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The 5 best punctuation marks in literature

Stewart Lee on Gary Barlow and GG Allin

FILMS: My favourite film of 2014 was a four-hour-long documentary about the University of California, At Berkeley, which sounds super dull, but was in fact lovely, an implicit but full-throated defence of the idea of higher education free for all, and a possible farewell to that idea whose time, politically speaking, may have past | The Grand Budapest Hotel (plus this attempt at recreating the courtesan au chocolat) | Also: Her, Ida, Locke, Calvary, The Two Faces of January, …

Casting a Shetland pony to be a donkey in a ballet

MUSIC: twigs and Thom and Caribou [above] and Nikki and Tori and Tayphex and everything on this playlist.

Six discussion questions on the auctioning of Piss Christ

On Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity and reading an ex’s favourite book

PODCASTS: Serial, obvs. | This American Life inside a New York school board | Radiolab in the Galapagos and on translation | The Culture Gabfest all the time | Ariel Levy on the** Longform** podcast (twin with her heartbreaking essay Thanksgiving in Mongolia).

An attempt to interview Macaulay Culkin about pizza

A bomb is seen before it hits a house in a Gaza City neighborhood (Max Becherer/Polaris Images):

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Experience: I got stuck in a chimney

On parenthood and pessimism (So many quotable sentences, but two that have really stuck: “That old woman is, I’m aware, suffering a final indignity now: the posthumous insult of being made to symbolize some truth larger than herself.” “If I had known I was going to love him this much, I’m not sure I would ever have had him.”)

In defence of Gus van Sant’s Psycho remake

What was the poke? (“The poking stopped long ago. I can’t recall who it was who finally didn’t poke back.”)

OLD THINGS I CAME ACROSS THIS YEAR: John Hersey’s 1946 report from Hiroshima is in every way extraordinary | JD Salinger’s short stories A Perfect Day for Bananafish and Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes | I stayed up till 5am one night, unable to sleep until I’d seen all eight episodes of the documentary miniseries The Staircase (aka Soupçons) | The suite The Ninth Wave on the second half of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love |  EE Cummings, “anyone lived in a pretty how town”.

The New York Times’s obituary of rocket scientist Yvonne Brill began: “She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. ‘The world’s best mom,’ her son Matthew said.” The Toast responds with Misandrist Obituaries.

I want to read Dan Brown’s Inferno as annotated by (NYT book critic) Sam Anderson and (cartoonist/artisinal pencil sharpener/Aphex Swift masher-upper) David Rees

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