We kick off this week's show (our 75th!) exactly where you'd expect to find us: having a thorough debate about the merits and demerits of NBC's heavily hyped new series Smash, which will debut on regular television on Monday night, but which you can find on Hulu or iTunes right now, if you're curious (and if those services are available to you). How's the music? How's the acting? How's American Idol runner-up Katharine McPhee? We ask all these questions and more, and we let you hear some of the music.

In our B segment this week, we turn a microphone over to new PCHH pal and new-ish NPR.org books editor Parul Sehgal, who introduces herself with perhaps the greatest first words in the history of PCHH. She helps us talk about the hierarchy of book publishing and the entire matter of reading fiction thoughtfully and with your senses and reading (as some of us — cough — do) with the sense that you're supposed to be finding the right answer and might be failing. (If you've never read Monkey See's coverage of reading Moby-Dick, you'll hear us refer to it, and you can find both the goofy and ponderous sections in the archives.) Parul also has an actual book recommendation for you, although you'll have to wait a bit to read it.

As always, we wrap up with what's making us happy this week, including the return once again of Stephen's increasingly culturally adroit children, Twitter accounts we hope are real, casting a seemingly familiar political figure, and lots more.

Remember to find us on Facebook — that's where we try to answer questions and follow up on your thoughts from the show. And of course, you can follow us on Twitter: me, Stephen, Trey, Glen, Mike, and our new smarty-pants pal, Parul.

With the Super Bowl looming, three questions are buzzing around America: Who are you pulling for; who's singing at halftime; and where are you watching the game? And if you're hosting a party, you're also asking yourself: What am I going to feed these people?

So it's a good time to highlight a basic lesson of hosting: Nothing classes up a party — even one that's focused on watching football on TV — like good cheese.

And as I learned recently, nothing tastes better with cheese than beer. That's the word from Garrett Oliver, author of The Brewmaster's Table, an influential book about how to make beer-food relationships work.

When I called Oliver to ask which cheeses and beers are simpatico, he was traveling around to support his more recent work: the encyclopedic Oxford Companion to Beer, which he edited. In what may be the most enviable book tour I've ever heard of, Oliver hosts "tasting dinners" for audiences at craft breweries and restaurants around the U.S.

Oliver's beer and cheese pairings have been honed by numerous competitions, in which he faces off with wine experts to see who can pick the best beverage to go with a variety of cheeses.

"I've done a lot of competitions against sommeliers," he says. "And I always win. In fact, there are a number of wine books that actually mention that beer is easier to pair with cheese than wine is. And I think it's undoubtedly true."

We started talking about why that might be. I asked Oliver whether beer's carbonation might help cleanse the palate after you've eaten a hunk of creamy cheese.

"That's definitely true," he says. "It's got a cutting power. I mean, it's a physical scrubbing action. I call it 'scrubbing bubbles' — you know, literally, lift some of that fat off your palate. Whereas, famously, cheese is quite mouth-coating, and often doesn't even allow you to taste the wine."

And then there are the essential ingredients. Beer can be made from a wide range of malted grains, hops, and yeast, along with other add-ins, such as fruits and spices. That's where it can pull ahead of wine, says Oliver, who is also the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery.

"For example, if we want to take the malt and smoke it, we can make a smoked beer," Oliver says. "We can caramelize the malts; we can roast them like coffee beans, and make a beer that tastes like coffee, or chocolate. Or, you can make a beer that's 3 percent (alcohol), and slightly acidic, and is much lighter and delicate than any wine, and tastes completely different. Brewing is more like cooking; it can taste like almost anything."

By contrast, wine relies on a single ingredient — grapes, as either a single breed or a blend of several breeds — for its basic flavor profile. Other qualities are derived from how it's stored and aged — in oak barrels, for instance.

"That's not to say there's not a big difference between gewürztraminer and chardonnay," Oliver says. "But it's not as broad as the difference between IPA and stout."

Still, Oliver notes that an individual wine can be very complex. And he stresses that he's not trying to say you can't pair cheese with wine — just that it's not as easy as it looks.

"It's less about harmony than about contrast. Wine is very good at doing contrast. Beer is very good at doing harmony with food, including cheeses," Oliver says. "If you really do it well, with the beer, you can have the harmony and the contrast at the same time. And that's what gives some of those pairings a great lift."

