In which Maria Bustillos and David Roth venture to the movies to see the latest by Terrence Malick. It is called To the Wonder and it is 113 minutes long.

David Roth: There's a thing that happens to me watching Terrence Malick movies. I marvel at the way they look—which I know is a novel response, but I'm a unique dude—and kind of chuckle to myself at the involuted, ponderous what-if-God-was-one-of-us philosophical stuff. And then I walk outside secure in my sophistication and am instantly struck by how THE WORLD IS SO RICH AND BEAUTIFUL HOLY SHIT.

Maria Bustillos: Yes, first things first: I nearly died of the BEAUTY. Every [...]

Maria Bustillos: I'm trying to parse all these Metacritic reviews of The Master. Mainly they seem to be saying, "I hate it, but I think I'm supposed to. A masterpiece."

David Roth: David Thomson, in the New Republic, had a great first line. Which was "Well, at least it's pretentious."

MB: Yay? I'll say this, whoever reconstructed M. Phoenix's shoulders deserves a special Oscar. His bod is all Cubist, suddenly.

DR: It seems to me like this: a fine director made a mostly perfect-looking film, with an interesting musical score and fine performances. Except that it is also totally inert, with no real characters one can or could [...]

Here is a tweet that Gawker writer Max Read retweeted a few days ago.

RT @DavidWinkies: @max_read actually if you call a lawyer and say you're white a dude and str8, they say you have no case #truestory

— max read (@max_read) May 23, 2012

So, sort of a backstory, to begin. Last week brought us two Internet rumpuses regarding and/or demonstrating an especially privileged kind of blindness/obliviousness/ridiculousness. One was TED curator Chris Anderson's flabbergasting decision to withdraw a TED speech about wealth inequality on the grounds that it was "too political." The other, John Scalzi's head-patting essays on Kotaku, comparing [...]

David: I need a haircut, Maria. I look like a duckling right now.

Maria: And a stiff drink, if you listened to that radio interview with Caitlin Flanagan, like we were supposed to. Evidently the women of America had calmed down too much since her last book, To Hell With All That, caused such a ruckus over what was widely perceived as the author's throwback and essentialist anti-feminist ideology. So not content to get people in a stir with Atlantic Monthly and New Yorker appearances, she's written a new one, Girl Land. Even the cover of which is pretty provoking.

All these moms are fine [...]

Paris or Phoenix. Barcelona or Oklahoma City. If you're planning a vacation, these aren't difficult choices. And if you're pursuing a career in professional basketball it's barely a choice at all. For all the fringe perks of gig hooping in Europe, playing in the NBA offers better pay and a higher public profile than playing anywhere else, as well as the opportunity to be posterized by Blake Griffin and endure reliably wrongheaded, weirdly passive-aggressive criticism from TNT's Reggie Miller.

But because of the long-running lockout, the NBA seems likely to make a lengthy stop in federal court before returning to the hardwood kind. This means that America's ballers are [...]

David Roth: Before this World Series is over, I really hope we can find out what Tony La Russa could've said over the phone to Derek Lilliquist that would've sounded like "Marc Zep-chinski." There is really nothing that sounds like that, except maybe for some long-simmered Ukrainian hoof-and-potato stew

David Raposa: Wait, he was asking for Rzep and got Lynn? I'm not sure there are enough wine coolers west of the Mississippi for TLR to plausibly mush-mouth "Jason Motte" into "Lance Lynn."

David Roth: I think he wanted Motte to pitch to Napoli? Or I'm assuming as much, because you'd have to be a fraudulent Seagrams-7-cured Just For Men box-model [...]

David Roth: Well, how do you like that? A guy who looks like a flamboyant, bespectacled version of Grimace doing the Humpty Dance at Yankee Stadium.

David Raposa: You shouldn't talk about David Wells like that. He's worked really hard to beat the gout.

David Roth: You can tell by how shiny he is in the TBS studios. He looks good. He looks less like a week-old, goateed gnocchi than he used to.

