reopening of the American Wing, the program featured music by American composers—broadly interpreted. The concert opened, for example, with two liturgical settings by Antonio de Salazar, one of New Spain’s most acclaimed composers, whose work would have been performed throughout the Catholic missions in what is now California. I suppose programming Salazar, who died in 1715, was partly a way to include some Baroque music despite the fact that the United States didn’t exist during the Baroque period, but Salazar’s music is far too lovely to attribute its inclusion solely to the America technicality. With striking use of a double choir, elegant chromaticism, delicate polyphonic texture, and, of course, familiar Latin texts, Salazar’s music made the hall’s resonant space sound remarkably cathedral-like.

From there, Chanticleer moved to a couple of shape-note hymns, which I always enjoy. Shape notes were invented in the nineteenth century with the idea that assigning different shapes to different notes on the scale would make it easier for untrained singers to learn to read music, so technically “shape note” refers only to a notional style. But the hymns those shape notes were used to write, predominantly in the South and Midwest, have a distinctive style as well, ignoring many conventional harmonic progressions and frequently employing stark open intervals. The resulting music has a fervent, raw quality, like an exposed nerve. Chanticleer doesn’t plunge all the way into traditional shape-note-sing vocal style (which, frankly, can get a bit shouty), but the singers do adopt a brassier-than-usual tone that makes for a good compromise, giving the hymns an uninhibited, earthy quality even amid the grandeur of the Engelhard Court.

But not even Chanticleer could make the program’s jazz standard arrangements sound quite at home in Engelhard. I admit that Ellington’s “Satin Doll,” Lorenz and Hart’s “My Romance,” and Arlen’s “Blues in the Night” aren’t really to my taste anyway (it is possible to find standards that aren’t quite so … cheesy), but even given my bias, the music didn’t quite come together in that space. A clubby sense of intimacy might have given the vampy arrangements more charm, but in the comparatively remote space of the American WIng, they often felt sort of silly—and not in a good way.

The program’s spirituals (“Wade in the Water” and “Deep River”) worked a bit better—I suppose the gravity of the genre grounded the songs even in the echoing room—but my favorites were definitely the twentieth- and twentieth-first-century art songs. I think I might prefer Barber’s choral arrangement of his solo song “Heaven-Haven (A Nun Takes the Veil)” to the original. Rendering the first-person text in a shared voice gives the brief, mystical song, with its shifting tonalities, an aura of universality, longing not for a convent life but for some better world. That ideas is already in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem, but giving the words to a choir rather than a soloist makes that theme more explicit and more moving. Eric Whitacre’s “This Marriage,” another short but lovely work, sets a gorgeous text by Rumi, and as with “Heaven-Haven,” the blurriness created by the room mostly worked for it rather than against it. Both pieces move slowly, luxuriating in every harmony, and extra resonance adds to the lushness of it all.

The weightier works were two song sets, Steven Sametz’s Not an End of Loving in its entirety and selections from Stephen Paulus’s The Lotus Lovers, both commissioned specifically for Chanticleer. Sametz uses three poignant texts: a gently romantic poem by Antjie Krog, a sensuously homoerotic poem by Walt Whitman, and a gloriously transcendent poem of love and mortality by Alcuin of York. Together the diverse texts create a portrait of love across a lifetime and beyond, and Sametz sets them with intricate craftsmanship, piecing together melodic fragments and rhythmic motives in a stunning mosaic.

Paulus uses vivid translations of Chinese poems attributed to a woman named Tzu Yeh. The dynamic are sometimes a bit showy, but the more subtle passages are exquisitely tender. Paulus pays great attention to the descriptive qualities of the poetry—bending willows, beaming moonlight, racing heart—and evokes those in the arcing melodies and vital rhythms of the music. Like Not an End of Loving, Lotus Lovers sounds like music that rewards further listening. I adored them on first listen Thursday night, but I suspect there’s more to discover with a more considered ear and, perhaps, a few less echoes. And of course, those promises of underlying depths are part of why I loved them most in the first place.