Here's a guide to some of his favorites:

Or, if you prefer a quick short-hand list, here you are:

• Fresh Goat Cheese and Saison
• Sheep's Milk Cheese and Brown Ale
• Stilton Blue Cheese and Stout
• Farmhouse Cheddar and IPA
• Epoisses or Taleggio and "Brett" beers (sour or wild ales)

We used Oliver's suggestions to set up an informal taste test here at NPR — well, it was a photo shoot, and then people realized we had beer and cheese in the office, and things just kind of went that way.

Oliver didn't name specific brands for his pairings, so I took the opportunity to get together some of my favorite beers, and to try others for the first time.

People loved a pairing of taleggio and Mikkeller Nelson Sauvin Brut, a craft beer that includes subtle New Zealand hops along with Brettanomyces, a wild yeast that imparts musty, grassy notes that are often referred to as "barnyard."

"Those funky, earthy flavors tend to be very nice with washed-rind cheeses, like Epoisses, Taleggio, and cheeses like that," Oliver says.

Another favorite was the Stillwater Stateside Saison, along with Capriole's Sofia goat cheese.

"With fresh goat cheeses, as opposed to aged goat cheeses, saisons work very well," Oliver says. "They're bright; they're citrusy, they're super dry; they're slightly tangy."

The dry Stateside and delicate Sofia both drew raves as people went back and forth between the two. And the cheese got bonus points because it was made in Indiana, where the Super Bowl will be played.

If all this fancy-cheese talk sounds a little high-brow to you, think of it this way: Super Bowl XLVI will be an expensive spectacle, in which millionaires compete on a field enclosed by a stadium named for an oil company. The broadcast will include Madonna, in a halftime show that has ties to Cirque du Soleil.

So if you're hoping to preserve the grass-roots simplicity of football, my friend, not only has that horse left the barn — it's voguing its way down Main Street.

And if you're hosting a party, you must confront a few essential truths: Some of your guests only want to see the commercials and the halftime show; others are bored by the idea of a rematch of the 2008 game; still others, I recently learned, only want to see guys running around in tight pants.

Taken together, all this means that this is the year for your Super Bowl spread to really shine, for you to show that you've put some thought into your menu — even if it just gives people more reasons to eat good cheese and have a nice beer.

The best part is that cheese takes almost no preparation time. If your repertoire of culinary skills includes unwrapping a block and placing it on a plate next to some crackers, you're good to go.

If you'd like to round out your menu with foods specific to Indiana, Michele Kayal has written up how to do that, for our Kitchen Window recipe series.

"Poetry" and "money" are rarely found in the same sentence, unless a practitioner of the former is lamenting his dearth of the latter. Most poets get by on odd jobs, occasional grants, adjunct teaching, snippets of journalism or — in the case of the poet-undertaker Thomas Lynch — preserving dead bodies.

For Timothy Donnelly, however, money will be a little easier to come by, at least for a few years. Yesterday Donnelly, who teaches at Columbia and Princeton, was awarded the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, which is administered by Claremont Graduate University and carries with it a cash prize of $100,000. Along with the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly Prize, it's one of the largest awards given solely for poetry in the United States, if not the world. Donnelly received the prize for his collection The Cloud Corporation, which was published by Wave Books in September of 2010.

The Kingsley Tufts Prize is given to a poet in mid-career (Donnelly is 42), which means that it's usually going to someone with three or four books under his or her belt. But The Cloud Corporation is Donnelly's second book. His first, Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit, was published in 2003, after which Donnelly did something all too rare in the poetry world: He took his time.

That approach has paid off, and not just literally. The Cloud Corporation is a long, strange, often lovely book in which various antic contemporary tactics are used in counterpoint to a mood of intense melancholy. So, for instance, Donnelly gives us a poem called "Dream of Arabian Hillbillies" that is, as he puts it, "composed of words from successive pages of Osama Bin Laden's 'Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places' and randomly from the theme song to The Beverly Hillbillies..." It's the kind of project that could easily be too cute for its own good. But here is the poem's conclusion:

...May you not cave in and weep deep. May wolves
not eat your wings. May your life
not be a lifelong movie of your life
but a steadfast becoming other than that

which you are: a slave to the power
fiddling among the hills of fed clouds and shaken
into wonderment like a shot horse barely
gathering will to lay down with it, y'hear?

