At the end of season two, Betty became convinced that Don was cheating on her. (Crazy, right?) She spent much of a day tearing apart the house, looking for clues of infidelity. Shoving her hands inside pants pockets (smoking), pulling out desk drawers (drinking), reading every scrap of paper in the house (sweating), Betty, in a deflated and droopy party dress, found nothing. Generally, TV shows will afford one scene to this sort of lipstick-on-the-collar scenario, but instead we were drawn into the hunt over the course of the entire episode. READ MORE

The reviews are coming in for Joanna Smith Rakoff's new novel, "A Fortunate Age," which is not named 'Brooklyn': The novel ably captures the zeitgeist, with venture capitalists financing magazines headed by M.I.T. prodigies and young people worrying about the gentrification of their Brooklyn neighborhoods. But where [Mary] McCarthy's histrionic rich girls enabled her to skewer contemporary mores, Smith Rakoff's are almost indistinguishable in their blandness.