Every year, each of the major TV networks produces a couple dozen pilots for new shows before determining which ones to air that fall. Programming execs at all

This post is sponsored by Skype. It's time to say more and stay human. It's time for Skype.Jane and Edith don't live on the same coast. But they work together. A lot. So they emailed back and forth about the different ways they communicate.Edith: S O. We work on this website together, but you're in LA and I'm in New York. What would we do without instant messaging, a.k.a. the greatest and most important thing ever invented? I wonder what our total chat word count would be. "[Big number]." "Wow tha...

The Paley Center for Media, which has locations in both New York and LA, dedicates itself to the preservation of television and radio history. Inside their vast

Brenda“My daughter is now 36, and lives in San Francisco. I remember when she sold Girl Scout cookies door to door. Nobody ever really bought them. But she never gave up.”To celebrate Mother’s Day, we talked with 20 moms during an overcast, leafy wal k through Brooklyn. We asked them to describe memorable moments of their motherhood.For the moms in all of us. Mary“When they’re one and you see them walk, that’s great. When they’re three and they enter pre-school, that’s great too. Kids’ l...

In the early '40s, Laurence Olivier had everything going for him: he was widely regarded as one of the two best actors to ever grace the British stage, his film career had been set aflame by startling performances in Wuthering Heights and Rebecca, and hi s gorgeous wife, Vivien Leigh, had just pulled off Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. He was also at the apex of his career as a stone-cold fox. And as half of the “first couple” of Britain, he was the closest that a born-and-raised Brit would get t...

"If somebody wants big money, they're not gonna rob a bank."

Unpopular Opinions is a bi-weekly column in which a writer takes a stand against popular opinion, whether it's asserting the true merit of a supposedly guilty

WAIT, how can we possibly do a "history" installment? Is it going to be, oh, okay, here are a bunch of books from various disparate eras that may or may not correspond to fields Nicole studied? Yes. That's how it's going to work. And then we'll do a few mo re of them in upcoming weeks.London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew – I have read this book, along with Mayhew's The London Underworld in the Victorian Period: First-Person Accounts by Beggars, Thieves, and Prostitutes, at least eleventy-one ...

When people think of archives at all, they think of mouldering files in forgotten basements or top-secret government reports that shady agents go rogue for in order to PROVE THEIR INNOCENCE.The truth is that real-world archives lie somewhere between thos e two extremes. There are definitely juicy, delightful secrets hidden in your local archives, but there are also a ton of super boring records and nasty paper cuts awaiting you. Before diving into archival research, you need to be prepared, is what we’r...

The Sklar brothers, Randy and Jason, have been the Sklar Brothers for about 20 years, ever since a post-collegiate move to NYC and an embrace of the alternative