In the best moments of The Cloud Corporation, there is a depression so rich that it takes on a kind of grandeur. Readers will have to hope that Donnelly's newest honor only lightens his mood when he's away from his desk.

Comic-book nerds are outraged today. In fairness, comic-book nerds are outraged much of the time — it's part of their charm. But today, there's a unifying focus to their teeth-gnashing, as DC Comics has announced plans for seven limited-run titles focusing on characters from its venerated Watchmen series, which ran for 12 issues in 1986 and 1987.

The comics, which will follow the adventures of the central costumed heroes in the years before the events of Watchmen take place, will be published under the unifying brand "Before Watchmen." Since DC has already used "After Watchmen" as the brand for a series of reissues of titles that followed in that landmark story's wake, the first safe conclusion is that DC likes slapping the word "Watchmen" on stuff.

The Internet, as you could imagine, hit Defcon 2. People who are not comic-book fans might well wonder why this is any different from, say, the latest in a long line of Batman reboots that doesn't inspire outrage. People who are blog editors, for instance. [Hey! That naive question was between you and me. — Ed.]

I am here to help! Of course, I can't compete with the apoplectic howlings of the unhappiest of the comics bloggers, so I won't try. But I've talked about Watchmen before. I return to it every couple of years. And I am not here to tell you that "Before Watchmen" makes me, like so many others, angry at DC.

No, I am just here to tell you that "Before Watchmen" makes me think that DC is stupid, or at least it's acting stupid. Here are two — but not the only two — reasons why:

It shows that DC doesn't really understand Watchmen. The story of Watchmen goes back to when DC acquired a stable of heroes from Charlton Comics in the 1980s. They were handed over to writer Alan Moore to introduce them to a readership that might not have known who they were. The idea that Moore came up with for the characters was brilliant ... and so apocalyptic that it would have pretty much rendered them unusable afterwards. Since that's not really what DC had in mind when it shelled out good money for the Charlton stable, Moore reimagined the existing heroes as new standalone characters, while DC relaunched the likes of Charlton's Blue Beetle and the Question into its continuity.

In other words, not only was Watchmen never intended to be an ongoing series, that's precisely why the story was done as Watchmen and not just the Charlton heroes in the first place. It was produced as a single-shot, twelve-issue story using characters that had never existed prior to its publication and were never supposed to be used after. It was a self-contained novel with a beginning, a middle and an end, written with exactly that structure in mind. While Moore kicked around the idea of a prequel series around the same time, he ultimately rejected it as a dead end.

There's simply nothing in Watchmen that demands or even encourages the sort of infusion of new blood that ongoing series require every so often to remain relevant. Both its genesis and its final form explicitly argue against further elaboration. There are no other tales to be told in that world — none. That's the entire point. And mining it for material for what is essentially The Further Adventures Of The Minutemen (the Minutemen being the actual name of the superhero squad in the book) shows a stunning lack of comprehension by DC about one of their flagship literary properties. Speaking of which...

It risks devaluing Watchmen outside of comics fandom. Watchmen is very unusual in the world of comics, in that it's one of the few graphic novels known, read and loved by people who believe that comics are still just for kids, pow, zap, etc. And it's arguably the only work of graphic fiction in that lofty category, which, as the redoubtable Glen Weldon has mentioned in this space on multiple occasions, is primarily populated by nonfiction such as Maus and Persepolis.

So there are plenty of people who can't tell their Green Arrows from their Green Hornets who know that Watchmen is one of the landmark comic books. Maybe they even know that it was the only comic Time listed on its 2005 greatest-novels list.

To those somewhat comics-averse readers, "Before Watchmen" can serve only to dilute Watchmen's power as an ideal point of entry. It introduces market confusion where there was none before, dramatically increasing the chances that comics novices will pick up one of the new series without knowing the difference, be distinctly underwhelmed (even if the series themselves are done well, they are vanishingly unlikely to be as layered, intricate and powerful as the original) and dismiss as overrated the actual book that received all the accolades in the first place.

That doesn't just hurt Watchmen; that hurts comics. That's a new customer lost, having sought out something superlative and latched onto something inferior without realizing it and deciding that kids can keep their comics, thank you very much, blam, kablooey. And by marketing the titles under the "Before Watchmen" banner, DC is encouraging exactly that confusion, when it could really use the clarity of someone saying "You need to read Watchmen" without having to narrow it down to which Watchmen is which.