• Emily Nussbaum’s confession to “hate-watching” Smash cracks me up. It might not be a particularly justifiable pleasure, and in my experience, that kind of thing burns out rather quickly, but damn, is it ever fun while it lasts.
• Jerry Saltz, New York magazine’s art critic, rails against art auctions like the one that recently sold off Edward Munch’s 1895 Scream pastel. It’s interesting, but the angry idealism seems a bit over the top.
• The New Yorker‘s art editor has a new book featuring some of the magazine’s rejected cover art proposals, and she’s also posted many of the ideas online. It’s all fascinating—a good way to burn a ridiculous amount of time without even realizing it. (Via The Gothamist.)
• Alyssa Rosenberg’s analysis of boy band lyrics—comparing ’90s-era songs to some new ones—makes some great points and highlights some truly twisted lines.
• Little Japanese girls sing about the wonders of vegetables. I love it.

Few theatrical experiences are as awkward as a tearjerker that fails to jerk tears from you. In the case of War Horse, a play that attempts to dramatize all the suffering of the First World War through the suffering of a single horse, I’m prepared to concede that my own discomfort around horses (they might be beautiful from a distance, but they’re intimidating and off-puttingly alien up close) couldn’t possibly give me much of an affinity for this material. But I still think the problem transcends my own prejudices because, ironically, the problem is not the horse. All of the animals in War Horse are represented onstage by life-size puppets so gracefully naturalistic and expressive that you needn’t be one of those inexplicable horse-lovers to find them affecting.

No, the problem isn’t the three-dimensional animals but the one-dimensional humans, particularly the horse-besotted hero who doesn’t seem to care a whit about the death and anguish of any of the people he meets, not compared to the loss of his goddamn horse. His astonishing lack of empathy poisons everything. It makes me recoil from the play’s human lead and instinctively resist the animal lead, so when that final lachrymose climax rolls around, I’m more annoyed than touched.

If it weren’t for the puppetry, War Horse would be an utter failure. Instead, the puppetry of the production is so haunting and powerful that it redeems the play to a great extent. I don’t know quite what to make of that, but there it is: the spectacle of the production is so artful that it makes a flat, treacly, ill-conceived play worth seeing.

Like Steven Spielberg’s movie (which I didn’t see and never cared to), the play adapts a British children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo. The playbill notes that it has been adapted by Nick Stafford “in association with Handspring Puppet Company,” which seems a fair indication of just how intrinsic the puppetry is not only to the production but to the play—the very text—itself. The “lead” horse, Joey, and another horse in the British cavalry, Topthorn, are both represented by impressive physical models hand-operated by three puppeteers: two manipulating the legs, one the head and neck, and all providing whinnies and nickers and snorts and the like. Perhaps this sounds cumbersome, but the puppet is so flexible in its movements—and the puppeteers so perfectly choreographed in theirs—that both “horses” seem like living creatures. Even though the puppeteers are right there onstage, completely undisguised, you find yourself watching the faux equines, not the humans, for their reactions. The “horses” are easily the most compelling, charismatic actors in the whole production.

To be fair, the human actors really aren’t given much to work with, but that doesn’t stop some of them from turning in actively tiresome performances. Andrew Durand gives Albert Narracott, the naive country boy who falls hard for Joey, a ridiculously melodramatic habit of flinging himself to the ground and a petulant whine that would make Luke Skywalker roll his eyes in derision. (You might find that comparison jarring, but I’ve always hated Luke, whom I previously had considered the absolute nadir of male adolescent mewling. Luke, I think you’ve been replaced!) Not much more convincing (or palatable) is David Lansbury as Friedrich Müller, a German deserter who shares Albert’s obnoxious, histrionic disposition. Both Durand and Lansbury seem to pitch every line in a rushed, breathless shriek. I suppose it’s possible they’ve been directed to act this way, for some mysterious reason, but many of the supporting actors manage to turn in performances that don’t inspire unfavorable comparisons to Mark Hamill, so then again, maybe it’s just them.*

But ultimately, the play’s core flaw is its own insistence on privileging the suffering of horses over the suffering of people. I know that Joey can be read as a symbol—”never such innocence, never before or since” and all that—but that doesn’t make the story any easier to take when Albert reacts to the news that all the enlistees from his village may have been killed in a doomed cavalry charge by whinging about his horse. When a sadistic soldier—a German soldier, no less—has to act as the voice of reason, pointing out that a supposedly sympathetic character is ignoring the human misery around him in his sentimental fixation on animals, then something is seriously out of whack.