David Roth: I'm still baffled by pretty much everything that has happened. When the Diamondbacks played the Mets earlier this year, they seriously looked like a Western European World Baseball Classic entry. One where all [...]

David Roth: So, tell me again, please, how you found this novel, The Last Western? I know how I found it, which was by you giving me a copy and telling me it was important that I read it.

David Roth: It was like Natalie Portman's "The Shins will change your life" moment in Garden State, except you are shorter, smarter and less pointy than she is, and I am marginally less grumbly-sad than Zach Braff, and you were right and also The Shins couldn't conceivably really change anyone's life.

Maria Bustillos: A guy named Mark Harris went all crazy over it on this listserv I was on back [...]

Part of a series for the new Awl Music app.

The longish story shorter about how I came to lose cable around the time I entered high school is that I was screwing up. Not in any sort of way that would alter my permanent record, or was anything but suburban and toothless and play-acty. I was tanking my classes and baiting my teachers, refining my basketball skills—without much improving my NBA draft stock, in retrospect—to the exclusion of any other kind of self-improvement and shoplifting stupid eighth-grader things like baseball hats and basketball cards and used CD's. There was disapproval from across the dinner table, strange threats [...]

David: So, had your mind blown in a very understated way by any octogenarian restaurant critics lately?

Maria: Yes, and marveled at their sangfroid, also.

David: If we will all remember this past week as the one in which Marilyn Hagerty, elderly journalist in Grand Forks, North Dakota, became famous for a very factual review of a new Olive Garden—and was then punished for it by having to talk to Piers Morgan on CNN, as she will be tonight—it's still a little unclear how she and we got here. That is, I'm still trying to figure out what The Internet thought about all this. It had some [...]

David Roth: A film about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and ostensibly weird sex, from a director who has spent his career making films about how terrified/fascinated/aroused/disgusted/disgusto-roused humans are by their bodies and what they do and the horrible things that come out of them. So why, Maria Bustillos, would the two things I remember most from A Dangerous Method be 1) how cruel my female friends were about Keira Knightley's breasts and 2) the nagging question of whether David Cronenberg is trying to make interesting movies anymore?

Maria Bustillos: A film worth seeing, I thought—though not one worth talking about until after, so I'm glad we waited. I [...]

David Roth: Let's talk about how Adam Gopnik feels about French food.

Maria Bustillos: OMG HE REALLY LIKES IT.

DR: Which is perhaps the least surprising thing one could learn about Adam Gopnik. I guess if it were somehow to be revealed that he is blown away—to the point where he thinks you might also find it fascinating—by some things his kids said at the Museum of Natural History, that might be less surprising. But I'm kind of with him on this one, to a great extent. Who doesn't like food?

MB: Well, you! That is to say, I have noticed that awful food, at least, exerts a [...]

David Roth: Did you hear that "Let's Go Motte!" chants the Cardinals fans were doing in Game 1? Where do they come up with this stuff?

David Raposa: The Best Fans In Baseball continue to surprise and amaze with their improvisational alacrity. You cannot stop The Best Fans In Baseball. You can only hope to distract them with around-the-clock nonsense about how trading an up-and-coming center fielder for a fourth starter and some back-end bullpen arms is A Good Thing.

David Roth: I don't know that much about St. Louis. I know Fernando Vina was in a Nelly video and that they have tasty Italian-style sandwiches and that they've [...]

When the full, all-outtakes-taken-in version of Yakkin' About Baseball is released as a three-VHS set around Christmas (by Vestron Video: check for it!), much will be revealed. How much like a S.E. Hinton novel David Roth found this year's Royals to be; how much David Raposa keeps steering things back towards the "fact" that the United Nations/Trilateral Commission "set Ugueth Urbina up" for a crime he didn't commit. But if there is only one lesson to be learned from it, it is that it is very difficult to stay on topic or make jokes—or, at the very least, not type in capital letters all the time—during an Internet-style chat [...]