Look, there are plenty of reasons why today's announcement doesn't inspire confidence. (I'll start you off: Neither Moore nor Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons are to be found on the list of creative teams for any of the new "Before Watchmen" titles. You take it from there.) Raising most of them is tantamount to objecting to commerce being more highly valued than art, which is fair but, as always, futile. I'm less taken aback by the fact that DC is potentially screwing up Watchmen than by the fact that they apparently don't understand it or its value in the first place.

Also, if you think that there aren't howls of outrage every time Batman gets rebooted, you are adorable.

With the silent film The Artist in competition for this year's Best Picture Oscar, movie critic Bob Mondello has been thinking about the pre-talkie era. As it happens, the last silent film to win for Best Picture has just been released on Blu-ray: the 1927 flying-ace epic Wings.

Biplanes dive through clouds high above a World War I battlefield. Dogfights in the air, bombs on the ground, and all of it without special effects —Wings is an old-school epic, enormous in scope and basically real. The U.S. Army provided 220 planes, several thousand soldiers, tanks, artillery, and all sorts of logistical help.

There's a story, too, and it's a rouser. Two doughboys go off to war, both in love with the same girl. Rivals at first, they become friends, but then ... well, more you're not going to get from me. Suffice it to say there's a reason Wings won the first-ever Best Picture Oscar.

And that was the year The Jazz Singer brought sound to film, so Wings had to be bigger, better and louder, too. In big cities, it was accompanied by a full orchestra, with sound-effects guys in the theater to provide the roar of planes and bullets. To recreate that for the Blu-ray restoration, the filmmakers went back to the original shooting script and musical score — so they knew exactly where the sound effects should be, where the orchestra should burst into Mendelssohn for soaring flight scenes, and where the director wanted hand-painted yellow flames leaping from cockpits as planes went down. In an age of black-and-white silent film, those flames must have been astonishing.

When director William Wellman started working on Wings, Hollywood hadn't yet figured out how to film an air-war story. Most World War I planes, remember, were almost like kites, made of canvas and baling wire, and they were way too small to hold a cameraman and a pilot and an actor.

So Wellman bolted cameras directly to the planes and gave his 20-something stars flying lessons. In the making-of extras, Wellman's son remembers that leading man Charles "Buddy" Rogers, had never been in a plane in his life.

"They would go up in a two-seat plane, and there would be a 'safety' pilot who would duck down, and then the actors flew the plane," he says. "But you have fly those planes. You have a control stick, and you've got to work it to keep it in the air. My father said Buddy Rogers spent something like 98 hours in the air. When he would come down after shooting for a while, he would throw up."

Who could blame him? But the results are spectacular — flying footage that makes the green-screen trickery of modern films look downright lame.

Wings offers some down-to-earth pleasures, too: Gary Cooper in the bit part that kicked off his career, and Clara Bow, the It Girl, silently lighting up the screen. No wonder so many in the film industry despaired when big, clunky sound cameras came in, forcing everyone to stand in one place and talk into microphones. Spectacle and daredeviltry wouldn't make a comeback for years, but this one last time, Wings sure sent them soaring.

In comics news and rage news, DC has announced a set of prequels to Watchmen, and it will probably not surprise you to hear that creator Alan Moore thinks this is a pretty bad idea. [The New York Times]

Vanity Fair, not for the first time, is finding itself on the hot seat over including two women of color on its Hollywood issue, only to put them off to the right-hand side where they don't show on the cover when it's folded up. It may sound silly, but when you look at the entire series of similar covers, it really does seem weird that they keep pushing gorgeous people like Paula Patton and Anthony Mackie off to the side. [Jezebel]

Are you missing Adele since her surgery? Are you anxious to see whether any live appearance for the rest of her live can rival her Tiny Desk Concert? Well, you'll have another chance to see when she performs live at the Grammy Awards on February 12. This almost has to be the best thing about the Grammy Awards. [The Guardian]

There's some good advice at Lifehacker about giving some thought to your passwords on this, Change Your Password Day. (Hint: Don't change it to 12345.) [Lifehacker]

Tough economy? Not for auction houses, which are seeing huge numbers as they find investors "doubling down on art." Not in all cases, though: "The Degas was priced to sell in November for at least $25 million, but bidding stalled at $18.5 million." Heartbreak! Failure! [The Wall Street Journal]