I’m not dismissing Joey’s plight. The use of cavalry horses is disturbing even when they were strategically effective, and it’s even more disturbing when they’re obsolete yet used nonetheless, charging obediently into the oblivion of machine-gun fire and barbed wire because tactics haven’t adapted to those new technologies. But I would argue that people’s pain in such situations is exacerbated by their awareness of the pointlessness and futility of it all. Part of what makes the First World War so appalling is that people were being forced to face terrifying new mechanized horrors (machine guns, poison gas) using outdated tactics and with insufficient defenses—and all because of a complicated tangle of alliances that affected everyday people not a jot. Surely a war of attrition is more cruel and frightful when you understand that’s what’s happening, that your death will serve no greater purpose, that your service as a soldier has no more strategic significance that a single mark in a body tally.

Joey can’t understand that because he’s a horse. Albert can’t understand that because he’s a shockingly immature little dunce. So why are they are entry points into contemplating this war? The artistry of the Handspring Puppet Company’s artistry can do more than I could have imagined, but it can’t get me past that fundamental roadblock.

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* Edited to add that Sean pointed out that this is a rather cheap shot at Mark Hamill. As annoying as Luke is, the blame for that is probably best placed on George Lucas, who has a truly remarkable gift of drawing stultifying performances from otherwise talented actors. Sean is a big fan of Hamill’s voice acting as the Joker in various animated shows and video games, and he’s right, Hamill makes a delectably creepy Joker. So please consider my derision pointed entirely at Luke, not at the guy unfortunate enough to have to play him.

• Marc Hirsh’s essay on the frequency—and hypocrisy—of sheepish, defensive covers of Britney Spears’s pop classic “…Baby One More Time” is pointed and fascinating. And honestly, it really is a good song (though “Toxic” is my Britney guilty pleasure of choice).
• Barack Obama’s silly “slow jam” of the news on Jimmy Fallon’s show got all the attention, but I, like Alyssa Rosenberg, was more interested in his knowing callout of Key & Peele’s cathartic “anger translator” sketch.
• Now I know why The New Yorker uses that damn diaeresis, and I’m completely unsatisfied with the explanation. Seriously, “coöperate”?!
• This montage of movie clips in which the actors look directly into the camera becomes more and more charmingly uncanny as it goes on. I kind of love it. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

The challenges in adapting George R. R. Martin’s dark, sprawling fantasy epic, A Song of Ice and Fire, for TV must have been daunting. You have an enormous, ever-shifting cast of characters, in which once-minor players periodically rise to the fore and major players are sometimes cut down without warning. You have action spread out across continents, isolating many subplots that nonetheless must be woven into the story as a whole. You have an elaborate, fully imagined world, in which intricacies of history and religion fit together in complicated ways, all of which must be conveyed without drowning viewers in a sea of exposition. And those are just fundamental storytelling concerns. Creating the story’s supernatural beings, constructing the many required sets and costumes, staging battles and riots, and casting children in tricky yet key roles all present pitfalls of their own.

So it’s a wonder that Game of Thrones (named for the first book in Martin’s series) has succeeded as brilliantly as it has, especially considering that the show runners have been taking risks: committing completely to the books’ often grim tone, elaborating on relationships only implied in the pages, seeking cinematic ways to handle some of the narrative issues rather than simply parroting the text rote. It’s not unfailingly “faithful,” in the way people usually mean, yet this is the kind of adaptation I love, not a stenographic rendition of the books but rather a faithfulness to theme and character over raw details. This is the kind of adaption that honors both its source material and its own medium, and the result here is a grandly entertaining quasi-historic saga—in short, great TV.

