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?

Google has just introduced a new option that allows you to filter search results by "reading level." Who knows what black magick is behind this, but we thought it would be fun to compare some popular websites.

Author and intellectual Tony Judt died yesterday in New York at 62, after a battle with ALS. His best known book, "Postwar," about Europe after WW2 was called "remarkable" by The New Yorker. Read his final essays, starting here.

The Canadian author set up a Twitter account to promote a book, and now totally loves the OMG's and LMAO's. She quickly gained thousands of "Twitterpals," one of whom said to her, "I love it when old ladies blog."

In The New York Review of Books, Jonathan Raban argues that Sarah Palin's popularity is based on her oversimplification of economic principles. (And, also, hating the Jews.)

the New York Review of Books' signature illustrator for the last half century, at an exhibition of his work in 2008, according to the New York Times. Levine died today at age 83. RIP.

The intellectualization of Michael Jackson as icon starts in earnest today with The New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als' queer theory read on his career in The New York Review of Books. The only problem is, Jackson wasn't gay.

On the day you're the guy who switches parties and potentially gives Democrats a super-majority in the U.S. Senate, there are certain perks. Like making people read your boring New York Review of Books piece.

It is not easy to get news out of the North Koreans. It took the CIA to basically break the story of Kim Jong-Il's stroke; as an expert pointed out in today's Washington Post: "We don't know diddly about what is going on inside that closed country."* But it turns out Kim Jong-Il likes publicity! "I know I'm an object of criticism in the world," he told Madeline Albright one time. "But if I'm being talked about, I must be doing the right things." (Hey, think we've identified Spencer Pratt's PR role model??) Anyway, every year the hermit kingdom invites a few journalists to bask in its glorious spectacle of self-reliance, and every year we read the resulting works of journalism and think "Well who in the name of Engels let that guy in?" After the jump, find out how the likes of Parade, Vice and a random graphic novelist infiltrated the Stalinist hermit state.

The New York Review of Books, highbrow home of Joan Didion letters and occasional epic literary feuds (or "nerd fights") today undertakes it greatest challenge: explaining "blogs" to its million-year-old readers. The author assigned to the task? Journo (and cartoonist!) Sarah Boxer, who has assembled a little print anthology of blog "writing." Which means that her task is two-fold, actually: explaining blogs to old people and justifying collecting them into a book to herself. How does she fare? Hilariously!

Have you ever made it all the way through an issue of the New York Review of Books? Of course not! But did you realize that the septuagenarian crowd is getting totally rowdy back there, carefully crafting literate, occasionally randy personals for potential hookups? (Remember, they don't know how to use Craigslist). Actual example: "Manhunt for literate 70 y/o gay men!" Examples after the jump! (Totally SFW).

Critic, biographer and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick, co-founder of the New York Review of Books, has died. In a response to a letter from screenwriter and New Yorker columnist Penelope Gilliatt that complained about Hardwick's trashing of Lillian Hellman in 1968, Hardwick wrote: "Perhaps Miss Gilliatt doesn't yet understand all there is to know about New York and the literary and intellectual world here. When we remember the number of unjustified slams and unwarranted raves, the way convictions sometimes cross uncomfortably, it is astonishing that relations remain as humorous, slap-dash, unparanoiac, and, above all, as pleasantly disorganized as they really are." [NYO]

Last week, the NYT Book Review gave a page to MuggleNet's What Will Happen In Harry Potter 7. Today, as discussed, they reviewed the autobiography of Ron Jeremy. It is a fun little paper, the NYTBR. But the professors over at The New Republic's education blog are not amused. America, they say, is in urgent need of a new book review. Who will review Richard Rorty and Pascal Engel's What's the Use of Truth? Who will meditate on Dale Zacher's The Scripps Newspapers Go to War, 1914-18? Whoooo?

Well, what were you expecting from the New York Review's personals?