For reasons known only to itself, Vanity Fair has devoted some 3500 words to the hot-button issue of how some high-status literary critics don't like The Goldfinch. Representative phrasing: "But, in the literary world, there are those who profess to be higher brows still than The New York Times..."

Edmund Wilson, the noted critic and public intellectual, was born on this day in 1895. (He died in 1972.) Wilson had the kind of come-to-New-York-and-pal-around-with-writer-celebrities life that quite a lot of people still dream of. He was also a notorious gossip.

Ellen Willis is not a household name, but in a just world she would be. A leftist cultural critic and feminist, Willis was a defining figure of the New York cultural scene in the 1960s and 1970s. She was probably best known to the public as the first pop music critic the New Yorker ever had, a gig she held from the late 1960s into the 1970s. Music was not her only passion, though. She was an outspoken feminist commentator, and one of the early members of the New York Radical Women's collective, the effective cradle of the women's movement in New York. (Check out Susan Faludi's piece on the collective from the New Yorker last year for more details.) Willis died in 2006, but her writing has been experiencing a revival of late among younger pop culture critics, who are attracted by the energy and intelligence of Willis' work.

Invincible as herpes, Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" has topped Village Voice's Pazz & Jop year-end critics poll.

Critic Marshall Fine saw The Dark Knight Rises and didn't care for it much. That's bad enough, but then he had to go and post his opinion on the internet, thereby ruining the film's then-perfect Rotten Tomatoes rating. (Since then, it's dropped down to 85 percent, with eight "rotten" reviews overall. Sorry, fanboys and girls.)

Congratulations to New York Times dining editor Pete Wells, who was just named as the paper's new restaurant critic. Here are some pictures of him, in case anyone is curious what he looks like. For some reason, the Times has been scrubbing images of him from the site.

Lady Gaga has used her latest column in V magazine to go after New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn and institutionalized critics in general. She'd much rather all the bloggers of the world be judging fashion instead of, you know, the professionals.

The New York Times sent James Oestreich to review a free Mozart Concert at Avery Fisher Hall a few weeks ago. How was the concert? Don't ask James Oestreich! He spent the bulk of his review complaining about the presence that some selfish jerk with an oxygen tank.

America loves having its movies and television shows recapped, reviewed, and regurgitated back to them, but the one thing that it hates more and more is having the events of those things spoiled by reviewers. It's time for a guide on what constitutes a spoiler and what does not.

Katie Roiphe, one of the leading sex-opinion-havers of American letters, is the upper crust version of crazy cat woman Andrea Peyser. While Andrea only broadcasts her psychologically-fraught Victorian sexual shame to tabloid readers, Katie Roiphe gets to publish hers in all the favorite news outlets of East Coast Ivy Leaguers. She calls male novelists fey pussies in the NYT Book Review! She told women how to do divorce right in the pages of New York magazine! She pooh-poohed the notion of date rape all over the place! And now, she's taken to Slate—the Gawker of bored academics—to reveal how jokey children's book "Go The Fuck to Sleep" reveals that "yuppie" parents (unlike Katie Roiphe) are doing sex wrong.

Paige Wiser was the TV critic at the Chicago Sun-Times. She was fired yesterday for fabricating part of a review. But she might still have a job if it wasn't for her damn kids.

Prestige drama Mad Men is beloved by critics and those who give out awards. Now one critic is railing against the show's first four seasons as "weak" and "haphazard." Could he possibly be right?

Roger Ebert, who lost his lower jaw to cancer, just got a brand new prosthetic chin made out of silicone. Looks pretty good! Ebert says he'll wear the prosthetic during his new PBS show.

The reviews are rolling in for Season of the Witch, Nicolas Cage's latest home movie. And, surprise! They are not very kind at all. This might be Nicolas Cage's worst movie, ever! Which would be a feat.

The Los Angeles Times has responded to the unmasking of their restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila by the restaurateurs behind Beverly Hills restaurant Red Medicine.

When the owner of a Beverly Hills eatery spotted the L.A. Times restaurant critic in his lobby, he refused her service and took her picture, making her identity publicly available for the first time. Kiss anonymity goodbye, S. Irene Virbila.

Flowery New York Times perfume critic Chandler Burr is stepping down from that job to become the "curator of olfactory art" at the Museum of Arts and Design. Is this the end of an era of scent-based pretension?

So say the critics anyway! Well, the critics who have joy and whimsy in their hearts and aren't soul-dead monsters whose chest cavities are full of nothing but discarded tin. Heh, sorry. Let's look at both sides of the debate!

Now that he's already denounced Christiane Amanpour's foreign, Taliban-supporting hair, what shall Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales denounce today? Sexy, sexy things. Girls gallivanting about with their epidermis hanging out! And sexting. Oh yes—sexting.

David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's Facebook movie opens next week and the reviews are coming in. Surprisingly (?), stuffy old movie critics seem to think it's, well, brilliant. Let's take a look at what some folks had to say.