If you haven't had anyone send you a message in the last couple of days asking you something like, "Have you seen the thing with Kristen Bell and the sloth?", you must have been taking a few days off from the internet. But if you were, here it is. [E! Online]

Jonathan Franzen's in the news again, this time talking about how e-books are chiseling away at the foundations of civilization as we know it. Absurd, isn't it? That the author of two of the better regarded novels of the past decade (give or take) would be concerned about how you read his books. The problem, according to Franzen, is manifold. E-books and digital readers are a con designed to rob you of money that you could otherwise be spending on paper books; e-books are trivial non-objects that you cannot hold and fetishize; print books are durable ("I can spill water on it and it would still work!" he is quoted as saying); and, most perniciously, e-books are supplanting the gorgeous permanence of book-books. "But I do fear that it's going to be very hard to make the world work if there's no permanence like that," Franzen said. "That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government."

Right. So. Read that again. That free copy of Moby-Dick you downloaded to your Kindle with the full intention of one day maybe starting to read it — that copy of Moby-Dick is the harbinger of some liberties-trampled nightmare world. Somehow.

Look. I think Jonathan Franzen is a talented novelist. I loved Freedom and The Corrections. I thought The Twenty-Seventh City was pretty damned good. But, whatever. People are allowed to say silly things. But can we please, please, please get past the e-books versus print books thing? Please?

There's really no need for a discussion about the technology any longer. Readers like the Kindle and Nook are great. They work. They're cheap. You can put a lifetime's worth of books on one — including a ton of public domain classics for a buck or less each. You can cobble together a virtual classics bookshelf for less than the cost of a round of drinks. Amazing.

Of course e-books aren't perfect. I am a scribbler, and you cannot scribble in the margins of an ebook. Not all books are available in digital editions (Martin Amis' Money, for instance, and most of Saul Bellow). E-books do not allow you to advertise your literary affectedness on the subway. And then there's the matter of all those barren bookshelves, in your home and at the soon-to-be-closed local independent bookseller.

Here's the thing: you don't have to be a print book person or an e-book person. It's not an either/or proposition. You can choose to have your text delivered on paper with a pretty cover, or you can choose to have it delivered over the air to your sleek little device. You can even play it way loose and read in both formats! Crazy, right? To have choice. Neither is better or worse — for you, for the economy, for the sake of "responsible self-government." We should worry less about how people get their books and — say it with me now! — just be glad that people are reading.

Awards season brings with it many things: the beautiful speech, the awkward speech, the mawkish montage, and the unforgivable snub. But it also brings one of the most profoundly silly rituals in celebrity culture: the red-carpet interview in which actors step up to be grilled, most commonly on E!, before they head into the venue.

For years, these chats were done by Joan Rivers, who specialized in later saying mean things about what everyone was wearing. This last part, she still does on a separate show. But Rivers is out of the red-carpet game, and much of E!'s coverage is now anchored by Ryan Seacrest, the man whose official job in Hollywood is Host Of Most Things, and whose unofficial job is Doing Things That Seem Like Stupid Jobs Until You See Other People Trying To Do Them And Realize Hey, I'll Be Darned, That Ryan Seacrest Knows Something. Seacrest does the Golden Globes, he does the Oscars, he does the Emmys ... essentially, he handles your high-end red-carpet events, such as they are. (Hey, everything has a high end. Even a very short fencepost.)

He did not, however, do the Screen Actors Guild Awards Sunday night, and that meant the coverage was primarily in the hands of his frequent co-host, E!'s Giuliana Rancic, who is an E! anchor and has her own reality show, making her both a deliverer and a maker of celebrity news. Assisted by Kelly Osbourne (of the Ozzy Osbournes) and Ross Mathews, another person who is famous for really no reason at all except that he used to be a character named "Ross The Intern" on Jay Leno's show, Rancic delivered some of the most awkward, cringe-worthy celebrity interviewing that's been offered in some time.

The winners, plus plenty of video and photo evidence, after the jump.

