Daniel Lefferts

What is keeping HBO's The Leftovers from being an unmemorable flash in the pan? It's not the writing — for every genuinely interesting character arc (a gun-toting widow, a gambling priest), the show pulls greedily from the cliche grab-bag (hot-cop…

When news broke in late April that Giovanni's Room in Philadelphia, said to be the oldest LGBT bookstore in the country, will close its doors, many in the gay community took it as a death knell for gay bookstores and, worse still, a sign of gay…

[Warning: This article is the Carcosa of spoilers.] Not since Lost has a TV show been the subject of as much close scrutiny, heated discussion and perpetual theorization as HBO's True Detective. The guessing game inspired by the show's scattered red…

It's been less than two weeks since Netflix released the second season of House of Cards, but you can be sure that the show's biggest, most binge-prone fans are already well into the Kübler-Ross stages of TV grief. Anyone who's finished all 13…

WARNING: This entire piece is one massive spoiler. Of the many Churchill-worthy lines of dialogue in House of Cards, one of the most memorable is Frank Underwood's observation about sex in season one: "Everything is about sex except sex," he tells…

Amazon released its "100 Books to Read in a Lifetime" last week, to much fanfare in the book community. In the words of the retailer, the comprehensive list of titles satisfies "a well-read life." Lists are, by definition, exclusive creatures. Much…

Valentine's Day is only a few days away, and, trust us, your date doesn't want to hear that love is blind or that it makes the world go 'round. If you'd like to pour your heart out to your significant other (or to the empty bottle of Yellow Tail…

By now you've heard the news that the Barneys New York spring campaign "Brothers, Sisters, Sons & Daughters" will feature 17 transgender models — all of them clad in stunning attire from labels such as Givenchy, Balenciaga and Lanvin. The solemn yet…

When faced with a show about historically underrepresented minorities, we generally expect two things: 1. That it will complicate our understanding of those people by showing them to be unpredictable and diverse ("Look, not all X's are the same!");…

True Detective may finally have tipped the scales in favor of TV as the great visual medium of our time. The HBO drama about a murder investigation in mid-90s Louisiana is as good as anything that has appeared on the big screen this year, and this…

Girls is a show about growing up. Over the course of its two seasons, it's done some growing up of its own. But getting older, we know, is an ugly process, and, as the show has progressed, it's begun to shed its lighthearted comedic innocence and…

The new literary generation is here, and it's bored — bored with the New Yorker, bored with the New York Times, bored with the New York Review of Books. We need new literary sustenance. We want writing by people who understand the tremendous…

The holidays are a time of gift-giving, song-singing, delicious food, and togetherness. They're also the perfect opportunity to catch up on TV. Whether you're into ridiculous reality shows, crime procedurals, or the canonical TV greats, we've…

Pursuing a career in the arts has become next to financially untenable for millennials. As PolicyMic's own Elena Sheppard recently pointed out in an essay in the New York Times, "To support a career in the arts in 2013 requires a cocktail of…

If you want to know exactly how many hours, days, and minutes you have left on this beautiful green earth, there's an app for that. In fact, there's more than one. Days of Life, which was reviewed by Mark O'Connell on the New Yorker's Page-Turner…

We can all agree that we millennials take up more than our fair share of the cultural pie chart, can't we? We're on the covers of major magazines, on stage at TED, in books, peppered throughout the culture section of the New York Times. We're on the…

Richard Serra's new exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in New York has been called a "departure" from form, though he's still dealing in the materials — immense, rusted sheets of steel — for which he's recognized, it seems, universally. The 74-year-old…

It's No-Shave November, which means that for the next four weeks the men of America will be letting their beards and moustaches grow unchecked (and probably, in most cases, untended). The central aim of No-Shave November (also called Movember) is to…

It's never a wise thing to read a lot about a movie before seeing it, but very few American film-goers will sit down to watch Blue is the Warmest Color without having first treated themselves to an appetizer course of the tabloid gossip and feminist…