Whenever being a writer wasn’t enough to suit his churning sense of drama, Norman Mailer (1923-2007) could come up with some awfully wild-assed ways of advertising himself. They ranged from stabbing his second wife in 1960 (she lived and was dissuaded from pressing charges, and he actually got a judge to buy his argument that being labeled crazy would damage his literary reputation) to running for Mayor of New York City nine years later. But those almost seem like banal versions of Walter Mittyism gone disastrously overboard compared to Mailer’s notion that he could become a movie director—indeed, a visionary one, since why else bother if you were him?—without so much as a day’s apprenticeship.

Aaron Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing, among other things, is coming out with a new HBO series called The Newsroom. What can we expect? If Sorkin's oeuvre is any indication, we can expect lots of rapid-fire dialogue delivered while people are walking purposefully down hallways, surprisingly cogent explanations of issues, and, above all, thorny moral quandaries tackled with bold truth-telling. Let's take a look at the trailer:

In case you haven't heard, the Giants won. Because nobody who wasn't raised in the Boston TV market can abide the New England Patriots as either will or idea, a nation rejoiced between guacamole-flavored burps. But well before then—before the game's second half, in fact—the great American public met the real titans dueling for supremacy in Super Bowl LXVI. Clint Eastwood versus Madonna was a celebrity death match for the ages.

Madonna had literal home-field advantage, since she and her Madonna-ness—two increasingly disparate entities now that she's 53—were the stars of the halftime show. All 81-year-old Clint did (all? To quote Macbeth, "Did you say all?") was turn up in a two-minute Chrysler commercial. Iconically speaking, he cleaned her clock.

Early in the new HBO series Luck, a gangster’s chauffeur-cum-bodyguard, Gus Demitriou (Dennis Farina), goes to L.A.’s Santa Anita racetrack with his boss, Chester “Ace” Bern-stein (Dustin Hoffman), and makes a bet on a long shot. When the horse comes in, Gus clutches his winning ticket and says happily: “Don’t ever let anyone tell you this isn’t a great fucking country.” 

Jon Huntsman, languishing in the low single-digits in primary polls, has recently proclaimed his acceptance of both evolution and the contribution of human activity to global warming, which in today's GOP puts him somewhere to the left of Wavy Gravy. The Atlantic's James Fallows calls this the "what the hell, I might as well keep my dignity" approach to campaigning.