The plot of Game of Thrones in notoriously complicated, but it can be reasonably well summarized as the story of a nation reminiscent of medieval Europe (albeit with some supernatural elements at the periphery) plunging into an ugly, protracted civil war even as it is beset by a more existential threat of which few are aware and fewer still wish to acknowledge. The cast is too vast to list even the principals, but of particular note in second season are Lena Headey as Cersei Lannister, the desperate, not entirely stable queen regent; Alfie Allen as the insecure, little-loved Theon Greyjoy, well on his way to being a particularly contemptible traitor; Richard Madden as Robb Stark, making the most of the fact that the young King in the North has far more time on screen than he ever had between the pages; Maisie Williams, a marvelously naturalistic young actress, as the lost yet resilient Arya Stark; Emilia Clarke, small but surprisingly regal and appropriately fiery, as Daenerys, the last of the deposed Targaryens; and, of course, the great Peter Dinklage (top-billed now that Sean Bean lost his head at the close of first season) in a witty, shrewd, thoroughly delightful performance as Tyrion Lannister, the black sheep of his powerful noble family, now ruling as the Hand of the underage King in spite of them all.

Martin writes each chapter from the strictly limited perspective of a single character, alternating among a dozen or so in each book—a technique that gives the TV show’s writers considerable freedom in adaptation, imagining scenes in which none of Martin’s perspective characters would have been present. And almost without exception (we all have our quibbles), I have enjoyed such diversions from the “canon” tremendously: they’re like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead embroideries within Hamlet proper (if one will allow the heresy of comparing Hamlet and Ice and Fire—I’m well aware they’re worlds apart).

As for the canon, Game of Thrones has realized that strikingly well also. There are compressions and the occasional misguided oversimplification (the decision to rename Asha Greyjoy so she wouldn’t be confused with the Stark servant Osha had merit, but why go with Yara, which sounds almost exactly like—and in fact is a goddamn anagram for—Arya, the name of one of the most important characters in the whole series?!), but by and large, the show gets things right. As one who has read each of the books several times, I can’t speak to how comprehensible it is to newbies, but I can see the show runners putting in the effort, casting talented, distinctive-looking actors rather than a stable of generically pretty people and filling in background with judicious, well-chosen details, both in the dialogue and, more subtly, in the evocative sets and costumes. In one of the most inspired touches, the gorgeous opening credits scan back and forth across an ornate map, each week locating that episode’s settings in relationship to one another. It’s a beautiful way to orient the viewer, and for fans of the book series, it provides a fun hint as to what each episode might cover. (This week, Sean and I cheered eagerly at the first-time appearance of Harrenhal, a key stop in the journey of our beloved Arya. We are dorks.)

But back to what the show gets right. What I appreciate most about Game of Thrones is how it draws out Martin’s themes: about what makes a good leader, about how war affects common people who hadn’t any say in starting it, about how the compromises of ruling tend to thwart good intentions, about how good intentions are never enough. The sometimes excessive use of the HBO-given right to nudity (the hand-wringing over which I consider rather silly) and the often shocking violence (which, OK, I admit I watch some scenes through my fingers) have gotten a lot of press, but more often than not, that sex and violence are in service of a story that takes them seriously. Martin’s series mercilessly deconstructs romantic mythologies of knights and chivalry and takes a fascinatingly nuanced approach to the politics and fallout of war. It shouldn’t be any surprise that Game of Thrones—an adaptation of the very best sort—increasingly does the same.

• I don’t believe in worrying overmuch about whether television characters could realistically afford their homes, but I have to admit, this expert analysis of famous TV real estate is a lot of fun.
• This introduction to great opening film and TV titles features some modern classics, and if you’re in to that sort of thing, the site mentioned, Art of the Title, has long been a favorite of mind. Sometimes it’s a bit on the obscure, technical side, but it’s still fascinating, and the video collection is incredible.
• The Museum of the City of New York has a new online exhibition—with a smooth interface and gorgeous photographs—of nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century couture by Worth and Mainbocher. I’m having a ball looking through the Worth gowns and imagining which Edith Wharton characters would wear which, but even if you’re not semi-obsessed with The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, it’s worth checking out. (Via Jezebel.)
• This Reading Is Fundamental PSA is adorable—and so packed with characters and allusions that it rewards multiple viewings. Plus, it’s impossible to argue with the message. Reading is fundamental.