Imax is into what's big and splashy; it only makes sense that they'd be looking to get into Bollywood. [The Hollywood Reporter]

E-books are part of a loss of permanency that is "not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government." So says Jonathan Franzen. [The Guardian]

On the other hand, e-publishing of erotica is really taking off, so if we don't have justice or responsible self-government, at least we'll have plenty of distractions. Bread, circuses, and hubba-hubba. [CBC]

I firmly believe that questions like "What Really Famous Book Should Be Cut Down So It's A Lot Shorter?" are only asked as bait for those who enjoy indignant spluttering, but I have to hand it to The Guardian for asking a similar question in a way that left lots of flexibility: It only took two posts for someone to change the subject to spluttering about Facebook. [The Guardian]

This story makes my face melt, just because: Jekyll & Hyde returns to Broadway, starring Constantine Maroulis, the frog-lipped crooner who once came in sixth on American Idol and is now, undeniably, a Thing. Specifically, he is both Jekyll and Hyde. I am defeated. [The New York Times]

Still looking for Oscar prognostication advice? Michel Hazanavicius of The Artist took home the Director's Guild award this weekend, and while that's not a perfect predictor, when you combine it with the rest of the tea leaves, it makes the film a pretty persuasive Best Picture favorite. [Slashfilm]

Tonight's double episode marks the end of Chuck, NBC's genial spy-nerd comedy that has existed on a perpetual cancellation bubble since its debut in 2007. Against overwhelming odds and in spite of eternally low ratings, Chuck's life and death speaks in surprisingly potent ways to how television is changing.

More than anything, Chuck is a story about the rise of the fan. Not only because the show has organized devotees — that's not new. (Forget that fact and feel the wrath of the indignant Star Trek fans who campaigned to save their show back in 1968 ) What makes Chuck fans different from most is that rather than just expressing the depth of their love, they tried to think pragmatically as well as passionately about keeping their show on the air.

It's a common internet truism that if you're not paying for ad-supported media, you're not the customer — you, as an eyeball to be advertised to, are the product. It's most commonly said about services like Facebook, but it's just as true of ad-supported television. And Chuck fans, in their businesslike enthusiasm, sold themselves as a product.

Specifically, rather than trying to prove how much they loved the show (which is what it demonstrates when you send a network nuts or Mars bars), they took their argument to a sponsor, Subway, when the third season was imperiled. Attacking sponsors who support shows to which you object is old news; enthusiastically presenting yourself as a potentially loyal customer was an approach that had never been deployed in a way that got so much attention. Even star Zachary Levi participated, marching a small army of fans to a Subway to participate in the campaign to buy a footlong sandwich on the night of the season finale, which fans called "Finale And A Footlong." In a five-part interview with Alan Sepinwall of Hitfix, Josh Schwartz, who co-created the show with Chris Fedak, calls it "the sandwich revolution."

Sandwiches and advocacy, after the jump.

The Oscar nominations are like a small group of mosquitoes in your bedroom — you may want to ignore them, but you can't. (We talked about how the Best Picture nominees were determined, but if you want a fuller explanation, here is one.) We talked about how Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close managed to be nominated, whether Moneyball is the real surprise nominee, and how many ways we can amuse ourselves by saying "War Horse." Unsurprisingly, Glen has a few ideas about what the Oscars are going to sound like, and hearing him read them aloud is even better than reading them on Twitter.

Our other topic this week was how to go about making your case for something for which people already think they've heard the case made. Attack The Block?Our first in-depth discussion of The X Files? We've got 'em, and some other stuff, too.

As always, we wrap up with what's making us happy this week, including my new favorite Tumblr, a completely joyful video of people watching television (really! no, it's great!), and more.

You can find us on Twitter: me, Trey, Stephen, Glen and Mike. Or find us on Facebook and tell us what's making you happy this week.

It turns out that having the president warble your song will do good things for its sales. That's the apparent lesson after Barack Obama sang a line of "Let's Stay Together" at a fundraiser and online sales of the Al Green original increased substantially. [The Hollywood Reporter]

"Cynthia Nixon's gaze has its own grammar." So begins Ben Brantley's nicely lyrical review of Nixon's performance in Wit. [New York Times]

Critics are in an interesting position with live performances: They need to take notes, but some find their scribbling distracting. One performer in New York invited audience members to punch critics in frustration. [The Guardian]

I can only watch about five minutes of Sacha Baron Cohen at a time, but that doesn't mean I don't have a lot of sympathy for the argument that the Oscars are far too timid about recognizing comedy in general and raucous comedy in particular. [The Atlantic]

A survey in the UK finds that while gay performers are likely to be out to the people they work with and out to their friends and family, far fewer are out to their agents. It's an interesting report. [The Stage]