1. "A Choice that Films Ignore: Hollywood heroines who don't consider abortion are of a generation taking its rights for granted." In The Guardian, Hadley Freeman argues that Knocked Up, Juno and Waitress form "a hat-trick of American comedies in the past 12 months that present abortion as unreasonable, or even unthinkable - a telling social sign."

["Each of these films presents situations where women do not consider abortion as a feasible possibility and dismiss it - as something that is portrayed in Knocked Up as the act of selfish women who don't want a swelling belly to impede their clubbing. I don't believe any of these films is consciously designed to be anti-abortion propaganda. But they are a product of a generation that has had the luxury of legal and relatively easy access to abortion. The danger is that one forgets what the alternative really meant, and as a result sentimentalises it."]

["There are ellipses in The Witnesses, events filled in by the narrator that leave us scratching our heads: Téchiné left out that? The ending isn't much of an ending. But in an interview, Téchiné quotes Fritz Lang: 'Death is not an ending.' He also has a character in the movie say, of a work of art, 'The hub keeps shifting, like in life.' It's no mean feat to shift the hub and leave us more intrigued than annoyed."]

["It was while watching a version of Total Recall from a gang calling themselves Six Foot Studios For the Alamo Draft House that I realised that many of these home-made attempts were superior to the films that were being paid homage to."]

["Weird personal questions have become ubiquitous totems of online security. If you tell the bank your favorite grade-school teacher or cartoon character, the thinking goes, it'll be easy to confirm your identify when you misplace your account number. This thinking is dumb."]

"We don't turn away from a neighbor in their time of need. Because every one of us knows that what—but for the grace of God, there goes us. The American people have never stopped doing this, even when their government walked away—and walked away it has from hardworking people, and, yes, from the poor, those who live in poverty in this country. For decades, we stopped focusing on those struggles. They didn't register in political polls, they didn't get us votes and so we stopped talking about it. I don't know how it started. I don't know when our party began to turn away from the cause of working people, from the fathers who were working three jobs literally just to pay the rent, mothers sending their kids to bed wrapped up in their clothes and in coats because they couldn't afford to pay for heat. We know that our brothers and sisters have been bullied into believing that they can't organize and can't put a union in the workplace. Well, in this campaign, we didn't turn our heads. We looked them square in the eye and we said, 'We see you, we hear you, and we are with you. And we will never forget you.'"